We all want to be happy. It would seem, though, that few of us are seeking lasting happiness. Instead, we chase after things that bring us sense pleasures and conditional happiness. We desire these things because we think they will make us happy, and most of us do not know any other way to obtain happiness.
Instead of looking for sense pleasures and conditional happiness, you can seek lasting unconditional happiness directly. To do so, you must first accept that it exists within you, without cause. Then you need to turn your attention to it and away from what you presume will make you happy.
Finding Unconditional Happiness
To experience lasting unconditional happiness, you first need to accept the idea of happiness that exists without cause. Accepting this idea is difficult because the rational way to be happy is to do something to be happy. For most of us, the idea that you can experience spontaneous unconditional happiness is irrational and inconceivable.
To experience lasting happiness, you also need to shift the focus of your attention away from your desires for sense pleasures and conditional happiness, and refocus on the possibility of unconditional happiness.
To shift your attention, you have to let go of your emotional attachment to your desires for what you think will make you happy. Your attachment to these desires keeps your attention focused and fixed on doing things and having things as a means of being happy. This attachment prevents you from shifting your attention to unconditional happiness.
If you can shift in these three directions, accepting the idea of happiness without cause, turning your attention to unconditional happiness, and letting go of your emotional attachments to your desires, you can enjoy lasting happiness. Embrace and practice these three ideas, and you can awaken lasting happiness in your life.
It may appear difficult to do all of this, but a story told by Chuang Tzu gives us a sense of how easy it can be:
There once was a man who was afraid of both his shadow and the sound of his feet. He had the idea of running away from them, so he ran and ran, ever faster, but he could not escape them. He ran so fast and so long that he finally collapsed and died. He never realized that, to rid himself of both his shadow and the sound of his feet, all he had to do was stop running, and sit in the shade.[36]
Like this man, we are all running as fast as we can after things that we think will make us happy. To find the happiness we seek, we need only stop running. Stop running after things and learn to see that happiness is here and now, waiting for you.
Our Misdirected Desire for Things
In Chapter 2, we look at the desire for happiness, along with our striving for things that we believe will make us happy. We keep chasing after sense pleasures and conditional happiness when we should be seeking happiness directly. The “rat race” is all most of us know about finding happiness. How is it that we came to seek things to satisfy the need for happiness, and never thought to seek happiness itself?
How We Make the Mistake of Thinking That Things Make Us Happy
We seek things to make ourselves happy because that is what nearly everyone else in the world does. From the day we enter the world, we see everyone striving for happiness by doing things. Not only do we see this, but our early experiences in the world prove to us that happiness does indeed come from circumstances and things.
When a child comes into the world, he or she has a very basic orientation towards happiness. If a baby is hungry, it cries because it is uncomfortable. Once fed, the baby is content and usually goes to sleep. You can see how the baby learns quickly that the food takes away discomfort and makes it happy.
When a child can conceptualize its feelings, it thinks such things as:
If I could have candy, I would be happy.
If Janie would be my friend, I would be happy.
Some people never get beyond the belief that having things and favorable circumstances will bring happiness.
If I had more money, I would be happy.
If I were prettier, I would be happy.
If my husband loved me more, I would be happy.
If I could have a better job, I would be happy.
Even if we get past the idea that the things and relationships we have can make us happy, we may still fall prey to the mistaken notion that we would be happy if we ourselves were different.
If I were less insecure, I would be happy.
If I were less afraid, I would be happy.
If I were more trusting, I would be happy.
The Internal Rulebook for Happiness
The above statements about what it takes to be happy are a simplified version of the very complex rules we carry in our minds. We all have internal rules for what it takes to permit ourselves to be happy.
For example, your internal rules may say that you can relax and be happy if X, Y, and Z happen. Why would you permit yourself to be happy only when certain requirements are met? I have no idea! And as far as I know, it does not make much difference. It is important only to acknowledge that sometimes things happen and, as a result, you periodically permit yourself to experience happiness.
I want to emphasize here that YOU permit yourself to be happy. You do not do this consciously, of course. In addition, you do not do it anytime you please. You have your requirements for happiness, as we all do. Conscious or not, though, it is YOU who permits yourself to be happy.
