A New Way of Looking

Here’s the thing: If someone says, “The secret to life is...,” that person is unknowingly (or knowingly) misleading. Why?

Because.

It isn’t a secret. If it was a secret, everyone’s secret would be different.

It’s like looking for keys and not finding them even though they’re right under your nose. You’re in a hurry but waste time running around looking for keys and not finding them because you’re in a hurry! You look repeatedly on the table where they should be (and are) but you don’t see them. Why? In desperation you start looking in weird places. So too do people look for enjoyment in weird place when they don’t have to. Enjoyment is right under your nose.

When you finally do find find your keys, you feel extra extra annoyed because they were there all along, and you wonder: “How could I not see them? Am I blind? (No.) Am I an idiot? (Only partly).”

The power is in the focus. It’s a matter of attention. It’s all a matter of awareness.

In the hurry to find what you’re looking for you see with eyeballs but not with brain. Hurry causes stress. Stress causes the release of cortisol in the brain. Cortisol can kill brain cells in the area responsible for memory (Your Amazing Brain). If you add multi-tasking to a frantic searching, you have zero attention (Brain Rules…).

Searching for keys in all the wrong places is like searching for enjoyment. We don’t see what’s in front of us. Enjoyment is simple. It’s so simple that we don’t get it until we do and then we doubt it because we might be expecting something that isn’t so subtle.

If you’re reading this—wherever you are in this world—you’re probably alive. If you’re alive, you’re halfway there, but the other half isn’t easy. Nature isn’t on your side. Nature isn’t on anyone’s side. Nature is cause and effect.

The trouble is that happiness gets tied to desire and expectations. We define happiness as, Wanting what we want and getting what we get and hoping the two coincide.

You see, it’s because of our brains. We either over-think and make it complicated, we under-think and act on insane urges or we multi-task and miss everything.

We think, “If I have this (or that), I’ll be happy,” but not only do we think that something outside ourselves will make us happy, we’re drawn to things that actually hurt us.

Our brains send messages. Sometimes these messages are destructive—ask anyone in therapy, rehab, prison or who is about to blow himself up. Not only do we deceive ourselves, other people trick us with their deceptions and w can become like pawns in the game of life, sacrificed for someone else’s idea of enjoyment.

So, what’s the answer?

Picture brain messages symbolically like they do in cartoons with a devil-you and an angel-you on each shoulder arguing their case for you to decide (see Internal Multitudes and Enjoyment Decisions). The devil-you often wins and when he does, he gets harder to stop.

Pleasure and habit are linked. Cells that fire together, wire together. In other words: Habits are hard to break (see: It’s not me. It’s my brain.)

It’s like a battle between, on one side, the Rolling Stones at 120 decibels singing “Sympathy For The Devil”, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste,” and on the other side, a string quartet playing “Hallelujah” in your living room.! Who do you think will win?

On one side are symbols of light, innocence and wholesomeness (sappy?) and on the other, just the opposite (exciting?). In the battle between it comes down to focus. What do you choose to enjoy?

Enjoyment of life and of healthy beauty is decided by awareness of what “you” choose to pay attention to.

Do you take the gentle path of life as represented in Wordsworth’s poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud; That floats on high o’er vales and hills; When all at once I saw a crowd; A host, of golden daffodils“? Or is that boring? “Daffodils? You’re kidding!”

Do you prefer your entertainment on the excitingly evil side? How about delightful depravity and edgy cruelty that’s funny too? What’s your pleasure? Do you choose a quiet read, a walk in the park, a pint with a friend, or ‘gorified’ death in a Zombie Apocalypse?

It’s a tough decision for most people.

Subtlety is missed by mobs fed on chatter, drugs, violence, convenience and bread and circuses. A butterfly caught in a web is easily killed by the spider. It takes heart and courage and a focus on what is wholesome to overcome dark greed.

Wholesome isn’t a word used much these days. It alludes to marketing all-natural breakfast cereals and family values but back in the year 1200 wholesome meant “of benefit to the soul.” It comes from the word “whole” meaning “healthy” (undamaged, entire, safe) and “-some” meaning “tending to” (Etymology Dictionary).

Wholesome relates to “Hallow!” as in Hello! Health! Holy! It’s a greeting and a call to health and Hallelujah! (Word Origins).

Imagine: You go to a concert in a high school auditorium but your brain is messed up with problems. You miss the first part before your spirit gets caught up in the music and then… and then…

A switch to whole.

You see where you are. Your face relaxes. Totally still you breathe and your eyes… your eyes! they widen and go slack. You see as if you were life itself.

