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"Opening up to happiness" - an article

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Farawen
Post subject: "Opening up to happiness" - an article
Posted: Thu 10 Feb , 2005 8:19 pm
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(From Psychologytoday.com)


Opening up to happiness

By: Mark Epstein
Summary: Gives the reasons why happiness for some, is unattainable. Mistake in wiping out sources of displeasure; Causes of unhappiness; Importance of happiness to an individual.


One reason we have so much trouble attaining happiness is that we don't even know what it is. We keep trying to annihilate anxiety and other disturbances. But happiness has more to do with broadening your perspective, says a ground-breaking psychiatrist who blends Western and Eastern thinking.

"I'm sick of this," a patient of mine remarked the other morning. "I can't stand myself anymore. When am I going to be happy?" It's not an uncommon question in therapy, yet aspirations for happiness can sound naive or even trivial. How could she be asking for happiness, I thought to myself. Didn't Freud say the that best one could expect of therapy was a return to "common unhappiness?" Yet my patient's yearning was heartfelt. How could I possibly address it without being misleading?

I approached her dilemma not just as a psychotherapist, but as a longtime Buddhist. For Buddhism holds the promise of more than just common unhappiness in life; it sees the pursuit of happiness as our life goal and teaches techniques of mental development to achieve it. To the Dalai Lama, "the purpose of life is to be happy." He wrote those very words in the foreword to my new book Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy From a Buddhist Perspective (Basic Books, 1995).

"On its own," he goes on to say, "no amount of technological development can lead to lasting happiness. What is almost always missing is a corresponding inner development." By inner development the Dalai Lama means something other than mastering the latest version of Microsoft Word. He is talking about cleaning up our mental environment so that real happiness can be both uncovered and sustained.

Americans have a peculiar relationship to happiness. On the one hand, we consider happiness a right, and we are eager for it, as the advertising world knows. We do everything in our power to try to possess it, most particularly in materialistic form.

On the other hand, we tend to denigrate the pursuit of happiness as something shallow or superficial, akin to taking up woodcarving or scuba diving. But, as the Dalai Lama always emphasizes, happiness is not a hobby, nor is it a trivial pursuit. It is a fundamental drive as basic as those of sex or aggression, but not often as legitimized in our cynical, postmodern culture. In fact, Americans are waking up to the Dalai Lama's point: Materialistic comforts by themselves have not led to lasting happiness. Having reached that conclusion, however, we do not often see another way, and retreat into our comforts, barricading ourselves from what appears to be a hostile and threatening world. Acquiring and protecting, we continue to crave a happiness that seems both deserved and out of reach.

My experience as a psychiatrist trained in Western medicine and in the philosophy and practice of Buddhism has given me a unique perspective. I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

All the Wrong Places

Buddhism and psychoanalysis teach us that the very ways we seek happiness actually block us from finding it. Our first mistake is in trying to wipe out all sources of displeasure and search for a perennial state of well-being that, for most of us in our deepest fantasies, resembles nothing so much as a prolonged erotic reverie. One of my patients said it best with his adolescent fantasies of romantic love. He described his perfect woman as someone who would faithfully leave him with an erection every time she exited the house.

This approach to happiness is instinctual, deriving from our earliest experiences, when intense emotional states of pleasure and gratification inevitably are interrupted by absence and frustration, evoking equally intense states of rage or anxiety. Anyone's first response would be to try to preserve the pleasurable states and eliminate the unpleasurable ones. Even as adults we rarely come to terms with the fact that good and bad are two sides of the same coin, that those who make pleasures possible are also the source of our misery. In Western society, with its extended family structure and rabid pursuit of individualism, people often find themselves with nowhere to turn for support in dealing with these feelings. In more traditional Eastern societies, there is a much greater social and familial support system that helps people contain their anguish.

