Virtually everyone wants to feel good. Perhaps they want to be contented, happy, blissful, or something else, but I’ve never met anyone who wanted to feel awful.
The problem is that most people don’t know how to be happy. If they are happy, they don’t really understand what they have, and how others could get it. What works for one, rarely works for most other people.
So, how to be happy?
There are a lot of books about happiness. Most of them have a simple formula, varying in details:
Do/Get/Be X to get Happiness.
That is, you should get friends, or self-esteem, or money, or make a list of things you’re grateful about every day, or create a story about your life, or…
The great spiritual traditions generally say something else.
Our nature is happiness (well, actually bliss) and getting objects or doing things expecting those actions or objects to make you happy won’t work.
My experience is that this is true.
The research is also pretty clear: You do/get something you think will make you happy–perhaps a raise or a great lover or a lottery win–and a few months to two years later you’re back to your previous level of happiness.
Getting “things” doesn’t really work, though there are some minor exceptions (and this isn’t a book, so I’ll skip those for now).
Now, it is true that if you’re in a ton of pain all the time, you’re going to have a problem being happy. It can be done, but probably not if you didn’t do the pre-work before getting sick.
On the other hand, most chronic illness doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from being happy. I say this from experience.
So then, all the introductions and caveats aside, how should one become happy?
Get rid of the shit that stands in the way of being happy.
I remember very clearly the period after I first actually understood this. Suddenly I noticed that there was all this wonderful food around: Chinese, Indian, good roast beef, cheese!, curried goat, fruits, garlic toast, and on and on.
Everything I wanted to cook, fantastic food was available. If it was food I didn’t know how to cook, I could buy it cooked. And plenty of good food was cheap.
Marvelous!
And music! Music. Music. It was everywhere, cheap, and free, and marvelous. The music of hundreds of years of civilization, performed by the best musicians in the world, available to me at the touch of a few buttons.
And the women (and a few men, but mostly women, hey, I have my preferences), were beautiful. There was art. There were fantastic buildings. At night I slept inside, in a warm house in winter, a cool one in summer. I had food, art, entertainment, and beauty available to me everywhere.
I became open to happiness.
So many people walk through life, as I had, unable to appreciate its wonders. I’m the first, as long-time readers know, to note that a lot of life is absolute crap, and yeah, in many ways this is a hell-world, and while this is not the worst timeline (that’d be nuclear war), it’s certainly a bad and remarkably stupid one.
But the world is still full of beauty, the warmth of love is still real, and even simple food is still marvelous.
The first stage of happiness is simply being available to it. Most people aren’t. They are so caught up in their worries, fears, and desires that they can’t see what they already have.
All you need to have this basic level of happiness, which is way more than most people older than ten or so seem to have, is stop letting your fears, worries, and desires get in the way.
This is why early meditation practitioners who’ve made a bit of progress are always dribbling on tiresomely about being present. But it’s not really being present that’s important, it’s not dwelling.
We all have problems. We all have fears. We all have desires.
Fine. Have them. But don’t let them have you. If all you can see is them, you are missing most of what the world offers you ever single day.
So, let them go. Don’t dwell.
Don’t worry about anything you can’t control.
Don’t dwell on anything bad that isn’t happening now. Do what you’re willing to do about it, then put it down. This includes both bad things that happened in the past, and bad things you think will happen in the future. (And which often won’t.)
Don’t spend time castigating yourself because you think you suck. Perhaps you weigh too much, have too little money, aren’t loving enough, competent enough, or any other failure.
Fuck it. Drop it. Do whatever you’re going to do about it, and stop worrying about it.
The formula for simple happiness is just to not be too busy mentally to notice all the happiness available to you right now.
I’m not saying this is easy. When you get down to it, it’s about doing nothing. But before you get to doing nothing, you often have to do a lot of things. Maybe that’s some sort of therapy or maybe it’s meditation or other spiritual practices (genuine belief in a benevolent God does work well). Or maybe you’re one of the very lucky, very few who can just drop everything once you realize it makes sense.
But the core isn’t doing. It’s not doing. Just get out of the way. The human body knows how to be happy, and all it really takes is not being scared, not wanting something to point where you dwell on it, and not worrying, including not worrying about how think you suck.