Realizing That You Are the Source of Your Happiness
The most important thing to learn from this book is the truth that YOU make yourself happy. More to the point, you allow yourself to be happy. Some things can give you sense pleasure, but the feeling of happiness comes only from you. This truth is a hard lesson to learn, and may be a hard lesson to practice. However, knowing and practicing this truth is what gives you the key to unconditional happiness.
Why We Are Not Happy
Most of us seem to live in a constant state of dissatisfaction with our lives. Even those who say they are happy perhaps sense there is something much better. Some of us are not only dissatisfied — we are suffering, miserable, or depressed. The Buddha said that we all exist in a state of suffering whether we know it or not. By his standards, what we all accept as the paltry portion of happiness allotted to us in life is not close to what it could be.
It is not because of the normal ills of life that we are unhappy. The bad things that happen to us do contribute to unhappiness; however, some people are very happy who objectively should be very unhappy, and many people who have every reason in the world to be happy are not. A person in physical pain can still be very happy. On the other hand, a person such as the man depicted in the poem Richard Cory, can be handsome, smart, and rich, and still be very unhappy.
You can find sense pleasures and conditional happiness in what you do, but real happiness comes from somewhere else. If you are focusing all of your attention on doing and getting, then your attention is misdirected. You are looking for happiness where none exists.
The Birth of Dissatisfaction
Our drive for happiness motivates us to do things and get things that we believe will make us happy. The more we try and the more we fail to find lasting happiness, the harder we try the next time, always looking in the wrong direction.
After a time, the force of our desire for happiness may create in us a deep-seated craving, hunger, and thirst for things to do and things to have. We are likely to have an emotional attachment to these things. Our desires may be unthinking and reflexive, the mind ever focused on satisfying these desires.
Life may revolve around getting and having what we believe will make us happy. We may not be aware of this. We may be thinking only about getting and having, just for the sake of doing so. However, underlying all of this activity is a desire for happiness.
Constantly hungering for things to make us happy leads to dissatisfaction when we cannot get these things. Loss of that which we think makes us happy results in more dissatisfaction. Even the fear of loss causes dissatisfaction.
When we do get the things and circumstances we want, but they begin to pale, we are likely to get frustrated. We may feel cheated when all of our striving for things does not bring us the happiness that the world promised us. There may even be an unconscious fear that nothing we can do or have in the world will ever bring us the happiness we seek. This knowledge of the futility of what we do can fill every moment with dissatisfaction. We may feel that life constantly cheats us of the happiness we work so hard to obtain.
In summary, we are dissatisfied when we do not have what we want, afraid of losing what we do have, and disappointed when what we get does not bring lasting happiness.
This dissatisfaction can overwhelm our innate state of happiness. In addition, our desire for what we believe will make us happy can take up so much attention that there is none left for what we really seek, which is unconditional happiness.
The immediately preceding discussion of why we are dissatisfied and cannot get happy is based primarily on Buddhist philosophy, which is explained in Appendix 3.
We Do Not Permit Ourselves to Be Happy
If we fulfill our current desires, we are happy until new desires arise to replace them, and the cycle of desire, fulfillment, and dissatisfaction starts up again. Until we satisfy our desires, we do not permit ourselves to be happy. We allow the experience of happiness only under certain conditions. Even though we have the power to be happy all of the time, most of us permit ourselves to be happy only if certain things happen or if the circumstances of our lives meet certain conditions.
Bad Things Make Us Unhappy
It is no surprise that if something bad happens to a person, the immediate reaction will usually be unhappiness. When something bad happens we react, and sometimes our reactions are so overwhelming that they draw our attention away from happiness. At these times, reactions so consume us that we have little to no attention left. The mind cannot find happiness.
For example, if someone close to you dies, you are going to be unhappy. You have to go through the grieving process that is natural to us all. As we know from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, this involves denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.[37] This process does not last forever, but while it does, it is hard to avoid the physical and emotional experience of grief.
Loss of Belief Makes Us Unhappy
Earlier, I said that we are attached to our ideas and beliefs. Sometimes the loss of belief can be as devastating as a physical injury or the loss of something or someone we hold dear.
For example, we all have ideas about how life should be. When tragedy strikes, such as the death of a loved one — especially before “his time” — we grieve for our loss. However, we also grieve for the “loss of the belief that it shouldn’t have happened at all.” [38] The fact of the loss calls into question our fundamental assumptions about the way we think life should be.