However much we, as adults, think we have come to terms with the fact that no one can be all good or all bad, we are still intolerant of frustrations to our own pleasure. We continue to grasp at the very objects that have previously disappointed us. A wealthy patient of mine exemplifies this predicament. After a gourmet meal, he craves a cognac. After the cognac, a cigarette; after the cigarette he will want to make love; after making love, another cigarette. Soon, he begins to crave sleep, preferably without any disturbing dreams. His search for happiness through pleasures of the senses seemed to never have an end, and he was not happy. We think only of manipulating the external world; we never stop to examine ourselves.

Our search for perpetual gratification often plays out in intimate relationships. Take my friend who was very much in love with his new wife, but plagued by rage and bitterness over her sexual unavailability when she became pregnant. He could not help taking it personally. His happiness in her pregnancy was overwhelmed by his inability to tolerate his own sexual frustration, and he could not get past the feeling that if she really loved him she would be as interested in sex with him as he was with her. He was restricted by his tunnel vision; his own pleasure or displeasure was his only reference point.

We identify with the feelings of violation, rejection, or injury and we long for a happiness in which no such feelings could arise. Yet as Freud pointed out, even intense erotic pleasures are tinged with unhappiness since they all must come to an end, in the form of a relaxation of tension. Post-orgasmic depression is a well-known phenomenon. We long for this not to be so, but it is physiologically impossible.

The Buddha's point about happiness is very similar. As long as we continue trying to eliminate all displeasure and preserve only pleasure for a prolonged sense of well-being, no lasting happiness is possible. Rage, envy, and the desire for revenge will always interfere. Real life and its complications inevitably trickle in. There is a well-known story in the Buddhist tradition, that of Kisagotami, that illustrates how important it is to give up that approach to happiness.

Kisagotami was a young woman whose first child died suddenly somewhere around his first birthday. Desperate in her love for the child, Kisagotami went from house to house in her village, clasping the dead child to her breast and asking for medicine to revive her son. Most of her neighbors shrank from the sight of her and called her mad, but one man, seeing her inability to accept the reality of her son's death, directed her to the Buddha by promising her that only he had the medicine she sought. Kisagotami went to the Buddha and pleaded with him for medicine. "I know of some," he promised. "But I will need a handful of mustard seed from a house where no child, husband, parent, or servant has died."

Slowly, Kisagotami came to see that hers was not a unique predicament. She put the body of her child down in the forest and returned to the Buddha. "I have not brought the mustard seed," she told him. "The people of the village told me, 'The living are few, but the dead are many."' The Buddha replied, "You thought that you alone had lost a son; the law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence."

Kisagotami's story resonates, not just because of our sympathy for the horror of losing a child or because of our fear of a world in which such tragedy is possible, but because we all, like her, feel that our situation is unique and that our emotional pain requires relief. In the privacy of our own minds, we are aggrieved and single-mindedly self-centered. We still seek absolute gratification that is intolerant of frustration.

But the most difficult part of Kisagotami's story for me comes when she lays her child down in the forest. Even though he has been dead for a long time, I still feel slightly aghast at the idea of her leaving him there. Yet this is precisely what the Buddha is asking us to do. He did not teach a method of recovering primal emotions or embracing some sort of injured child that lies buried within. The Buddha helped Kisagotami find happiness not by bringing her dead child back to life, but by changing her view of herself. The inner development he alludes to is a development beyond the private childish perspective of me first that we all secretly harbor.

Happiness a la Buddha

The root cause of our unhappiness is our inability to observe ourselves properly. We are caught in our own perspective, unable to appreciate the many perspectives of those around us. And we are unaware of how insistently this way of perceiving drives us. Only through the uprooting of our own self-centeredness can we find the key to happiness. Buddhist meditation practice is one way to catch hold of this me-first perspective and begin to examine it. But it can happen in incidental ways. A teacher of mine, for example, remembers standing in line for food at a silent meditation retreat when someone suddenly spilled the large serving bowl of soup. "It wasn't me," he remembers himself thinking spontaneously. "It's not my fault."

