The Enjoyment of A Just Being Just being

Reality isn’t a theory. It isn’t a concept. It isn’t opinion. Reality doesn’t exist to teach lessons. Reality isn’t fair or not fair. It isn’t right nor is it wrong. Reality just is. If it isn’t reality, it’s fiction. How you think about what’s there can separate you from what is.

If you slip and fall and people laugh, don’t take it personal. Reality isn’t out to get you. It’s the dance of chance and circumstance. It’s slippery. It’s poor shoes, ice, and lack of attention.

Reality is the wind blowing and the hard icy sidewalk upon which you’re falling.

Reality is as Lauryn Hill sang of how it is, “Everything is everything” (1998).

Before you appeared, reality was there. After you appeared, reality was there. After you pass, reality will be there. Where does everything begin? Where does it end? It doesn’t end or begin, such divisions are like chapters in a book.

When you arrive at a state of being there, there is nothing the matter. As you go through your day taking care of business like Elvis, can you say there is nothing the matter? Only those who can, know it is.

Look at yourself looking. If you say, “I know my mind,” who is the one knowing? When you argue with yourself, who’s arguing? You started from your mother’s egg and your father’s seed neither of which is you. When did you become you? Are you a link or the chain?

Reality is the wind that blows. Reality is the cold. Your reality cannot be shared. When the wind blows your house away, reality doesn’t know, nor does it care. It can’t. It won’t. We create reality for ourselves and opinions obscure what is.

Reality is not what you hear. Reality is the sound.

Reality is not what you see. Reality is what’s there.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) Douglas Adams wrote, “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.” It’s a joke because reality can’t be inaccurate, but we can—especially if we’re emotional (Psychology Today). Once we believe we are right based on what we see, hear, and remember, it’s hard to be dissuaded. It’s hard to change a perception once we have one.

The rapper Tupac Shakur defied reality saying, “Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.” He tattooed “F-✴# the World,” on his back and “Thug Life” on his front. He was gunned down at 25. Was reality wrong or could his murder have been anticipated based on the times and the dangerous game he was playing?

The entrepreneur Steve Jobs said, “Reality is flexible.” He thought he could bend reality to his will. He later died regretting nine months of treating his cancer with acupuncture and fruit juice (The Telegraph).

The science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Minority Report) nailed it when he wrote, “Reality is that which when you stop believing, doesn’t go away.“

Herein is the human conundrum. Reality, as in, “the state of things as they actually exist…,” is objective (“not influenced by personal feelings or opinions…”) and enjoyment, as in, “the state or process of taking pleasure in something,” is subjective (“based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions”) (Google).

But what you want can run counter to what you get. That’s reality. When that happens, you can feel self-pity or anger because the truth about the way things are can be hard to handle.

The trouble is in our interpretations. We’re vulnerable. Our senses can trick us. We’re like a guy in a car who thinks he’s moving (but isn’t) because the car next to him is moving. We misinterpret situations until we realize perceptions are slippery like ice on a sidewalk.

Our subjective reality is “subject” to filters that modify perceptions. Rods and cones in our eyes, sensory processing in our visual cortex, higher-level brain functions, psychological factors and expectations can trick us into thinking that what we’re seeing is real.

Everything is moving, changing and spinning. One spin of the Earth carries it 24,000 miles as it moves about 30 kilometers per second around the Sun which is also moving around the centre of the galaxy at about 230 kilometers per second (Ask an Astronomer). All of this is happening right now without our awareness.

A model of how the planets orbit the Sun as it moves (Source: Rhys Taylor).

We’re like Whirling Dervishes in a universe spinning, changing and moving and here is the key: The world is right when you are right. You could be in a beautiful place, but not see anything if you’re thinking and feeling annoyed, disappointed, nauseous or angry. A just person is guided by truth, reason and fairness. You can paint the world ugly or become aware of what you’re doing.

The trick is to not believe everything you tell yourself. You could list everything wrong with reality, but why? You could let complaints buzz in your brain like flies in a carcass. You could believe that what you’re telling yourself is factual, or, you can see the truth and realize that mental machinations are like the whisper of falling snowflakes.

To say that reality is like something is to miss it. If you’re not self-aware, thoughts gain momentum. Thoughts can take you out of reality into a head game of self-inflicted brainwashing, but you can train your attention to let thoughts come and go. Open your own eyes. Stand on your own two feet (if you have them). See directly without delusion and act on truth without confusion.

