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

Enjoy The Impossible Dream

Long ago, before indoor plumbing, iPhones, disposable razors, squeezable cheese and remote controls TVs, sometime in the sixth century BC, along the coast in what was then Greece and is now Turkey, there lived a reclusive thinker of royal decent named Heraclitus of Ephesus (530-470 BC).

Little Heraclitus had no interest in politics or power. He preferred to think. He rejected information-gathering because it didn’t teach understanding (Heraclitus). He renounced royal privileges and withdrew to a secluded estate in the country where he enjoyed observing nature and self-questioning (Basics of Philosophy).

He wrote, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it” (Russell, 1945) and “The character of man is his guardian spirit (Stanford). One should turn one’s luck into a function of character and ethical stance.

He noticed how most people sleep-walk through life without understanding what’s going on (IEP). They called him the Obscure, the Riddler, the Reviler of the mob and the Weeping philosopher – possibly because he used to sit in Ephesos and cry over man’s feebleness (Heraclitus the Obscure).

Existential Comics “The Weeping Philosopher“

Heraclitus noticed how things flow and nothing stays the same. “We both step and do not step in the same river. We are and are not” (Fragments). “Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled” (Wikiquote).

“Panta Rhei” – all flows, nothing lasts. Permanence is an illusion of the senses. Things change for the continued existence of other things. Opposites replace each other (IEP).

But this is the hardest message of all. All things are transient: your happiness, your home, your family, your friends, your dreams, your health, your moments of ecstasy and insight – everything is flowing through your hands as you’re aware of it.

But what if it’s not such a bad thing? Life is change. It’s a good thing! That’s the point! What if there’s more to it? What if, at a level you’re not aware, you’re more important than you think you are. What if you actually matter?

Science says that you’re a complex machine. In a Scientific American article Why Life Does Not Really Exist it reads, “Life is a concept that we invented… all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles… We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.”

Really? A cat is a complex machine. You’re a complex machine. No wonder people treat each other like machines. According to science, we are machines.

But do we really think that there is no difference between an inanimate machine and a man or a woman?  What about feeling? What about consciousness? What about beauty? What about love? What about a baby? What about a boy learning to skate? What about spirit? 

Sam Harris observed that many people consider the word spiritual to be “thoroughly poisoned by its association with medieval superstition” (In Defense of Spiritual) and yet, it’s just the right word. Spirit is the deliberate effort to overcome separateness and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

In 1797 William Blake wrote: “What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song? or wisdom for a dance in the street? No. It is bought with the price of all that a man hath: his house, his wife, his children. Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy (The Four Zoas).

Experience is a loss of innocence and yet through that pain Blake sees how the world is infinite. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour / A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage” (Auguries of Innocence).

Can you see infinity in a grain of sand? What would it take to do that? Could any little thing contain a cosmic truth that you could be aware of with enough imagination? Could a wildflower be a miniature heaven? Could a grain of sand be a miniature world?

Most people don’t know how to hold eternity in the palm of their hand. It’s hard enough keeping it together until the end of the day! We’ve lost our minds. Our attention is lost in a blur of appointments, technologies, to-do lists, worries and agitation. We’re more absorbed in movie worlds than our own. We walk by a crow or a rabbit or a sparrow without being blown away by how miraculous it is!

But… sometimes… in the briefest moment, when we freeze in our tracks, when we hear Pachelbel’s Canon or harmonia 76 or some music, sound, sight or smell that takes us out of ourselves for no reason. And we look into the eyes of people who look angry, distant or afraid and we feel compassion for them. We feel a spirit of friendship. We have a feeling of beauty and a happy, tingly shiver goes through our body. In a brief moment of attention we pick up the scent of something more going on than survival, but the moment passes and mundane thinking swallows us again.

The trick is to cultivate those moments. Enjoy them. Again and again. Blake’s vision of an expansive experience is available to anyone, any time. It’s just that the modern world has given itself to the literal, to the informational and to the material. We’ve lost touch with what matters within ourselves. The pendulum has swung to non-spiritual. We miss the magic in front of us. A tree is not just a tree. It’s a tree! It’s a tree! It’s a damn tree!

You can see the Universe in a grain of sand! You can stop slogging through your day and take a moment to notice something cosmic. The connection between everyday reality and ecstatic enjoyment is as close as your face! It’s in the dust on the floor, in the mess on your desk and the water in your sink. The trick is to notice… and imagine… and love… and dream.