Immersed in the quiet of the meditation retreat, he was all too aware that his reaction was patently absurd. Yet this is the kind of response we all have much of the time without being aware of it. Buddhist meditation is a way of coaxing the mind to deal with frustration in a new way, experiencing it as an interested observer instead of an aggrieved victim. Rather than responding to the inevitable frustrations of life with "Why me?" the successful practitioner of meditation can begin to see how conditioned our everyday sense of self has been by the insulted response to disappointment.

Our True nature

The first step to inner development is to find and hold the sense of single, one-point perspective. This is the feeling that we all have that we are really the most important person in the room at any given moment, that no matter what happens the crucial thing is how it will impact me. You know the feeling; it's the same one you have when you are cut off suddenly in traffic or are standing on line at the cash machine while the person in front of you makes one transaction after another. The visceral response is always, "Why are you doing that to me?" Similarly, when someone comes to therapy because they have been spurned by a would-be lover, there is always the feeling of "what is wrong with me?" In Buddhist meditation we seek out that feeling; we bring it into self-awareness rather than let it run our lives. When a person is able to do that successfully, there is often a sense of freedom.

A patient of mine, for example, recounted to me how, when he picked his girlfriend up at the airport recently, he reached out to carry her bag for her after retrieving it from the baggage claim. She took the bag from him and carried it herself. Rather than take her action as a sign of self-sufficiency, he felt immediately rejected, as if she were not glad to see him. Once he learned to make that knee-jerk reaction of his the object of his meditative self-observation, he was freed from his obsessive scrutiny of his girlfriend's mood. He then became more self-reliant, she felt more supported, and both were happier with each other.

As the tendency to view the world self-referentially loses its hold, we begin to appreciate the Einsteinian world in which all realities are relative and all points of view subjective. Then a happiness that has more to do with acceptance than gratification becomes available to us.

One particular meditation technique prepares the mind for the a new, broadened perspective, that of naked--or bare--attention. The technique requires you to attend only to the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the very first time and distinguishing emotional reactions from the core event. So instead of experiencing a spouse's suggestion as criticism or their withdrawal as abandonment, as so often happens within couples, one would be able to simply bear the experience in and of itself, recognizing any concomitant feelings of rejection as separate and of one's own making.

As bare attention is practiced, many of the self concepts or feelings of self we harbor are revealed to be reactions that, on closer inspection, lose their solidity. My patient who overreacted at the airport was astonished at what he discovered upon closely examining his core sense of self. "This is it?" he asked. "This little feeling is determining so many of my actions? Am I really so narcissistic as that?" The answer, for most of us, is a resounding yes. Our sense of self, we soon find, is a house of cards.

A common misbelief people hold about meditation is that, in attacking reactive emotional tendencies, it encourages a stoic acceptance of unhappiness. Yet stoicism is not the goal. The point is not to become impervious but open, able to savor the good with the bad.

We cannot have pleasure without displeasure, and trying to split them off from each other only mires us more deeply in our own dissatisfaction. A recent incident involving an old friend of mine may illustrate the point. After breaking up his 10-year marriage, he sought psychotherapy at a local mental health clinic. His only wish, he told his new therapist in their first meeting, was to feel good again. He implored her to rid him of his unwanted emotions.

His therapist, however, had just left a three-year stint in a Zen community. When my friend approached her with his pain, she urged him to stay with his feelings, no matter how unpleasant. When he complained of anxiety or loneliness she encouraged him only to feel them more intensely. While my friend didn't feel any better, he was intrigued and began to practice meditation.

He describes one pivotal moment. Terribly uncomfortable with the burnings, pressures, and pains of meditation, he remembers watching an itch develop, crest, and disappear without scratching it. In so doing, he says, he realized what his therapist had meant when she counseled him to stay with his emotional state, and from that moment on his depression began to lift.

His feelings began to change only when he dropped the desire to change them. This is a major revelation that is often brought on through the physical pain of meditation, which requires stillness within a demanding posture. My friend's discovery is similar to the sensation cancer patients feel after taking morphine for chronic pain. They say the pain is still there, but it no longer hurts. So the sensation remains, but without the oppressive quality. Likewise, my friend learned to recognize his emotional pain, but was not oppressed by it.

