The difference between joy and happiness?
Believe it or not, I was actually thinking about this recently. I was thinking in terms of what would be the opposites. Is the opposite of joy sorrow or sadness? Same question could be posed for happiness. I think in some ways they are the same thing, and the difference is one of intensity and duration. Joy is what you feel when your team scores the winning touchdown. After the game you’re happy because your team won.
Happiness is what you feel when you’re sitting with your wife in the backyard of the house you bought watching your perfect children play. Sorrow is what you feel when things haven’t worked out quite so well. Sadness and sorrow could probably both be used as opposites for either joy or happiness. Sorrow I think has a added connotation of remorse.
Cool thanks
[QUOTE=bolno;73178]The difference between joy and happiness?[/QUOTE]
Variations of mind states.
Excellent Ray. A tough question to answer and this is a “root” answer you’ve provided. Thank you.
?Joy?, the happiness that comes from The within.
If you want to split hairs, the word ‘joy’ represents the actual emotion that one experiences, while happiness is a state of feeling happy. A more accurate way of phrasing the question might be what’s the difference between feeling joy and feeling happy? The two words are not exact synonyms, and it seems like there is a real difference in the quality of experience. Both are experience that is intangible and subtle. Unlike hot or cold where the experience is felt in a definite organ, we can’t quite put our finger on where it is that we feel joy or happiness. Both are effects, the fruits of actions. Joy seems to have a quality of exuberance, a reaction to a particular cause. A state of being joyful seems to imply many occasions for feeling joy, or maybe a sustained feeling of joy. Feeling happy implies a less exuberant, more quiet but still positive experience, not necessarily a reaction to a particular cause but possibly a number of causes having a cumulative effect over a period of time.
I will be happy when I find a job.
It seems a little silly to be stuck on this, but I suddenly realized there’s an error in my previous posts. If we say ‘i feel happy’ or ‘I am happy’, in both cases ‘happy’ is an adjective describing a state of being. If we say ‘I feel joy’, ‘joy’ is a noun, and we would not say ‘I am joy’. Joy and happiness are not the same thing differing only by intensity and duration. The original question is phrased correctly. Joy is an emotion while happiness is a state of being.
The line of reasoning can be carried over to the opposites. We could say ‘I am sad’, but we would not say ‘I am sorrow’. Sadness is a state of being, sorrow is an emotion. So the opposite of joy is sorrow, and the opposite of happiness is sadness.
Interesting Asuri. After reading your first post, I thought of exactly what you wrote in the next. And it repeated one more time. You said it.
So, I will bring in another term for splitting more hair, “bliss”. I think (and that’s a problem!) bliss is not just a state of mind like happiness probably caused by emotions of joy.
‘One experiences joy’.
‘One becomes happy’.
(both in a point in time and in the context of certain space).
‘One is bliss’ not conditioned by time or space.
Also, it occurs to me that sadness is not the simple negation of happiness, which would be unhappiness. Even though sadness is the opposite of happiness, there is a qualitative difference. The same seems to be true of joy and sorrow, except that there does not seem to be a word for the simple negation of joy.
@Suhas
A discussion of bliss is a little more problematic. Everybody knows what joy and happiness are from personal experience. Bliss is something I’ve heard about from scriptures, but I usually don’t practice along those lines so the discussion tends to be a little more intellectual rather than speaking about common experience.
I post this so people can have a point of reference. The Mandukya Upanishad is the origin of the concept of bliss as an aspect of the self. The yoga sutras contains a reference to this.
I think it’s fair to say that the vedic concept of bliss is completely different than a feeling of joy or happiness. In the more modern schema of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, the state of bliss corresponds to the unconscious. We would not say that bliss is a feeling or emotion like joy or sorrow; and we would not say that it is a state of being or state of mind like happiness or sadness. We [I]could[/I] say that bliss is a state of consciousness.
I think probably most of us have had the experience of a problem that we need to solve, ‘sleeping on it’, and when we wake up, we have our answer. I think that is what the Upanishad means when it says that the state of bliss is ‘the door to the knowledge’.
read the gita
What makes you think I haven’t? If you have a difference of opinion, you should elaborate a little.
I really don’t think there is much of a difference between joy, happiness, jubilation. The meaning of these words is very close to each other, rather fuzzy and imprecise. This is a handicap of the English language in describing subjective mental states. On the other hand, the language of Sanskrit has a more rich vocabulary to describe subjective mental states.
