Mining For Happiness.
For convention's sake, the following article discusses “we” as if we are all separate selves. This should not be confused that a more correct interpretation would be the One Self talking to itself!
Happiness is a word quite disliked in mental health circles. We talk more comfortably about "well-being" or "mental health". These are safer terms, slightly more technical, perhaps.
We could more easily say it is the absence of anxiety or mental ill-health. However, to avoid talking about happiness is to refrain from discussing the one thing that unites all individuals. It's just a word, but beneath lies a fundamental point. All activities we do are fundamentally carried out to achieve it. Even those that are destructive to our mind and body, we do because, at the moment, we believe they will lead us to happiness. It is the fundamental "gravitational force" of our entire life. Hiding this fact only confuses our life.
Suppose we do not consciously accept that this is the whole purpose of our activities. In that case, the reason for the relationships we share, conversations we have, things we buy, build, and destroy, the skills and qualifications we gain, the lies we tell to ourselves and others, the bad and good habits we develop, our addictions, depressions, positive thinking, child birthing and all other activities, will be unclear. We will be confused as to the underlying dynamic of life.
Happiness is viewed with disdain because we equate it with only one side of life. There is pain and pleasure in life, and sometimes, sadly, a lot more pain than pleasure, and many view happiness as the absence of pain. But this again has only happened because of the failure to look at its deeper meaning. No wonder it is disliked as a term.
In a world that promotes transient happiness, it pays to disdain the proper understanding of happiness. Business is too often about the promotion of transience. Equating happiness with temporary objects, we live in an economy that depends on impermanence and will defend it at every cost. Built-in obsolescence is everywhere. The whole economic model depends on this central tenant.
If we go back in history and look at the roots of the word, we see this distinction between transient pleasure and permanent peace of mind emerges.
"Sukha (Pali and Sanskrit: सुख) means happiness, pleasure, ease, joy or bliss. Among the early scriptures, 'sukha' is set up as a contrast to 'prey' (प्रेय), meaning a transient pleasure, whereas the pleasure of 'sukha' has an authentic state of happiness within a being that is lasting. In the Pāli Canon, the term is used in the context of describing laic pursuits and meditation. "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukha]"
Happiness is a permanent peace of mind and body to distinguish it from the temporary nature of pain and pleasure. So, when we acknowledge this distinction, things become much more straightforward.
On a fundamental level, for thousands of years, there have been two groups of people on this planet "mining for happiness". One group has been mining into the material Earth, defining value in terms of transient materials. The other has been '" mining for happiness" into the heavens (meaning consciousness), determining value in terms of our only permanent experience – being conscious. For the former, what is real and valuable is material. For the latter, what is real is what cannot be perceived. Materialists may not like talking about happiness because it highlights the issue of permanence and transience, and they will claim it’s very complicated when it is not. For materialists, the idea of a permanent state of happiness is almost viewed as hubris and disdained. It is time, perhaps, to bring these two groups of miners together as they both have their skills.
A fundamental confusion could even be called a deception at the heart of modern civilisation. It is the claim that obtaining what we want somehow 'makes' us happy. On the surface, it's an easy mistake to make. Because when we get what we desire, be it a new car, house, job, relationship etc., for a moment, we feel a great relief that contrasts with the contracted tension of not having it. The mistake is we ascribe this momentary bliss and satisfaction to the object of our desire, not realising this is just circumstantial evidence. Falling into this trap, we become psychologically dependent on these moments of achieving desires and attached to the objects of our desires. If someone tries to point out this is not real happiness, we defend our territory sometimes viscously. Indeed we protect it so much that we organise our whole civilisation around its defence, and woe betide anyone who tries to challenge this notion.
We fail to see that the release of tension we feel that we equate with peace of mind on getting the object of our desire is not coming from the object, but the experience of happiness is coming from within. Because we create this confusion, we reduce this peace of mind to a simple mental and physical state. But this is an enormous error. We have concluded without a second thought this is happiness and are designing our whole life around this. We have not seen the more profound truth that peace of mind results from a deeper experience of happiness that is not quantifiable as a mental or physical state and, most importantly, is always there. It is a life-affirming quality that is beyond all psychological and physical states. Our whole culture has closed the door on this possibility; it seems currently (well, maybe not entirely). It simply cannot understand that there is a legitimate experience of life-affirming qualities that are beyond or precede material states of mind and body. What a shame.
In the same breath, it acknowledges that something must be done because this materialistic view of the world is destroying things. Yet it cannot yet open to the solution, so it mainly goes on in vain, destroying things. Like an obsessive unrequited love, it fixes love in objectified form.
First, we must recognise that experience of awareness is what we mean when we refer to the terms self or "I". Many people need clarification about this, thinking of themselves as the body. But it doesn't take much to point out that the body and mind constantly change moment by moment, but the self doesn't. An hour of contemplation and asking the right questions will resolve that issue, but that's not worth spending for many! If we examine the matter more closely, however, we will all find, in our experience, that happiness equates to a certain indefinable quality that we experience when we become aware of the self that is aware.
When we become aware of the aware self, we recognise it by an undefinable sense of what I call a "life-affirming quality". Religious people have sometimes called the "Divine Spark" and all other names. We cannot say there is nothing there, for there IS something. But we cannot see or touch it, but it IS real. Examining this experience further, we discover a range of other qualities. This is how we know the Aware Self through its indefinable qualities. It is beyond most words, though even mentioning some will lead us to the experience of it immediately. The critical problem is how to open our minds to discerning this experience. This openness of mind can be easily achieved by enabling people to experience these qualities and then admit they have no idea of their source. Thus the mind gives up trying to understand the experience and accepts that this real experience that can be trusted is beyond it. This is what the ancient mystics referred to as the "cloud of unknowing" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing]. Modern teachers refer to it as 'not knowing".
The spiritual teacher Francis Lucille calls this a "perfume". It is initially more subtle than the gross material feelings and states of mind we are used to. However, over time, as we get used to this "perfume", it becomes a powerful scent much stronger than the emotions and bodily sensations we rely on.
The simple truth is that the discernment of these timeless life-affirming life qualities is impossible for many. They seem so subtle they are lost. Without a qualm, they are overlooked. The root of the confusion about where happiness lies is not being open enough to discern the permanent source of happiness found in the experience of being aware. Ironically, lost in the complexity of materialism, as a culture, we have lost sight of the most basic and simple truth and even claim that it is 'too complicated to understand'. We cannot see the wood for the trees. As a result, we have too often fundamentally mistaken the source of value. Once realised, we see that this source, which is one indivisible reality, is everything and permanent and always available and reliable. It is not dependent on anything transient at all. We also realise that it was not people who were not realising it, but ourselves! – only the befuddlement in individual minds blocked some people from seeing it. So saying all this is not to take it personally but to say that this is the One Self firmly reminding itself to “wake up” to these qualities in as many minds and bodies as possible.
The failure to discern the lasting source of happiness leads us into a lifetime of activity of trying to source it in one way or another in transient material experiences, including human relationships. We objectify it. This objectification of happiness is, in fact, unhappiness ultimately. Total confusion of pleasure and happiness. We may find solace in this relative objectified happiness for a while, but that is only because we have not tasted the powerful perfume of permanent happiness.
Happiness in this world seems to come down to identifying as that which is eternal and being as psychologically comfortable as possible in biology. Further thoughts on this in my next article entitled “Could “Context Blindness” (a.k.a “Caetextia” Be The Unifying Principle Between Science And Spirituality?” which is also the topic of a free talk I will be giving.
Love
Freyja
