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 An Insight

Ever have one of those days? Everybody does. It’s a real bummer of a day (bummer is hippie speak for misfortune). It’s one of those days when you say to yourself, “Why me?” or “Why now?”

You’re up before the sun “working in a coal mine, going down down,” and someone says, “Lord! I am soooo tired. How long can this go on?” Not that you actually work in a coal mine (unless you do). We’re talking metaphor. We all work in a coal mine of one kind or another. Even those who don’t work, work in a coal mine of a kind.

It’s on a “one of those days” day that you look for a sign that there’s more to life. Not that you’re superstitious. It’s just that when life is boring, pointless and terrible, most of us look for a sign that there’s more to it. Even those who don’t believe in miracles look for them.

But few people see signs these days and those who do are maligned. We might crave a vision but all we have is TV. It’s not because the signs aren’t there that we don’t see them.

We don’t see them because we’re either not paying attention or we lack imagination. It takes a special kind of sensitivity to subtlety for a person to see signs and put it together.

In 1989 two math professors wrote “Methods for Studying Coincidences” in which they outlined four sources for most coincidences: 1) a hidden cause, 2) the psychology of a person, including memory and perception, 3) multiplicity of endpoints, including the counting of “close” or nearly alike events as if they were identical, and 4) the law of truly large numbers – given enough events, almost any coincidence is bound to occur.

They found that most puzzling coincidences arise in the mind of the observer. Therein is the magic! That’s the answer! You alone see the sign! You create magic by tuning into it!

Coincidence?

If you pay attention and if you lighten up and if you go for silly walks now and then you will become familiar with wonderful oddities (for complete instructions see: Ministry of Silly Walks) .

Call it coincidence. Call it ironic, moronic or divine. Call it just one of those things. Beyond rationalization, confabulation and logical explanation, there are times when weird things happen and you are in a perfect position to see them (see earlier post: “Enjoy What Is And Take What Comes“).

The Slant.

Let’s say you’re on your way to get your blood tested. As you peddle past a pretty storybook house with a fountain, you’re reminded of fairy-land pictures you’ve seen. The thought occurs to you that you and everyone you know will soon be dead.

It sounds gloomy, but at this moment it isn’t. Knowing that everything you know and have ever known will soon be gone has a way of putting things in perspective (see earlier post “Enjoy A Bad Day“).

What’s the worse case scenario in any situation? You could die. But you know that’s going to happen anyway so, as Dire Straits put it, “Why worry?”

No sooner do you have this realization when you see a sign. But it isn’t the sign that catches your attention. It’s the sign spinner. Stopped at a streetlight, you watch the sign spinner. Suddenly life doesn’t seem so bad.

And you hear music coming from somewhere. It’s Tommy James and the Shondells singing Draggin’ the Line which goes: “Makin’ a livin’ the old, hard way. Takin’ and givin’ my day by day. / I dig snow and rain and the bright sunshine…/ My dog Sam eats purple flowers.
Ain’t got much, but what we got’s ours… / I feel fine!”

What you thought was going to be “one of those days” changes into something beautiful when you open yourself to connection and possibility.

Jump forward: now you’re in a lab cubicle waiting for a nurse to take your blood. You’re listening to the Moody Blues sing “Tuesday Afternoon” and you think, “That’s funny. It is a Tuesday afternoon!”

The nurse comes in and prepares the syringe. You avert your eyes and on the wall you see a picture of a fountain. It looks like the fountain you saw earlier by the storybook house that reminded you of pictures that you once saw of a fairyland of love. They say that fountains symbolize joy and peace and water is the sign of calmness. All you know is that you like water fountains.

You may look back on your life like a Dickens’ novel. Life seems planned but little accidental meetings and experiences turn out to be main features of the plot. At this minute, looking around at the world as you do, you suddenly have an insight.

You marvel at the wonder of life and in so doing, enjoy it.

Enjoy the Reality of Reality

As Sandy Nelson put it in in the 1961 hit “Let There Be Drums,” there’s reality and there’s the reality of reality.

Reality is the beat. It’s the world as you see it. It’s not real in the dictionary sense of “occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed” because we each see the world a bit differently based on how we think about it.

For example: A couple stops to look at cows. One person is a sweet city woman (like the song). She says, “Cows! Aren’t they cute?” The second person has cow experience and says, “Yeah, they’re cute until one steps on your foot.” Same cows, different reality.