Enjoy being a just being just being there (wherever there is).

The Point of Enjoyment

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” ~ Lewis Carroll

A point, whether of an idea, joke or tapered object, is always arrived at in the immediate. You get the point when you get the point. Even if you don’t get the point right away, when you do get it, you get it at a precise moment.

In the game of darts you get points by getting the point of your dart to stick to a point aimed at, but over and above the mechanics of the game the real point is to enjoy it.

But why? Why do we enjoy what we do?

Lawn darts were enjoyed in the 1980s: 6,700 people were treated in hospital and three children died.

Science says that enjoyment is a matter of brain chemistry. A characteristic of people with depression and mental illness is anhedonia: an inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences.

Art by Murfish.

Brain expert Dr. Stuber PhD might say (and did), “GABA neurons located in the VTA are just microns away from dopamine and are negative regulators of dopamine function… A dysfunction in these GABA neurons might potentially underlie different aspects of neuropsychiatric illness, such as depression” (UNC Healthcare).

Psychologists treat happiness as if it’s mysterious. They recommend working on a meaningful career, spending time with friends, savoring the day and so on, but happiness doesn’t come from outside.

Assuming your GABA neurons aren’t buzz-killing dopamine release, there are as many ways to enjoy as there are people but it boils down to one thing: We enjoy what we enjoy (because we enjoy it).

It’s circular – like Donna Summer singing, “Love to love you baby.”

X is true because of Y. Y is true because of X. We dance because it’s enjoyable. It’s enjoyable because we dance. We play to have fun and have fun when we play. If we’re forced to play, it isn’t play anymore. It’s emotion first, then realization and confabulation.

“Now we dance.“

If the point of enjoyment is to enjoy, the question is: What is the meaning of true enjoyment? This was asked in Quora (a question-and-answer site) and people responded. (Note: names have been changed to protect the anonymous).

Tommy said enjoyment is, “Celebrating life, not one’s life; just life!”  Dieter said enjoyment is, “Living the moment.”

Sally listed enjoyments: “Looking at the smile of a new born baby. Eating Mango by plucking and stealing it from an orchard. Getting wet in rain without bothering about getting wet.”

Simon says, “Enjoy!”

Simon said, “Everyone has different meaning of enjoyment! They have different source of enjoyment but for me … it’s something which I do for myself!”

And there it is.

Maybe there’s a little Simon in all of us. There’s just something about one’s self that makes it special to one’s self. To you, there’s no you quite like you.

Psychologists say it’s good to love one’s self. Why, if there was no you – no you as a living organism with thoughts and feelings in an environment – there would be…what?

But vain self-importance blocks the flow of enjoyment like crimping a garden hose. When things don’t go the way we want, we’re unhappy so the trick is to loosen up and enjoy what you get (see post: Is it serious?).

We have a limited idea of who we are. Yes, we are each a bag of skin crowned by a cranium, but do we end in skin? What about air in lungs and energy from the sun in our bellies? Going into atoms we see nothing there – just energy waves. We’re energy waves. Not that this matters when you stub your toe, but a “hard” world is softened with a realization of how interconnected and diaphanous (light and insubstantial) this all is.

Philosopher Alan Watts saw interconnections, saying, “where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism” (Conversation With Myself).

A dandelion seed has fine hairs allowing it to ride on the wind. The wind is, in a manner of speaking, a part of itself. Why do advertisers associate their product with love and happiness? It isn’t the product in itself that we want: it’s the feeling the product is said to impart.

What you love is what you enjoy. Enjoyment is a one step process: Express love for something and you are happy.

Author of The Element (2009), Ken Robinson, said, “To be in your element you have to love it… Being good at something is not a good enough reason to do it…It’s about finding the thing that resonates within you most fully” (see Ken Robinson video).

There’s a little verse from an ancient Hindu text called the Rig Veda that tells of the tree of life and two birds. One bird eats the tree’s fruit (some good some bad) and the other watches. They represent two aspects of ourselves. We are the bird eating – we participate in the action of life (killing and eating), experiencing joy and sorrow – but in contemplation, we are the second bird who watches. The trick is to be aware of the second bird watching the first bird participating.

