Depths of Happiness

     There are many levels, qualities or depths of happiness, somewhat akin to the nutritional content of food: 
     • from scarfing down a chocolate bar alone resulting in quick sugar-high, after which you quickly crash & burn; 
     • to a memorable healthy, home-cooked feast, slowly, skillfully, lovingly prepared, and then celebrated & savored with loved ones.

     “Only a very few people alive today can make me smile just to think of them: the Dalai Lama is one and Huston Smith is another. And when I reflect on it, I realize that this is partly because both celebrated teachers are voracious in their pursuit of wisdom and able to push back their own assumptions in order to learn from everyone they meet; both radiate a calm and openness that can come only from an inner shrine that is unwavering. More deeply, with both of them the sense of wisdom is infectious because they are light in every way: alive with mischief and sparkle, unimpressed with themselves and ready to see, and bear out in their every action, that delight is as much a part of life’s adventure as is sober rumination.”
       Dana Sawyer “Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions. The Authorized Biography of a 21st Century Spiritual Giant.” Fons Vitae, 2014. 

     "The most important factor in maintaining peace within oneself, in the face of any difficulty, is one's mental attitude. If it is distorted by such feelings as anger, attachment, or jealousy, then even the most comfortable environment will bring one no peace. On the other hand, if one's attitude is generally calm and gentle, then even a hostile environment will have little effect on one's own inner peace. Since the basic source of peace and happiness is one's own mental attitude, it is worthwhile adopting means to develop it in a positive way." Dalai Lama

      And now from a very smart fellow, but (who, like most of us) doesn't have the Dalai Lama's depth of practice, nor attainment:

     “… presentation of Buddhism as a way to be happy (is) basically knowtowing to a kind of Western hedonism. At least the impression is given that if you do this, if you practice Buddhism, somehow you become more happy. I think the word ‘happiness’ in that sense is insipid, almost banal. Yes, of course, we don’t seek to be unhappy, we seek in some broad sense to improve the quality of our lives, and we call that well-being or contentment or happiness. Again we are giving too much emphasis to personal affect... How can you really be happy if you are empathic, sensitized to the suffering of the world? … 
     I certainly do not practice (meditation) in order to be happy. I seek meaning, I seek purpose, I seek value, and I seek to find a way of being in this world in which its mystery, its tragedy, becomes more and more apparent, more transparent. The challenge of the practice in each moment really is to seek resources in oneself to respond to that. Whether of not it makes you happy is irrelevant.
     That’s why the training of meditation, etc., comes into play. It constantly returns you to a place within yourself where perhaps you are more able, because you have a certain stillness, a certain equanimity, a certain hope, to respond more truly, more caringly, more honestly, less selfishly. That’s what matters. At that point we go beyond Buddhism really. This is really about living the human life.” Stephen Batchelor
     Richard P. Boyle. “Realizing Awakened Consciousness. Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind.” Columbia University Press, 2015.
 
     “When I was young I used to admire intelligent people. 
     As I grow older I admire kind people.”            Abraham J. Heschel

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When One side is Illuminated, the Other is Dark

     The way most of us tend to perceive things, including ourselves & the world around us, prevents us from seeing things as they actually are. Naturally, this puts us at odds with those who have very different perspectives on pretty much everything. A proportion of us will gradually mature to gain a more balanced & thus changed way of perceiving and therefore way of being in what now appears as a brand new world.

     “… we must come to understand two distinct kinds of meaning. One is quantitative (external and seen); the other is qualitative (internal and sensed). Both meanings give our lives significance and substance if they are equally valued, integrated, & embodied…
     We are most familiar and comfortable with the quantitative – the outer meaning of life and our outer experiences: meaningful memories, important historical events, significant opportunities, or important turning points. We may return to school, retire, get divorced or remarried, have children and grandchildren, lose friends and family to illness or death, survive accidents or trauma, excel in a field, travel, or move to new location.
     The qualitative life experience is often more subtle, less familiar, more internal, and representative of our soul urges – those numinous, mystical, and transpersonal experiences that occur synchronistically in spontaneous unbidden ways. These subjective experiences often appear as inner stirrings or disturbances that provoke insight, dreams, precognitions, breakthroughs, and unexpected glimpses of the mysterious aspects of who we authentically are.
     Quantitative and qualitative life experiences converge in the second half of life to be meaningfully integrated. Our nature is then rewoven into a more expansive and textured fabric. Carl Jung tells us of the dangers of over-identifying with either the outer, quantitative or inner, qualitative world rather than integrating them:

     ‘Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. 
      Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture.’

