A Way of Seeing To Enjoy (Part 1)

Knowing is equated with seeing. If you see the light, it could mean that you see a light blinking on a radio tower or it could mean that you know something that makes you see everything different or it could mean both.

Philosophy is equated with thinking. Religion is equated with feeling. Today, like the physicist David Bohm, “we hold several points of view, in a sort of active suspension” (Dialogue). Like poet William Blake—”To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower“—and like philosophers Søren Kierkegaard—we see the ‘eternal in the temporal’—and Ludwig Wittgenstein we say, “how extraordinary that anything should exist” (Lecture on Ethics).

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; from Logicomix (2008) by Apostolos Doxiadis, illustrated by Alecos Papadatos

Today we feel stoic acceptance of what the world throws at us. We say like Wittgenstein, “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens” (Lecture on Ethics). With a “Click!” we connect to an awareness that leaves us feeling strangely lighthearted, for no apparent reason.

This feeling could best be described as “Self Actualization” as psychologist Abraham Maslow described, or as an “oceanic feeling” of limitlessness and oneness with the entire human race and universe as the mystic Romain Rolland described or it could be just one of those things: “What’s for supper?”

Today we go from a narrow self-centred perspective to a wider view of the world in its totality. We are ‘disturbed by joy’ like William Wordsworth was a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

“…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man” (source)

1804. Tintern Abbey by William Havell (source).

Religious belief and the lack thereof could be understood not as rival theories but as different ways of seeing. If a believer and an atheist look at a picture and one says it’s hideous and the other says it’s lovely, who’s right? who’s wrong?

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Wittgenstein saw religion not as theoretical but as a “collection of pictures” reinforcing rules of life in the form of morality and a way of living that is itself what is eternal (Culture and Value, 1980). If someone taps into that eternal by living its ideal, one is living and being the eternal for a time like a leaf on a tree that is seasonal.

The world is factual. Facts are identifiable by science but facts can’t answer why you are here.

Like Wittgenstein said, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched” (Lecture on Ethics).

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte concluded in The Transcendence of the Ego that, “The World has not created the me: the me has not created the World” (p.105) but these two things are connected in a consciousness that is spontaneous. Sarte wrote, “Consciousness is always ‘of something‘, and therefore defined in relation to something else. It has no nature beyond this and is thus completely translucent” (source).

Some people picture a soul as translucent, as a kind of a ‘thing’—but not Wittgenstein. He said that if you look at soul language in religion, soul is not pictured as a thing but as integrity which is equally invisible. So if someone says, “He sold his soul for money” or “He sold his soul to the devil” it really means that he’s become materialistic. He has no deep moral sense and moral sense, as we know, is not visible.

A man may have everything but feel horribly afraid of what’s coming. A good man, however, enjoying a good way—tried, true and eternal through himself and those who live after—why, he has nothing to fear. Ever.

No matter what.

He can be light as a feather. He is not chained by anything material. He can never be judged as having lived a futile life even if he dies poor and unknown and didn’t do very much. After all, what does a sparrow do? What are flamingos for?

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a person can’t get to the highest level of “self-actualization” without making it by lower level needs such as food, sex and security.

To be self-actualized is to be unafraid of the unknown, untroubled by ambiguity and triviality, self-aware, accepting weaknesses while developing strengths, living a “meaningful life” by having a purpose that goes above and beyond one’s self to a greater good (see: Self Actual).

If you were asked, “Do you understand the difference between thinking and being?” what would you say?

Understanding the difference between thinking and being is like when police catch someone in the act of a crime and say, “What do you think you’re doing!” which is another way of saying, “How stupid are you?”

This is the exact moment when the cop and the criminal give their collective heads a shake. Most people (most of the time) see the world from inside a self-enclosed bubble of preoccupied thoughts that shape how the world is perceived. But this way of seeing is limiting because it sees a world perceived through language and opinion.

When a person with soul (and a clear conscience, if possible) wakes up, looks around and says full of happiness, “This is a miracle!” he isn’t just describing an event. It’s really his reaction to something significant that he is being, becoming and enjoying.

Priming, Framing, Transcending & Enjoying

There’s a battle going on. It happens in your brain. Do not be alarmed. It only affects every decision you’ve ever made and will ever make. It only affects your health, wealth and opinion and how you think and behave. No biggie.