You walk into a forest and suddenly you are struck by the wonder of this place. You feel the mystery of being and life itself. A cedar waxwing flies by. That such a creature should be there! That the universe should be here! That’s something that excites you to wonder. Take a deep breath and simply enjoy (see also: The Point of Enjoyment 2).

Enjoy Love

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. And then one fine morning—  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 180)

The “single green light” on Daisy’s dock that Gatsby gazed at from his house across the water represents an “unattainable dream.” It is the dream that seems close but can’t be grasped. It represents the hazy future, forever elusive. The green light is Gatsby’s dream of Daisy in the past, but then, if it is of her in the past, how does it represent the future too? Is the future tied to our dreams of the past?

We wander as we wonder, “What is that green glow?”

A philosophy of enjoyment is about enjoying life through a special kind of awareness but if enjoyment is the purpose of life, doesn’t this philosophy give a green light to selfish behaviour?

In a word: Not at all.

What interests people most? Themselves. Centuries of navel gazing prove it. A starting point for enjoyment is your self – not self as it is normally thought: a brain encased in skin like a car in a garage, but a self imagined (like air).

When asked, “What is the self illusion?” writer Sam Harris observed that the self is not what it seems. “The self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else?” (Psychology Today, 2012).

Harris isn’t saying we should throw out our rule books, but to understand psychological factors that control behaviours.

We often think of ourselves as our car, our clothes, our job, our house, our country, our uniform, our gender, our age… our body. This has always been the case throughout history. We get caught up in material things.

But when you are lost in gazing at the moon, who are you? Who is the real you – the you who was a child – the secret you – the true you? Who are you when you’re asleep? As Suzanne Little sang in You, “There’s something about you’s not too bad.”

There’s just one thing to do. Look at your self and in mental stillness ask, “Who is my ‘I’?” When angry ask, “Who is angry?” When sad, ask, “Who is sad?”

Instead of ‘self-ish‘ in the dictionary sense of: “lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure” and instead of ‘self-ish’ in the sense of adding an “ish” suffix to say that something is somewhat x (largish, rockish, selfish), this philosophy encourages stepping into natural places to ask, “Who am I?” until the last “I” thought vanishes. And when it does, something beautiful happens.

The world changes. You free yourself from problems and woe can’t touch you.

Chatty professors Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari stretch the idea of animal-human boundary not to encourage a metamorphosis like in that scene in American Werewolf in London (1981) but to achieve a “non-identity” which to them is a condition of freedom.

Most people think rocks are inanimate, but writer David Abram (Becoming Animal An Earthly Cosmology, 2010) says that to a person alive to her animal senses, a rock is “first and foremost another body engaged in the world.” Abram writes:

“You are silent, puzzling. I see you gaze back at the rock face now, questioning it, feeling the looming sweep of its bulk within your torso, listening with your muscles and the quiet composition of your bones for what this old, sculpted presence might wish to add to the conversation… The stillness, the quietude of this rock is its very activity, the steady gesture by which it enters and alters your life.”

Imagine coming upon a rock on the road. You see it. You smell mud and exhaust. You hear two-leggeds and feel the patter of rain. You have a conscious experience from a first-person point of view that isn’t limited to your senses – thought, emotion and imagination are part of it too because you are “part of what it is for the experience to be experienced and part of what it is for the experience to be“ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Phenomenology).

Plato once said, “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” This is not a reasonable philosophy. It’s a love philosophy.

To most people, most of the time, love is selective. It’s personal. It’s based on contact with people and things that please us, but if you go mentally quiet, there’s an all encompassing and unconditional love that can hit you in unexpected moments.

It’s like seeing the world as a basket of baby bunnies. You go unreasonable and love everything. You see the baby in everyone’s eye. It’s a great love that comes from knowing that everyone is worthy. It’s like that opening scene in Love Actually (2003) where the narrator, Hugh Grant, says, “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport…. Seems to me that love is everywhere” (opening scene Heathrow airport).

And it is.

 

 

Enjoyment And Enlightenment: Side By Side

In 1927 a small woman with a big heart named Lee Morse sang, “Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money. Maybe we’re ragged and funny, but we’ll travel along, singing a song – side by side” (“Side by Side“). It’s a song about enjoying good times and bad together but it could be about enjoyment and enlightenment. They go together.

One might even say they’re one and the same.