This is a large part of what is meant by “just drop it all.”
None of this means you’ll be happy all the time. It does mean you’ll be happy a lot and that you won’t tend to dwell on unhappiness. Sufficient to whenever it happens is the crap of life. It shouldn’t destroy your happiness before or afterwards.
So… be happy. I’d like to see more of that. Misery serves no one. It doesn’t serve us when we’re miserable and it doesn’t harm our enemies. Might as well be happy.
(This is the first stage of happiness. More on the happiness in Part II.)
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AB
This is true, but your true nature is not realized from the perspective of the person.
The person, what you normally take as “you”, is also an object. 🙂
Herman
Great points. I think the advice “stop worrying about how much you think you suck” is hard for a lot of people today because of social media. Since people mostly just post good stuff on social media (cool vacations, new job/promotion, their great meals, their awesome new car, their wonderful spouse and kids, etc.) there is always the temptation to feel really bad about yourself. This tendency already existed due to the advertising industry and pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” but social media has massively increased the power of “compare and despair.”
mistah charley, ph.d.
I posted this comment here a couple of years ago, and I hope its relevance compensates for its repetitiveness –
in “The mind illuminated: A complete meditation guide integrating Buddhist wisdom and brain science”, Culadasa gives a picture (3 pictures, really – figure 57, pages 411-413) of the changes in worldview he says can be produced by practicing the program of development he delineates. There are a lot of circles and arrows in the illustrations. Here are the captions for the three stages:
p. 411 Three assumptions – that I am a separate Self, that I live in a world of relatively enduring and self-existent “things”, and that my happiness comes from the interactions between my Self and this world of things – are shared throughout the subminds making up the mind-system. They provide the foundation for our sense of meaning and purpose in life.
p. 412 The “true” nature of reality, as revealed through Insight experiences, directly conflicts with all these assumptions: there are no “things”, only process; all we ever really experience are the fabrications of our own minds; the Self I think I am is as impermanent and empty as everything else; the world can never be the source of my happiness. When these truths are realized by the deep unconscious minds, it is severely disruptive.
p. 413 As Insight matures, individual sub-minds reorganize their internal models to accommodate the new information. This transformation brings about a completely new worldview, life takes on a new and deeper meaning and purpose than ever before, and there is a much greater sense of ease, regardless of what may happen.
The thought balloon on page 413 states, “I am not separate. Everything arises and passes away due to causes and conditions. This body and mind are not things, but causal process. Having arisen due to causes and conditions, they are causes and conditions in their turn Ultimate truth is knowable, but not through ideas and concepts. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
On January 13, 2017, Culadasa/John Yates tweeted:
“A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution, and Ethics in the Modern World” by David R. Loy. I purchased it after one of his talks. This is an excellent work. Here he clearly explains why the emerging global culture needs the Buddha’s teachings, and why Buddhism needs Western culture and science. With the proper combination of both, humankind may even survive its successes and excesses.
Ian Welsh
“The Mind Illuminated” is excellent. But it’s really mostly about Shamatha (concentration) with only small parts about insight and other types of meditation.
Combine it with “Seeing that Frees” by Burbea for a map that can protentially get you all the way to something that could be considered enlightenment.
AB: you get simple happiness long before that insight, unless you skip past the earlier stage.
And that’s really really rare.
AB
AB: you get simple happiness long before that insight, unless you skip past the earlier stage.
And that’s really really rare.
That’s a fair point. Finding simple happiness like you suggest can pave the way for further insights.
Eric Anderson
This is all straight out of the 12-step playbook.
There is a word for what you’re trying to express, Ian. It’s called gratitude.
Invariably when I find myself unhappy it’s because I “want” something, rather than being grateful for what I already have.
Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” is not easy, and it slips if you don’t work to keep it forefront. As such, in my sobriety I’ve come to begin every day with a simple prayer [Some meditate, I pray without focus upon deity]:
Thank you for all I’ve been given.
Thank you for all that’s been taken away.
Thank you for what I have today.
