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.

Step Into Enjoyment (take one)

The old joke goes, “A salesman tells an American that he has a new invention that will do half his work for him. The American replies, ‘Great. Give me two.‘”

Suppose a person named Emerson, of whom you’re familiar (and avoid), is in an elevator that you enter. “Oh great,” you think without pleasure. This is the last person you want to meet, but it’s too late to turn around. Emerson smiles brightly. You do likewise, but dimly. In Emerson’s eyes you see the sting of your dislike which makes you dislike even more. It’s not that Emerson is a bad person—just boring, an innocent, a nerd.

Stepping into the elevator, you assume the position: facing the door watching floor numbers count down—14…12…11…. And you think, “Why is this elevator so slow?”

Hawaiian music comes from a speaker in the ceiling. “That’s Gabby Pahinui singing “Hi`ilawe”,” says Emerson. “Oh, really?” you feign interest, roll your eyes and then, something remarkable happens.

In a beautiful voice Emerson sings “Hi`ilawe” in English,

“All eyes are on Hi`ilawe
In the sparkling lowlands of Maukele
I escape all the birds
Chattering everywhere in Waipio.
I am not caught
For I am the mist of the mountains.
Waterfall,
Nothing can harm me at all.
My world is so very small
With my waterfall I can see
My rainbow calling me
Through the misty breeze
Of my waterfall.”

The song ends and you are hit by silence and stillness. Time is suspended between now and later, like the elevator that is suspended between up and down.

A fog of indifference lifts. Emerson’s lack of guile disarms social defenses. In an instant you know yourself and forget yourself. You see and hear—not as “you” seeing, but as “seeing” itself—as a body-and-mind seeing, you grasp things directly (see also Enjoy a Perfect World).

You feel giddy and silly as you and Emerson laugh. You wake up to the moment. You feel the space around you as if it’s a ghostly solid connecting everything together. You feel yourself inside a body that has an outside appearance that’s inside an elevator that’s inside a building that’s outside on a street and inside a biosphere.

And you wonder: “If everything has an inside with an outside that’s inside something else, where does it begin? where does it end? The experience of experiencing yourself experiencing feels like an awakening! 

In school Emerson was voted least likely to succeed. Like the Invisible Boy in the movie Mystery Men (1999), Emerson is invisible because no one is looking. It’s a power developed after years of being ignored.

“A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.”

And a new thought occurs: Why not be nice to Emerson? It won’t hurt. Maybe it’s from the music or the wine you had with dinner (or the Mai Tai before), but right now you feel a loving warm glow for all the Emersons in the world.

So you smile. It is your gift. You give generously with your teeth.

You realize that you are not a mind attached to a body and neither is Emerson.

You are just two human beings in a world dancing without moving as you fall through space in Hawaiian time.

You once saw Emerson try to talk to people. Emerson quoted the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who said, “The ox does not butt because it happens to have horns; it has horns because it intends to butt” (A Perplexed Philosopher, p. 154). People looked at one another as if Emerson were a talking houseplant.

Unfazed, Emerson held up a pen saying, “I don’t write because I have a pen. I have a pen because I intend to write! It’s a matter of will that I am what I do! I don’t enjoy being Emerson because life is enjoyable. I enjoy being Emerson because it is my intention that life be enjoyable! All that we are and will ever be is an intention. We fly in jets because people contributed intelligent effort towards that intention. With intention and will, we devise ways to make our want happen.”

Someone said something stupid (and it wasn’t “I love you” like Frank and Nancy Sinatra) and everyone wandered away talking about their day. Emerson stood like a statue listening to a song no one could hear and then went invisible.

On the ground floor as the doors are opening, Emerson says, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” and then, without being given permission asks, “Do you enjoy being you?” 

Of course you do! (Don’t you?) What a stupid question! You have to enjoy being yourself! If you don’t enjoy being you, you can’t enjoy! (Can you?) It’s like what the great Sammy Davis Jr said in song, “Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong. Whether I find a place in this world or never belong. I gotta be me! I’ve gotta be me! What else can I be but what I am?”

In this world increasingly crowded, where people become traffic and virtual reality is deemed more desirable than the physical, in anonymity we assimilate into social functions like machines in a hurry as we crush nature and lose a sense of being in the world.

As William Barrett, author of Irrational Man (1958) observed, it is from one’s being in the world in the most mundane, factual and ordinary sense that we feel aware (William Barrett Interview, 1978).

That we split reality between observer and observed isn’t obvious. We’re often on auto-pilot, thinking thoughts that may or may not be stupid, but sometimes—on vacation, while washing dishes or doing nothing, in a relaxed moment—we emerge from being babies in a baby world to feeling aware of our self being here in this world!

Much of life’s unfolding is beyond our controlling. One thing happens, then another, and another, in an interconnected chain of consequences like a Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) machine, until one day, without awareness, nothing happens and you stop waking up.

Today we plant donut seeds in the form of Cheerios. We do what our Mamas and Pappas told us when they sang, “Do what you want to do. Go where you want to go” (“Go Where You Wanna Go”).

Today we celebrate you! We celebrate you, not to be egotistical, narcissistic, solipsistic or to show you how equally equal you are with 7.5 billion other people (according to a Worldometer).

We celebrate you “being in the world” so that you can feel as happy as Tommy (aka Roger Daltrey in The Who musical) singing “I’m Free” after he’s healed from not seeing, feeling and hearing.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? ‘Doris.’ Doris who? ‘Doris locked, that’s why I knocked.’

Sensory awareness is a key. Sensory awareness isn’t about holding something like a key as a means to the instrumental task of opening a door. Sensory awareness is to be drawn to a particular aspect, like a key’s shiny metal, its cool texture, or lovely “Click” when it opens a door.

Sensory awareness is when you take a call from nature and hear yourself hearing. Everyone has sensory awareness, but not everyone engages in sensations thousands of times a day, but such is the intention of a lover of wisdom. Sometimes all it takes is an absence of hurry.