The battle goes on beneath the surface of consciousness. That’s why you sometimes say, “Why did I do that? Did I say that? That wasn’t me.” Like everybody, you’re under a misconception. You think you know what influences you and how those influences affect you.

Freud (1915) described the conscious mind as the tip of the iceberg because a lot goes on beneath the surface (source). We can like or dislike something instantly without knowing why.

It goes like this (cue music: Ulf Söderberg “Tide” part 1).

First you have a feeling, then you make up something to explain that feeling. The explanation becomes a label. The label is declared true. It influences you. You become a self-fulfilling prophecy primed by what you do.

Think badly and badly you become.

You’re framed by spin.

In You Are Not So Smart (2011) David McRaney wrote, “You move through life forming opinions and cobbling together a story about who you are… taken as a whole it seems real” (p. xi).

But it isn’t.

It’s how you look at it. Out of the randomness of life you try to make sense and create meaning for yourself (McRaney, 2011). It’s what humans do. We interpret reality. We look at stars and see constellations. We see patterns in bullet holes on country signs.

With facial suggestions, we are “uniquely wired” to see faces in breakfast (source).

Jesus on toast.

We connect the dots of what goes on by combining expectations (what we think will happen) with mental models (how we think something works) and five senses (source: Myth or Science?).

See: “Act Naturally,” 1963

With confidence you see your history like a movie with characters, plots, themes and settings. You see yourself as a protagonist, but it’s a beautiful confabulation. The truth is: You make yourself up as you go. You’re a work in progress and like Buck Owens and a Buckaroo think, “All I gotta do is act naturally.” 

You are the tale you tell. It’s “The Story of Me!” as told by you. Memories are daydreams: part true, part fantasy, but you believe them completely.

Look at your surroundings. Set your mind “Open!” Realize that what matters most is to enjoy the significance of existence by loving the life you are given and giving the life you are living.

There’s nothing you must do. There’s no mountain you must climb. Success and failure don’t matter. Just contentment. Contentment is not death! Contentment is bliss! In dictionaries contentment and happiness are interchangeable.

It’s all in how you frame it. What’s your spin on things? How do you see yourself? Is life bliss-filled or disasterous? You decide. You choose. It’s simple really. Nothing to it. Live a pleasant life by living wisely, justly and well (Epicurus). And yet, living a pleasant life can be difficult when you’re with a species hell-bent on making the earth a landfill.

How is it that humans are such brilliant numbskulls (or is it boneheads)?

In 1982 when Alice Cooper (aka Vinnie Furnier) sang, “We’re all clones. All are one and one are all” (“Clones”) he anticipated a people without individuality singsonging, “No more problems on the way!” 

It’s not a new idea. People have always cloned around. In 1802 Willy Wordsworth put it this way:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; –
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Why have humans declared war on nature? Is it because we construct reality and meaning within our minds? Is it because we have a bias towards confirming ourselves? Is it because we have a bias towards the present? What is it? The news is not good.

Is it any wonder so many want a new drug like Huey Lewis did?

Here we come to the crux of the matter. The trick to enjoying in the midst of humanity’s idiocy is in framing, priming and transcending.

Framing is a bias towards a given choice depending how it’s presented. It’s how the cover of a book influences your judgement. Framing moves you to react in certain ways based on how your brain makes comparisons between loss/gain, good/bad, half-full/half-empty. In framing you decide what’s important.

Framing is how you find patterns in chaos to survive and create meaning out of meaninglessness. The way you choose to frame things determines how you see.

See: Amelie frames and primes les petits plaisirs (the little pleasures).

Priming happens when subtle triggers influence your behavior without your awareness (Gladwell, 2006). Almost everything you perceive with your senses can blitz you with associations in your mind and cause you to act in certain ways without your awareness.

For example, if asked to name a fruit and you see the word “RED,” you’re more likely to think “apple” than “banana.” The word “RED” is priming the word “apple” into your brain.

Detail of  René Magritte’s “Son of Man” (1964).

René Magritte painted a self-portrait with his face behind a green apple and said, “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see” (source). Maybe that’s why we don’t see what’s in front of us. We’re looking for something hidden.

Priming works best when not over thinking. You know you’re priming when time disappears. The trick is to let human bumbling cruelty prime you for transcendence by framing it differently. Frame it: They don’t know what they’re doing! They’re doing the best they can. Frame yourself freedom and then see beauty in a dump.