Well-Being

Like many others, my friend was looking for that pervasive feeling of well-being and hoped that meditation (or love, money, success, alcohol, or therapy) would provide it. But well-being, which is not sustainable, is not the same as happiness. Happiness is the ability to take all of the insults of life as a vehicle for awakening--to enter into what the pioneer of stress-reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has called the "full catastrophe" of our lives with an open mind and heart.

In pursuing a study of Buddhism and psychotherapy, I am convinced that a method of mental development exists that enables a person to hold feelings of injury without reacting destructively. Rather than immediately responding with rage or anxiety, a person can use feelings of injury to focus on the core sense of self that will prove illusive, nonexistent. If there is no self to protect, there is no need to react in rage or angst. Pleasure and displeasure can then be appreciated for the ways in which they are inextricably linked. Well-being becomes understood as an inseparable part of a larger whole that also encompasses catastrophe.

Happiness, then, is the confidence that pain and disappointment can be tolerated, that love will prove stronger than aggression. It is release from the attachment to pleasant feelings, and faith in the capacity of awareness to guide us through the inevitable insults to our own narcissism. It is the realization that we do not have to be so self-obsessed, that within our own minds lies the capacity for a kind of acceptance we had only dreamed of. This happiness rarely comes without effort to train mind.

To accomplish this we must first discover just how narrow our vision usually is. This is the function of meditation. Go ahead, close your eyes for five minutes and observe how self-obsessed your thoughts are. "When can I stop doing this?" you may think. None of us is very far from the eight-year-old child who can think only about who got the biggest piece of cake.


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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 10 Feb , 2005 8:30 pm
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I don't care how big my piece of cake is, as long as it has a lot of icing. :mrgreen:

Seriously, though, if everyone did this, civilization would fall apart in a matter of days. Society is based on desire and fulfilling or frustrating it as needs be to maintain itself. The question is, is this a good or bad thing?

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enchantress
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Posted: Fri 11 Feb , 2005 5:37 am
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This strikes deep with me as I work in psychological emotions research and our lab is in fact called the "subjective well being" lab... Im also a student of Eastern spiritualities, and an admirer of the Dalai Lama...

The Dalai Lama's "Art of Happiness" is a great book that develops this point further, giving actual everyday pointers for this philosophy...
I last saw the Dalai Lama speak in April of last year, and the words from his talk still resound in my ears. *My evil live journal will not let me use the memories function just now to dig up the notes made after coming back from the Skydome from the Lama's talk... grrrr...* I remember he said something striking though... that our Western concept of love is of a possessive kind, and is in fact the flipside of hatred... that attachment to a person causes us to want to capture that person in some sense, and that is a counterproductive desire... he advocated for a wider, more universal type of love; an emmanation of love towards all sentient life, but none in particular... an affection not burdened and constrained by fears and anxieties of separation and loss, but an ongoing willingness to serve, love, and perceive the unity in all life... This again, made perfect sense to me, when rationally contemplated...but in practice, I fail at this...and I fail to see this kind of particular love I exhibit as improper...its an ongoing internal fight inside of me :P
--I find this stuff fascinating. The Buddhist approach to happiness and letting go of attachments and desires as the only course to rooting out suffering and misery, is one of the few philosophical ideas that makes PERFECT sense to me...

...yet at the same time, Im a creature of wants, needs and desires, and a pleasure loving hedonist at heart... my desires partially define me and I find great beauty in that, though there also at times comes great sadness.

Perhaps its a trade off... perhaps one can either live life the almost "bipolar", poetic way of high ups and low lows....or choose the "wiser", more balanced and stable "middle path" of Buddhism...a stable state of contentment with no sudden deviations...

I continue being fascinated by this and trying to reconcile this paradox within myself...

