What is happiness, actually?
Happiness and Option
In my previous post, I did a nasty sort of thing. I used the very real, very (now) hopeless case of Zoraya ter Beek, a young Dutch woman who was euthanized for being too unhappy, as a booster rocket to get this series of posts off the ground.
I now eject the Zoraya booster, and turn to watch as it falls back toward Earth’s atmosphere. Goodbye, Zoraya. I’m sorry.
Engaging second-stage rockets.
This is the leg of our journey together where I cover a few impossible questions, like “What is happiness?” and “What are emotions?” With this basis, I can address how we move beyond conventional, unhappy-making orientations to everyday circumstances and realize the sort of unconditional happiness Bruce Di Marsico was speaking from when he said things like:
I often meet with people who believe that they’re unhappy and aren’t. I mean that may sound funny. Yes, they’re unhappy but they really aren’t. They come and tell me all these symptoms they had about this and that and they’re excited really or they’re horny or they’re just very peaceful and quiet when everybody else is being all riled up or they’re all frenetic when everybody else is all calmed down.
Di Marsico was an American psychologist who emphasized the optionality of unhappiness. His therapeutic method and teaching style addressed people’s underlying beliefs about the conditions that give rise to happiness and unhappiness.
Di Marsico’s Option Method uses discourse to uncover these beliefs and allows practitioners to discover the happiness underlying their death-grip on life circumstances. This unconditional view subsumes every configuration of human conditions:
I’ve seen a lot of questions […] about symptoms of unhappiness. [...] The first thing you learn is that symptoms are something to be unhappy about. If they’re symptoms of unhappiness or if they’re symptoms of disease, are they still anything to be unhappy about, in and of themselves, and why do you believe they are?
So it could be that people who are afraid of so-called unhappiness symptoms, that feel bad about having symptoms of unhappiness, are just simply that. They feel bad about having symptoms of unhappiness, especially when they don’t have any reason to be unhappy, except now they’re feeling bad about having symptoms for being unhappy.
Prolonged misery
My interest in Option and the topic of happiness is informed by an experience of prolonged misery. For most of my 20s, I was regularly miserable, despite having plenty to eat, easy access to potable water, being sheltered from the elements, being in a romantic relationship with a partner who cared about me, and building a successful career. I had the sort of life lots of people (throughout history and in our contemporary times) would kill for. And I regularly fantasized about killing myself.
The strangeness of this disconnect was not lost on me. I became intensely depressed and nihilistic, and for years my life stretched across long plains of serious unhappiness. My life was basically good, and it was awful.
I tried drugs, self-medicated and professionally-administered, I tried talk therapy, I tried behavioral modification, I tried working really hard at changing things. None of it worked, not in a way that stuck.
I knew about meditation, and eventually tried that. Without ever really admitting it to myself, I figured that I could nonviolently commit suicide by deconstructing myself at worst, and maybe at best stumble into the living paradise of Enlightenment. Neither thing happened.
At last, something did work. I found Dzogchen-inflected contemporary Vajrayana, which, among other things, works with the misery of life directly. It came as a shock that this was not an attempt to get rid of the misery. The misery was not an existential problem that needed to be solved for things to be okay. I was floored, and dug in.
Eventually, I learned non-concentrative meditation. After a good deal of practice, this revealed the ever-present, non-conceptual awareness that underlies and serves as the basis for every manner of experience, good and bad alike. I stepped out of my self-made torture chamber at last, recognizing the door had never been locked. I saw, for the first time, how I had been causing my own misery.
Once I became familiar with non-conceptual awareness, no manner of conceptual experience seemed to seriously threaten my sense of being basically okay. I also found I could not explain this to people—that awareness which underlies conceptual experience and a sense of deep okayness are synonymous is not obvious. These posts on happiness are my attempt to explore how this works.
Definitions of happiness are usually unhelpful
So what is happiness, actually? If, at base, everything we do for ourselves and for other people, every smidgen of conflict we ever experience, is all in the service of being, becoming, or remaining happy, shouldn’t we know what happiness is?
Wikipedia’s entry on happiness currently says it’s “[…] a positive and pleasant emotion, ranging from contentment to intense joy. Moments of happiness may be triggered by positive life experiences or thoughts, but sometimes it may arise from no obvious cause.”
