The Essence of This

“The Essence Of Life” by Christopher Pollari

There’s a phrase found on knickknacks in gift shops that goes, “I’m a human being, not a human doing.” The implication being, that a “human doing,” is not what you want to be.

Better to be than to do—so the song goes. Human doings identify with action but doers (those who do) get so caught up in doing they don’t see the beauty in just being a being being (singing: “Moonshadow”).

Then again, devaluing doing could be a sweet rationalization for inactivity.

“I’m a human being, not a human doing,” is attributed to at least two writers: Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1922-2007), “So it goes,” and Wayne W. Dyer (1940-2015), “Our intention creates reality.”

Kurt Vonnegut in his natural habitat. “Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why” (Slaughterhouse Five, pp. 76-77).

“To be is to do – Socrates.
To do is to be – Sartre.
Do Be Do Be Do – Sinatra.” ~ Vonnegut.

As Dyer said, “Don’t equate your self-worth with how well you do things in life. You aren’t what you do. If you are what you do, then when you don’t… you aren’t.” Or said the other way around, “If you do what you are, then when you aren’t….you don’t.”

Funny.

To simply enjoy being relates to a line in Slaughterhouse Five (the book, not location): “How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive” (p. 105), or, better yet, “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt” (p. 122).

In Your Erroneous Zones (the book, not location) Dyer explains how negative thinking leads to negative emotions (e.g. worry, guilt, anger) which leads to painful consequences via erroneous (read: wrong) actions (singing: “Where do the children play?”).

“Remember those three magic words: You are God.” (Dyer).

Dyer’s path to happiness is based on commitment to oneself. He thought that humans have the potential to live happily, but not everyone does because external influences form erroneous (wrong) zones in your personality that block personal fulfillment.

The idea of individuality is discussed in the movie Harold and Maude (1971).

The question is, “What flower would you like to be?”

Dyer moved from behaviorist psychology—Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy—to a philosophy where positive thinking cures disease, solves problems, and manifests goodness by aligning thoughts with divine intention to create miracles (Psychology Today).

So it goes.

The crux of the matter is this: Let’s say you’re trying to do something on a computer, but no matter how determined you are or how much you want a result to happen, no matter how frustrated and emotional you get, the computer will only respond to your actions. Only when you do what needs to be done, will results be satisfactory.

The same holds true for life.

The world is like a computer that responds to your behaviour. The world doesn’t feel your feelings. Feelings come and go as they will.

As David K. Reynolds put it in Playing Ball On Running Water (1996), “Reality doesn’t respond to my will or my wishes or emotions. To believe that positive thinking changes the world directly is childlike naiveté. To be sure, my thoughts and feelings may influence what I do (my behavior), and that action, in turn, may influence reality. But it is what I do that affects my world. And it is the same for you” (p. 16). 

Shoma Morita, “Life flows from being natural” (A River to Live By, pg 39).

Insight isn’t enough. You need to do, so as to be.

As the Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita (1874-1938) put it, “Give up on yourself. Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect, or a procrastinator, or unhealthy, or lazy, or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself.

Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die.”

Morita taught that energy comes from everywhere—things, people, words, feelings, nature, places—and as individuals we have the choice to live in positive or negative energy (source).

The question is: positive or negative?

What is your essence?

By knowing your essence, you know who you are, what to do, and how to do it. But essences are tricky. They’re abstract. They exist in thought and not as physical things.

Your essence is your “intrinsic nature” (as in, essential). It is your “indispensable quality” (as in, “absolutely necessary”). Your essence belongs naturally to you. It is essential but what is it? Is it self-awareness?

Existentialists assert that a human being is “thrown into” a universe that cannot be “thought away.” This means that being in the world comes before consciousness and that being in the world is the ultimate reality.

The essence of you is the meaning you ascribe to yourself or, as Sartre put it, “At first [Man] is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”

And so you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”

You win a lottery! Bam! you’re happy! A loved one dies, Slam! you’re sad. Emotions are natural reactions. It’s natural to feel highs and lows and stress. That’s the ride. Stress motivates. Emotions are your natural response to a given circumstance.