One person sees potato salad and salivates, another sees it and cringes. Same potato salad, different reality.

It’s because we each see through a mental window of our own making. From this self-window the world is negotiated. We look for advantages. We envy. We see faults. We worry. Our world is decorated with self-created irritations and we feel different and alone within our self-made, self-identity.

But it’s easy to break that self-window. Just slip off that self-made identity with a shrug of your shoulders. Let self-concern and opinion go quiet and you’ll look around like a baby and feel that subtle feeling. It’s a feeling of awe. You notice colours and textures more. Silence sounds more silent. You feel ecologically aware when you enter a reality that’s all too beautiful.

Shift from thinking about the world as self-interest sees it to experiencing it with your five senses plus one more: Amazement. The games Mel Tormé sang about can continue, but you don’t care (see related post: Horizons, Games, Connections & Enjoyment) because you see through the games and enjoy them for what they are.

Reality “As Is”.

Most of the time we take what we see for granted, but then, in an emergency or during a profound moment of awareness, when reality isn’t resisted or judged and it’s taken “as is,” the reality of reality hits you like a beautiful dream.

With this gentle shift in looking, you enjoy beauty, pathos and humour. You love almost everything and you enjoy humility because “you,” as you normally think of yourself in a competitive world, are gone.

But wait! There’s more!

This can be tested. Prove it to yourself with direct experience. Every now and then stop what you’re doing and look up. Look around. Listen. That’s it. Don’t do anything. Go perfectly still like a show room dummy. Take a deep breath and observe. See yourself seeing. Notice thoughts thoughting. Watch what happens. Look at where you are and say to yourself, “I am aware.”

And you are.

Because it isn’t what you see, it’s how you see. That’s what unshaven mystics, romantics and drummers have been sayings for years. Perceiving the reality of reality is like being in a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving at the same time.

In quantum theory there’s a phenomenon known as “superposition” from which it’s possible for the same particle to be doing two contradictory things simultaneously (Scientists supersize quantum mechanics).

You’re like that particle. A particle can be moving and stationary at the same time until an outside force acts on it and then in an instant the particle chooses one of two contradictory positions. Similarly, reality is perceived by you as it affects you AND you are a reality perceiving. The trick is to go into “superposition.”

Think of a time when you felt a feeling of love, of beauty, of understanding, of oneness with everything and everyone.

Sublime feelings like this come out of the blue like the sky above when you enjoy the reality of reality.

Maybe you’ve felt it while sitting alone beside a lake or while walking in a forest or while eating ice cream that you found. It’s when your senses are heightened and worries vanish.

It’s like we’ve been hypnotized by a magician (our self). He snaps his fingers and says, “Wake up. Look around.” And you do. No longer is reality filtered by fear and desire. It’s direct. What you see blows your mind.

In a state of intense consciousness everything is poignantly lovely. There’s a beautiful ordinariness to everything.

Separations dissolve. There are no faults and no thoughts of self. You understand. You are free and unafraid. You do your best without thought for result and let what happens, happen.

It’s like going into a trance while walking in a forest or driving in a car at night. It’s a total presence in a moment of heightened awareness without expectation or want.

In a self-perceived reality one must be smart, tough or lucky. In this self-created reality there are sharks and dragons glorified on TV by their dollars, possessions and arrogance and there are self-righteous people looking down on others from a vantage point of belief.

The sky may be blue, but it’s not impressive to you if you’re like the old man who sees fireworks on the fourth of July in Fort Collins Colorado and says, “If you’ve seen fireworks once, you’ve seen them all.”

We let our senses go dull and interpret the world like a movie rated from one to five based on convenience and comfort, but if you want to feel something beautiful, watch opinions come and go without clinging to them like a creeper to a gate.

Enjoy the reality of reality by getting out of your way. Breathe into what is and go swimming away into the reality of reality because you already know how it ends.

Enjoy Happiness from the Periphery

One day, in searching for “happiness” on Google (as many people do), happiness appeared as a man and woman in hip medieval clothing.

Is that how you picture happiness?

Is happiness a warm puppy like Charles Schultz said in 1962? Is happiness that simple? Is it a moment of satisfaction with whatever your “warm puppy” is?

