The four levels of happiness are interconnected and there is a natural progression moving up the four levels. However, one of the four levels is going to be most dominant in your life. The choice you make reveals which level of happiness is your priority. As you repeatedly resolve conflicts of desire in favor of one particular level, that kind of happiness becomes your meaning in life. You start living for it and the other levels fade into the background.
The desires of Level 2 motivate us to pursue many good things. It is very good to achieve a lot with our lives—to further our education, to have status, security, self-esteem, and the power to get things done. But people who get caught up in the "comparison game" can find themselves trapped. Moving on to Levels 3 and 4 becomes necessary if they are to avoid unhappiness.
Up Next in Episodes
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The Faith to Reach Transcendence
Levels 1 and 2 aren't bad; they simply aren't enough. Though it may seem easy to get stuck in the pursuit of pleasure or status, we all have deeper needs that call us to higher levels of happiness. It can be difficult to overcome habits that focus on the lower levels, but the effort brings us clo...
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Level 4 Evidence: Near-Death Experiences
"While the detailed similarities among the many cases of near-death experiences are striking, it is still challenging to explain from a physical perspective how they happen in the first place, since the subjects are all clinically dead at the time. However, the scientific data, the ""vision"" of ...
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Level 4 Evidence: The Resurrection
"The historicity of Jesus's Resurrection is important on a personal level in the same way as evidence from near-death experiences: it provides evidence of life after death, evidence that there is something transcendent about us beyond just our bodies, something that continues to live. Moreover, J...
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