Dream your own particular impossible dream. 

References

Harris, W. (n.d.). Hericlitus: The Complete Philosophical Fragments.

Russell, B. (1945). History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Shuster. New York.

For Roberto. Who encourages.

A New Way of Looking

Here’s the thing: If someone says, “The secret to life is...,” that person is unknowingly (or knowingly) misleading. Why?

Because.

It isn’t a secret. If it was a secret, everyone’s secret would be different.

It’s like looking for keys and not finding them even though they’re right under your nose. You’re in a hurry but waste time running around looking for keys and not finding them because you’re in a hurry! You look repeatedly on the table where they should be (and are) but you don’t see them. Why? In desperation you start looking in weird places. So too do people look for enjoyment in weird place when they don’t have to. Enjoyment is right under your nose.

When you finally do find find your keys, you feel extra extra annoyed because they were there all along, and you wonder: “How could I not see them? Am I blind? (No.) Am I an idiot? (Only partly).”

The power is in the focus. It’s a matter of attention. It’s all a matter of awareness.

In the hurry to find what you’re looking for you see with eyeballs but not with brain. Hurry causes stress. Stress causes the release of cortisol in the brain. Cortisol can kill brain cells in the area responsible for memory (Your Amazing Brain). If you add multi-tasking to a frantic searching, you have zero attention (Brain Rules…).

Searching for keys in all the wrong places is like searching for enjoyment. We don’t see what’s in front of us. Enjoyment is simple. It’s so simple that we don’t get it until we do and then we doubt it because we might be expecting something that isn’t so subtle.

If you’re reading this—wherever you are in this world—you’re probably alive. If you’re alive, you’re halfway there, but the other half isn’t easy. Nature isn’t on your side. Nature isn’t on anyone’s side. Nature is cause and effect.

The trouble is that happiness gets tied to desire and expectations. We define happiness as, Wanting what we want and getting what we get and hoping the two coincide.

You see, it’s because of our brains. We either over-think and make it complicated, we under-think and act on insane urges or we multi-task and miss everything.

We think, “If I have this (or that), I’ll be happy,” but not only do we think that something outside ourselves will make us happy, we’re drawn to things that actually hurt us.

Our brains send messages. Sometimes these messages are destructive—ask anyone in therapy, rehab, prison or who is about to blow himself up. Not only do we deceive ourselves, other people trick us with their deceptions and w can become like pawns in the game of life, sacrificed for someone else’s idea of enjoyment.

So, what’s the answer?

Picture brain messages symbolically like they do in cartoons with a devil-you and an angel-you on each shoulder arguing their case for you to decide (see Internal Multitudes and Enjoyment Decisions). The devil-you often wins and when he does, he gets harder to stop.

Pleasure and habit are linked. Cells that fire together, wire together. In other words: Habits are hard to break (see: It’s not me. It’s my brain.)

It’s like a battle between, on one side, the Rolling Stones at 120 decibels singing “Sympathy For The Devil”, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste,” and on the other side, a string quartet playing “Hallelujah” in your living room.! Who do you think will win?

On one side are symbols of light, innocence and wholesomeness (sappy?) and on the other, just the opposite (exciting?). In the battle between it comes down to focus. What do you choose to enjoy?

Enjoyment of life and of healthy beauty is decided by awareness of what “you” choose to pay attention to.

Do you take the gentle path of life as represented in Wordsworth’s poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud; That floats on high o’er vales and hills; When all at once I saw a crowd; A host, of golden daffodils“? Or is that boring? “Daffodils? You’re kidding!”

Do you prefer your entertainment on the excitingly evil side? How about delightful depravity and edgy cruelty that’s funny too? What’s your pleasure? Do you choose a quiet read, a walk in the park, a pint with a friend, or ‘gorified’ death in a Zombie Apocalypse?

It’s a tough decision for most people.

Subtlety is missed by mobs fed on chatter, drugs, violence, convenience and bread and circuses. A butterfly caught in a web is easily killed by the spider. It takes heart and courage and a focus on what is wholesome to overcome dark greed.

Wholesome isn’t a word used much these days. It alludes to marketing all-natural breakfast cereals and family values but back in the year 1200 wholesome meant “of benefit to the soul.” It comes from the word “whole” meaning “healthy” (undamaged, entire, safe) and “-some” meaning “tending to” (Etymology Dictionary).