Or is happiness a warm gun as the Beatles sang it in 1968? Said John Lennon, “I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say” (Beatles Bible).

“Project Happiness” (where the science of happiness meets the art of living) says that 10% of happiness is due to circumstance, 50% comes from genes, and 40% comes from activities like forgiveness and gratitude. With practice, they say, you can make yourself happy. But what if, instead of making yourself happy, you make someone happy?

What then?

It’s strange. We feel so alone. Talk to someone and there’s a gulf between. We’re a universe apart. We don’t see how the consciousness looking back at us is the same as our own. The profound is hidden in the ordinary.

To look into another’s eyes and see love and mercy reflected there is a rare happiness. We grow up forming a healthy self-image but gain wisdom by letting it go (Jung).

A self-image is developed through what we say and think about ourselves and what others say of us. If that self-image is overly negative, inaccurate, or inflated, it creates problems.

It’s hard to see a self-image (Latin ego “I”). It hides behind opinions believed true, but if you follow the trail of emotions it leaves behind like anger at a slight or jealousy or a need to win and so on, in those emotions you find ego. It’s a condemning voice inside your head that’s critical and blaming.

But, “Smile,” says the research. “It’s good for your brain.” Who cares if you look insane?

The thinking is that if you’re not happy, there’s something wrong with you. Maybe that explains why antidepressant use went up 400% in the US between 2005–2008 (Harvard Medical School).

Too bad they don’t work – at least, according to the New England Journal of Medicine (Huffington Post, 2011).

Kirsch (2014) said, “Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future” (Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect).

So, “What are you gonna do?” (language warning)

In Google, if you do a search for what “happiness” looks like, you’ll see images like the ones below:

“Happiness” image search results.

Happiness appears as beaches, beautiful skies, people with arms open wide at sunrise and jumping at sunset, we see ladies with balloons and a parasol soaking up sunshine and summer fields. As you look at these images, the word “freedom” might come to mind. The word freedom comes from Old English ‘freo’ meaning, “not in bondage, acting of one’s own will, noble, joyful” (Online Etymology Dictionary).

So, does freedom look like happiness? A search for the word freedom shows the following images.

Again we see sunshine, that same woman with a parasol and people with arms open wide as if to fly. Maybe Frank Sinatra was onto something when he sang, “Fly Me To The Moon.” From these images the word spirit, as in, “happy spirits” and “free-spirited” comes to mind.

The word spirit comes from Latin “spiritus” meaning, “breathing.”  Like “moo” or “BANG” such words mean their sound. Spirit is like that. It is an imitation of breathing (Online Etymology Dictionary).

An image search of the word spirit showed images from a Disney movie, but undeterred, entering the word “spiritual” reveals the images shown below.

“Spiritual” image search results.

Again we see beautiful skies, sunshine, beaches and arms open wide. Maybe Enya was onto something when she sang “Only Time.”

What if, instead of categorizing things into two opposites (either-or, self-other, good-bad, life-death, happy-sad…) we consider opposites as one process like a game of ping pong.

Without ping there is no pong. Happiness (ping) goes with sadness (pong). Life (ping) goes with death (pong).

Happiness might not be about getting what you want and having a good time all the time. Happiness could be a love of life in all its aspects – pleasant and unpleasant.

A self-image is like putting on eye-glasses. As Clark Kent, the world looks different. How we think colours everything we see. Should you take off your glasses of personality, you might enjoy reality (even if it is fuzzy). Maybe that’s what a higher consciousness experience is: It’s a union with reality. You see everyone and everything as interconnected. You see beauty.

When you focus on breathing, you are aware of it (in-out, in-out, repeat), but when you stop focusing, breathing continues. We are breathed in the same way that grass grows and produces the oxygen we need. It’s all a relationship. It’s all connection.

Life is a doing. It’s happening (see the Supreme’s sing “The Happening,” 1967). We might feel isolated, but that isn’t how it is.

A feeling of happiness doesn’t depend on what you know or do. You can’t make progress in it. You can’t do anything or not do anything to get it.

Happiness comes when you are so adapted to pleasure and pain that you say, “I love it!” No matter what happens. Like the Bad Finger song, “Knock down the old grey wall. Be a part of it all. Nothing to say, nothing to see, nothing to do,” you get it because you got it (see: Bad Finger “No Matter What”).