“Transcend” comes from Latin trans-, meaning “beyond,” and scandare, meaning “to climb” (source). It’s simple: to transcend is to climb beyond your usual physical needs and realities.

Prime yourself aware! Create meaning! Climb beyond ordinary feeling. Transcend transcendence by enjoying.

References:

Glandwell, M. (2006). Blink. Little Brown & Company.
McRaney, D. (2011). You Are Not So Smart. Gotham Books.

Enjoy Every Day Better Than A Billionaire

Day lilies bloom for a day then wither. They are a symbol of forgetting worries and love of mother.

Old people speak day lily language. They know in their bones that the song of life is not very long and that happiness makes you cry. They say things like, “Enjoy every day, ’cause you just never know!” This irritates some people.

There are at least three reasons why “enjoy everyday ’cause you just never know” irritates some people:

1) It’s silly. You can enjoy yourself sometimes and on occasion, but every day? Even billionaires have bad days.

2) It puts the pressure on. It leaves one guessing: Is this enjoyable enough? What should I be doing?

3) When someone says ’cause you just never know, they actually do. Knowing disaster could strike isn’t helpful.

Most people would probably like to enjoy every day, but life has a way of getting in the way. Things that hinder enjoyment include: pain, cold, hunger, fear, illness, discomfort, disappointment, frustration, humiliation, sex (too much, not enough, in eccentric doses), mental disturbances and, the big one: boredom (when you feel sick of everything).

Is there a way to shake off the obstacles that hinder enjoying ourselves? Of course. It’s called forgetting. Forget who you think you are! Forget thinking! Forget you have a face! 

Over time an apple head shrinks.

If you think you need to win a lottery to enjoy every day, you’re not noticing. You’re richer than any billionaire. Would not a billionaire give it all away just to stay alive another day? It’s not what you see that matters, it’s where you’re seeing from! 

Do you see through a peep hole embedded in an apple head or do you see the world through one huge all encompassing window without an edge? Who is the one seeing?

The beauty of this philosophy is its simplicity. It starts with mind. Mind is everything. You are your mind. It doesn’t have to be a clever mind. It can be an idiotic mind. The mistake everybody makes is to assume that you have to be wise and intellectual to get the truth about life.

Quite the opposite.

The trick is to clear your mind of ideas and use it not for the purpose of more thinking, but to stop thinking and start noticing.

What we all live for is happiness. What is happiness? Happiness is a series of pleasures that in the long run satisfy us completely. Without single pleasures that are delicious in themselves, it’s impossible to have any satisfying sequence of pleasures. And what do single pleasures consist? They consist of simple pleasures. Pleasure is the sensation we experience when we plunge into something outside ourselves.

Imagine that your body is a diving suit and that all matter is a mass of material outside yourself. Mind is the self within us and matter is the self without us. It is by plunging into the mind, into what we hear, taste, touch, see and smell that we experience the enjoyment of living.

The trick is to combine seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching without preconceived notions of who you think you are as an object (The Headless Way). Look not from behind a thought-mask, but from a centre of direct experience.

See not the world from meatball peepholes, but through a huge window.

The key to profound, serene and high definition spots of enjoyable time is to be aware of your own private and particular vantage point.

The whole of life can be divided into two overlapping halves, the first action, the second contemplation. You perform an action like walk down the street. If you’re busy thinking without looking, you won’t notice much, but if your mind is open, you see beauty.

In this philosophy there is nothing to believe. It’s all an experience. It’s a matter of taking off blinders. You can enjoy every day better than any billionaire burdened by big stuff. All it takes is a shift in perspective from what you look at to what you look from.

Let’s say you’re washing dishes. While your hands work, you see a sunbeam shine on the table, you see a brown leaf blown across bricks out the window, you hear a distant train. Such contemplation of smell, sight and sound occupies about three-quarters of our life while action occupies about a quarter of conscious awareness.

You might work all day without noticing you’re alive. So much does our happiness depend on those three-quarters of life that even if we are incredibly good at our daily job we can be the reverse of happy in our lives!

In “Tintern Abbey“ Wordsworth wrote, “And I have felt/ A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime” (93-96). This presence doesn’t come from within or from outside. It isn’t here or there, but present in the “blended might” of mind and nature (Durr, 1970).

The heart of enjoyment lies within feeling spots of time intensely realized without thinking. It’s a matter of opening. You can enjoy every day better than all the billionaires put together!

 

References

Durr, R. A. (1970). Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience. Syracuse University Press.