You can’t help yourself from hating people sometimes, but you can stop yourself from killing them. Truth is built upon life experience. Your self is a flow of attention. The real trick is to enjoy reality.

Go from there.

That’s the heart of it.

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).

Nonordinary Enjoyment

After scuba diving, Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV (aka Blackman Francis or Frank Black) from the band the Pixies was inspired to write, “With your feet on the air and your head on the ground. Try this trick and spin it. Yeah. Your head’ll collapse, but there’s nothing in it. And then you’ll ask yourself: Where is my mind?”

He’s not literally looking for his mind. One doesn’t lose one’s mind like one loses one’s keys (see post: A New Way of Looking).

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. 

Stilling the inner monologue has been talked about by artists, poets, artisans and all those who lose themselves in creating, by athletes who lose themselves in playing, by mothers, fathers, lovers and friends who lose themselves in loving, by meditators who lose themselves in breathing, by comrades in camaraderie, by martial artists in the zone, by co-workers and soldiers, by mystics and bakers – by anyone who suddenly feels aware of the world with a shock of boundless love and the enjoyment of being.

If your mind is always busy, angry, depressed or confused, if you are always trying to achieve goals and better health, you won’t enjoy living because you are always somewhere else. You’re living for for a future perfection that never comes. If life doesn’t feel quite right, it never will. Life is never quite right because it cannot be what you like. It’s only when you allow yourself to relax that you relax and in so doing, enjoy life in its unfolding.

There may be future goals, hazards, struggles and sorrows but each seeker of happiness should know that we don’t want happiness later. We want it now. Happiness isn’t at the  top of the hill.

We want a path to happiness right now but we only find good reason to be satisfied on that path by being satisfied. Feel satisfied and you are. That’s it. Tell yourself and you will listen. It’s an unconscious thing. You don’t love because, as in, “for some reason.” You love because you do.

When thoughts of self-gain subside one’s mind is extended from brain and body to world all around. Ego-brain and ego-mouth are Trumped by love and forced to be quiet. Everyone is just another you. It’s a merging. Scientists and mystics call this an altered states of consciousness. You can see it happen in brain scans. 

The Pixies 1988 version of “Where is my mind?” is in the movie Fight Club. Other versions of the song include Maxence Cyrin’s (set to scenes from The Mysterious Lady, a silent film from 1928 starring Greta Garbo), the band Placebo‘s and Sunday Girl’s version in the show Mr. Robot.

It’s a song that gets around.

Enjoyment can be conscious – as in, you consciously choose to read this – or unconscious – as in, you feel something without knowing why.

Feelings are real.

Most people think their mind is in their brain. Some say that “the mind is a function of the brain” in the same way that seeing is a function of eyes and hearing is a function of ears (The Automatic Mind). Others say the mind is your personality, but personality is in the eye of a third-person and mind is a first-person thing.

The mind is what it feels like to be you. When that mind—the feeling of being you—is blown away, “you,” as in your individual feeling of consciousness receives sensory information from the environment around you, you are shifted from a self-perception to utter contentment and a good solid floating feeling.

Float on that dandelion seed of imagination and enjoy the sensation.

In the British Journal of Psychiatry Susan Greenfield (2002) wrote, “Now consider ‘losing the mind’ or ‘blowing the mind’. Because we are still conscious when these often much-sought-after events occur, I would suggest that it is wrong to conflate ‘mind’ with ‘consciousness’. Just think a little more about being ‘out of your mind’. In such situations, the individual no longer is accessing personalised cognitive perspectives, the world no longer has a personalised meaning and instead one is the passive recipient of incoming sensory information” (Mind, Brain and Consciousness).

You don’t need a rave to enjoy. You don’t need anything. When mental chatter about wanting and not-wanting are silent, you become enjoyment itself. You shift to lamp mode. You glow.

When you enjoy, you become as a poet.

And what is a poet? A poet is a person speaking to people. A poet adopts the very language of people. All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerfully good feelings (adapted from Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads).

Medicine for an unhappy mind is not just sensory awareness of outward beauty, but in states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.

With practice of character, self-awareness and attention to your senses in your surroundings, a sense of beauty and love – a fantastically happy feeling – can happen anywhere, any time. Even right now. Why not?