What was a disheveled auditorium with flickering light bulbs about to die and chattering nuisance people becomes… beautiful. You enter the stream. You are empty absolutely. You know that life runs along like a runaway train as you float in your body behind a face.

A scene.

You look out of yourself self-aware. This moment is captured in the very being of yourself – not as an ego, but as… a spirit.

The purest illuminations come unsought.

You are transfigured but no one knows. How could they? You are alone in yourself but through the eyes of another you see the importance of all this. It’s in relationships and immersion. You’ve put your will to the side and thrown yourself out.

Such is enjoyment seeing.

Cease demanding that life conform to desire. See daffodils and ignore zombies (they aren’t real).

“It’s not me. It’s my brain.” Self-Help, Brain Training and the Art of Enjoyment

Since Sammy Smiles (yes, his real name!) wrote the bestseller Self-Help in 1859, millions of books have been sold as self-help. In 2008 self-help brought in 12 billion dollars (The New Atlantis) and a recent search of “self-help” in Amazon revealed 436,600 titles.

It just goes to show: people want help.

In The Pros and Cons of Self-Help Ben Martin wrote, “Self-help books may in fact be helpful, but don’t expect them to work magic” and in The Science of Self-Help Algis Valiunus wrote, “The recidivism rate for self-help users is high.”

Apparently not all selves in the self-help game are helping. (Big surprise.) Maybe it’s a, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” kind of thing.

Self-help is defined as, “the use of one’s own efforts and resources to achieve things without relying on others” (Google).

Is a Philosophy of Enjoyment any different from other self-help stuff out there? No. Not really.

But it’s a bit like asking, “What’s the difference between you and Jimmy over there?” or “What’s the difference between Bieber and Beethoven?” 

It’s obvious: Each is unique. You are you. Bieber is the Biebs and Beethoven only looks constipated.

People have a mania for comparing and under or over rating each other. We’re opinion machines.

If the intent of self-help is to teach readers how to solve personal problems and achieve success, then a philosophy of enjoyment will do the trick.

Everyone has problems. That’s life, but you deal with them and success, what is that? How is it measured? If you enjoy life, isn’t that success? In a Philosophy of Enjoyment, external problems are secondary and outward appearances of success is meaningless. What is foremost is sensory awareness.

This has nothing to do with your self. It’s not about you. That is, the thing to do is to forget yourself. Enjoy all you see, hear and feel. No ego. No win. No lose. No success. Be as 24 hour radio: All humility! All the time!

Stop what you’re thinking. Take a break. Look at something small (a leaf, a stone, a fairy) and calmly abide. If you get distracted by negativity, return to abiding (like the Dude). With awareness of yourself in this world you can experience ecstasy as you are right now.

You, in the form of criticism, regret, worry and fear, are a distraction. Only when you are gone do you know. You don’t need drugs to remove the gauze of yourself. Use your senses. You are an observation post for the earth. Like a bird. Like a frog.

Be free.

The greatest thing is to forget yourself completely and to live in the sensations of hearing, feeling, seeing, and tasting. Attend to experience in a particular way: on purpose. When you work, work. When you look around, enjoy paying attention non-judgmentally.

It’s a Zen thing.

A Zen story tells of a woman carrying water in a bucket. She glances across the surface of the water and sees the reflection of the moon in the bucket. As she looks, the bucket breaks and the water runs into the soil and the moon’s reflection goes with it.

The woman realizes that the moon she’d been looking at was just a reflection of the real thing like her whole life had been (No Moon, No Water). In other words, thought colours what you see.

Jump thousands of years and science discovers what is there.

Research psychiatrist and neuroplasticity – conscious use of directed thoughts – expert, Jeffrey Schwartz says, “You Are Not Your Brain.” He explains that the mind or, “directed attention,” changes how the brain sends messages.

Schwartz says, “The brain puts things into our consciousness, but it is the active mind that makes choices about whether to listen and how to listen… the reward centre sits right embedded in the habit centre. Both are run by dopamine…Dopamine gives you pleasure, but in the process of doing that it gives you embedded habits… anything that gets that reward pleasure centre activated rapidly becomes a habit…balance the relationship between pleasure, reward and habit…Your brain becomes what you focus on ” (You Are Not Your Brain).

Moreover – and, in addition to – science says that our brains have a negativity bias (Our Brain’s Negativity Bias). Don’t you hate that?

Nicole Force (yes, her real name) writes, “Although some people are naturally more negative, negative events still have a greater impact on everyone’s brains…” (Humor, Neuroplasticity and the Power to Change Your Mind).