     An extreme example of a delusionary ‘mastery of the inner world’ combined with ‘contempt for the outer’ was the mass suicide at Jonestown, in which hundreds of people followed their spiritual leader, Jim Jones, to their communal death. 
     Over-identification with outer-world mastery to the exclusion of inner is found in contemporary examples of corporate crime, where greedy, well-educated people are driven to misuse their talents in ruthless ways to get richer at the expense of their own ethics and integrity. 
     In contrast, when both worlds are accessed and attended to equally, in non-extreme ways, the human spirit exemplifies unimagined courage and commitment to alleviate human suffering, restore justice, and uplift the quality of life for many. The Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks etc are all examples of individuals committed to both internal and external development. The integration of the quantitative and qualitative enables them to touch lives for the better. 
     Without balance in our lives, we become lopsided or incomplete. We must be vigilant in maintaining balance and access to both the inner and outer worlds. We can no longer flirt with the blind faith or lack of discernment that closes the door to outer mastery, nor can we indulge in the chronic cynicism or hopelessness that cuts us off from inner mastery. In our later years, rather than choosing one world over the other, we need to become adept at living in both.”
       Angeles Arrien. “The Second Half of Life. Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom.” Sounds True, 2007.

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Conditioned (Thought-mediated) Mind & Direct Knowing

“These are the moments when we define the self: 

          • I want this.

          • I feel this. (& judge as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) 

          • I must do it this way.

This is the arising of the conditioned mind (marked by 'preferences'). There are other moments of direct knowing when we slip in and out of events smoothly, without conditioned mind impeding.

If it is a conditioned moment, we might inquire whether some fear is at its root, a fear that requires that I (behave) in this ‘particular way.’ ….

A good way to study the conditions in which we want things to appear or to not appear is through working with pain, the sensation of burning, throbbing, hot, stretching, tearing – however it is arising for you. What happens when consciousness dares to enter this throbbing, burning sensation? When you enter the shape of pain, you go past the shape in your mind; you go past the aversion and fear in your mind. This direct experience lacks aversion and fear. There is simply direct knowing.

When a part of consciousness isn’t holding out, saying, ‘Oh, do I have to do this?’ your whole being is hot, throbbing, on the verge. It’s on the threshold because you have entered the shape of pain in your mind. That experience goes beyond the appearance and nonappearance of conditions. You’re right on the margin, where your authentic life actually exists.”

Katherine Thanas. “The Truth of This Life. Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is.” Shambhala, 2018.

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The Buck Stops Here!

      “There are times when life sharpens, things come into focus and, gradually, you become aware that you are standing before a threshold. There is no way back to where you were before, and there is no way out but through.”                 John O’Donohue

     “Throughout our lives, transitions require that we ask for help and allow ourselves to yield to forces stronger than our wills or our egos’ desires. As transitions take place during our later years, a fundamental and primal shift from ambition to meaning occurs.
     The shift often takes the form of abrupt, unexpected changes in our lives – such as a surprising new interest, a career change, a significant loss, divorce, or a move to a new location – that can align us with what truly touches our hearts and has meaning for us. With this shift comes an initial restlessness, irritability, anxiety, or discontent with our current situation, and a deep questioning of the motivation surrounding our choices in career and relationships. Everything comes up for review. Previous desires and choices to attain status, power, money, fame, or strategic relationships lose meaning and become unsatisfying. Any one of these one-valued egoic needs may be radically diminished as deep congruence and authentic fulfillment emerge to be expressed.”
       Angeles Arrien. “The Second Half of Life. Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom.” Sounds True, 2007.