In the film, Gone with the Wind, there is a scene in which Ashley is both despondent and nostalgic for the life that he and Scarlett O’Hara had lost. He says, “We've traveled a long road since the old days, haven't we, Scarlett?…the golden warmth and security of those days.” However, Scarlett says, “Don't look back, Ashley, don't look back. It'll drag at your heart until you can't do anything but look back.” [39]
Ashley suffers from loss of the belief that life can be good. This kind of loss is perhaps the hardest to get over. Wounds heal, but belief, once lost, is hard to get back.
The Way to Find Unconditional Happiness
To find lasting happiness you first have to learn that unconditional happiness exists. Then you need to turn your attention to real happiness. To shift your attention to happiness you have to free it from its attachment to your desires for what you mistakenly think will make you happy. These are your desires for sense pleasures and conditional happiness.
Learning That Unconditional Happiness Exists
The most important single thing you can do to find lasting happiness is to learn and understand that it exists. As the Buddha said, “we become what we think.”[40] You have to learn that unconditional happiness exists, and you need to learn how to permit it to come into your life. You have to learn that sense pleasures and conditional happiness cannot lead to the lasting happiness that you want.
Once you know the truth of happiness, and incorporate it into the way you approach the world, you can eliminate a huge amount of dissatisfaction from your life. Knowing that sense pleasures and conditional happiness do not give you real happiness will help you to overcome your desire for them. Knowing that unconditional happiness is there for the asking will encourage you to direct your efforts to finding it.
I discuss the nature of unconditional happiness in Chapter 2, so will not repeat it here. I will say, however, that once you come to know in your heart that it exists, you will have taken the biggest step on your path to happiness.
Turn Your Attention to Unconditional Happiness
Once you know that real happiness is not conditional, you need to begin turning your attention to it. You also need to choose it. Then you will find happiness effortlessly increasing in your life. You attend to it by allowing yourself to be happy without anything changing in your life.
One good way to practice turning your attention to happiness is to meditate on it. In meditation, you can learn to let go of your thoughts and ideas, and in the quietness that remains seek your place of happiness.
Many years ago, I started practicing an “unconditional happiness meditation.” Once in a meditative state, I would gently tell myself to “be happy, for no reason at all.” I must admit that during this meditation I often felt a deep sense of the irrationality of what I was doing. My mind could not make any sense of the idea of just being happy. I persisted, however, and found that happiness could arise all by itself. I did not have to imagine any good thing happening to me, and I did not have to imagine my life being any different from what it was. I could just be happy.
What I have just described is only one way to meditate on happiness. Another way is to do a simple meditation, such as watching your breathing and allowing happiness to come to you. It will come.
The more often happiness comes in meditation, the more familiar you become with how it feels to be happy. Your knowledge of it will deepen, and as it deepens, you will find it easier to be happy in meditation and in your day-to-day life.
It is important to learn that unconditional happiness exists, and to begin turning your attention to it. You need to do this first, because the next step, letting go of your desires for sense pleasures and conditional happiness, is hard. It is like giving up an addiction. You cannot give up these desires without first knowing that something better awaits you.
Letting Go of Desire for What You Assume Will Make You Happy
Once you know that unconditional happiness is possible, you need to turn your attention to it. To do this, you have to free your attention from your desires for what you assume will make you happy. You have to reduce the importance of them in your life. Reducing your focus on desires is hard because you may have built your entire life around getting and having things that you mistakenly believe will provide lasting happiness.
One way of describing this idea of turning towards happiness is to say you are redirecting your attention. You have a powerful urge to be happy. You need to take that power and redirect it towards happiness. (In Buddhist training, they refer to this as learning to redirect attention from unwholesome cravings to wholesome desires, such as happiness.[41]) As you pull your attention away from desires and cravings for material goods, popularity, career success, relationships, etc., you turn more and more to the unconditional happiness you seek.
Unfortunately, if you are like most of us, your mind is attached to your desires for what you think will make you happy. The presumption that sense pleasures and conditional happiness will provide lasting happiness is extremely hard to overcome. Severance of your mind’s attachment to its myriad desires is the path to happiness and eventual enlightenment in yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and even in religious devotion.