Let go your eggo (aka ego) and go out there and let the universe happen as you.

Enjoy.

References

1. Happiness (14th century) (Wikipedia)
2. Beatles Bible
3. Project Happiness
4. How Smiling Changes Your Brain
5. 5 Ways to Make Yourself Happier in the Next 5 Minutes (Psychology Today, 2014)
6. Harvard Medical School
7. Huffington Post (2011)
8. Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect (2014)
9. Online Etymology Dictionary.
10. Science of Happiness

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.

Enjoyment Without a Head

Imagine walking into a forest. It’s winter. There’s snow but you’re not cold. It’s silent and still and magical. As you stroll you notice how thoughts come and go, until gradually, as you pay attention to the graceful world, thinking subsides and a gentle feeling arises.

This is a path you’ve walked before. You can picture the former you walking here. And it’s a funny thing: You’ve lurched between wanting and not wanting throughout your life, but in a moment of attention like this, you don’t do either.

You see your breath in the air and ask: “Who are you?” Who but you would know? Why not look into what it’s like being you – first person, singular, present tense? “Would you want to live and die without looking at the one doing that?” asked Douglas Harding.

You see yourself as a kid looking in a mirror. Your mom said, “That’s you!” and you believed her. Again and again you see the person under glass and think, “That’s me!” You think you are as you appear in the mirror, but that’s not how you actually see. When you look out of yourself, you don’t see a head.

You see hands, feet and knees. You see objects. You see trees and rabbit droppings and pine cones. You see far and near, but try as you might, you can’t see the one seeing. Your self is like that. Your self is a concept like a reflection in a mirror.

The ancients spoke of beauty, goodness and truth. Immersed in a world of snow, grass, trees and colour, you put one foot in front of the other and care not for images, politics and economies. You see beauty. You see goodness. You know a simple truth: You’re here and glad of it.

The poet William Blake (1757-1827) wrote, “Every Eye sees differently. As the Eye, Such the Object” (Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, p. 19). Everyone may see the same tree, but experience it differently. Blake said, “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The fool is less aware. He sees, “trees” like a million others. Meaningless. Insignificant. But a wise person lives in gusto and pays attention. A wise person’s tree is more real.

You are the space between. Before a thought comes, there is a thinker. You are the one thinking. You are consciousness itself.

Writer Douglas Harding saw philosopher Ernst Mach’s 1885 self-portrait where he closed his right eye and drew himself. While walking Harding had an insight and wrote, “What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, and odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me.”

Harding looked at himself and realized that he couldn’t see his head. “It took me no time at all to notice this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far beyond them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world”  (On Having No Head).

In the 1960s Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band saw a similarity between poet Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) and Douglas Harding. Heron wrote a song about headlessness that begins, “When I was born I had no head. My eye was single and my body was filled with light. And the light that I was, was the light that I saw by. And the light that I saw by, was the light that I was” (song: Douglas Traherne Harding). 

In the 1600’s Traherne wrote, “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.” Traherne was a philosopher of enjoyment. He wrote, “Your enjoyment of the World is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven” (Centuries of Meditation). Wade (1944) writes of Traherne, “In the middle of the seventeenth century, there walked the muddy lanes of Herefordshire and the cobbled streets of London, a man who had found the secret of happiness… He became the most radiantly, most infectiously happy mortal this earth has known” (p. 2). This is the secret: It is in paying attention without thinking. Don’t be fooled by personality.

You are like the surprised squirrel silently watching you watch him.

If this squirrel were a person, you would feel self-conscious and probably look away, but when you’re headless, you don’t worry. Both you and the face you see, don’t see their own face. It’s just a you looking back at another you. 

You are a tightrope walker. The path you walk (in or out of forests) is the rope you’re on. You walk between thought and attention. The trick is to enjoy both. You are the world seeing. You are not a thing. You are not your appearance. You are seeing itself. You are capacity. This year is dedicated to paying attention without distracted thinking. Wherever you go, there you are. You are the world to yourself. You are the one experiencing.

Trust experience and enjoy it.

References

Wade, G. (1944). Thomas Traherne: A Critical Biography. Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press.

 

Rules of Enjoyment

Imagine that in your hands you hold an old bow and arrow. It is summer. The sun is rising. You are young and better looking than you are (why not?). All is quiet except for birds singing. You gaze up at distant hills and the last of midnight stars.