Emotions? Wikipedia says “Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition.”
What about the “positive” or “pleasant” aspects of happiness? What does it mean for an experience to be “good”? I’ll spare you additional presentations of Wikipedia quotes and summarize—a “good” experience is a desirable experience.
“But what is desire?” We could go on like this pretty much forever, and we would never hit paydirt. This is actually a real problem. We’re going to have to look closely at our own, immediate experience to see how these things work because explanations alone will not suffice.
Unfortunately, we must build our understanding about what it means to be a human being, moment to moment, from scratch. This will only be a map of that territory. I invite you to try out the map, and discard it whenever it’s unhelpful.
What is it like to be human?
We’re in the subtle, smeary territory of those aspects of the human experience which are the most important to us and which we can say the least about with accuracy. For this reason, most statements about what happiness is tend to be vague. They tend to pass the ball back to you, the reader—happiness is whatever it means to be happy for you in particular.
Di Marsico defines happiness this way:
All of us in one way or another are striving for happiness. We may all have different words for it; we may all describe it as a search for truth or the search for fulfillment, for meaning, for inner peace. […] So I’m going to sort of use that word happiness as a catch-all word. What I mean by happiness is for you to define, that which you are always endlessly searching for, that which you are always endlessly striving for.
[Emphasis mine]
You in particular might not know what your happiness is. Do you?
Ask yourself, dear reader: “What does happiness mean for me?”
Unless you are already familiar with the view I am exploring here, my guess is what happiness means for you is what Wikipedia refers to as a “state of mind” which has specific causes and conditions for coming about. That Wikipedia entry is already too heady for my taste, given we’re dealing with the great, undefinable mysteries of being human. Let’s be a bit less theoretical and work as directly as we can with our immediate experience:
For most people, happiness means what it feels like to be in a particular kind of state.
This state is a configuration, a recognizable pattern of characteristics, of the sensorium. The sensorium is the grand total of every sensation we are experiencing at any given moment, including our thoughts and emotions1.
From the simplest to the most fabricated, the sensorium consists of:
Basic sensations
Patterns of sensation called perceptions
Patterns of perception called concepts
Basic sensations have no names, no distinctions. They have no duration in time or space; they exist collectively and simultaneously. They churn, constantly in flux. They know themselves without knowing about themselves, and require no observer to make this happen; they know that they are but not what they are. Sensations arise in awareness, as awareness. Everything builds up from here.
From this undifferentiated sea, perceptions form. They coalesce, an emphasis in the sensorium, an area of specific definition. This can be any patterning of sensation, like light, sound, taste, color, texture, and so on.
The only way to distinguish one perception from another is to compare them. By doing this, we’ve recognized a pattern—either a similar perception reoccurring or two totally different perceptions. Here, concepts can come into being—associations built using patterns of perception, which fabricate every describable human experience: robin egg blue, danger, a smiling face, me, my neighbor Terrance, time, space, the universe, and literally every thing you could possibly describe
Concepts are the “layer” of the sensorium where obvious separation between me and the things I experience tends to occur. We identify with some patterns of perception (calling these “me”) and disidentify with everything else2.
The more we conceptualize, the more we form second and third-order patterns and more, patterns of patterns of patterns. Verbal and linguistic experiences become possible. We can associate complex patterns of sound with other perceptions, creating explicit meaning.
In this way, every class of meaning and interpretation arises.
By selectively recognizing patterns, we build our entire world from basic sensations. Great work, by the way! You formed your self and your world with this creative engine3.
What are emotions?
This bears repeating: the totality of sensation, including all patterns created on the basis of sensation, adds up to your sensorium. The sensorium is constantly in flux, then, because sensations change as soon as they arise. And so the states of the sensorium are never stable. To gain a sense of control, we learn to ignore much of our sensorium’s richness, barricading ourselves in the conceptual layer behind stories of who we are and what we need.
But we are sensitive, responsive human beings. From the self-conscious sensations up, we are aware.
