It seems like you’re coming at philosophy from a religious (Hindu?) angle, whereas I take for granted science and start philosophizing with that in mind. For example, your statement that life prior to the evolution of our species was “in harmony and symphony” isn’t scientific or objective. It’s more like poetry than a statement of fact. Darwin’s theory of evolution emphasized the extent to which species compete to survive under scarcity conditions. Species evolve by dying off as mutations slowly find their uses when environmental circumstances change. So there’s no “cosmic field” that energizes or oversees the process. The scientific account is that natural selection is blind and largely accidental.
Maybe this is due to a language barrier, but I’m not sure “sadness” is the right word for what you’re trying to explain. The Western religious myths take as fundamental not sadness exactly but shame as we lost our innocence (the Adam and Eve myth). This too is unscientific, although it might be closer to the truth.
What actually happened in prehistory, I argue in the link below and elsewhere, is similar to the transition from a child to a young adult. Children are innocent in a sense and when they become self-aware they begin to feel shame (about their nakedness, for example, as in the Garden of Eden story). Likewise, as the brains of our prehuman ancestors grew, they became more intelligent, self-conscious, and withdrawn from nature and from their animalistic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The key psychological response to that inner knowledge, I think, isn’t so much sadness as alienation. As we become autonomous or separate from the environment, having the ability to rationally decide our actions and to act as people rather than animals, we lose our feeling of being at home in nature. So we had to build artificial environments (our language, worldviews, cultures, villages, cities, empires) that cater to our wishes and whims.
The wilderness is full of cycles that are indifferent to the preferences of individual creatures, which is fine for animals that aren’t even aware of themselves as individuals. But people have limited freewill that makes us resentful towards indifferent nature for treating us as slaves to the natural life cycle. We preferred to think of ourselves as offspring of supernatural gods and we acted as gods, domesticating animals and cutting down forests and using up the world’s resources.
We cope with that alienation by developing irrational pride, both in religious and secular contexts. Again, religious folks are proud to be at one with transcendent deities, while secularists are proud of their scientific, technological, and social progress and of their heroic resistance to nature’s absurdity.
That’s more or less how I would explain it. So when you say happiness is the default and sadness doesn’t exist, I’d say, rather, that alienation, anxiety, and depression are most fundamental to our species, since our self-awareness puts us in touch with life’s absurdity (with nature’s inhumanity, godlessness, and indifference). Most people cope with that default unhappiness by believing in uplifting myths and delusions that reassure and distract them, to enable them to work hard and start families and get on with life. Philosophers and religious extremists (such as ascetics from the Eastern traditions) are the exceptions, since they’re unable to take seriously the mass delusions. They’re stuck with their knowledge of the unsettling objective truths, which means they’re less likely to be happy.
Sadness (melancholy, anomie, anxiety, alienation) is how we feel when we’re forced to see the world as it really is and when we can no longer fool ourselves into accepting the conventional stories.
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