Happiness

1.Happiness

I am starting what I hope will be a long term project: a blog on the subject of happiness. What I mean by happiness is a deep sense of  satisfaction and well-being that includes feelings  of pleasure, joy, freedom, and in some cases, even bliss or ecstasy. This state of being, I believe, is what we most deeply long for in our lives. In earlier essays I referred to it as a sense of wholeness, and to the feeling of being alive.

In everyday speech, the words “happy” and “happiness” are often used for  more passing and less intense experiences. For example, you might say you are happy because the sun is shining, or you got invited to a friend’s birthday party, or your checking account balance is a little larger than you had anticipated. On the other hand you might be unhappy about a grade on an exam, a friend’s failure to respond to your e-mail, or the heavy traffic which is making you late for an appointment. Brief everyday experiences of happiness or unhappiness such as these are passing reactions to events in the world around us, events  which we judge to be either good or bad, desireable or undesireable. By contrast, the happiness I want to discuss in this blog arises from a more  inner source which is deeper and longer lasting. Various religious traditions have special words to refer to this deeper happiness:  enlightenment, realization, or liberation. These traditional religious terms, however,  can sound so lofty that they may seem to be beyond the reach of ordinary people. Many of us may feel it is rather pretentious to say, “I am enlighted.” But we can be comfortable with the statement “I am happy.” For happiness, in its various degrees of depth or intensity,  is clearly understood to be a very basic element in the experience of human beings.

In designating happiness as my subject, I have in mind the fact that, in my Catholic high school, the textbooks for the four years of religion class carried the overall title  Our Quest for Happiness. The word happiness here  referred to the ultimate happiness in heaven which is thought to arise from communion with God. Catholic theology uses the Latin word beatitudo to refer to this ultimate happiness which, it is believed, is fully experienced  only in the afterlife but can be at least partially attained in this life. It pleases me to recognize the connection between my present pursuit and the Catholic intellectual tradition which was so formative for me as a young person. Of course I am departing substantially from the other-worldly focus of that religious tradition by viewing happiness as a flower which comes to full blossom right here on this beautiful earth. I hope you will read along with me as I write further posts and that together we grow in our capacity to experience happiness.

2. Happiness and Gratitude

In my first blog post I described in a general way what I mean by “happiness.” Now there is a specific aspect of our experience of happiness that I think is important to notice. What I am referring to is that when we are conscious of feeling happy, we often notice that we are also feeling gratitude. It may not be clear who we should thank, but we do feel grateful and have a sense that thankfulness is called for. I will give two examples from my own personal experience that illustrate what I mean.

When our grandson was a tiny infant, I would sometimes rock him till he fell asleep. I would arrange myself in the chair so that he wasn’t on my lap but rather lying right over my heart. This felt like a tremendous privilege. I could stay like that for an hour or two, perfectly content.  Though I knew where he came from in the biological sense, I still wondered, “Where did he come from? Where did he come from.” It seemed like a miracle. I remembered the enormous effort and energy I had exerted in my life to acheive academically and professionally; how hard I had tried through a lifetime to present myself to the world in such a way that people would respect me, admire me, accept me. Yet nothing in all that striving had ever brought the joy and happiness of having this little baby sleeping against my chest. There was nothing in the whole world that was more important or more valuable than what was happening right now. I was so grateful!

Another example is an experience which comes back to me from time to time. It is linked to the connection I felt with my aunt Imelda when I was a young boy. Every Saturday afternoon she would turn on the radio to listen to the opera broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera under the sponsorship of Texaco. I wasn’t particularly taken by this kind of music at the time. But a few years later I began to explore opera and grew to love it. First on an iPod, and then on my iPhone, I would download favorite arias or even whole operas to listen to as I took long walks in the neighborhood or through gardens or wooded areas. Every  now and then when a particular aria seems especially beautiful to me, I feel my chest expand and my heart seems to be lifted up in ecstasy. And almost automatically, I notice myself saying, “Merci, Imelda! Merci, Imelda!” I’m grateful to her because she loved opera, and by exposing me to it, led me to love it too. I’m grateful that music exists; that we have our sense of hearing to enjoy it. I’m grateful to the composers, the musicians and the technical wizardry which makes it possible to carry this wondrous artistry around in a small object that fits in my pocket.

There is no way for me to know to what extent my experiences of happiness are similar to yours. I hope that, as a reader, you will reflect on times in your life when you felt happy and see if you too received the happiness with gratitude; if you too experience happiness as a gift.

June 30, 2016

3. Does Happiness Just Happen?

In my last post I suggested that we respond to happiness with gratitude because we experience it as a gift. Now I want to go further along these lines.

To begin with, I want to describe a process which we have all experienced many times.  First, we become aware of some organismic need (for food, for companionship, for exercise, etc.). Then thoughts and memories arise suggesting resources in our environment which would serve to meet our needs (e.g., there is food in the refrigerator; there is a restaurant down the street; my friend would probably enjoy it if I called) . Finally, a choice is made among these possibilities, and we move into action implementing the decision. Provisionally, I will label this sequence of events as the thinking/doing process. When it takes place, we have the sense that “I am the maker of this decision and the doer of the action.” Put a little differently, “I am the one who is making this happen.”