You feel like you’re in a movie that only you will see, but that’s not sad. It’s profound. It’s an opportunity for you to enjoy the show.

Wild grass swishes against your legs as you walk into the centre of a meadow lined by trees. The air smells damp. It is cool, not cold. Selecting a spot from which to launch, you position an arrow and raise the bow. A lively tune from your soundtrack is playing. Tension builds. Aiming high, you hope to hell no one gets killed.In this imagining where you are better looking than you are, the arrow is you, the bow is you, the air is you and where you land is you. It’s all you!

There’s unity in what you see. Wisdom is knowing that organisms in a meadow are each a part of it. You are as much a part of the meadow as anything else in that meadow. To feel no separation between yourself and your surroundings – to merge in what you see – is the ultimate enjoyment of the earth-trance kind. People may feel peaceful absorption while gardening, rock climbing, walking on a beach or in intimacy. It is to lose yourself in where you are. It is a subtle feeling as light as a line traced by a fly.

When your mental chatter goes quiet and you feel the landscape seeing you seeing it, that is when you slip into an alternate reality of one. It’s a giddy feeling! Words like, “This is amazing,” come to mind just before you go silent. It’s an ever so slight shift in perspective from how you normally perceive reality. Reality that was out there is now not. There is no out there. Its like a spell that takes you out of yourself, but it isn’t magic or mystical. It’s ordinary. It’s extraordinarily ordinary. It’s a silent, click. The world around is always there, but we stop noticing. Thinking keeps us busy and detached.

TWANG! The arrow zips into the air, where it lands… you don’t care (it’s the flying not the landing that matters).

Such is life.

You’re like little castle in a pond. This is the thrill of your loneliness but it’s tricky because everything has an opposite. There’s enjoyable alone (alone and glad of it!) and there’s suffering alone (alone with self-pity). These things loop.

If you’re happy alone, you’re happy alone but the more alone you feel, the more alone you are. The more self-conscious you feel, the more self-conscious you are.

A person alone who takes care of himself is together. A sign of sanity is to be happy alone and to take care of yourself. To feel separate and alone is to feel broken. On one side there’s you and on the other, everything (and everyone) else. With people, the more alike we are, the more we like, but the more unlike, the more dislike. To feel a kindred spirit is to feel unity. To feel the same behind the eyes, is to feel as one.

In this imagined sending of an arrow into the air, the arrow is you, but what if you tie rocks to your arrow? People who tie rocks of pride, vanity and conceit to themselves weigh themselves down. If your desire is to enjoy life and to increase other people’s chances of enjoying it too, the thing to destroy is all trace of arrogance, vanity and conceit. Humility is one of the most powerful weapons in the life-battle to enjoy.

Just as there are rules of engagement in time of war, so too are there Rules of Enjoyment! The rules are simple. Post them like you would post swimming pool rules.

• Never substitute your own enjoyment for other people’s ideas of enjoyment
• Never sacrifice a life of contemplative sensation for a life of outward success
• Never let haters of other people’s enjoyment interfere with your own

Pelican Rules of Enjoyment

1. No worries about work
2. No worries about money
3. No worries about fame
4. No striving
5. No pride, no vanity, no conceit
6. Remain calm
7. Remain kind
8. Remain slightly amused at all times
9. Enjoy being alone.
10. Enjoy being together
11. Enjoy sensing surroundings
12. Enjoy enjoyment
13. Suffer through suffering to enjoy again

Busy Bees and Peripheral Visions

Question anyone on a busy street anywhere in the world and ask: “How are you?” The reply could very well be, “I’m busy like everybody.” It’s the mantra of modernity. “Busy, busy” is said as humanity hives the world, but to complain is ineffectual, not to mention, unenjoyable.

You can’t stop busy bees any more than you can stop ants or humans. You can’t change them. Despite the malleability of the human brain (see neuroplasticity), most people don’t (or won’t) change their habits even if it made life more enjoyable for everyone, but there is a loop hole you can use to enjoy your life. What is that loop hole? Enjoyment (your own).

Enjoyment is its own reward. Life isn’t meaningless (see: The Great Big Huge Secret). Let this be your litmus test: In any decision ask: Is it enjoyable? Considering a new job? Is it enjoyable? Considering marriage (or divorce). Is it enjoyable? Whatever the decision, think: Is it enjoyable?