In 1784 a small man with a big head named Immanuel Kant wrote “What Is Enlightenment?” In it he called people cowards. He said that except for a few men (and no women), most people are too lazy, immature and afraid to think for themselves. Kant believed that mature thought and reason is enlightenment. He said, “Dare to know!” is enlightenment’s motto.

Spiritual types say otherwise. They say it’s not about thought. It’s about heart and love and letting go of what you think you know. A teacher in the Zen koan tradition, Joan Sutherland, said that enlightenment is “more true than our ordinary self-oriented ways of experiencing life… Enlightenment is our true nature and our home… it’s not about being a better self but about discovering our true self” (Lion’s Roar). But most people wouldn’t know their true self from a hole in the ground.

We can’t help it.

Neuroscientist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz said, “The brain puts things into our consciousness, but it is the active mind that makes choices about whether to listen and how to listen.” He said that our brains trick us with deceptive brain messages that come to us as mental chatter.

Schwartz said, “Deceptive brain messages are any false or inaccurate thought or any unhelpful or distracting impulse, urge or desire that takes you away from your true goals and intentions: your true self” (“It’s not me. It’s my brain”…).

When we try to improve ourselves, we can’t seem to because the one that needs improvement is the one trying to improve! Spiritual entertainer Allan Watts said that it’s the equivalent of trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and it can’t be done.

Thinkers think enlightenment is thought, feelers feel enlightenment is felt and scientists say it’s a matter of re-programming. Enlightenment sounds hard if not impossible, but it isn’t! It’s like enjoyment. It’s easy. The word enlightenment has light in it. Lighten up!

It’s like that scene in the show Breaking Bad where a tough guy who broke the law and lost everything sits watching a river and waiting to die.

Everything he tried to do was for naught. He’ll never see his beloved granddaughter again but just before dying, he finds peace. He simply enjoys watching the river and is enlightened (the Breaking Bad river scene).

Hermann looking dapper.

It’s not just that the river is tranquil, soothing, and the best place to chill beer. Rivers are wellsprings of ancient wisdom (in a good way). In Siddhartha (1922), Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) uses a river to represent existence and time. Through a river Siddhartha is enlightened: “You’ve heard it laugh,” he said. “But you haven’t heard everything. Let’s listen, you’ll hear more…

“They listened. Softly sounded the river, singing in many voices. Siddhartha looked into the water, and images appeared to him in the moving water: his father appeared, lonely, mourning for his son; he himself appeared, lonely, he also being tied with the bondage of yearning to his distant son; his son appeared, lonely as well… The river sang with a voice of suffering, longingly it sang, longingly, it flowed towards its goal, lamentingly its voice sang. 

“‘Do you hear?’ Vasudeva’s mute gaze asked.

“Siddhartha nodded” (chapter 11).

Rational thinking may be necessary for day-to-day responsibilities, but sometimes, in an odd moment of awareness, when you realize that doing something won’t help you and not doing something will also not help you (like the old man in the Breaking Bad scene), you are in the zone of enlightenment. You step out of “the quicksand of time” (Moody Blues). You watch. You listen.

When we listen to what others have to say about enlightenment, it’s like trying to see through a dirty window.

We get caught in the middle like that Stealers Wheel song that goes, “Trying to make some sense of it all. But I can see that it makes no sense at all… Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am. Stuck in the middle with you…” (Rafferty & Egan).

Who is the clown? Who is the joker? How do you know? You Kant. It’s all opinion. But when it comes to enjoyment and enlightenment it isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s direct experience. A feeling of peace and tranquility is not a matter of opinion. It is enjoyed. Like music.

In 1969 the Moody Blues sang “Watching and Waiting” with the words: “But don’t be alarmed by my fields and my forests / They’re here for only you to share / ‘Cause here there’s lots of room for doing / The things you’ve always been denied / So look and gather all you want to / There’s no one here to stop you trying.”

And there it is. No harm trying. Watch and wait. That’s all it takes. Enjoyment is enlightenment enjoying.

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).

Congeniality, Ideal Goodness and Enjoyment

Two guys are driving in a vintage car in Portland, Oregon. The driver says to the passenger, “I think you’re supposed to have fun in life.” “I’m right with you,” says the passenger shaking his head from side to side. “Great,” says the driver. “Right with you,” repeats the passenger.