Lang, R. (2016). “Reflection 285,” The Headless Way.

 

 

 

 

How to Master the Joy of Living

The news likes to boost our egos by saying how big our brains are. Huffpost Science reports, “Humans have an advantage in the animal kingdom because our brains are bigger and more wrinkled than those of other animals” (7 Cool New Findings About the Brain).

Big wrinkly brains. Amazing. Good to know. Hallelujah. But if big wrinkly brains make us smarter than other animals, how come we make such a mess of things?

We only see what we want to see and are as happy as we want to be. Each of us is like a flock of geese inside a biological car.

We think we create our own reality but we can’t control what other people do or environmental forces. That doesn’t mean we’re victims. We participate in creating our reality through attitude and how we deal with things (Amodeo, 2014).

To master the joy of living takes grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape. It takes a conscious effort (and a nonconscious one too).

What isn’t widely known is that the human brain has a well-being filter (Wilson, 2002). Just as our bodies have an immune system to protect us from disease, we have a psychological immune system to protect us from unease. We look at the world in a way that maintains our sense of well-being. We’re spin doctors who rationalize threatening information to make us feel better.

In Strangers To Ourselves (the book, not the album) social psychologist Tim Wilson writes, “What makes us feel good depends on our culture and personalities and our level of self-esteem, but the desire to feel good, and the ability to meet this desire with nonconscious thought, are probably universal” (p. 39).

We apply fight-or-flight reflexes to information by pushing threatening information away and pulling friendly information up close for a kiss.

Reasoning is bathed in emotion. Anger let’s us dominate. Love let’s us harmonize and vanity let’s us feel better about ourselves. People without normal emotional processing display irrational behaviour (Damasio, 1994).

What we feel is based on the value we place on something. Positive or negative feelings occur fast enough for an EEG device to detect but too fast for conscious awareness. We can reason but that works slower.

The challenge posed by a Philosophy of Enjoyment is to enjoy life, but living on a planet without forests, song birds, tigers and water might not be as enjoyable as it sounds.

Not Mars.

If something is too painful or disturbing, our unconscious protects our sense well-being (McLeod, 2009). We enjoy fictional wars on stars and imagine life on Mars. As appealing as Mars is – with its average temperature of minus 60 Celsius, planetary dust storms and radiation equivalent to a whole-body CT scan every five days (Castro, 2015) – there’s just something special about Earth.

Maybe it’s the flamingos.

There’s a cartoon called “MAN” by Steve Cutts that illustrates human impact. It’s funny, sad and if you don’t unconsciously hate it immediately, it might make you wonder: What’s a big wrinkly brained creature to do?

In “The Lie We Live” Spencer Cathcart says, “Each of us shares a common goal: Happiness. We tear the world apart looking for joy without ever looking within ourselves. Many of the happiest people are those who own the least but are we really so happy with our iPhones, our big houses, our fancy cars? We’ve become disconnected… We have mastered the act of killing. Now let’s master the joy of living.”

But how does one master the joy of living?

Are the happiest people those who own the least? Researchers say no. They say that wealthy people aren’t happier they’re just less sad, daily (Kushlev, Dunn, & Lucas, 2015) .

Forbes magazine reports: “One day I’ll be able to afford a spacious loft in the city with outdoor space and huge windows overlooking the park…The first step in getting what you want in life is to envision yourself already there… what is behind this process is believing… you can will the life you want into being and make it a reality” (How To Create The Exact Life You Want).

Forbes is a money man magazine with a bad ass financial plan. Its advice to create the exact life we want assumes we want the fool’s gold of a spacious loft in the city with a view of the park.

But here in our philosophy we put on those glasses that help us see unconscious messages. Here we focus on that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. We don’t believe in money gods, spacious lofts and cars, but in the inner wealth of character.

We keep our eyes wide open all the time and gaze – and gaze – at the wealth and pleasure of daffodil shows.

A philosopher of enjoyment sings with Johnny Cash, “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I keep the ends out for the tie that binds. Because you’re mine, I walk the line…As sure as night is dark and day is light, I keep you on my mind both day and night. And happiness I’ve known proves that it’s right. Because you’re mine, I walk the line” (I Walk the Line).

And who are you? You are the line. Enjoy it. You walk the line between life and death, and love and hate. The trick to it is to walk that line one step at a time with a kind heart valuing wisdom, reason, nature, beauty, harmony, humour, friendship and love – you know: the good stuff.

