“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.
On a cold winter’s night long ago an old man sits happy by a fire. He enjoys warming himself after a difficult day and realizes with surprise how fantastic he feels.
As he pours wine for he and his friend, the old man realizes that the whole struggle he’s had has always been between himself and the pressure of his experience to enjoy or not enjoy life. That is the battle we all wage, but now he knows that there is no need for such a struggle to prevent him from enjoying life because he can enjoy the struggle itself!
The old man who earlier saw without seeing now disappears in seeing! He no longer is in a room with a friend and a fire as a cold wind blows outside. He is the room! He is his friend! He is the fire! He is the cold wind that blows up to the stars! The old man has broken free! In this act of imagination he feels no separation.
Nothing hurts. Nothing disturbs. He smells the smoke and hears the stew simmer. He feels the weight of his beautiful hat on his head. He touches his shirt with gnarled fingers and feels nothing but love for all that is and was.
Poet John Keats (1795-1821) called it “the empathic entrance into essence.” He writes in 
Without imagination and attention our senses are filtered through self-thought. Every “thing” is a “think.” Thought can distract us from the enjoyment of living in the same way that looking down texting on an iPhone as we walk can take us unknowingly into the path of an oncoming truck!
While he was scuba diving Black probably did lose his mind, not to madness, but to a beautiful feeling when there’s nothing in it but the beauty of being in the beauty of what’s all around. When inner talk runs between wanting and not-wanting, and liking and disliking is stopped—particularly in a natural setting—we can feel aware of beauty in the outside world and enjoy it like nothing else. 
Enjoyment can be conscious – as in, you consciously choose to read this – or unconscious – as in, you feel something without knowing why.
When you enjoy, you become as a poet.
Self-help is defined as, “the use of one’s own efforts and resources to achieve things without relying on others” (Google).
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.
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!
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.
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.”
A poet of enjoyment lives in song. 
A rousing song can provoke a fighting spirit to not give up – to get up like Buster Keaton after a tumble and see humour in a fall. Slogans like Keep Calm and Carry On, songs like Trio’s 
To feel better than OK is to enter a state of grace and ecstasy. That’s what we want. To feel burdens lifted and a passage made enjoyable. Ecstasy: to feel overwhelmed by great happiness (Oxford Dictionary); “a state of exalted delight, joy and rapture” (The Free Dictionary).
Before depression and shock treatment, poet Sylvia Plath wrote, “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy” (The Bell Jar).
Jack London wrote, “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive
philosophy of ENJOYMENT 