They rattle on. “I’m really enjoying this car. Are you?” “I love it,” says the passenger.

As far-fetched as it sounds, this conversation happened. The guys are Jerry Seinfeld and Fred Armisen. The show is Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

It’s not hard to imagine two congenial friends like this having fun together, but what about someone who doesn’t have fun? What then?

Someone enters the words, “no enjoyment out of life” as a search term and finds this blog. Does it help or is it like John Steinbeck said in 1961, “No one wants advice, only corroboration?”

You can set the stage for enjoyment like they do in Comedians in Cars, but whether you get it or not, depends.

There’s a knack to it.

A banker.

Ask people: “What do you do if you have no enjoyment?” From a banker you get a loan. From a stoic you get, “Do what you can, not what you can’t.” From a positive psychologist you get, “Think positive!” (and take your damn anti-depressants!).

From a bartender you get a drink. From a hedonist you get hedonism. From a believer you get belief. From a radical you get radicalized. From Big Joe Turner you get Shake, Rattle and Roll.

What you get depends on who’s giving it. Things like receptivity (What Do You Enjoy?), determination (The First Step), awareness (Who am I?) and planning (Rules of Enjoyment) help, but there’s more to it.

It’s like what Chris Rock said in Comedians in Cars when Jerry asked him what he thought of a car. Chris Rock said, “I like you Jerry… everything is about the company … If we were in a cab, we would probably be having the same exact conversation.”

Someone who gets no enjoyment probably won’t get it from lighthearted banter and a Lamborghini. You need an ideal.

Life is justified by its fruits. Whether you eat or drink, do so for the sake of life, of enjoyment and the ideal of goodness. What is goodness? You know it when you see it. A good is a natural delight in the the senses, in affections, and in the mind. A vision of heaven on earth is ideal goodness.

That the end of life is death may sound sad, but what other end could anything have? At the end of a party you go to bed. At the end of a dance, you sit down. At the end of the day, you go home. After tea, you wash your cup.

Transitoriness is essential. Existence is change.

Things get sad with sentimentality. When we imagine that an end is untimely, we get sad. The trick is to live in the presence of ideal goodness. It’s all around. You die, but goodness doesn’t.

The world can be dangerous. We take shelter in human constructions, but the next storm, earthquake, or bomb can take it down. Despite the odds of catastrophe, pain and suffering, challenge the assumptions you have of a universe of desires and come to self-knowledge. You get it when you don’t. It’s a new order. The decision is yours.

The vision you’re having right now is your life. Here. Now. Reading this silly little blog, you can be completely aware of yourself in the place you are. Seeing with these eyes. The voice you hear is your own.

Marcus Aurelius as he looked in 151 AD.

If you are catastrophe free, count yourself glad. If not, as the stoic said, “You win. You lose.” Or, as Marcus Aurelius said when he stubbed his toe on a throne, “Misfortune nobly born is good fortune” (Meditations).

Forge on. Become goodness incarnate. Goodness shows as humility, kindness and a lack of self-centredness. Empathize! Enjoy updowns.

Henry Thoreau as he looked in 1861.

Breathe a silent sigh. As an animal with a mind, filled with folly, happiness and sorrow, a stupid dreaming creature with odd perspectives in the midst of a vast natural world, quietly observe the place you find yourself in and look for harmonies. Imagine yourself as the earth seeing itself seeing itself.

Ideal goodness is the enjoyment that emerges when you connect or as Henry Thoreau said to himself in the woods after leaving the pencil factory, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails” (Walden, 1854).

So, what do you do? Live the ideal of good. Live in the imagination of ultimate things and like Mother said, “Go outside! Be good!” Enjoy the music of strawberries in the summertime (even if they’re in your mind).

Imagination and Enjoyment

Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist and bed writer, came from a wealthy family. He had the Leisure of a W.H. Davies poem and enjoyed pondering ponderings, galleries, fine dining, observing and writing without brevity.

In Remembrance of Things Past (1923), people say he wrote about having new eyes (as in a metaphorical ocular transplant), but that’s not quite what he meant.

His wordiness is construed as follows: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

It’s become a slogan slathered on pillows and bric-à-brac for those who enjoy pithy inspirations.

In a salon long ago, Proust enjoyed a musical performance that transported him to a wonderful “strange land” in his mind (see: What Proust Really Said… and a reenactment).