Meditation Practice & Prosocial Emotions like Compassion

      “… meditation leads to all kinds of great cognitive outcomes. It’ll increase your scores on standardized tests, enhance your creativity, and even make you more productive at work. In short, it’s touted as a kind of ‘supercharger’ for the mind. These claims are justified because much of meditation training focuses on learning how to master attention, thought flow, and focus, all of which are closely related to executive function. And since such cognitive abilities can be used for self-control, the notion that meditation lessens cravings and increases success seems to logically follow. … (but) all the cognitive benefits of meditation — ​better focus, better memory, etc — ​were traditionally considered secondary to its true purpose: development of a deep and abiding compassion. All the cognitive training is simply a means to an end, and it is that end — ​a feeling of great compassion for all beings —​ that ultimately makes self-control and related virtues more automatic.

     The central role played by compassion is often ignored, thanks to a historical accident. The scientists who first began to study meditation were primarily neuroscientists and those interested in cognition and memory. … But if you think about it from a historical standpoint, the goals of early meditation teachers … weren’t enhancing test scores or memory. To the contrary, they were centered on fostering ethical decisions and compassionate behavior, … on ending suffering. But because these phenomena were inherently social in nature, they were ignored as neuroscientists turned their lenses on what meditation could do to enhance the information-processing power of the brain. This was a gap I wanted to fill. If meditation, compassion, and self-control were truly linked, … we first needed to find some evidence, and that required studying the effects of meditation in an entirely new way. 
     The first step in most scientific investigations of meditation is to recruit people … 
     We now had two groups of people who were equally interested in meditation, but only one of which contained people who actually had some degree of authentic training. … our participants believed that at the end of the eight weeks they’d be coming to the lab to have their cognitive skills tested. Little did they know that the true experiment would begin in the waiting room. 
     If we wanted to examine meditation’s effects on compassion and self-control, we needed to do it in a fairly normal environment. … In short, we needed to design a challenge that would offer people the opportunity to keep a mild comfort or to give it up to benefit someone in pain. … When our participants arrived in the lab’s waiting room, they saw three chairs. The first two were occupied by actors working for us. So, as you’d expect, each participant (as they were scheduled to come to the lab one at a time) would sit down in the remaining chair to await being called into the lab for testing. After a few minutes had passed, the relative quiet of the waiting room was interrupted by an elevator door sliding open at the opposite end of the hall. Out came a young woman on crutches who had her foot in an orthopedic boot. The woman, who also worked for us, hobbled down the hall, wincing a bit with each step, until she entered the waiting room, where, somewhat dejectedly, she leaned against the wall with a bit of a whimper, as every chair was taken. 
     What would participants do? If they wanted to act nobly, the answer was clear: offer her their chair. But that meant sacrificing their own immediate comfort to aid another and thus would take some degree of self-control. That might sound like an overstatement on my part, as many people might (and did when we asked them) predict that a solid majority of people placed in this position would have readily offered up their chair. As it turned out, though, only 16 percent of “normal” people in our experiment — ​and by normal I mean the ones who hadn’t meditated for the previous eight weeks ​— ​suggested that the woman in pain take their seat. 
     This was a dispiriting finding, and sadly it wasn’t a fluke. We ran the experiment a second time and got similar results. Now, truth be told, we were stacking the deck a little. The other people who were sitting in the room when a participant arrived—​the actors who didn’t offer their chairs—had been instructed by us to ignore the woman on crutches. They were to read a book or thumb their phones as she entered, appearing to pay her no heed. Yet the sighs and similar sounds of discomfort she uttered were audible enough for everyone to hear, meaning it was clear to our participants that these others were willfully feigning ignorance of the injured woman’s plight. That was the point. This type of mass indifference is specially meant to reduce people’s motivations to help. If nobody else is bothering to assist someone in need, why should you? It’s a pernicious phenomenon known as the bystander effect, and it allows people to stand by passively while all manner of suffering occurs right in front of them. In our experiments it worked all too well. 
     When we examined the meditators, however, quite a different story emerged. After only eight weeks of mindfulness practice, the percentage of people who felt compassion and sacrificed their own comfort to aid the woman in pain more than tripled, rising to 50 percent. That’s a big difference, and one we and others have been able to replicate using related measures of compassionate behavior. When considered in combination, these findings show how meditation bolsters self-control via compassion. … People often need self-control to act with kindness and generosity. Whether that self-control is aimed at sacrificing to aid others or their own future selves, they need a push to give up their immediate comfort and thereby raise the likelihood that they’ll benefit from a returned favor or a better outcome down the line. And while it’s true that we can remind ourselves daily to be kind and exert the requisite willpower to behave accordingly, practicing mindfulness —​ a route by which compassion begins to emerge automatically and continuously — ​offers a better route.”