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Andri
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Posted: Fri 11 Feb , 2005 8:49 am
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Axordil -
I don't agree with you there.
I think that your starting point, that society is based on desire and its fullfillment or frustration, is problematic. First of all, this is a very general supposition that you are making there. What desires do you mean? For power? For material goods? For human relations?
Is desire the only thing that forms a society? Is that its only or its stronger ingredient? I think not.
What society are you refering to? A western city of 3-4 million people? A small village of 500 inhabitants?

By looking at your post, I understand that you mean desire for material goods.
Correct me if I am wrong - I may be reading things that you did not intend to write.
And then you ask if that is a good or bad thing.
If we are indeed talking about material goods then I would say that, generally speaking again, we cannot say whether it is a good or bad thing. Consumerism and trade are certainly very strong forces in society. They are often among the factors that change society and history (e.g.the Industrial Revolution in Europe or Globalisation today). But they are only one factor, albeit a strong one, among many. Beliefs and ideology can be equally strong and they can influence, and be influenced in turn, by economy.

Now, about your question about the good or bad, I cannot answer that because I do not agree with your first supposition. However, for the sake of arguement, let's say that I agree.
I would then say that it depends to what extend that society as a whole (if there is such a society that speaks and acts like one mind) would go in order to satisfy those needs. If destroying the environment, occupying foreign countries and keeping thousands of people below poverty line is what is required so that all the citizens of the first society can afford to own a car, then, this in my book is wrong, regardless of the convenience that it would offer to the citizens.

Enchantress -
Quote:
yet at the same time, Im a creature of wants, needs and desires, and a pleasure loving hedonist at heart... my desires partially define me and I find great beauty in that, though there also at times comes great sadness.
I would say that our feelings are part of our human nature and thus we need to accept them and embrace them. You are young, beautiful, in-love and want to enjoy life to the full. That is a beautiful state to be in and enjoy it as much as you can. At the same time, you understand that you have desires and that they can sometimes lead you to sadness. That is very wise. By recognising that it is our needs that are the cause of our sadness we do not depend upon outside influences to make us happy or sad. At the same time, when you want something you can say to yourself that it is only a desire. If it gets unfulfilled then you will maybe feel sad, but you will know that this has no other deeper cause than the unanswered desire.

The teachings of Buddha say that we cannot change events. What we can change is our interpretation of them and our approach towards them. An event happens - by it's nature, it is neutral - neither good or bad. We say it is good or bad by the effect it has on us or on other people. And whether that event disturbs the order of things of how WE think that the world should be.


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enchantress
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I also forgot to mention, that from a psychological point of view, global ratings of life satisfaction over long periods of time do not change dramatically for people along with life-altering events. Being in an accident and ending up a paraplegic or suddenly winning the lottery and becoming the owner of a million dollars, have their initial effects, but each person usually fairly quickly returns to their baseline. Psychology seems to suggest happiness is something internal. Thus, to put it simply, if the now-paraplegic was always a cheery fellow taking things in stride, after the initial grieving process of the loss of his lower limb function, he will learn to get the most he can out of life in this changed state and approach the baseline of happiness he previously enjoyed...while if the lottery winner was always a sour faced complainer, the high of the prize will quickly wear off... Depending on their respective attitudes also, the paraplegic could join a support group and meet wonderful new friends to enrich his life.. whereas the lottery winner could get swallowed up by feelings of paranoia, thinking that everyone is jealous of their new found wealth and therefor dislikes them...

Constantly using "external" excuses for our feelings of sadness or happiness appears to be a form of unwittingly deceiving ourselves. We come up with such explanations perhaps because they reasonably make sense... but on the whole studies suggest they are faulty, and happiness (defined as overall subjective well being and life satisfaction aggregated over long periods of time) lies in the attitude of a person, and the cognitive and affective style with which she or he construes life...somewhat akin to the Buddha's teachings, as you outlined them :)
(I am talking about psychologically normal people, not people suffering from clinical depression etc...also, there are always exceptions to the rules, but the significant results of studies report what I mentioned)

Nice to meet you Andri!!!!! :cheers

... lol, and thanks for such a positive assessment of my life "young, beautiful and in love" :P :oops:
I am fairly young, I am in love, I am normal looking (you are far too generous :oops: )... yet fear not, I also have some problems hopping along with me. :P While I lead a fairly privilidged life, it is far from a "problem-free" life, but then that is what partly makes it more beautiful and gives more opportunities for growth and learning...