Sometimes the answer won’t be clear-cut. “Should I drive fast?” Is it enjoyable? Yes, but a speeding ticket or crash isn’t. Weigh present enjoyment against future enjoyment. Temper enjoyment with reason and go with the flow. Use an enjoyment strategy.

If you have to do something you don’t enjoy (such is life), you can endure for the sake of future enjoyment or for the enjoyment of having enjoyable thoughts as you do the unenjoyable.

The expression, “If you’re not busy living, you’re busy dying,” takes on significance when considered in light that both occur involuntarily. Life happens. Cause is in effect and vice versa. Society exerts pressures to keep us busy and people judge those who aren’t. If you don’t believe it, try this experiment:

Go some place busy and stand still (without being in the way – that wouldn’t be enjoyable). Look around. Watch the world. Imagine you have a special power to slow time down with your own boredom. Shift the focus of your eyes to the periphery. See from the sides. Listen. Imagine everyone is hypnotized except you. Be brave and look dumb.

No doubt you’ll get strange looks. You might get reported for statue behaviour. Serious people will think you’re odd, but who cares? Odd numbers are not divisible by two. If you’re an odd number, you’re alone, but this is your secret power. If you can endure the loneliness, you are home wherever you are.

Lonely souls enjoy a special bond with other lonely souls. Feel sorry for busy bee-people and be kind to them. They’re too busy to know what they’re doing.

People hurry. Don’t believe it? Look around. Millions of cars are visible at night like red and white corpuscles in city-bodies. Nature, as in “the wild” is designated, sectioned off, preserved. Animals are moored in small island parks, but it is pointless to complain. It is a human race we live, but you can enjoy the wild even when it’s tame because wherever you go, there you are (see: Where Are You?).

Some people seek thrills. That’s enjoyment to them. Waiting in line is torture, but if impatience is quiet, time slows down. If a watched kettle takes forever to boil, why not watch kettles? Live longer. Enjoy time not doing.

The counter argument is, “If I’m not busy, I’m bored. I may as well be dead!” This may be true, but if it isn’t, it could be that you’re not doing ‘not doing’ quite right.

To not do isn’t a lull between doings. You can be not doing and look busy. To not be busy is to take the time to watch something far away. It is to linger on a sensory memory (see Keep it Simple). It is to shift focus to the periphery as you walk down a long hallway without swinging your arms and feel amused in so doing. Enjoy yourself as yourself where you are. Why not? Is the alternative any better? What have you got to lose?

To not be busy is to take your time. You are here to be here. This isn’t serious. Enjoy a rock and roll groove as you watch trees shake and shimmy to distant thunder.

Here’s The Thing

Everyone knows that horrible, terrible, and disgusting things happen. The News is not always good. People are nuts. Flies exist and it’s hard to open a pickle jar now and again, but that’s beside the point!

We know that bad stuff happens! It’s obvious – just look around – but could bad stuff be just a distraction? With your head well-above the sand, you can probably see how life oscillates between good and bad, on and off, life and death. First good, then bad, then good, bad, bad, good – you get the picture. Life is fraught with adversity. Life lives off of itself. It truly is a bitter sweet symphony.

If you want to enjoy the experience of living as you are in this body with that face that looks back at you dumbly, you have to try to enjoy living. In so doing enjoyment is shared forward. This is your Philosophy of Enjoyment. It comes with a money back guarantee.

If you want to will yourself happy, you need the courage and freedom to become nothing but an impersonal consciousness. This isn’t to say that you don’t care for others, it’s just that you are willing to be light as a feather. To be nothing-but-an-impersonal-consciousness means that you excuse yourself from self-importance.

To enjoy, really enjoy, one must be so immersed that one becomes enjoyment. One becomes the eyes that see and the ears that hear. The islands of other selves all around are doing the same. Each person feels alone so be kind to every one of them, for each one is a another you.

What is the value of a frog? Not much, but the value of a frog to itself is priceless. A healthy frog is a happy frog. To live to enjoy living is what a frog appears to be doing. Why else would it try so hard to get away? A living frog wants to keep living. To be a frog another day is the goal of every frog eating a fly. That’s what this trip is about. It’s circular. To live is to enjoy living and to enjoy living is to make living enjoyable. You are like a frog except for the unexpectedly long sticky tongue.