Krystyn
\”I remember very clearly the period after I first actually understood this. Suddenly I noticed that there was all this wonderful food around: Chinese, Indian, good roast beef, cheese!, curried goat, fruits, garlic toast, and on and on.\”
That is not happiness, it is hedonism. Even the Daoists say \”The five flavors dull the taste\”!
The purpose of the spiritual path is not to find happiness, but rather, your true nature.
Sukha Sutta: Happiness
\”There are, O monks, these three feelings: pleasant feelings, painful feelings, and neither-painful-nor-pleasant feelings.\”
Be it a pleasant feeling, be it a painful feeling, be it neutral,
one\’s own or others\’, feelings of all kinds[1] —
he knows them all as ill, deceitful, evanescent.
Seeing how they impinge again, again, and disappear,[2]
he wins detachment from the feelings, passion-free.
And regarding your last line \”Misery serves no one. It doesn’t serve us when we’re miserable and it doesn’t harm our enemies. Might as well be happy.\”
Well, from Dvayatanupassana Sutta: The Noble One\’s Happiness
\”What others call happiness, that the Noble Ones declare to be suffering. What others call suffering, that the Noble Ones have found to be happiness. See how difficult it is to understand the Dhamma! \”
Move past worldly joy to unworldly happiness.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.031.nypo.html
alyosha
All the worries and the focus on getting are mind stuff, the way our culture trains us. As the Beatles sang in “Tomorrow Never Knows”:
The overwhelming majority of humankind has never experienced life without mind chatter. Get this out of the way and bliss can start to appear.
Ian Welsh
Krystyn, no, what I’m talking about is happiness. Taoism says that happiness is a problem: what you want you is contentment. But the first step is happiness, before you get contentment.
It’s perfectly fine to enjoy what the world offers. What is bad is clinging to any of it. If you try and hold onto anything, or push anything away, that’s the mistake.
Or, as my first real teacher said, “a properly enlightened person doesn’t care whether they are having sex or not.” But that not caring includes “not rejecting.” (Unless you have a good reason not too, of course.)
Eric, I don’t think it exactly gratitude. Life is wonderful, but there’s no necessity to be thankful. Just experience it as it is, and a lot of it turns out to be great.
Tal Hartsfeld
I’m not too keen on the quintessential self-help guru and their officious “concern” for the for the physical or psychological health of others around them.
“Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is an ideal anthem for such types and their ideologies, as is “The Old Philosopher” by Eddie Lawrence.
Krystyn
Ian, who was your first teacher? That will tell me a lot.
Make the assumption I have been practicing/studying Eastern religion for 25 years and read the full English translation of the Tripitaka as well as all the Daoist works and have had conversations with Red Pine, so as to not waste time explaining to me the basics, like “clinging is bad”.
You are not far off, but you are mixing Daoism and Buddhism and you think there is great similarity, but there is not. I think you are closer to the Dao, meaning that you see that life, in its’ natural state, is fundamentally good. Do yourself a favor and pick one. There is a disconnect between Daoism and Buddhism, and I see Daoism as a natural progression after you see through Buddhism. so now I will only speak as a Daoist:
Seeing the nature of reality, there is no joy/sorrow, no happy/sad, no enlightenment/whatever. No dualism, in short. There is only the operating laws of the universe to follow without thought, with instinct. Happiness is not a problem, only thinking about happiness is a problem. Happiness can happen to you with no action, like you find a $100 bill. Seeking happiness is a problem because doing so you automatically create the opposite, sadness. There is no first step, there is only going with or against the Dao. Your approach through negation “Get rid of the shit that stands in the way of being happy” has the same goal; happiness. How long will it take you to get rid of all the shit that stands in your way? So instead of seeking happiness you are seeking the unhappy things. Always seeking.
A river does not get things out of its way; it goes around them, over them, or just gets blocked by them. It does not care about the result, it only the force of gravity a its guide and does not make dynamite to get a mountain out of its way.
Maybe start here: Contentment is about acceptance.
Ian Welsh
Krystyn,
my first teacher was Vinay Gupta, aka. Shivanath. Kashmiri Shaivite. I had pretty intensive teaching with him, literally hundreds of hours. (I had also been meditating for 10 years before he taught me.)
