It’s been a while: Time to enjoy

“A mixture of trees purifies urban air best” (source).

Let’s get right to it.

Cue music (something gentle): Still Corners “The Trip“.

In this blog, a mixture of philosophies has been presented. Rather than one way of thinking, an eclectic approach has been taken. A philosophy of enjoyment mixes philosophies and accepts wise insights from anywhere and everywhere, including:

1) Epicureanism: avoid pain and seek natural and necessary pleasures like food, friends, and shelter,

2) Stoicism: seek virtue, use endurance, self-restraint and willpower to withstand problems, and balance animal nature with human reason,

3) Existentialism: as a free and responsible agent, you develop yourself through willpower,

4) Romanticism: subjectivity, beauty, imagination and emotion are important,

5) Empiricism: what we know comes from sense experience,

6) Rationalism: what we know comes from reason,

7) Religion: peaceful happiness comes through love, egolessness and the golden rule,

8) Science: ideas can be tested,

9) Movies, music, books… all forms of beauty making: “Only connect,” E.M. Forster,

10) Nature: “Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher,” W. Wordsworth.

Like a pie made better with a mixture of select ingredients, so is your philosophy of enjoyment.

An example of a delicious pie made with a mixture of select ingredients (see: A Brief History of the Great British Pie).

And in this pie of philosophies, there are two ways of looking at the world. We can look a the world: 1) The Thinking Way, or, 2) The Not-thinking Way.

Please note: We can pivot between looking at the world the thinking way and the not-thinking way.

1) The Thinking Way: The first way of looking at the world is the ordinary way. It’s how we get things done. It is what most people are used to and why most people look distracted. This is the practical, utilitarian way. It is to see things filtered through yourself. It is to look at the world as it affects you and as you think about it. It is to see the world through the filter of your personality. Your mood, your preferences and your conditioned opinions colour everything.

The danger in the Thinking Way of looking at the world is that you can be so inside your head that you don’t see what’s going on and when you’re in your head like that, you can talk yourself into, or out of, almost anything. You can see, but you don’t. It’s like when you park a car and don’t remember driving. You get home and don’t remember the trip. Why is that? It’s because you were absorbed in thinking and you didn’t see the world. You negotiated down roads, around trees and buildings, but you were a million miles away.

2. The Not-thinking Way: The second way of looking is the opposite of the thinking way. It’s not that your brain isn’t working—it is—it’s just that it is not self-directed and busy. The Not-thinking Way is a stilling of one’s mental chatter to the point of experiencing the world directly, unfiltered by thoughts, fears, memories or desires.

And when you look directly at the world with all of your senses, there is no one narrating. There are no mental movies playing. There is simply: here.

You, and, here: One and the same. Aware.

Just awareness.

The odd thing about looking at the world the not-thinking way is that, when thoughts go quiet, for however brief a time, one starts to feel a happy feeling that must be experienced. To try to describe it is as ineffectual as to describe the colour red to someone who can’t see red.

Suffice it to say that you feel a peaceful easy feeling. When mental chatter fades and you feel yourself in a peaceful, lazy, stillness, and that subtle feeling of happiness bubbles-up, keep in mind that this “bubbly feeling of happiness” will last up until you realize you’re feeling it. When you realize you‘re feeling it, awareness of yourself puts you in the Thinking Way again and then it’s like when Wile E. Coyote realizes he’s defying gravity and with this realization, suddenly plummets.

An example of what happens when you realize that you’re having an inexplicably beautiful feeling because you’ve stopped thinking.

Along with this mixing of philosophies and this pivoting between two ways of looking—the thinking way and the not-thinking way—another thing to remember is that, in life, there are two ways of finding meaning. There is finding: 1) Meaning in Being, and, 2) Meaning in Doing.

1) Meaning in Being: One way of finding meaning is to find meaning in being itself. One finds meaning and living to be the same thing! The meaning of life is to live. Living is the meaning and meaning is found in living. It’s like, if you asked what is the meaning of a flower? Does a flower have a meaning? What’s it mean? What’s its purpose? Is it just biology? It could be said that the meaning or purpose of a flower is to flower. Similarly, it could be said that the meaning or purpose of you is to “you.”

This way of finding meaning in being relates to the not-thinking way of looking and we are advised to live everyday and enjoy it. The counter to this is to find no meaning in life which leads many people to escapism and mind-altering drugs.

Finding Meaning in Being is like going into the field as shown in the golf movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000):

2) Meaning in Doing: The second way of finding meaning is to find meaning in doing, and, if possible, to make a difference in the world before you die. This latter way of finding meaning is illustrated in many movies.

In Fight Club (1999), for example, there’s a scene where a guy (Brad Pitt) puts a gun to another guy’s head and tells this poor guy to follow his dream and become a veterinarian, or else. In this way, a gun is used as a motivation device.

Another example is in the movie Ikiru, or, “To Live” (1952) in which the main character doesn’t realize he hasn’t been living until he gets diagnosed with cancer and then that realization causes his transformation.

Ikiru (1952) Original Trailer

In all of this, in what you pay attention to and in the way you look at the world and find meaning in being or doing or not doing, it is a choice. You choose to be who and what you are.

In the novel, In the Days of the Comet (1906) by H. G. Wells, a comet hits Earth causing “nitrogen of the air,” to “change out of itself” which results in: “The great Change has come for evermore, happiness and beauty are our atmosphere, there is peace on earth and good will to all men.”

People instantly become good, rational and wise because of a change in the air, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to be hit by a comet to change. A person can be enlightened simply by deciding to be wise and loving like Mr. Williams did in the movie Living (2022).

In Ethics (1677) the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) said that you can experience a personal transformation without a comet simply by becoming more rational. The more you are rational—as in, reasonable, logical, intelligent, wise, judicious, clear-eyed and enlightened—the more your mind coincides with the minds of others who are rational and when our minds coincide, we are united; conversely, the more irrational and unwise you are (think Trump and Putin), the more our minds are divided.

To Spinoza, if you can look upon the natural world as a whole with an attitude of love and reverence, you are freed from your particular identity as a historical person with a particular body and you are not just united with your community, you are united with the whole universe.

Now, enjoy yourself being rational because you never know. C’est la vie!

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?