Definition of Happiness

"It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional, and mental states--even that that might be ordinarily labeled as unpleasant."

I've been trying to convince my son, Ben, that there is such a thing as happiness. He has read Camus and believes that the rock is always going to be falling back on him.

So I started re-reading Joy of Living and came upon the above quote as something to work with in advancing my argument.  It's a tricky and interesting quote because it's easy to misread it and think that happiness is the absolute well-being.  In fact happiness is the experience of this  state of peace. It's not being in a continuous state of blissful calm that constitutes happiness, it's the intuitive knowledge that this state is there.

Many people who meditate, myself included much of the time, have an intellectual, conceptual grasp of this ideas.  Formal meditation, regular practice, is what makes it truly understood at the physical and emotional level.

But note, this definition also encompasses the unpleasant sensations.  Happiness can actual radiate from and radiate through stress.  This morning I read this really interesting article in the NYTimes on How To Be Better At Stress.  The theory is that perceiving the stress response as something that makes you stronger, as part of a thriving body, makes people both physically and psychologically stronger.

My goal in the next month, and in the next year (birthday on Tuesday) is to work on having an intuitive of how deep abiding calm and stress can work together to make me stronger and healthier.   The trick is to be able to experience both at the same time.  To be able to thrive from the benefits of both.

36 hours to joy

Good strong meditation this morning. I started when I woke up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.  I sat with it and let it decompose into its granular bits of pain and agitation, and then slowly I dissolved layers of pain and agitation in my body until I settled into my gut, finally feeling the freedom of a forever loop of calm and pleasure. The opposite of disappointment. A profound feeling of hope and true power and success.

It didn't last forever, or I'd be sitting there now on waves of peace. But I knew that it could.

Shinzen Young says that we really only need to penetrate unpleasant emotional patterns a "few dozen" time for them to be released permanently.

If that's true, why am I watching Netflix?  I could be binge releasing unpleasant, unproductive patterns of feeling, coasting on true success, instead of watching one more disappointing season of House of Cards. Why do I self-sabotage? Or rather, since I don't really believe in "self" anymore, why do I sabotage these loops of calm and pleasure?

I suppose it's mostly because I keep forgetting that this choice exists.

If it is true that it would take me about 36 hours of work to release all this shittyness, and instead I'm putting in 10,000 hours of Netlflix, then my life has been on a sad trajectory.  But if it's true that I'm 36 hours away from freedom, then there's a lot to rejoice about.

Self, no-self

This week I’ve been thinking and reading about the self and about the idea of no-self.

Enlightenment, according to Shinzen Young is the paradigm shift where we see the no-self and never go back to believing in self again. He compares the shift to going from a tribe that believes that there’s a monster that eats the moon, to one that understands the solar eclipse. Enlightenment doesn’t mean that there isn’t darkness, it’s the understanding of the causes of the darkness.

The cause of much of the darkness in our lives is this attachment to self. I write those words and I feel a sudden despair that I will ever be able to write about Buddhism in any way that doesn’t sound dry and intellectual. What I want to convey is the sense that it is really living from this “self” that dulls the mind. The self is a flickering fire that is kept alive on the kindling of time, the slow burning past, the dry twigs of the future. It burns up so much energy. To live with non-self is to be a surfer on vast and powerful waves of abundant calm and pleasure.

 That’s what my meditations on non-self have felt like this week. Like, I have a choice.  I can live in this puny little sense of self. Or I can tap into this awesome power that’s always there for me. But there’s this life, as a mother, as a non-profit executive that pulls me away from my true ambition: to coast on waves of bliss.

 The trick I suspect is to make intuitive that each of these paths is a manifestation of awareness.  I’m not sure I would have been able to sustain any of these insights without a basic understanding of feedback loops that I got from programming, and that is what I want kids to know from a very young age, that they can build things--toys, bridges, selves--and then take them apart. That they can decompose problems and emotions down to the component parts of calm and agitation, pleasure and displeasure. That they don’t have to be caught up in all these manifestations from the past.  

 I can do both. I can be an executive of a flourishing non-profit and I can surf on the waves. The trick is to not get attached to the theory that I have to be one of these things.