You’re here aren’t you?

Internal Multitudes and Enjoyment Decisions

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is called a romantic. He painted pictures of people looking out at sunsets, moonlit landscapes, cemeteries, morning mists, barren forests and ruins.

A Walk at Dusk – completed shortly before a stroke in 1835 (Getty Museum).

It’s easy to imagine entering a Friedrich’s painting to enjoy a melancholy meander at dusk in misty autumn stillness, to contemplate life and death, to feel the music of this mad world and wonder: Can I be wise?

The trouble with wisdom according to Slovenian Slavoj Žižek, is that it’s conformist. Wisdom can be used to rationalize participation in enjoyments better avoided or to avoid enjoyments sadly missed.

“Whatever you do, a wise man will come along to justify it,” says Žižek (I’m generally opposed to wisdom).

You could say, “What the hell!” and quote the wisdom of Horace (Roman poet) made famous by a Dead Poets Society: “Carpe diem. Seize the day! Enjoy the day, pluck the day when it is ripe” (Phrase-finder)…

… or you could play it safe with wisdom of camel retention, “Tie your camel first then put your trust in Allah” (Daily Hadith Online)…

…or you could quote wisdom encouraging you not to worry about anything, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Mathew 6:25-34).

Walt Whitman in 1891. He died in 1892.

It was Walt Whitman who said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” (Song of Myself). He probably didn’t realize how right he was.

There are multitudes of opposing views within each of us. It’s how we think.

David Eagleman writes, “Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, over-lapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices…There is an on going conversation among the different factions of your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior” (Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, p. 107).

At its most basic, our brains are in a two-party system. One side renders decisions based on emotion (like a romantic) and the other bases decisions on reason (like a mathematician).

A person’s brain is like a bag of jelly-beans. Each jelly-bean has a flavour of thought. When you’re offered something to enjoy, factions will argue in front of a brain “boss” who listens and renders a decision about what to do.

Let’s say you’re life is going well. You enjoy yourself (for the most part), but someone comes along who has everything you want. You compare yourself and find yourself lacking. A faction of jelly-beans gets envious – Team Envy – and another faction feels ashamed for feeling envy.

When factions within your brain present conflicting arguments, what’s your brain-boss going to do?

Nietzsche (1844-1900)

You could turn to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who encouraged people to embrace envy. Nietzsche’s perspective is explained thus, “a great-souled person – an Übermensch – rises above their circumstances and difficulties to embrace whatever life throws at them… He recommends that we own up to envy, use it to inspire us to action, put up a heroic fight and if we fail, to mourn with solemn dignity” (Philosophy, Nietzsche).

You could turn to psychologist Mary Lamia who writes, “You may idealize another person when you are envious…When you experience envy… you have an opportunity to learn about yourself…” (Jealousy and Envy). “Negative interpersonal experiences that leave you feeling… jealousy, envy, anger, or rage can alert you to the possibility of shame contagion…Don’t be afraid to accept responsibility… Only then can you forgive yourself” (Psychology Today –Shame).

You could turn to a story about what happens when three great spiritual leaders taste vinegar:

1,000 year Old Man Rock Near Quanzhou, Fujian Province , China.

“Confucius found it sour, much as he found the world, full of degenerate people and Buddha found it bitter, much as he found the world to be full of suffering, but Lau Tzu found the world sweet. He saw an underlying harmony” (Eastern Philosophy).

Lau Tzu said that we need to find effortless action, a sort of purposeful acceptance of the world and to make time for stillness (Lessons and Thoughts) which brings us back to Friedrich’s paintings.

Woman before the Setting Sun (1818)

Maybe all we need to do to feel absolute free enjoyment is to do what people in a Friedrich’s painting do. Go for a misty stroll alone or with another. Gaze at the moon. Sit in sunshine. Visit a cemetery. Let the jelly-beans within stop their debating for awhile. Sing a song at sunset to yourself. Uncomplicate your life and be in the world.

As Bert Dreyfus puts it, “in fully absorbed coping, mind and world cannot be separated…” or as Sartre said, “When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. . . . I am then plunged into the world of objects… but me, I have disappeared” (Mind-reason and being-in-the-world).