He was writing about beholding with the eyes of another person so as to appreciate the universe from that person’s perspective – especially the perspective of a painter or composer who help us to fly with them from star to star.

“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star” (Proust, “The Captive“).

Joyce Hesselberth: Developing Empathy

Imagine yourself as another person. Feel what he or she feels. It’s an enjoyable projection. To drink of the fountain of youth is to behold with the eyes of a child.

Neuroscience describes this as the act of mirror neurons: “a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action (The Mind’s Mirror).

This is to see a man drink and say, “This is better than good,” and taste it yourself. It is to see a person’s foot do something and neurons connected to our own foot fire. It’s like that Joe South song, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, that Elvis sang.

The relation between yourself and the world is like a pair of shoes. You have a left shoe (that’s you) and a right shoe (everybody else). You take care of both out of self-interest. You imagine the best life possible by maximizing choices to get what you want.

George Ainslie (not Larry David)

George Ainslie, psychiatrist and economist, is quoted in Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience (Hall, 2010) as saying, “Self-control is the art of making the future bigger” (p. 173). You imagine a future you’ll enjoy over an immediate gratification you’ll regret.

You construct, as Ainslie says, “your idea of your character, your idea of heaven, your idea of simply the moral life, the kind of person you insist on being in the long run… (it) is a budgetary skill” (p. 173).

There are two aspects to enjoyment: one is to have awareness of reality (beyond the way it appears and the way you want it to be) and the other is to use this awareness of reality to take action to increase happiness and decrease suffering.

A rampantly selfish campaign is like focusing only on the left shoe (your self). To do that is to hop on one foot. It’s tiring and leads to tumbles.

Not enjoyable.

Every creature wants to avoid suffering and be happy, but happiness and suffering are interconnected. We know this. The other guy is like you.

With imagination (and those mirror neurons), we see from another person’s mind and make choices knowing that another’s well-being is as our own. Kindness towards another is advanced self-interest.
Train yourself to enjoy like it’s an Olympic event and you’re an enjoyment athlete. Even when you lose, you lose well. Enjoyment hangs like grapes picked like California Stars.

See humour in oddities, as from above. Will enjoyment and let it roll. Just imagine. Practice emotional self-control and let go. Notice surroundings and contemplate. Contrary to what you may have been told, you’re not special and those who think they are: probably aren’t. Humility is a key to enjoy ability.

The trick is to enjoy the expanse, float and feel at home in yourself.

Horizons, Games, Connections and Enjoyment

People enjoy games. They say, “Life is a game.” Who they are isn’t clear, but you know: “They say a lot of things.”

On the Internet Einstein is quoted as saying, “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” When he said this isn’t clear. It doesn’t sound like him.

A web site with the tagline, “the best answer to any question,” said: “He (Einstein) wasn’t really big on advertising how he was better than other people” (see: Quora.com).

The analogy of life as a game, isn’t a stretch. Life has rules (physical and man-made), winners and losers (depending on who you ask) and, like all games, life appears to end.

Milton Bradley used to sell a portrait of Abraham Lincoln without a beard. When Lincoln grew a beard, sales dried up.

Such is life.

In 1860 Bradley came up with the first popular board game called the Checkered Game of Life. It had a moral message. According to Wikipedia, the object of the game was to land on “good” spaces, collect points, and reach “Happy Old Age” in the upper corner, opposite “Infancy” where you start.

The game evolved into a track now called The Game of Life. It simulates a person’s travels from school to jobs, to marriage and children. The purpose of the game is to enjoy it.

Such is life.

Joe South (1940-2012) as he looked in 1970.

In 1969, Joe South observed: “Oh the games people play now. Every night and every day now. Never meaning what they say now. Never saying what they mean. And they wile away the hours, in their ivory towers, till they’re covered up with flowers, in the back of a black limousine.”

The song came from a 1964 book about the “games” human beings play in interacting with one another.

Grantland Rice on the links in 1921.

In 1908 Grantland Rice, a Southern sport journalist, wrote, “For when the One Great Scorer comes; To mark against your name; He writes – not that you won or lost – But how you played the Game” (Alumnus Football). From this we get the saying it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.

In the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Gartland Rice was played by Lane Smith (a Southerner).

Click image to see film clip of golf in the field.