No matter how great you might think you are: you’re not. Nobody is superior to any one else. Much depends on chance, opportunity and ability. People get misplaced priorities. They judge. They find fault or they grieve over faults. People get self-absorbed. They do some smart things and they do some stupid things, but when you get right down to it, under the skin, behind the eyes, in the heart, everybody is a lonely soul within a singularity.

The key to enjoyment is to lose one’s self in the enjoyment of living or, as Kurt Vonnegut so aptly put it, “We’re here to fart around.” Making a lot of yourself can get in the way of enjoyment. Expect what you get and get what you expect. The more important you think you are, the more you set yourself apart.

Life isn’t easy. Even those who find it easy say it isn’t. Why be surprised when there’s trouble? Trouble is part of not having trouble. Being untroubled is to be without it. The trick to enjoyment is to defy trouble. Troubling trouble by being untroubled is enjoyable. It’s fun to say, “Troubles be gone!” 

To be untroubled is freedom from trouble. Freedom from trouble is enjoyable. Anything enjoyable is itself enjoyable. Bring it on home!

Defy! Defy! Defy! Just as it is easier to endure pain, anxiety and calamity with defiance, so too is it easier to enjoy enjoyment by defying it to be otherwise. Troubles are doubled when one resigns to them. Without expectations one is never dissatisfied. Be the wedge between sensation and emotion and feel the magic of life living.

The Great Big Huge Secret

It is common for people to ask: What is the meaning of life? Such a question assumes that life is like a word which symbolizes something other than what it is. To get your head around the idea that the question about life having meaning is quixotic or nonsensical, replace the word life with something from nature, as in: What is the meaning of a flower? What is the meaning of a tree? What is the meaning of a duck? 

A flower flowers. A tree trees. A duck ducks (especially when a stone is tossed at its head).

What is the meaning of quack? A duck may have an intention for saying it but to our ears, it’s just a sound. To us the meaning of quack is the sound it makes. In like manner, the meaning of a duck is to live as a duck – to be a duck. To duck or to flower or to tree is an action that happens in and of itself. The same holds true for you. You, you. You’re a you-you!

Science can explain the what’s and how’s of a species of duck – its behaviours and interconnectedness to other living things – but as to why there is a duck at all, science is mute.

Religion provides explanations as to why there are flowers, trees and ducks, but those explanations depend on belief systems. Belief, no matter how entrenched it may be, is not verifiable by one’s senses and although science may be verifiable, it cannot explain the why’s. When it comes to explaining why there are flowers, trees and ducks, science and religion are inadequate. That’s where you come in.

When someone walks into a landscape alone and takes the time to smell a flower, to touch a tree or to hear the melodic song of a duck, the meaning of these things is meaningless. This is not to be dismissive of the existence of a flower, tree or duck, but to physically sense that these things exist and that in their existence they are enjoyable, that’s what matters.

What they mean is what you experience as yourself with them.

The more you can use your senses to get them into yourself – to get their beauty and significance – the more your enjoyment of them becomes what they are for you. In your selfishness you can appreciate them for the betterment of your life experience and personal enjoyment.

The only other creature that can enjoy a duck quite as much as you would be another duck or maybe a fox, but that’s another story.

The great big huge secret is that your will can make you enjoy what surrounds you. Every organic thing has its own secret reaction to its surroundings. This is its living purpose. This is your living purpose too. It has nothing to do with achievement. Humans have a habit of substituting unimportant things and strivings for what matters which is to react to living and to enjoy that reaction. You can make yourself take the time to take in your surroundings.

Happiness is not based on circumstance. A bum can enjoy life more than a millionaire. It’s in the attitude. That is what those old silent films of Charlie Chaplin were about. Through humour, a fighting spirit, and loneliness, anyone can experience life as utterly enjoyable. With this attitude, even when it’s bad, it’s good.

Everyone has to endure what he or she has to endure. We must bear pains as well as we can for the sake of enjoying the pleasures. The huge secret is that you are able to enjoy what we are able to enjoy. A person is a universe of one. Happiness is not any kind of happiness. Happiness is never any feverish, vulgar or superficial pursuit of pleasure. Go outside and give it a try. See if you can enjoy flowers, trees and ducks.