So too can you enjoy this merging with the world and be wise.

Emotions, Enjoyment and a Comic Sensibility

Imagine two human-animals (otherwise known as “people”) sitting together at a table. It’s pleasant. They’re having a drink. Conversation flows as it will and even though the setting is comfortable, feelings within each will waver between hospitable and hostile depending on what is said and the reaction of one to the other.

In this scenario a Philosophy of Enjoyment can tell you exactly what you feel. If you are one of those human-animals or “people” having a drink, you’ll feel somewhere between love-hate and tenderness-fury. Your opposing feelings will mingle into a different position with each minute of each hour of each and every day.

And as you age, every season of every year will deepen, make worse, mellow or complicate past feelings depending on your habits of mind.

Imagine that you and your partner are each hooked up to an “Emotion-Feeling Meter.” It could be a simple meter with a sliding scale or a complicated meter connected to wires measuring brain activity, respiration, perspiration and heart rate.

As you talk one to another, you can see the needles on your respective meters slide one way or the other – from love to hate to neutrality, from tenderness to fury and back again – like the needle on a thermostat going from cold to hot. Depending on the trajectory of ideas expressed, each human-animal will feel the glow of a good feeling or the edge of irritation.

It might even come up in conversation. “Look! What you just said about robots made my love meter go down,” or “Look! When you said how great I was, my tenderness level went up!”

Such are we. Dithering bowls of emotional jello, sliding up and down love-hate scales. One minute cheerful and the next not-so-much and ready to kill. We subject ourselves to opposite feelings minute by minute as we think and measure what we say against what is said to us.

We measure slights, impatience and hurt feelings misconstrued one to another in concentric circles of complexity. We worry and we fret about how we feel, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can be free of fretting. You can stop yourself from being an emotional yo-yo by recognizing the silliness of what you and everyone else is.

This isn’t serious. This is enjoyment. Each of us is tragically and humorously human. We’re all grotesquely and pitifully animal. The trick to it is to see yourself and all the other human-animals not as spiritual entities to be assessed, but as comical animals to be enjoyed and appreciated as oddities.

We need to lighten up and take the joke that is ourselves.

After you develop a sense of comic ridiculousness, you recognize and sympathize with the tragic absurdity and special silliness of all the other “humans” who irritate, aggravate, and infuriate. You might even feel compelled to flatter rather than critique. You can enjoy humility and obscurity like a crow. You can love the tragedy of being born to die.

With awareness of a silly built-in “Emotional-Feeling Meter”, you can recognize the pathetic heroism of each person’s struggle with this thing called life.

Ever since René Descartes, that swarthy French philosopher with long hair, wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” (as it is translated) in 1637 and people concurred, human-animals have separated themselves from the outside world into thought bubbles.

And then when self-help entertainers saw opportunity in undoing the handiwork of Westernized busy-brains with Eastern ideas of non-thought, people started to sit uncomfortably and walk very, very slowly.

In either case, in the Western, “I think therefore I am,” or the Eastern, “don’t think about not thinking and listen for one hand clapping,” life gets confusing. We bounce between over- and under-thinking like ping-pong balls and miss the immediate.

We don’t know if we’re coming or going and we argue about what we do and don’t believe as trees outside our windows drop their leaves.

Expert philosophers bamboozle with never-ending hard questions that become meaningless as spiritualists obfuscate what is easy with fluffy language that says nothing for a fee.

In this, the immediate is what nobody sees. Right now you’re here. That is all. Enjoy it. While you can. Hug. Be kind. No harm. Look up and become aware of yourself as you are. No judgement one way or the other. Does a tree judge itself as worthy or not? Mental conventions, reflections and political concerns can turn one’s very existence into a realm of ideas.

Relax and play. Enjoy when and what you can.

Someone who discloses the immediate enjoyment that’s all around is not profound. It’s just someone who’s free to be, like a goose, a duck, or a bee (see: Busy bees and peripheral visions).

A philosopher of enjoyment is an abstainer from nonsense that passes for clever. An appreciator of the immediate is someone whose depth is nothing but innocence recovered.