Later in this book, you will find practices aimed at helping you free your mind of its attachments to desires so that it may turn its attention to happiness. The following summarizes these practices.
Mindfulness
To let go of desires and cravings, you need to be mindful, moment to moment, of what you think and do. We’ll describe mindfulness in Chapter 8 as being aware of the moment, as well as how you are being in the moment. Just knowing what you are doing, saying, and thinking right now, moves you a giant step closer to happiness.
In Chapter 4, I also talk about the way you experience the world. That chapter can also help you to be mindful of your thoughts, words, and deeds.
Meditation
I suggest that you meditate regularly. Chapters 9 and 10 cover meditation. In the quiet of meditation, you can experience for yourself the true happiness that is available to you. You can also learn to control your attention so that it is free to seek happiness.
Acceptance
The desire that leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness is usually that the circumstances of life be other than as they are. A big part of eliminating self-centered desires is to accept things just as they are. As we will see in Chapter 11, to accept something does not mean you have to be apathetic about it, or like it. You simply accept it as it is without judgment.
Nonattachment
Nonattachment, discussed in Chapter 12, is a way of actively engaging in life without your happiness depending upon the result of what you do in life. In other words, your happiness is not contingent upon what you do or what you have. You continue to care about what happens, but you do not allow events and ongoing circumstances to disturb your happiness, peace, and equanimity.
Selflessness, Charity, Compassion, and Forgiveness
Selflessness and charity are the opposite of the self-centered desires for what you think will make you happy. These virtues put the needs of others ahead of your own personal needs. As you practice these virtues, you weaken your attachment to desire, and move closer to happiness. We look at selflessness and charity in Chapter 13.
Compassion and forgiveness of others, which are the hallmarks of selflessness and charity, move you closer to happiness because these virtues take your focus off your personal needs and desires. We’ll examine compassion and forgiveness in Chapter 14.
Ethical Living
All spiritual practices and beliefs emphasize ethical living, promoting the ethical life in a variety of ways, some positive and some negative. The negative is obvious: “If you sin, you will go to hell!” This negative approach perhaps works for adolescents. However, most clear-minded seekers prefer the positive incentive for ethical living, which is that this type of living helps you and others find peace and happiness.
In the appendices on Buddhism and yoga, we will look at the guidance for living that these practices offer. We’ll see how ethical living weakens the self-centered desires that make us dissatisfied with life.
For example, practicing the virtue of truthfulness is conducive to happiness in many ways. In addition to the fact that you relate better in life when you tell the truth, being truthful helps you be happy. When you are not truthful, your motives for lying are often selfish. Often the motive is greed. You lie to get something that you do not deserve, or you lie to avoid some punishment. Anytime you tell a selfish lie, you make it easier to lie the next time. You also strengthen the self-centered motives for lying. You cannot eliminate self-centered desires if your actions keep making them stronger.
The Self-Centered Self
Let me introduce you to what I call the “self-centered self.” Knowing this character may help you better understand the remedy for overcoming your attachment to desires for what you may mistakenly believe will make you happy. The path to happiness involves weakening and eliminating the self-centered, egoic self from your life.
If you can be mindful, whether in meditation or while performing some simple task, you can experience the self-centered self. This self is that inner sense of you that wants to live forever, avoid pain, be regarded as special, and get whatever it wants. (It is like a perpetual adolescent.) We all harbor one of these, even if we try to hide it. We all know people for whom the self-centered self is on full display.
I call it the self-centered self because it is not only conscious of itself, but is quite self-centered. Others may call it the self-conscious self, the ego, or the egoic self.
Qualities of the Self-Centered Self
The primary qualities of the self-centered self are fear of harm, fear of loss, fear of death, want, envy, jealousy, and frustration. These are all emotions that are inwardly generated and unreasoning. They are also, by the way, the negative emotions frequently seen in adolescents.
All of these are selfish qualities that come into play when you thirst for something that you do not have. Of course, you do not experience yourself as self-centered when you are in the midst of these experiences. The honest acknowledgement of your selfishness is a mature experience. When you are acting selfishly, your emotions are quite immature.
Exercise: Finding the Self-centered Self
Here is an exercise to help you gain awareness of the self-centered self.
