Changing how I look at happiness

If "happiness" isn't a useful word to you, try another one (fulfillment, bliss, joy, ...).

I feel it's important that I change my perspective on it.

I usually think of it as something I'll get, by doing or achieving the right things. I may not think of it this way consciously, but that's fundamentally how I treat it. I think most people do.

If I'm feeling spiritual, then maybe I'll get it by achieving the right meditation states. But it amounts to the same thing.

But what if joy is something that you do, not something that you get? When you achieve the right things (according to whatever standard you've set up for yourself), you do joy. It doesn't come from some magic fairy, or some part of your brain that's outside your control.

If you find the word "do" too striving, perhaps the word "allow" is sufficiently soft. But either way, it's not some outside force that lets it in.

But this doesn't go far enough. Okay, so joy is something that I can "allow." What if I don't feel worthy of it? Then I may not allow it. If I look closely, it's because I feel that I don't deserve it. So then maybe meditation subtly becomes the process of earning joy.

Now another twist: joy isn't something that I deserve or earn. It's a responsibility. A sacred duty.

Perhaps for some, turning it into a "duty" makes it feel oppressive, like a chore. For me, I link it to the Bodhisattva Vow I took some years ago. That was one of the most emotional moments of my life. It was the feeling that I'm devoting my life to the most meaningful purpose, with witnesses. In the same way that parenthood may be a duty but is also (I'm told) the most sublime of joys, the duty of being happy can be viewed as the greatest gift I could bestow myself and the world.

How could it be a gift to the world? One simple reason is that I get more done when I'm joyful, and I'm also kinder. True joy is never selfish. An even more direct reason is that everyone wants to be joyful, so why not be a role model?

I intend to really internalize that.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -- Marianne Williamson 

Another explanation of nonduality

First, a definition: when I use the word "sound," I'm referring to a particular kind of experience. Snap your fingers and listen. What you hear is a sound. Now, imagine that a tree once fell in a forest when nobody was around. Whether or not it actually produced a sound is a matter for philosophers. But unless you actually heard something just now (which okay maybe you did if you have a good imagination...), I'm not calling that a "sound" for our purposes. Maybe you want to call it an "abstract sound" or a "theoretical sound" or something, but make a clear distinction between that and things you actually hear. So here "sound" refers to a particular kind of experience, not some abstraction.

We say that we "hear a sound." There are two things: hearing and the sound. More generally, we say that we "experience an experience." The word "experience" is both a verb and a noun, reflecting how we think of perception.

But notice that there's no such thing as "hearing" in the abstract -- that is, hearing without a sound. Whenever you hear, you hear a sound. Similarly, there's no such thing as a "sound" in the abstract (recalling our definition above). The category of experience we call "sound" requires hearing for its very definition. Spend some time with this in your own experience. Try to find an instance of sound that isn't heard, or an instance of hearing that doesn't involve a sound. You can't.

This may seem mundane, but it's not. According to the nondual traditions (which exist both in the east and in Abrahamic mystical traditions), the very reason we suffer (i.e., feel anything less than completely satisfied with and fulfilled by existence) is that we mentally split an intrinsically undivided and indivisible reality into two parts: the subject (I, doing the experiencing) and the object (the world being experienced). As a result, we believe ourselves to be fundamentally isolated, like a man on an island whose communication with the outside world is limited to bottles floating back and forth. You may think "I don't feel isolated!", but if you have a sense of being "in here" while the world is "out there," then indeed you do feel that way, whether it consciously bothers you or not.

When we're really engaged, like in the state of flow, that imagined isolation can drop away. But even in flow, unless we have a remarkably high degree of awareness, we can subtly miss out on the wonder of what's occurring. That's why hours pass like seconds in that state. If you lived your life in that kind of state, maybe the next five decades would pass in minutes.

The second difficulty is that we conceive of flow as a particular kind of state, which by definition we can enter but must inevitably leave. Sometimes people describe Zen in this way.

But Zen isn't a particular experience or state. It's a realization: that the world wasn't actually divided until we inserted that woeful division ourselves. In fact, it could never actually be divided at all. That was all just a funny dream we invented, a little game we played with ourselves so that we could have the joy of rediscovering the astonishing and ravishing truth of existence.

The cart before the horse

Note: the following post is not spoken from firsthand experience. It's an attempt to summarize an idea I find intriguing. In some sense, it's the most amazing idea in the world. That's also why it's so hard to take seriously.