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Axordil
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Posted: Fri 11 Feb , 2005 3:27 pm
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Material possessions are only one object of desire.

The basic drives (food, sex, and risk-taking) are at the bottom of the desire pyramid--everyone wants them (4 billion years of evolution take their toll) and society is more than happy to channel those desires into avenues that support the society: work, marriage and war.

Further up you have more esoteric desires, all of which stem from the will: autonomy first, then control, then domination. To be able to do and not be done to. The apportioning of fulfillment for this desire is society's stock in trade: Do as we say and you get pretty much left alone. But learn what the real rules are, as opposed to the laws, and you can control not only yourself but the lives of others.

All societies have the equivalent of old-boy networks, designed to pass power from generation to generation with minimal disruption. When there is a disruption, they co-opt it as quickly as possible, folding into the status quo. But in doing so, the status quo mutates ever so slightly...

But back to the point. I do think society is nothing except a construct to channel human desires into "productive" activities, that is, into activities that maintain society. Society tells us what happiness is, and (surprise!) it always boils down to fulfilling desires. Obviate those desires and you destroy society, at least as we know it.

Which again, may or may not be a bad thing. But my point is, this is not just a personal question we're talking about. This is a much broader and deeper issue, of whether human community and interaction can be based upon a different model.

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Impenitent
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 2:19 am
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I have been absent here for awhile due to my own stuff and was tempted back by a PM from Voronwe and thought I'd whirl through the fora while I was at it - and I'm so glad I did for I discovered this thread, which seems tailored to address the very issues besetting me.

(...with which I won't bore you, fear not! :P )

I've been pondering this pursuit of happiness and it's flip-side, the attempt to run away from unhappiness, and one's attachment to both. For it seems to me that we ARE attached to our unhappiness also; we wear it as a kind of badge of pride, hugging to one's self with amazing intensity those experiences which make one unhappy, teling them over, nursing them.

Letting go of attachment to the emotional experience - is that not another way of saying detach from the ego? Or perhaps from the id, which demands satisfaction? Like babies, whose entire experience is filtered through the all-encompassing ME.

Detachment is given bad press, I think. A capacity to look at the longer view, the bigger picture.

I don't know about the gratification of desires being the foundation of society; I think it more likely that the ability to balance desire (a purely self-ish urge) with altruism (ie acknowledgement of the desires of others) is the only way society works. For altruism to exist, detachment from the self is required. If the self is all-defining, if the world is one's ego, there is no room for others except in relation to the self.

Detachment from the now; the knowledge that change is the only constant so the now will pass - whether happy or unhappy. And at the same time, to live in the moment, to feel the joy or the despair - while knowing it cannot last.

What a contradiction!

Excuse my stream of consciousness; I'm right in the middle of my own stuff and trying to find some detachment of my own.


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Ethel
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 3:17 am
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This is going to seem awfully simple-minded compared to everyone else's thoughts. I am quite a happy person, and would you like to know why? I take anti-depressants. Have for years. Still taking the same modest dose I started out on. It changed my life.

I spent the first 40-odd years of my life coping with misery. Depression, anger, self-loathing - all the usual suspects. Whether this was because of my fairly hideous childhood, or a genetic predisposition, or perhaps just a character flaw, I don't pretend to know.

I wasn't unhappy all the time, and I functioned pretty well. Got a degree, had good jobs, friends, fun, a marriage that went pretty well for a dozen or so years before it crash landed - a lot of the good stuff that life has to offer. But I was always fighting serious, clinical depression. Frequently thought of suicide - sometimes that thought felt like my dearest friend. Frequently had to spend hours and days alone, just being miserable.