Feelings in Samkhya-Yoga are really seen as the permutations and combinations of only three fundamental forces in nature: sattva, rajas and tamas: these in turn correspond to certain emotional states: sattva corresponds to feelings of happiness(sukha) and tamas to feelings of sadness(dukha) and rajas corresponds to feelings of passion, anxiety, desire, anger which really are a mixture of happiness and sadness.
Practically, however, feelings are measured on a spectrum beginning with sattva on the higher end and tamas on the lower end. Rajas is more like the middle of the spectrum. If one is more towards the sattva end of the spectrum one experiences a grade of happiness. If one is more towards the tamas end of the spectrum one experiences a grade of sadness.
It is of course very difficult to measure accurately what grade of happiness subjectively one is experiencing. It may not even be happiness one is experiencing but a grade of sadness which is less than a previous grade of sadness, so it is mistaken for happiness. Then there are feelings which are unmistakably happy and we may prefer to use words like joy and jubilation to differentiate it from our usual grades of happiness. This is of course is entirely subjective. What one considers joy for them, might actually be just a lower level of happiness for another. This is why for practical purposes the only words we need is happiness(sukha) and sadness(dukha). Anymore to describe the grades in between is a futile exercise because of the difficulty of measuring it and defining it, giving rise to threads like this 
The word sukkha and dukhha are often translated as happiness and sadness, and this is not incorrect, but a more accurate translation that captures the meaning better are the words ‘uplifting’ and ‘depressing’, even the words ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are not bad. Associated with these emotional states are the actions punya and paap; punya is that which brings more upliftment(pleasure) and paap is that which brings more depression(pain)
In one Upanishad an attempt is made to quantify different grades of happiness by comparing the pleasure of one thing with the pleasure of the other in terms of how many times greater the pleasure is. The pleasure of Brahman being considered infinite and unending(ananda)
Joy and happiness both of these words are same just with a little different joy is something you felt joy to something like to achieve your goals or celebrate something and happiness in my thinking you get from someone else is best known to be happiness.
I am not an English native speaker, but the more I practice and read, the more sense it makes to me. Language is often used in simple and sometimes wrong ways and can therefore be underestimated. Especially the English language is misused as a communication vehicle so often, is almost hurts
Happiness is a feeling coming and going, usually triggered by external events, and expressed to the outside. Joy is more internal, durable and rather used in the context of spirituality. You could say that joy is a level above happiness.
There is a rather good explanation in Vedanta for what happiness is. Happiness is not something we get from external things, because if happiness was the attribute of a particular thing, then that thing would give happiness to everybody universally. There is no such thing in the world that will give everybody universal happiness, in fact what may make one happy, may may another sad. Thus happiness is purely an internal state.
According to Vedanta, happiness is not just another internal state, but it is actually the very nature of the self. It is experienced in the following times for brief periods:
- When an object or person that is desired has been obtained
- When the mind is clear and sharp
- When the mind enters samadhi
Either of these can unveil for brief moments our true nature of happpiness. When one desires something and obtains it, for a very brief moment they experience a state of desirelessness. Sometimes, the mind is absolutely clear and light, and we feel on top of the world on those days. Sometimes, during deep relaxation or meditation we experience a deep joy or bliss. These are all grades of the same happiness.
The mistake we tend to make is associate happiness with something else because it elicits that feeling in us. For example if a certain somebody makes us really happy when we are in their company we start to associate that person with our happiness and seek out their company. However, is happiness really in that person? No, because not everybody is going to feel happy in their company and nor are we going to feel happy in their company at every moment.
What is called bliss is really an unending feeling of happiness(hence the word ‘ananda’: meaning unending) It is when every moment is felt as happy and there are no other variations. Just a constant flatline of happiness.
In terms of [I]gunas[/I], I hesitate to classify sadness and sorrow as [I]tamasic[/I]. As a psychic quality [I]tamas[/I] represents dullness, bewilderment, and delusion, and I don’t see those extremes in sadness and sorrow. It might be helpful to realize that [I]gunas[/I] are said to always exist in combination with each other, in a relation of more or less. I see all emotion as predominantly [I]rajas[/I]. It is easy to see joy as having a large component of [I]sattva[/I], with [I]tamas[/I] practically absent. Sorrow on the other hand can be seen as having relatively more of the [I]tamasic[/I] quality, but still retains a bit of [I]sattva[/I].