Returning now to the main subject, I suggest that the emergence of happiness is quite different from the thinking/doing process discussed above.  This seems clear to me from my observation of the happiness of children. When I watch a baby lying on her back and swatting at a mobile, babbling and laughing, it does not seem that this happiness could be the result of thinking things through and making a decision. The infant lacks the mental development to be capable of such a process. The child’s happiness seems more like a natural unfolding such as a bud blossoming into a rose or a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis and spreading its wings. The same is true when I observe our seven year old granddaughter. She can play for hours either alone or with a friend creating houses and towns, moving around little action figures, making up a dialogue to accompany the story she is making up. She is often skipping around the house. She sings both songs she has learned and new ones she makes up.  These are the signs of a happy child. And again, the happiness is something natural and wonderful unfolding. So it appears that happiness is something that happens naturally not something we can “make happen” by exertion of the will.

Let’s shift from happiness in the early years of life to the ultimate kind of happiness which is seen as the final flowering of the religious impulse. In various religious traditions such as Vedanta, Zen, or Christian spirituality, it is insisted that no actions resulting from human choice and will (what I called the thinking/doing function) can produce the states of enlightenment, awakening, or mystical union. This crucial understanding is especially emphasized in the writings of J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts and, more recently, Steven Harrison. The insistence that the ultimate state of happiness is not under human control is particularly well illustrated by the concept of the “dark night of the soul” in Catholic theology. It was the experience of many saints and religious seekers that, relatively early in their spiritual journey, they experienced an inner joy and sweetness. But quite abruptly the experience of bliss ceased and they felt plunged into a dark night of loss and dryness which could continue for years. No matter how much they prayed, meditated, or practiced works of charity and asceticism, the dark night continued. When it became absolutely clear that no effortful activity would lead to the happiness of spiritual fulfillment, then and only then, by the grace of God, the gift was restored.

The ideas that happiness is a gift and that it just “happens,” either of itself or by the grace of God,  corresponds to my personal experience and I like to see things in this way. But there are some practical questions which arise?  Does all of this mean that there is absolutely nothing we could do to experience greater happiness? Or are there ways we can at least prepare the ground so that we would be more receptive to the gift of happiness. Can we get stuck in unhappiness without any way out? Or are there ways of dealing with unhappiness and its causes which would weaken its hold on us? These are questions I plan to deal with in future blog posts.

4. Dance, Joy, and Freedom

A song I really love from the Broadway musical Billy Elliot  beautifully expresses some important facts about  joy and happiness. The name of the song is “Electricity” with words by Lee Hall and music by Elton John.

Billy is a young boy from a coal mining community who wants to be a ballet dancer. During an interview for admission to a dance school, one of the committee members asks him to describe what it feels like when he is dancing. He begins by singing that he can’t really explain it because he hasn’t got the words. And a few lines later he adds “I don’t know what it is.” His inability to articulate his feelings of joy and freedom is not due to any personal inadequacies on his part. Rather, it is an essential aspect of the deepest feelings that you can not understand what they are unless you yourself have experienced them. Anyone who has seriously fallen in love recognizes that the feeling can’t be communicated to another person who has never had the experience. And in the writings of saints and mystics, the ecstasy of union with the divine is said to be “ineffable,” beyond verbal expression.

Billy’s description of the sensations which arise for him while dancing continues with the statement, “It’s a feeling that you can’t control.” That is, joy is not the product of conscious volition and doing. It happens “of itself.” As Billy continues, “It’s like forgetting, losing who you are.” Or, a few lines later, “I’m listening and I’m listening, and then I disappear.” Of course he doesn’t physically disappear. It is the sense of the “I” as a conscious deliberate agent which fades away. That is when the dramatic transformation happens:

And then I feel a change, like a fire deep inside,

Something bursting me wide open, impossible to hide

And suddenly I’m flying, flying like a bird

Like electricity, electricity sparks inside of me and I’m free, I’m free.

There is one more passage in the song which I like a great deal. He sings, “It’s a bit like being angry, it’s a bit like being scared, confused and all mixed up and mad as hell.” It’s a little counterintuitive that a song about the ecstatic joy of dancing would say that it’s similar to fear, confusion, and anger. These latter are sometimes mistakenly labelled as “negative emotions.” In fact they are just as natural as happiness and the psychologically healthy person is free to experience the full range of emotions in all of their intensity. One thing the emotions all share is that they are somatic states. To be able to feel deeply, one has to be able to powerfully feel one’s own bodily sensations of what I would call “proprioception.” This is why Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, described emotional health as losing your mind and coming to your senses.

As I discuss in the essay Wellsprings, the feelings themselves are a manifestation of the energy of life flowing through the organism. Being fully alive means allowing the energy of aliveness to flow, which it does “of itself” if we are not repressing it. Unfortunately, when we try to block energies we don’t like, or which we label as “negative,” we also end up blocking love, joy, and bliss.

Enough talk about the song. If you have not already done so, I invite you to listen to it. There are several versions on You Tube. One I like follows the choreography as staged in the musical.  Another version is sung by Elton John himself with a freer interpretation of the choreography. If you are anything like me, you will feel the joy of dancing just by listening and watching.