Neurobiologist Carla Shatz refers to Hebb’s Rule, which is, “Cells that fire together, wire together” (The Organization of Behavior, 1949).

It’s not that we want to stop firing, it’s that we want things firing to help us enjoy. The trick to beautiful enjoyments is to realize that what your brain is doing isn’t you, as in: “Excuse me. That wasn’t me. It was my brain.” Schwartz calls this your “true self” or “wise advocate. You can change your brain effectively through “wise focus of attention.”

Shift attention to the beauty of the world like poets of long ago.  

In 1818 doomed poet John Keats wrote:
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness” (from Endymion).

A poet of enjoyment lives in song.

Let go of ego-drives and materialistic ambitions. Only you can see and feel what you see and feel. You are the window. Enjoy this sometimes beautiful world. What have you got to lose?

It’s all good even when it isn’t. Let success be measured in moments of attention and enjoy it all in spite of everything. 

Ideals, Repose and the Prefrontal Cortex

An ideal is a standard of perfection. It lives in the imagination. It’s a conception of something excellent, an ultimate object, an aim or an ultimate “good” that we imagine. An ideal can be anything. It doesn’t have to be universal or other-worldly.

You can have your ideal summer, your ideal sandwich, your ideal bird. You can imagine your ideal wife or ideal husband. A parent can imagine their ideal child and a farmer their ideal cow. It’s a dream image of perfection. We invent ideals to serve our deepest needs and happiness. Our ideal life will be this way or that – ideal house, ideal lover, ideal friend, ideal environment – and then, we measure the success of our expectations against those ideals.

George Santayana (1862-1952)

The “surprise” is that most things don’t meet our expectations which makes things appear ugly. The philosopher George Santayana said that there are two modes of consciousness: there’s day-to-day life as a Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man or knowing man), and there’s escape. Escape comes as freedom from anxieties, cares and problems.

Escape is about seeing the whole forest that couldn’t be seen because you were too close, and focusing on trees. It’s when you realize the world is ideal as it is and you can enjoy whatever comes along. Ideal enjoyment goes with the Lucretian goal of “happiness.”

Lucretius, who probably died in 55 BC at age 44, wrote, “Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant” (Book II, Line I).

Lucretius loved Epicurus.

“What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure” (Epicurus).

Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a gentle man who said, “The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity” (Vatican Sayings 8). 

Strife and violence in ancient Rome partly explains Lucretius’ commitment to the Epicurean ideal of “intellectual pleasure and tranquillity of mind” (Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Heraclitus (540-470 BC).

Aside from there being more of us and new technologies, Homo sapiens haven’t changed since ancient Rome. We’re still stupid. We lack higher levels of understanding. We can’t help it. It’s our brains. It isn’t easy being human. You can be absolutely certain about something and be absolutely wrong. You can plan ahead, but things change: you get sick, lose a job, fail, get old, disasters strike. Heraclitus said a mouthful when he said with his mouth full, “All is flux. Nothing is stationary.”

We’re overly optimistic, mechanistic and absorbed in “stuff.” We fool ourselves with gregarious pleasures we don’t really enjoy. To feel profound enjoyment, takes brain training.

In “The Vulcanization of the Human Brain” scientist J. Cohen (2005) describes the conflict between emotional and cognitive parts of the brain. We have an “old” brain (about the size of a fist) that makes quick, inflexible decisions driven by emotion, desire and physical needs, and we have a “new” brain (the prefrontal cortex and cortical layer).

This “new” part can override anger, pride and impatience, but it takes reasoned practice. You can train this “new” part through contemplation, cogitation, deliberation, meditation and rumination. You can override emotional vexations and frustrations by stepping back, reframing, reassessing and reposing.

Wisdom personified.

“Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy” (Proverbs of Solomon).

To feel this kind of happiness is to live the repose of a heath as described by Thomas Hardy in The Return of the Native (1874).

In the novel Hardy wrote, “To do things musingly, and by small degrees… not the repose of actual stagnation, but the… repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life…” (p. 10).

Take lucky moments of awareness and mix them with moments of simple pleasures. Moments of pleasure are illustrated in the movie Chocolat (2000).

We would do well to take the kind advice of the young priest in the movie who said, “We can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do, by what we deny ourselves, by what we resist and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.”

The narrator is the little girl in the film who is now grown up looking back on her life. In her closing narrations she says, “The parishioners felt a new sensation that day: a lightening of the spirit; a freedom from the old tranquillity.”

This “new sensation” of lightening of spirit and freedom is to enjoy an escape from anxiety, fear and worry. In this, ideal enjoyment can be realized any time you so choose. One need only contemplate, slow down, reason and enjoy.