The legend is based on the Bhagavad Gita which is about a warrior hero named Arjuna (Junah=Matt Damon) who refuses to fight (or play) until the god Bhagavan (Bagger Vance=Will Smith) helps him find his way through awareness of the field.

Bagger says, “You got to look with soft eyes… See the place where the tides and the seasons and the turnin’ of the Earth, all come together… where everything that is becomes one… You got to seek that place with your soul Junuh… Seek it with your hands. Don’t think about it… Feel it… Your hands is wiser than your head ever gonna be…”

In the story Junah (Matt Damon) failed when he concentrated on himself and worried about failure. He succeeded when he played to enjoy – with awareness from his senses. He succeeded when he forgot about himself and concentrated on doing the work as well as he could and identifying himself with the field. That is when he entered an infinite game. That is simple enjoyment.

Retired professor, James P. Carse, said in Finite and Infinite Games (1986) that there are two kinds of games: 1) a finite game – played for the purpose of winning; and, 2) an infinite game – played for the purpose of continuing to play (p. 3)

In a finite game there is an ending. There are boundaries. Opponents are known by their differences. Winning or losing is thought of in terms of one to the other and it’s imagined in terms of life or death. To play is a choice of spontaneous desire (Carse, SALT talk, 2005).

In an infinite game the rules or boundaries are like a horizon. It moves. Where it is depends on where you are. It’s ill-defined. Nature on this planet is our best example of an infinite game. It plays to continue to play. It plays to keep players in the game.

The rules in an infinite game allow players to continue without a limitation – not even death. It is infinite because limits are taken into play. “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries” (p. 10, Finite and Infinite Games).

Go into the field. Enjoy the game. As the song says, “It’s all inside you” (The Cars’ “Moving In Stereo“).

A True Philosopher

A true philosopher has a selfishness of a peculiar kind. He earns a living, makes a contribution, meets responsibilities and then is free to enjoy. Like a red panda enjoys playing in the trees, so too a true philosopher enjoys a red panda-ing.

George Santayana (1863-1952)

Humans are poetical animals. A wise human takes everything good-humouredly with a grain of salt (Santayana, A Brief History of My Opinion, 1930).

The Harptones were on the money in 1956 when they sang, “Life is but a dream“. Sensations are dreams. Perceptions are dreams developed. Sciences are dreams abstracted, controlled and measured.

The goal of happiness is realized when your life becomes an instrument for the enjoyment of being. When you become the Earth enjoying itself, contentment is yours: Bliss and bubbles. As a cardinal enjoys its red colouring, its song and swoop on a Saturday afternoon, so too, you enjoy your own crimson and clover.

A Special Kind of Selfishness

The selfishness espoused by this philosophy isn’t directed towards personal gain at the expense of others. It doesn’t race to the head of a line and cut in. This is not a selfishness that takes the last cookie in the cookie-jar without sharing.

That isn’t nice.

This is nice selfishness.

This is the selfishness of taking a deep breath in a landscape made for breathing. A satisfying breath does not begrudge another’s opportunity. You enjoy breathing and in so doing inspire others to do the same. Inhale deeply a fleeting world monetized, cauterized and dissected. Stake your claim in the air that remains. Take a slice of water. Enjoy what you can. Treasure where you are.

Enjoyment is simple. It’s as simple as breathing. Fresh air is underrated. You do not breath to help others. A bear eating salmon does the same. It’s a re-circulation. Animals eat and breath not to be mean. This is the selfishness of living.

This is the selfishness of a mother feeding her child and enjoying her child’s feeding. This selfishness wonders where have all the flowers gone? It’s selfishness laced with kindness.

This selfishness hears music and dances, not to impress or to hurt, but to enjoy. To dance is to live and to sing and talk is to honour that living by enjoying.

This is the selfishness of a musician playing for others. It is the selfishness of a writer writing for the enjoyment of pleasing. It is the selfishness of a lover who enjoys her partner and in so doing, pleasures the other with her enjoyment.

It is a selfishness exemplified by unemployed lilies in a field. It is as the philosopher Mr. George Santayana said, “The gift of existence would be worthless unless existence was good and supported at least a possible happiness” (1905, p. 190).

To live a simple life is to enjoy. The good is the ideal. This ideal is the good of being who you are in your enjoyment of living. You don’t take what isn’t yours. You receive the enjoyment of living as others dream of being.