Wholesome relates to “Hallow!” as in Hello! Health! Holy! It’s a greeting and a call to health and Hallelujah! (Word Origins).

Imagine: You go to a concert in a high school auditorium but your brain is messed up with problems. You miss the first part before your spirit gets caught up in the music and then… and then…

A switch to whole.

You see where you are. Your face relaxes. Totally still you breathe and your eyes… your eyes! they widen and go slack. You see as if you were life itself.

What was a disheveled auditorium with flickering light bulbs about to die and chattering nuisance people becomes… beautiful. You enter the stream. You are empty absolutely. You know that life runs along like a runaway train as you float in your body behind a face.

A scene.

You look out of yourself self-aware. This moment is captured in the very being of yourself – not as an ego, but as… a spirit.

The purest illuminations come unsought.

You are transfigured but no one knows. How could they? You are alone in yourself but through the eyes of another you see the importance of all this. It’s in relationships and immersion. You’ve put your will to the side and thrown yourself out.

Such is enjoyment seeing.

Cease demanding that life conform to desire. See daffodils and ignore zombies (they aren’t real).

How To Enjoy: The Good, Bad And Ugly

Relationships are fraught with trouble. Relationships are fragile. The terrain is complicated. In any given situation, where one person reacts with rage another is sad; where one is amused, another is confused. You might think you know how someone will react, but you never know. You can’t see what goes on in another’s head. People are unpredictable.

In a conflict, one person’s solution might be to accommodate while another’s is to attack (or withdraw). Few people master the art of human relationship. Philosophers and poets have their explanations.

Jean Paul Sarte, a philosopher, said in a play (No Exit, 1944) that,  “hell is other people.” He might mean that our freedom is deprived because we are trapped by our need for respect and adulation from others. He might argue that until a person learns that he or she alone is responsible for his or her own behaviour, he or she will remain in hell and people who say they don’t care what other people think of them are probably lying.

John Milton, a poet, said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” (Paradise Lost, 1667). He might mean that what we enjoy is heaven in this life and what is distressing is hell. We think ourselves into the states we’re in. If one can focus one’s mind on good stuff in spite of the sorrows and difficulties, one could experience heavenly bliss in this life. People who are always sad and dissatisfied (even the rich and healthy) can’t experience true bliss.

Both of these thinkers – philosopher and poet – might agree that happiness and sorrow depend on how we think. A happy mind can make surroundings seem heavenly and an unhappy mind can make surroundings seem hellish. As one thinks, so one feels. The trick, therefore, to living in a heaven or a hell in this life is in the way we manage our thoughts and emotions, but what is a thought?

A thought is like an invisible bubble. A thought is like that song, I’m forever blowing bubbles which goes: “I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, they fly so high, nearly reach the sky, but then like my dreams they fade and die” (Jaan Kenbrovin, 1918). Fortune eludes the singer, but therein lies its beauty – it’s resonance. We all know the feeling that you can’t always get what you want (and, rightly so).

People speak of being in high spirits and low spirits depending on mood. A mood is coloured by thought. Think angry thoughts, see red; think sad thoughts, get the blues. Think envy, go green. Mandatory happiness is phoney. To enjoy life is to feel all the colours without necessarily acting on them. You’ve got to go with it and get what you need.

In each person there is a secret self, not in any mystical sense, but in the sense of a hidden self inside each of us. One person might understand another, but no one can fully experience the thoughts and feelings of another. You might understand someone’s pain, but you can’t feel it yourself.

On a cold winter’s morning in the midst of a deep-freeze it is a challenge to enjoy. When someone we love dies, that too, is a challenge. To enjoy again despite the pain is to hear a sad song and enjoy a good cry. To feel the bad is to feel future good. Take courage! Bring it on home. Enjoy the ups and the downs in equal measure. You can’t have one without the other.

As a philosopher of enjoyment, you will get the blues and gain the strength to say, “Bring it on!” To enjoy suffering like a philosopher-poet is a challenge for the enjoyer of living.

There are tricks you can use. Notice how the face of ecstasy looks similar to the face of pain. Grin yourself through the pain and smile at the good as much as you can. Get the blues and feel a special kind of confidence that only you yourself can possess.

If you cultivate in your soul the genius of loneliness, you’re not just a human: you’re a sturdy tree, you’re a patient toad, you’re a crafty panther. Imagine how you will feel and and you will.

Will yourself to feel what you will.