Any time, day or night, is the right time to walk the line.

 

References

Amodeo, J. (2014). Do We Create Our Own Reality? Not So Fast. Psych Central.

Brooks, D. (2011). The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. Random House.

Castro, J. (2015). What would it be like to live on Mars? Space.com.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error and the Future of Human Life. Scientific American.

Heath, I. (2002). Unconscious Ideas and Emotions. Psychologist World.

Krueger, A. (2014). How To Create the Exact Life You Want. Forbes Lifestyle.

Kushlev, K., Dunn, E. & Lucas, R. (2015). Higher Income Is Associated With Less Daily Sadness but not More Daily Happiness. Social Psychological & Personality Science.

McLeod, S. (2009). Simply Psychology.

Whiteman, L. (2014, Sept. 1). 7 Cool New Findings About the Brain. Huffpost Science.

Wilson, T. D. (2004). Strangers to ourselves. Harvard University Press.

 

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?

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).

Shifting to Enjoyment

1924. Auto Wash Bowl. Chicago.

The guiding intuition of this philosophy follows the hunch that life is to be enjoyed. It asks that you make enjoyment a priority of epic proportions without actually doing anything in particular. We’re not talking about doing exciting things like zip lines, amusement parks or buying socks. There’s no need for putting yourself through the pressure of a bucket list (see: What Do You Enjoy?). It’s just a matter of shifting your perception of reality.

That’s all.

No biggy.

Let’s get trippy (hippy talk for cool, freaky and groovy). Rather than think of your life in practical terms with all its aches, pains and frustrations, perceive the enjoyment of your life as somewhere between the eternal (not ending) and temporal (ending). It’s easy, just perceive life from multiple vantage points.

Think of yourself as a manual or “standard” transmission in a car. You’re the shifter. Enjoyment is the clutch.

Take the literal experience of your life – you, as you are, where you are – and think of it as a metaphor. Think of your lifespan as a ferryboat. You can float along without noticing, or, you can enjoy it. Think of enjoyment as a symbol. 

A metaphor and a symbol are related, but a metaphor draws a comparison between two distinct objects (as in your lifespan is a ferryboat taking you between birth and death), whereas a symbol is used as a stand-in for a much more complex, and generally more abstract, idea.

The point is this: a symbol is literally a throwing together of the eternal (that which is without ending) and the temporal (present life). To feel the symbol is to go beyond practical. It is to enter a zone of poetry. It’s the words beyond words. Dare it be said: it’s transcendence.

If you can go into the zone of your average 18th century romantic poet like Keats, Blake, Wordsworth or Coleridge, you’ll recognize that a flower isn’t just a flower. A tree isn’t just a tree. You are not just a you and a Cosco isn’t just a Cosco – well maybe it is – but the truth is that there is more to living than just living.

There’s enjoying.

Life is so serious that it isn’t. It’s a paradox. It’s pretty incredible if you think about it. First, there’s a you and then… there isn’t.

Philosophy of Enjoyment Imagination Exercise #42

Not a picture of Rick Ocasek.

Picture LIFE! as your best friend’s girl (like that song of long ago). Picture LIFE! as a beautiful girl always dancing down the street with suede blue eyes (Ocasek, 1978).

Imagine that you are LIFE itself.

You are the music. You dance ‘neath the starry skies except you do it like an idiot.

If you are to enjoy the experience of living as yourself in your situation, if you are not going to go around and around not enjoying yourself like you’re in some kind of cockimamy 1920’s car wash – LIFE! – if it is to be fruitful and not fruitless, futile, frivolous and a big waste of time – LIFE: requires discipline and imagination (among other things).

Look at the faces of people. Study them without creeping them out. You can’t help but notice how people don’t get it. They don’t. They’re hypnotized by themselves. They’re blinded by science. People live unwisely. If not convinced, watch the News on TV. Individuals don’t get the sense of themselves in their surroundings. If they did, they would be amazed and not do half the stuff they do.

A lot of people (excluding philosophers of enjoyment) do not make enjoyment a priority or if they do, they’ve got the wrong idea of what enjoyment really is. Enjoyment isn’t a thing, an object – it’s like love. It’s the spirit of good feeling feeling good! That’s it.

Now: Go forth and enjoy. Make it a priority to spread gentle enjoyment wherever you go with whomever you meet and in so doing, enjoy doing.