To get a sense of this self, try sitting quietly with your eyes open, looking at some object, such as a flower or a picture. Allow that object to fill your awareness, so that you get a sense of its existence as an object separate from yourself. Do this for ten minutes, so that you get a good sense of this object just being there, existing by itself and taking up space as a separate thing. Try to feel its solidity. Try to experience its realness.
While observing this object, try to be present. Also, without focusing on yourself, be aware of yourself as you experience the realness of the object. You may get a sense that you feel more real than you ordinarily do.
Once you are present, sensing the solidity and separateness of this object, turn your attention back to yourself. Try to be self-aware. Now go back to experiencing the realness of the object. Once again, try to be present. Then, go back to your self-centered self. Try to go back and forth.
You should get a sense of your self-centered self as a kind of separate consciousness. It may seem like a separate kind of thing within you.
What I am trying to get you to experience with this exercise is a sense of your “present self,” in contrast to your self-centered self. The present self sees and experiences an object. The present self is here and now. The self-centered self, on the other hand, does not directly experience the object. Its focus is your mind and memory and, by extension, the utility of the object. The self-centered self feels different because it is not present. It is a mental construct, accumulated over the years.
The self-centered self needs things, is afraid of things, feeds on compliments, wants to be right about everything, and is embarrassed when viewed in an unflattering light. The self-centered self flares conspicuously when aroused by one of its signature experiences: fear of harm, fear of loss, want, envy, jealousy, and frustration.
Loss of the Self-centered Self
Those who have rid themselves of their self-centered selves can function just fine without it. Its loss does not diminish the ability to function - and function very well. In fact, without the fear of failure or the greed for reward that accompanies the self-centered self, you are free to express who you really are. It is said that there is no greater joy.
Absent self-preoccupation, the only thing that seems to change is what you decide to do. When incessant personal desires are no longer your priority, and when you overcome your dissatisfaction with life, what remains is simply happiness, and compassion for others. Your goals in life change from concern for personal reward to concern for others.
Practicing Happiness
Once you see the source of real happiness, you can start to look to yourself for it instead of waiting for something to happen in the world. This truth is a hard lesson to learn because it probably goes against everything you ever learned about being happy.
Knowing and believing that happiness is natural to you and that you do not have to do anything to be happy is a rare thing. Just knowing this truth is a huge step. The next step is to incorporate this knowledge deeply into the way that you think, and the way that you respond to the world.
Happiness and a Sense of Approval
Let us consider the approval of others. If you are like most of us, from the moment you were aware of other people, you wanted their approval. Having a sense of the approval of others makes us feel comfortable and safe in the world. If you feel comfortable and safe, chances are you will permit yourself to experience real happiness as well.
In modern society, it is sometimes difficult to confirm the approval of others. Some cues from others are objective and obvious, clearly communicating their judgments of both acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Sometimes, though, the cues that we receive from others are ambiguous.
There are thousands of little things that we pick up from others signaling what they think of us. These thousands of little cues can be difficult to read. In some complex fashion, all of the feedback, both subtle and overt, that you pick up from others must come together as one single gestalt in your mind, and if there are enough positive cues, you may permit yourself to feel approval.
This system for knowing whether you have the approval of others seems chancy to me. For any number of reasons you may misinterpret the cues from others, and feel disapproval. If you cannot permit yourself to be happy without their approval, then this is just one more thing in life that gets in the way of happiness. If you do not feel approved of, you can find it difficult to function in the world.
If you do not feel approval, what can you do? You need to stop thinking about it. Thinking about yourself in comparison to others, or thinking about how other people view you can be very destructive. Psychologists call this thinking rumination. When you ruminate about yourself, you only feel worse about yourself.
When you ruminate on thoughts of disapproval, there are emotions associated with those thoughts. These emotions give the thoughts great power. These thoughts and emotions set off a cascade of negative, destabilizing thoughts and feelings throughout your body.
You need to stop ruminating on disapproval. One way to do this is to try to shift your attention to a sense of unconditional happiness. Treat all of these thoughts of disapproval as just thoughts. As in meditation (see Chapters 9 and 10), when thoughts of disapproval come up, just let them go. Turn your attention to happiness. Practice happiness by controlling your mind. Let go of thoughts and feelings of disapproval and move your attention to happiness. What you will find when you do so is the emotional power of your thoughts of disapproval simply