A perspective to enjoy

Everyone has a perspective, a “point of view,” or POV, if you will. We all have a vantage point from which we perceive the world around us with our senses and, moreover, everyone has their own way of thinking and feeling about what they are perceiving with those senses.

Thinking and feeling are interconnected. Thinking and feeling certain ways can cause a person to say certain things and behave in certain ways, and then, one will feel and think certain ways after having said or done what one has said and done because saying certain things (to yourself or out loud) and behaving in certain ways reinforces what one already thinks and feels. 

It’s a loop, really.

Source: The Loop of Thinking, Feeling, Being

If you’re not happily looping, however, there is a way out, and, once out, one is free to enjoy without needing anything or having to go anywhere and with the added bonus of a light-hearted happy feeling of good humor.

What could be better?

“Good humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us,” Ernest Renan (1823-1892).

It begins with cultivating an awareness of how one’s thoughts affect one’s feelings. As an online grief assistant put it (not that you’re grieving, but this applies to all feelings), “When your thoughts appear to be the product of your overwhelming sadness and grief, know that it is your thoughts that are feeding the sadness rather than the other way around. Your thoughts generate a feeling which you then act upon” (“How our thoughts govern how we feel“).

When you have a good, bad or indifferent thought, a matching good, bad or indifferent feeling will be the result. It’s all cause (thought) and effect (feeling) in a chain of causes and effects.

If one isn’t aware of how one’s thoughts affect one’s feelings and thus one’s self and the world at large, one can unknowingly let thoughts get the better of one by looping in a way that limits or eliminates happiness, because happiness, if you dig into it, is the ground of one’s being. Happiness is there all the time in the background before we muddle ourselves with thinking and feeling.

Cue music:

As a kid you were probably naturally happy, that is, unless your happiness was tarnished by someone equally tarnished, but even then, even if it feels like your happiness is or was tarnished, even if you think happiness is completely missing, it actually isn’t.

You can have everything but still not be happy and, conversely, you can have nothing and be happy. It depends on how one thinks. The trick is to limit bad thoughts and feelings and nurture good thoughts and feelings. By repeating the latter (good thoughts and feelings), the former (bad thoughts and feelings), evaporate.

Happiness doesn’t come from outside sources like cars and money, nor does it come from experiences like world travel or cannabis imbibing. We know how thoughts and feelings come and go like clouds on any given day as we age, but one thing remains in the background blue sky: one’s self prior to thinking.

To enjoy is to agree to partake. Violence begets violence. Peace begets peace. So it is. Make your choice. Enjoyment is affirmed when one says, “I will enjoy” but not at the expense of others. Just as one can initiate enjoyment with an affirmation, so too can enjoyment be prevented by a lack of attention or unrealistic expectations.

Metaphorically speaking, who one is, as a person, is like someone wearing sunglasses. The sunglasses one wears affects how one sees. When one wears pink sunglasses, the world appears pink. Likewise, so too is the world colored by the lens of one’s thoughts and feelings about what one has seen, thought or felt in the past and is seeing, thinking and feeling in the present.

The reality that we assume to be real—that each of us perceives with our senses combined with awareness—the reality that we consider to be reality, is not really reality, at least, not directly.

Looking at reality is kind of like watching reality TV. Reality TV is not reality. It’s TV reality. So too is one’s personal subjective reality. If one perceives reality as harsh and unenjoyable, reality appears harsh and unenjoyable and then one acts accordingly.

In this choice to enjoy, willpower might come to mind, but enjoyment is like sleep, you can’t make it happen. You can, however, set the stage for enjoyment. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-186) said that the will is like “the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.” The strong blind man symbolizes willpower and the lame man symbolizes one’s conscious mind. Not everyone has willpower, however. That’s where a contrasting philosophical concept called free will comes in. Whereas willpower emphasizes persistence and determination, free will emphasizes the choices we make and our individual autonomy as conscious beings (The Socratic Method). Having autonomy means one is free to follow one’s heart. 

It is one’s conscious mind that possesses the faculties to evaluate the consequences of one’s actions. It is will power and free will in combination that allows one to navigate the complexities of living. Repeated thoughts become like grooves in a record that play again and again. If one has been treated harshly, one may treat others likewise but if one perceives the world without a bias initiated by a past experience, one can get out of the rut of past thinking to realize the beauty that is in front of one, like a blue sky hidden by clouds.