Forced Enjoyment

You set the stage. It’s your play. As worries cease, the “normal” feeling of life that you take for granted gives way to a more subtle feeling. What was ordinary becomes beautiful. Eyes widen. It’s as if Tchaikovsky’s child-like German Song patters within your heart. When you are peaceful in the world as yourself enjoying yourself a lovely feeling is felt. When a worry or criticism occurs there’s a shift. The feeling of beauty vanishes like the fragrance of a flower caught in a breeze.

It sounds like a contradiction. If you force yourself to enjoy, is it real? How do you know if you’re enjoying if you’re making it happen? Is forced enjoyment like an actor who laughs on stage according to a script? Everyone knows that’s not real laughter. Is forced enjoyment like that?

No.

Forced enjoyment is nurtured. It’s a gentle reminder to enjoy your being here as you are where you are. The greatest thing in the world is enjoyment. It can be felt right this instant without anything but a body, some surroundings and the senses. It takes a thoughtfulness to appreciate the experience of being your body in these surroundings.

Nature floods each of us with a calm-breathing peace of life itself except we often don’t notice. A person can be happy simply by remembering odd divine moments. One need only chew the cud of old sweet memories.

What every living self most requires is a philosophy to tell it how to enjoy itself under the immediate circumstances and conditions at the moment it finds itself. To turn tedium into pleasure and dreariness into thrilling sensation requires a person to start from scratch and mingle the self (you) with the not-self (surroundings; not-you). Each of us is actually working magic as life itself works magic.

Who Am I?

Who am I? Have you ever asked yourself this question? “Who… am…I…?” If someone asks, you probably say your name, something about your life, your job, your family, your hobbies, maybe you say something about your likes and dislikes, you list personality traits like introvert, extrovert… psychopath. Maybe you tell a story about yourself to illustrate a character trait. Maybe you tell people what you enjoy, but is that you?

A lifetime is spent creating the person to whom you think you are, but you are probably more than one person. You act a certain way depending on who you’re with and the situation you’re in. Other people tell you who they think you are (to your face or behind your back). You see yourself as others see you. If you do something out of character, people say, “That’s not you!” or “You wouldn’t do that!” But how do they know what you will and won’t do? Do they know you on the inside?

You could be a sad clown, smiling on the outside, but crying on the inside. You could be a kind-faced backstabber filled with a secret rage and ready to pounce on anyone who gets in your way. You could be a gentle puppy-dog, but appear as a warrior.

An intricate web of experience as recorded in memories affects who we think we are. We are an idea to ourselves and each other. We have a body image and a personality that becomes who we are, but all that could be regarded as a front. We act. We are actors. We play parts. From day one our character develops as we go along living each day. With each successive year we become more concretized to ourselves and hidden to others.

Our bodies change as we age and our ideas about ourselves change along with it. Ideas are, however: ideas. An idea is an image. The word idea is an idea. We come to think of ourselves in certain ways but those thoughts are not who we are when those traits are removed. It’s an elaborate ruse. It’s a game of hide and seek that we play with ourselves. We hide in ourselves and seek outside ourselves for ourselves and the questions we have.

We seek answers to who we are, but we get in our way. The answer is too obvious. Our ideas are abstractions of the feelings we get when we look out of ourselves. We think of ourselves as inside and of the world as outside.

If we are old and look in the mirror, we may not recognize the person reflected there, but inside, when we look in the mirror, we see our eyes and know that the person behind those eyes is the same person who has been there all along. Just as gentle music isn’t just a sound, so too are we.

We think our thoughts are connected one to another like one day connects to the next, like one month to the next, one season to the next and one year to the next, and so it goes, year to year, but really, each day is a self-contained unit of time that’s been artificially measured by humans who constantly organize and make straight lines in and around the world which we name.

It’s all in an effort to control the world which we call our world as if we owned it and were separated from it by our amazing heads which gift us with dominion over everything on earth.

Once you know who you are, you can enjoy yourself through the experience of receiving living.

Who are you? You are a living organism and in so living, enjoying. All of it, the good and bad. The good, because it is very good, and the bad because it is temporary – a break – to help you know more good.

It’s not complicated. There’s nothing to think about. Look around. Smell the air. Touch the ground. Who are you? You are the one reading, thinking, seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching.

You are here.