Perhaps for 'normal' people, meditation or something similar is the answer. I can't tell you how many times I tried it, and told myself I felt better - and then found myself plunged back into the same old pit of despair.

For me, it turned out, happiness is biochemical. SSRI's are not magic. They are not happy pills. I still get plenty sad and upset and whatever. But it no longer sends me into a death spiral. My 'baseline' went from 'despair' to 'pretty happy'. I don't feel like it changed my essential personality at all - in fact I feel more myself now than I did when I was always trying to talk myself out of killing myself.

Maybe I'm just really shallow. ;)

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Axordil
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 2:57 pm
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No, Ethel, you're not shallow. As someone familiar with the effects of SSRI's, I can tell you that there is a world of difference between life with and without them. They aren't magic, and they aren't for everyone, but when they work, it's like being unwrapped after spending years inside a great, shapeless mass of gray cotton.

I do think that meditation can affect brain chemistry, though. I also think that your brain has to be in a place chemically where it can make a difference.

Impy--are we not defined as much, if not more, by our unhappy experiences than by our happy ones? The latter may leave happy memories, but the former leave scars. Again, whether this should be the case is another question.

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In some cases, firing the drummer helps.


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Teremia
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 9:37 pm
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Ah, I read this thread with great interest -- though I also feel strangely tongue-tied.

I am greatly drawn to Buddhism -- and run away with at least equal fervour. Here's the thing: I think probably the Buddhists are "right," that desire for things in particular can only lead to misery, that detachment might be the key to a kind of non-contingent happiness. But at the same time, something about non-attachment rubs me the wrong way. (When I was younger I would joke with friends that it sounded like "non-attachment TO TEREMIA.") You wouldn't want your mother loving you only In General, and not In Particular, would you? My Buddhist friend assures me I'm seeing this incorrectly and have misunderstood, and that may well be, but I can't help but see the releasing of attachment as a mixed bag, not all good.

I have been intensely grieving a loss over the last couple of months, and Ethel, what you have said here about anti-depressants makes me think. I have been resisting the idea of medication, because I keep thinking: I have a REASON for being as depressed as I am. But my life has gone pretty much as you describes yours going for the first forty years, and it could be that I'm just going to have to admit defeat and try the drugs (oh -- why does it feel like a defeat? That's silly, I know! I think it's because I wanted things to get better for real, In Real Life -- in other words, back to the Buddhist topic! I am attached to THINGS being different, and not just my chemistry shifting.)

THis feels like quite a departure from my usual reticent TORC persona, but I am sort of at my wit's end now, and even writing this seems to help. Or at least I see where the tangle is, even if I can't undo the knot just yet.

To bring us back to Buddhism, here's a Valentine's poem I found in somebody's Buddhist memoirs (book opened randomly in a bookstore):

Roses are empty,
Violets are empty,
Sugar is empty,
And so are you.

I have to say that I am not yet mature enough to find this the Valentine of my dreams, though I did find myself coming back to it later and glossed it for myself then as FREEDOM, rather than emptiness -- you are FREE to be whomever you are, free to surprise me -- and it felt a little better.

Still, I'd better sign myself here as

Teremia,
Failed Buddhist (As Yet)


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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 9:57 pm
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Teremia, I've been wanting to post in this thread but have found myself tongue-tied as well. Thanks for thaying it fiwst. ;)

I'm still a bit tongue-tied because I want to express my feelings about a certain kind of balance and don't know how to do that. There's a difference between attachment to material things and involvement with the other souls we find around us. Detachment appeals to me, in some ways I crave it, but quietude disturbs me and I think that ... release of the ego can also be a kind of egotism ... people who detach themselves from the needs of others may be very much attached to their own inner selves, you know?

And then, how nice to let nothing bother you, but not so nice to be the local doormat. So ... some balance, some harmony, some blend of need recognition (self and others) with serenity.