I’ve also been taught by a technical Vipissana guy.
What you’re saying about Taoism agrees essentially with what I just said.
I’m saying something very simple.
If you stop clinging to your fear, desires and worries (as a short hand for a lot of different things) you become open to the everyday happiness that is available due to the world and your human body.
Yeah, there are stages beyond, where bliss arises all the time. And there are various forms of enlightenment, and no this is none of those things and thus early on the road.
But it’s way better than what most people had before, and it works.
That it can involve a seeking is no big deal. Virtually everybody, prior to enlightenment, is seeking something, and for most of them it’s either some version of happiness or some version of truth (or some version of God.)
(I wasn’t looking for happiness, as an aside, when I got this. I was quite startled when suddenly I was wandering around all day going “wow, this is great! How did I miss that?”)
Near the end they have to drop whatever they’re seeking, but it only gets dropped very near the end. Before then, it’s necessary, even if it eventually has to be discarded.
As for the difference in path. Well, yes, but I find a lot useful in many paths. While perhaps your advice is good (and perhaps not) for now I think I won’t “pick one”. Heck, even inside traditions there are huge differences: Mahayanna Buddhist masters have straight up stated that their enlightenment isn’t the “inferior” Theravada “Minayana” Arhat type.
ponderer
@Tal Hartsfeld
Great comment, very insightful. Also, what you said so true about “Israel Complex” on your site.
Willy
Ideally, all the different people types counterbalance each others excesses and blind spots. At least they did long ago. With times being what they are, good answers for unforeseen problems can come from almost anybody. But it sometimes seems like it’s our kind which gets tasked to divine which answers have the most potential, and then try to get the others to either shoot down those answers or run with them.
But sometimes we find that the stupid assholes have taken that job and they aint gonna listen because they like it. And fuck you.
That’s when we put on the Bobby McFarrin. Maybe that’s part of the job. But I think that song should’ve been called “Fuckem all just be happy”.
Ché Pasa
‘Happiness’: Innate and universal or acquired and individual? Neither? Both? These questions can’t be answered in the absolute, can they?
‘Contentment’ is perhaps a less emotionally charged but still not adequate description of a state of being that a friend of mine calls ‘release and relief.’ A feeling, true. But yes, letting go of whatever stands in the way of gratitude and contentment, ‘happiness’ if you wish.
‘Gratitude’ is often a missing element among seekers, isn’t it? But there is always so much to be thankful for, even when conditions are bad and appear to be getting worse. For most of us in the developed world, conditions are far from the kinds of ‘bad and getting worse’ that so many people have endured in the past and so many millions or billions endure today.
Find your bliss by all means; encourage the bliss of others. What they see as bliss for themselves, however, may not fit your definition, and at least in some cases, may cause direct or indirect harm to others.
How to reconcile that dilemma — assuming we’re not seeking to be happy at the expense or harm of others? Buddhism suggests a ‘middle way.’ Work on yourself and become an example which may inspire others. Eschew extremes. As chaos surrounds us, be aware, stay calm.
Serve others generously.
Joan
Thank you, Ian. I really enjoyed this.
nihil obstet
The single habit most supportive of opening up to happiness in the early stages is to avoid advertising like Superman avoids Kryptonite. Nobody is immune from the mental and emotional damage caused by constant appeals to “You’re inadequate and miserable and you will become good and happy with this product”.
Donna Curtis
I’m late to the party here. What else is new?
Look, I’m an atheist and a retired accountant/dance instructor. My “spiritual heights” were dancing and hiking in nature, both of which I cannot do now because of disability.
I had such a lightspeed mind that it took me 20 years to learn the “there are no thoughts intruding into your mind” meditation. I’m pretty good now. I can at least use meditation to block out some of the chronic pain I have everyday. I’m not looking for nirvana. I’ll settle for contentment.
If you’re ill, want to be content and can physically handle it, get a cat or a dog. They can really brighten up your day especially if you’re like me and chose not to have children. If you have any kind of empathic streak at all, an animal will give you a good reason to get out of bed. That’s half the battle right there.