Clouds are like thoughts. They come and they go. They cover the background blue sky which is the happiness we feel when we let all those thoughts drift on by.

If one can see the big-picture, one can see one’s sameness with others and the beauty of living and, if one can see that big-picture and enjoy the feeling of being and breathing in that blue sky feeling without thinking or needing, well then, one is effortlessly and naturally happy.

Breathe in the air (and enjoy)

“Long you live and high you fly
Smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be” (Pink Floyd, “Breathe”, 1973)

Contrary to popular belief (and advertisers everywhere), people don’t need a product, service or lifestyle to enjoy life.

A moment of peace in a park or beside a drainage ditch with a Great Blue Heron can stop a busy brain from blocking beauty.

Without the blinders of identity and self-interest, a person can go from listening to an interior monologue capable of souring any perspective (and ruin your life), to enjoying the smallest things—a ladybug on a leaf, ducks quacking and water vapour (for no reason).

Breathing can be enjoyable. In the midst of a problem, you can enjoy breathing (assuming that it is safe to do so).

If you hold your breath long enough, your body breathes for you. Combine this breathed sensation with a heart beating autonomously and you can appreciate self-driving organic automation. 

But breathing and heart-beating (consciously or not) gets boring. After breathing (even if it is enjoyable), people get distracted and ask like Peggy Lee did, “Is that all there is?”

What’s easily enjoyed is easily ignored. We might want to enjoy more, but therein is our problem: What we enjoy triggers our brain’s “reward” centers and makes pleasure habit-forming (see also: “Hedonism, Selfishness and a Womb with a View”).

A pleasure repeated can “set up potentially harmful routines, such as overeating, smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, gambling and even compulsive use of computers and social media” (Breaking Bad Habits).

Enjoyment (and addictive drugs) prompts the brain to release dopamine—a chemical responsible for transmitting signals between nerve cells.

Dr. Russell Poldrack, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas comments, “If you do something over and over, and dopamine is there when you’re doing it, that strengthens the habit even more. When you’re not doing those things, dopamine creates the craving to do it again” (source). 

(Saturday Cartoons)

Therefore, it isn’t prudent to do whatever thou wilt. One will soon find one’s self on auto-pilot, following a predetermined sequence of operations conditioned by habit prompted by pleasure.

One may soon find one’s self on a Hedonic Treadmill chasing a craving for happiness that becomes evermore unattainable.

source

“The hedonic treadmill, which is also referred to as hedonic adaptation, is a metaphor for your set point of happiness. The idea here is that no matter how good or bad something makes you feel, you will eventually return to your original emotional state” (developgoodhabits).

Cue music: “The Windmills of Your Mind“:

“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon…

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream…”

“

Aristippus (435-356 BC) the philosopher saw danger in pleasure and advised, “It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without being worsted” (source).

“The vice lies not in entering the bordello but in not coming out” (Aristippus)

The philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) agreed, but his idea of pleasure was ataraxy, “a state of serene calmness.”

Epicurus advised us not to be ambitious but to live in harmony with nature and strive for tranquility brought by contentment with simple things and the absence of pain.

Existential Comics: Was Epicurus Really a Hedonist?

Our happiness formula is backwards. We think, “If I do something great, work overtime, get straight A’s, achieve some goal, then I’ll become more successful, and then I’ll be happier.”

But a few weeks after a goal is achieved, the trip over, the new treasure made familiar, happiness levels return to normal and a new goal is needed to achieve happiness later.

The trick to evading the trap of cravings and treadmills is to not wait until later to be happy. Save time and be happy first! To do that, it’s quite simple: Go without expectations, forget who you are and shift from thinking, “I must do something,” to, “I must do nothing.” The real trick is to enjoy reality as it is, because it is.

You are free to enjoy, but enjoying the world as it is, as you are, is difficult for people who are weighed down by time and things to be done.

Accepting reality without need, fear, or demand, with a sigh, without resistance, “this is what it is,” you suddenly find yourself relaxing into what there is (see also: “This too shall pass“).

Beautiful Enjoyable Virtue With More Cowbell

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a hell-fire preacher and philosopher. His book, The Nature of True Virtue (1765), is a hard book to read (without falling asleep), but what he said in his wordy way is that virtue, a.k.a. moral excellence, decency, and courage is a kind of sixth sense like Spider-Man’s spidey sense except instead of sensing imminent danger, one senses a beautiful feeling of virtue.