Imagine being truly happy. Or perhaps a better word is "fulfilled." Try to remember a moment when you were perfectly carefree, not a worry on your mind. Perhaps a moment when you had just completed some important project and felt on top of the world, like all burdens had been dropped and nothing could get you down.

Is that how you feel in your daily life now? If not, I want you to try the following exercise. Complete the following sentence in as many ways as possible:

How could I be completely fulfilled, when...

Some examples might be:

• when I haven't found my partner in life?
• when I'm in so much debt?
• when I still have this crippling back pain?
• when there's so much suffering in the world?
• ... so many starving kids in Africa?
• ... so many calves in veal crates?
• ...
• when I'm not enlightened?

If life is going generally fine and you don't have any overt examples like the above, there must still be moments during the day when you're implicitly completing the sentence:

• when my partner promised to do X but still failed to.
• when I promised myself I wouldn't waste the weekend, and I watched the whole last season of GoT.

If there's any moment in any day where you're anything but completely fulfilled, you have something to write down.

Finished? Really, do the exercise.

Now I want you to imagine being a person who's completely fulfilled despite all the things you wrote down. What would that person be like?

Paradoxically, it might be easier to imagine being happy despite not having the "big things" than to imagine being happy despite the small annoyances.

For example, someone who's happy despite not having a life partner seems wise, whereas someone who's happy despite his partner's unreliability just sounds like a bozo. Or at least, that's what I tell myself every time I get "lovingly annoyed" when I perceive my partner as unreliable. What kind of chump would take that lying down?

But I digress.

It should be obvious from a moment's thought that happiness is a choice. We choose to be unhappy about our partner because we believe that to do otherwise would be foolish.

So far this is probably all obvious. So let me ramp it up a bit. (This is where things get weeeiiirrdd...)

If we choose to be happy, our outer circumstances have no choice but to adapt accordingly.

If I'm happy despite my partner's unreliability, one of ~three things will happen:

• I will realize that this relationship is not a good fit and move on.
• I will realize that the matter is too trivial to be upset about and we will genuinely laugh it off. 
• My partner will be inspired by my love and overcome her unreliability.

I don't even have to know in advance which of those choices will end up being the "right" one. In fact, if I do pretend to know in advance, I just slow down the whole process, because I subtly make my happiness contingent on that outcome. Remember, to say that happiness is a choice is to say that it is not contingent on anything -- i.e., it is unconditional.

Nothing weird yet. The first two bullets involve me changing my own attitude -- hardly supernatural. The third bullet just requires someone who loves me to change her behavior. In fact, just the sheer possibility of this third option -- the one where I don't have to adapt -- makes the happiness choice easier.

If it's "scientifically impossible" that my happiness could have an objective effect on physical reality (either because the target is too far away in spacetime, or the effect is too large, or whatever), then I'm left with only the first two kinds of choices. And sometimes it's just not enough for me to learn to be okay with things. It's just not inspiring enough, and so I don't make the happiness choice.

I'll stop short of suggesting outright that there are no actual physical limits (because then you'd stop reading -- though I might break it down in a future post), but I can suggest that you obliterate all such "limiting beliefs" as you notice them.

This may be a bit hard to do, since they form the very base of your perception of the world -- whether you know it or not. You probably also feel that if you release this most reasonable of assumptions, your brain will turn to mush and you'll become another crystal-toting starry-eyed New Ager. If that's the case, go take some science classes and stay sharp with your maths and reasoning (though my advice would be to distinguish the practical aspects from the fundamentally mechanistic worldview it tends to elicit in the incautious).

But if you've ever had the sneaky suspicion that this world is more wondrous and mysterious than your everyday perception tells you, then this is the place to start digging. Choose happiness, and continue to uncover marvels as deep as you dare to dig. From what I'm told, the plot just keeps thickening.

One ground, two paths

From an interview with Dzogchen master Anam Thubten:

There is a verse in one of the spiritual songs: “There is only one ground (the dharmadhatu or source or underlying truth of all things), only two paths and only two fruitions.” This is one of my favorite verses, because it says there are not three paths, only two paths, the path of awareness and the path of unawareness. Every moment we either choose to be on the path of awareness or on the path of non-awareness. So in each moment we are enlightened or not. When we really contemplate this verse, it shocks our minds. It is easy for many practitioners to think that even though they are not actually residing in awareness that somehow so long as they are doing the various practices they are making some kind of progress according to some invisible scale or record—because they are doing all the right practices they are going in the right direction. When you contemplate this teaching, it shocks your mind because you realize you are making the enlightenment choice in every moment.