Even if our sensorium seems characterized mostly by information about our sensorium—in other words, conceptual experiences—it is always like something to experience whatever state we’re in. This is intrinsically obvious at the sensory level, underlying perception. But it’s just as true all the way through to conceptual experience.
Because it is like something to experience sensations, perceptions, and concepts, every momentary configuration of the sensorium has a unique richness to it, what I’m referring to as the feeling tone of states. This is the intrinsic lucidity, the sentience, of our comprehensive experience. The atmosphere inclusive of all momentarily-appearing weather patterns.
These atmospheres are mostly ineffable—we might vaguely describe them as having a taste, a texture, a tone, a vibe—but they’re undeniable. In a way, feeling tones are the realest thing there is. They are the unification of every layer of the sensorium with awareness.
But when we separate ourselves from some aspect(s) of our experience, these feeling tones take on limitation. They seem to happen to us, in us, or around us. We give names to these objectified feelings: happy, sad, angry, afraid, and so on. We call these limitations of feeling “emotions”.
Conceptual limitations of feeling happen so quickly that we may only become aware of the presence of these concepts, rather than the “raw” and vivid sensations constituting them. Living in the conceptual layer of our sensorium when we’re in familiar territory means losing much of the feeling tone4.
But it’s our sentience, so we can never really lose it5. Perhaps darkly, we have an inkling of the feeling tone of whatever state we’re in. We recognize differences, form preferences, and develop conscious and unconscious strategies for finding and remaining in preferable states for as long as possible.
This is what most of us really care about. Swap out the feeling tone of the state called “being abandoned by my spouse of 30 years” with the feeling tone of the state called “winning a Ferrari in a raffle at the mall” and you’ll cruise through the divorce proceedings.
This is how we find happiness—moving into states of the sensorium characterized by those feeling tones we don’t reject.
The duality of happiness and unhappiness
From an encampment in the conceptual layer of our sensorium, we recognize patterns of perceptions occurring as parts of preferable states. With a causal view we make the rational inference that emotions arise according to a specific set of conditions, understood according to conceptual reference points.
We come to believe happiness—the limited subset of feeling tones we’ve decided are okay to experience—is conditional, occurring as result of familiar conceptual experiences. Based on these repeated observations, we form theories and beliefs and coping strategies and models of socially-acceptable behavior, all attempts to manipulate the inputs of life circumstances, trying to maximize happiness outcomes.
This is totally rational, but fundamentally mistaken. And this mistake kills people.
No matter what the configuration of our sensorium is like at any given moment, if we reject any aspect of that state6, we enter into the duality of happiness and unhappiness. The moment we relax this active rejection, we regain the unconditional satisfaction inherent to every state.
Up next
That’s enough for one post. We’ve created the universe in order to bake an apple pie from scratch explored the foundations of human experience to explain the basis for the duality of happiness and unhappiness. In Part II of Happiness and Option, I’ll say more about the inherent struggle of this duality, my history with Bruce Di Marsico’s view, and how to enjoy any state whatsoever.
My definitions of sensation, perception, and concept are not identical to the dictionary definitions and do not directly correspond to any particular Buddhist metaphysics as far as I’m aware; these are specific usages of terms I’m employing here to explore subtleties of the immediate human experience.
At a subtler level, we might identify with certain sense fields to the exclusion of others, or identify with sensations to the exclusion of awareness (or visa versa), but the grosser dualities are easier to address.
Of course, you had help. Some older person probably held an object up to you, or pointed at it, and then made a noise with their mouths. You learned to associate that sound (“wa-terr”) with patterns of visual sensation (the light, shadow, and color that are present when Mom fills the tub up with water from the faucet), and learned the name for that object.
When we lose the apparent unification of our sensorium and awareness, we separate ourselves from ourselves. All sorts of fanciful and antagonistic dramas become possible within one person. I’d like to explore this further in another essay on the Spectrum of Ecstasy.
Though you could try to snuff yourself out like a candle’s flame.
“Rejection” here includes clinging and ignorance, which reject the dynamic and powerful nature of states, respectively.
Thank you Max. Beautiful as usual.
> In Part II of Happiness and Option, I’ll say more about ... how to enjoy any state whatsoever.
Even this very anticipation? Looking forward and then some.
How usefully articulated!