Virtue is “founded in sentiment and not in reason,” said Edwards meaning: virtue is a beautiful feeling. If you enjoy strolling a tree-lined path, you don’t need reason to explain beauty to you. You know its beautiful because you feel it! Virtue is like that. It’s something “immediately pleasant to the mind.”

“…virtue most essentially consists in love…”  Jonathan Edwards

Edwards may have been indecisive about what to wear, “Should I wear the black jacket or the black jacket?” but when it came to virtue, he was never conflicted because virtue is not relative to culture. Virtue is universal. It may not come to everyone (even though it could), but with genuine concern for what is good, virtue has already come.

Edwards (a.k.a Mr. Bluesky) called true virtue the “benevolence of being” or “beauty of the heart.” The heart being symbolic home to emotions of love, affection, and courage and where people say they feel a heartwarming sensation (as opposed indigestion).

If you are touched by an insurance commercial and “believe in good,” that is true virtue. It isn’t beautiful like a flower, house or body. It isn’t a thing. Virtue is feeling beauty in good doings.

Taking an opposite stance to “feelings, nothing more than feelings,” (not the Offspring version) is Ayn Rand (1905-1982). To her, reality is exclusively perceived by the physical senses and only REASON can take sensory data and arrive at objectively valid conclusions (source). Her philosophy, Objectivism, is based on reason, egoism, individualism and capitalism.

“Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” Ayn Rand.

With Rand, prickly analytical type people are either critical (Was Ayn Rand Evil?) or evangelical (The Atlas Society).

Rand argued that morality is a code of values that guide the choices we make which determine the course of our lives (source), but we’ve been offered two false alternatives: be moral – sacrifice yourself to others, or be selfish – sacrifice others to yourself (source). Which did she choose?

Be selfish. 

Edwards probably wouldn’t buy Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness.” He believed in feeling beyond reasoning, but he did say that some virtue comes from self-love (even if it isn’t true virtue).

The Golden Rule for example (treat others as you wish to be treated) treats virtue as an exchange for mutual benefit (reciprocity), but when treated poorly, do people say, “That’s OK,” (true virtue) or do they say, “How dare you treat me this way?” and demand retribution?

Cue music. Edwards said that “self-love” is to feel “one with one’s self” and true love (like parent for child), is to feel a “union of the heart with others: a kind of enlargement of the mind, whereby it so extends itself as to take others into a man’s self.”

In eastern traditions, feeling separated from the earth and each other is a trick. Our brains put things into intellectual boxes that we label, but we are all a self and an other to each other and everything goes together: back with front, sound with hearing, inside with outside.

Edwards probably believed in a higher self (good) and a lower self (bad), but in Zen there’s no such thing. There’s just you as far as the eye can see! Poetically speaking, “We’re rays of the same sun,” or as Oliver sang it in ’69, “Good Morning Starshine. The earth says hello. You twinkle above us. We twinkle below.“

And yet, feeling at one with everything sounds like a fantasy because it feels like there’s a self “in here” (with your name on it!) and a world “out there,” (that’s scary sometimes) but this is a trick we play on ourselves (source).

Reality is a feeling of colour, sound and sensation. We receive this as an entirety, but tell ourselves that some of it is “me” and some of it is “you.”

Pristine enjoyment is total acceptance: acceptance of yourself, of this universe as it is in this instant without any feeling of separation between self within (yes you!) and world without (look around!).

True virtue is to enjoy walking 500 miles in comfortable shoes like the Proclaimers claimed they’d do for no good reason but love.

Martial artist, Morihei (“abundant peace”) Ueshiba (1883-1969), said in The Art of Peace, “Foster peace in your own life then apply the Art to all that you encounter” (p. 13), but how do you do that?

Watching simulated horror in The Walking Dead show is popular, but in such places as ISIS territory, in flooding refugees, in crowded slums and extinction of species from inharmonious activity, a leaden-hearted brain-dead zombie apocalypse of a kind is happening now.

That a terrifying show about death feeding on life should provide advice about love and peace just goes to show, “You never know.”

In the non-horrible video below we meet Mr. Eastman who shows a man how to live a peaceful philosophy of nonresistance: redirect, evade, accept, care, protect, move forward and remember: All life is precious (and carry a big stick).

Enjoy living in the beauty of virtue. In the words of the band Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t fear the reaper,” but if you do, amuse yourself with a little more cowbell!

And remember: Living in peace is better than resting!