There's another interesting way to look at this "one ground, two paths" idea. For this post to make any sense, you'll first have to agree with this axiom:

• All you've ever wanted, in any moment -- ever -- is to be happy.

If you don't like the word "happy," choose another one. But you first have to see that what you ultimately want is for things to be fine; for life to be well; to feel okay; etc. It could even be that you thrive on turmoil, and if so, turmoil is your path... to happiness.

What's much harder to see is that in every moment, we have a choice: to be happy, or to be unhappy. And this choice is free, in the sense of being unconstrained by physical reality. You may think this is obvious (everyone's heard of poor people who are still happy), but when taken literally it has two profound corollaries:

1. It is unconstrained by past moments. There's no "lag effect" whereby our choice in the "last moment" bleeds over into this one, so that our unhappiness yesterday, or even a moment ago, prevents happiness now. 
2. It is unconstrained by neurology. Your neurotransmitters cannot be to blame (though believing so can certainly relieve a certain kind of pressure we sometimes unduly place on ourselves).

Of course, there's no reason to take the above seriously, since it seems to contradict what we've learned from science. I don't believe it actually does, but this post is meant to be practical instead of metaphysical, so let's look instead at how this choice actually plays out in real life.

You're sitting there and there's an alarm going off. Some thoughtless person has failed to notice it for some time, and it's becoming ever-more annoying. In any instant, before the annoyance has a chance to form, we discover two options:

1. Choose unhappiness. This seems reasonable: I'm annoyed by the alarm, and my annoyance is what will enable me to fix the problem, thereby resulting in the happiness I seek.
2. Choose happiness. This sounds stupid: I'll just end up being a dopey doormat or bum who doesn't make stuff happen. That sounds like a pretty unhappy outcome.

In short: I believe that by choosing happiness, I'll be unhappy, and that by choosing unhappiness, I'll (eventually, possibly even real soon!) be happy. Duh, I choose the second one.

But of course, the next moment comes around, I'm faced with essentially the same choice (though the details will have changed a tad bit), and because the same delusion is still in operation, I do it again.

And this is most of us do in every moment of every day, from cradle to grave. Instead of facing this intrinsic delusion head-on, we take a rain check and push away the only thing we've ever wanted.

Maybe you feel that the example is a strawman. Of course I can choose to be happy in the face of something so trivial, but what about real problems?

I maintain that the situation is always exactly the same. As long as you deep down believe that unhappiness can be the cause of happiness, you'll push away the only thing you've ever wanted.

I cannot prove any of this to you, but I can suggest that you consider it very seriously indeed.

Parallels

"A powerful way to unveil the primordial ground of being is to ask yourself, "Who am I?" ... The ground of awareness is the essence and source of your being" -- Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche


"If you enquire 'Who am I?' the mind will return to its source (or where it issued from)." -- Ramana Maharshi

Gratitude and miracles

Suppose you have a little kerfuffle with your spouse over some issue. You think she's not going to use the new XYZ, and she insists she is. You feel it will go to waste, but she promises she won't let it.

Six months later you discover you were right: the XYZ sits unused on the shelf. Some possible reactions:

1) Resentment. "Why am I with that kind of person?"

2) Resigned acceptance. "It sucks, but I might as well not poison myself with resentment."

3) Forgiveness. "I forgive her for her flaws."

4) Gratitude. "I'm so happy she's exactly the way she is!"

These are increasingly healthy attitudes. Number four is of course the hardest, and may even sound strange and counterintuitive if you've never given it an honest shot.

If you have given it a try, you might discover interesting things happening. Maybe your spouse picks up on your love, and this actually changes her. How wonderful!

But there's still a surprising amount of subtlety here. For example: given my expectations about how the world works, I know there are limits on how much my gratitude can accomplish. For example, it can only change her if it influences my behavior in some way that she can detect. My smile, or tone of voice, or pheromones, or whatever. There has to be some physical mechanism. That's just how the world works.

But what if I don't have any deep-seated expectations about how much my gratitude can accomplish? No requirement that it must work via some discoverable mechanism? What if I one day decided to drop that requirement? And what if the result were -- somehow -- to open up a level of love that was not accessible when I placed subtle subconscious limits on it?

Well that just sounds crazy.

But what if?

Sam Harris on MDMA

Harris, Sam (2014-09-09). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (p. 5). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987, I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and “raves” in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone of my generation who had tried it. One evening , a few months before my twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.

The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear. 

In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me— he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy. 

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance— the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person— seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.

A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety— and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall— and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal— and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love— I love you because . . . —now made no sense at all.

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love . The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all.

The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was— as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages— a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.