     Excerpted from: David DeSteno. “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride.” Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

 

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Opportunities Everywhere!

     “Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden.... 

     Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life.”                  Rachel Naomi Remen 


     “Times of transition are strenuous, but I love them. They are an opportunity to purge, rethink priorities, and be intentional about new habits. We can make our new normal any way we want.”  
       Kristin Armstrong, professional road bicycle racer, three-time Olympic gold medalist, winner of the women's individual time trial in 2008, 2012 & 2016.
 

     “It’s no small thing to be born human. A lot of ‘stuff’ comes along with the opportunity of human life. Zazen (open-awareness meditation) is an incredible doorway for getting to the bottom of it all, and learning to live your life out of what you directly experience yourself: not what somebody tells you, not what you read, not because you should, but because your own direct experience of yourself and your life tells you what to do.”              John Daido Loori


     “Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken. Take heed, do not squander your life.”            Dogen Zenji 



      “I think I’ve learned so many things from this experience. I don’t think in 54 years I truly understood the suffering, and once this happened to us (her husband being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis {ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease}), I was amazed at how I just didn’t pay attention to all the suffering going around. Before ALS I had my perfect little life, I was really enjoying it – we were both enjoying it, very busy, and I just didn’t see that. And I would never want to go back to that blindness. And I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to give back in some small way the amazing love and devotion that we’ve been showered with throughout this experience. So I wouldn’t trade that in. … I think maybe we see (the suffering), but don’t feel it. I could see and think ‘Oh, that’s so terrible,’ but I never felt it. It’s terrifying to feel it. But once you’ve experienced it, it opens you up to so much other suffering, and to knowing that you do have the opportunity to help. … It’s really a different way to live.” Ev Emerson, Bruce Kramer’s wife

Bruce Kramer's EXCEPTIONAL interview by KristaTippett
http://onbeing.org/program/feature/in-the-room-with-bruce-kramer/7424 

      “I didn’t need to not be angry. I just needed to stay with my anger long enough to see what it actually was and how it arose (or co-arose with my chicken heart). This kind of big-picture thinking, where things make sense as a whole when taken in relation to each other and not as unconditionally separate parts, is the spiritual project in a nutshell. Spiritual work is not the same thing as self-help. It is not meant to ‘everlastingly improve’ or fix you. It’s a means to help you see clearly what’s been there all along, beneath the surface, both in the larger sense and within yourself. 
     You don’t have to change things. Just see them properly, bear witness, and they fall into place. Attention, not intervention, leads to true healing. If you spend all of your time and energy trying to become a better person or ‘change the world,’ you miss a profound opportunity to see how all the imperfect, muddled, fucked-up things in our world come together, find their place among each other, and then form something far greater.”

       Shozan Jack Haubner. “Zen Confidential. Confessions of a Wayward Monk.” Shambhala, Boston, 2013.

     “I’m struck by how suppressed the life energy of many students in my current undergraduate class seems to be. … I keep sensing something is somewhat missing: perhaps the ‘primordial confidence’ … 

     Students are not given much opportunity to attend to their inner lives, to explore their unfathomable riches, to plummet the depth, and to be nourished deeply by such engagements. Yet, it is only through such engagements that energetically charged awareness deepens and expands, connecting self with cosmos, and fully reconciling us with life and universe."
       Bai H, Cohen A, Culham T, et al. “A Call for Wisdom in Higher Education. Contemplative Voices from the Dao-Field.” in: Gunnlaugson O, Sarath EW, Scott C. eds. “Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines.” State Univ of New York Press 2014.

Opening to Life

     "A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe',
a part limited in time and space.
We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein

     "The small man builds cages for everyone he knows. While the sage keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." Hafiz