Needless to say, I have not achieved this!! :neutral:

Jn

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Ethel
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 10:00 pm
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Teremia, I understand your reluctance about medication. I felt the same for years. And it doesn't work all that well for everyone - I think it sort of depends on your specific brain chemistry.

But it worked for me, so I'm a believer. Every once in a while someone says something snarky to me about the "Prozac society" - the implication being that I take the stuff to be blissed out. That's not how it works, but I don't even bother trying to explain any more. I just say, "If I had diabetes, I would take insulin."

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Teremia
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 10:30 pm
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That's it, Jnyusa. I think that's exactly what I was trying to say. But for some reason, it all gets very intense for me, and I find myself unable to say anything sensible at all.

And Ethel -- I sure do know that certain brains run differently than others. No question in my mind that depression, like diabetes, is a physical thing. I guess I'm still on the "can't I avoid insulin if I exercise more and change my diet?" level. And then there is that other thing, too, about wanting to have a REASON to be happy again, instead of becoming happy (or, more likely, as you point out, merely OK!) for no reason or a chemical reason. [I have to say that last sentence sounds pretty foolish even to me. Sigh. I'm working on all of this, really -- I'm trying.]


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MariaHobbit
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 10:41 pm
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I don't like the whole "let go of your *self*" philosophy. It seems to me that the POINT of being human for a while is to BE HUMAN. Yearning to get back to the selfless supposedly blissful state that many religions espouse as whats coming next seems like a waste of energy. We'll die later and experience that anyway. Why not enjoy what you've got for now?

BE human. Love life. Play the game and enjoy it, you aren't sure how many more levels you have to go before you are finished with it!

Do you think Gandalf spent all his time trying to get back in touch with how it felt to be a Maia? That would be silly. That's what I feel like these Buddists are trying to do: catch a glimpse of that timeless pre/post physical existance state and hold onto it. That's NOT THE POINT! The whole human experience is so we can try out being human for a while. Enjoy it.

This is not to say one can get *happiness* from dashing from one gratification to the next.
The I Ching wrote:
He who seeks nourishment that does not nourish reels from desire to gratification and in gratification craves desire. Mad pursuit of pleasure for the satisfaction of the senses never brings one to the goal. One should never follow this path, for nothing good can come of it.
Happiness is appreciating the good things about every experience, not finding only *good* experiences to have.

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Impenitent
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 10:52 pm
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"...people who detach themselves from the needs of others may be very much attached to their own inner selves, you know? ..."

I'm not sure that is the aim: I think it is more magnanimous than this: to detach from one's OWN needs, one's inner self, in order to have the capacity acknowledge the needs of others. The ego shrinks; the id becomes manifest and therefore no longer dictates, thus leaving room for others.

An attractive concept - to not be enslaved to one's needs and desires - but I can't pretend to comprehend it viscerally.

Teremia, I am also grieving a loss and at this time the prospect of detachment from the intensity of that emotion is what I crave - what I crave and what I cannot achieve. I just want it to stop; I want to be able to breathe without having to shift that heavy stone in my chest with each intake.

That poem - when substituting FREEDOM for EMPTINESS - resonates for me also. The capacity to love and not be attached to that love, to have the capacity to release, let go, without feeling loss and grief is a very great thing. A very great and loving thing, I think. To take joy in the love itself without grasping the object of that love; to realize that loss is external and that love can remain.

It's beyond me frankly. The idea is so soothing but is it any wonder that few reach enlightenment?


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Impenitent
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 11:47 pm
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Well, I missed the posts between Jnyusa and mine. Sorry. The above post loses any relevance.


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Jnyusa
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No, why, Imp? Your post sounded complementary to my ear.

I know from practicing T'aiqi and studying the philosophy behind it that the concept of yielding is complicated and paradoxical in Chinese thinking. We connect with the energy of the other in order to deflect it onto a harmless path ... we even 'step into' the other, grab and not let go until we are able to use their own momentum to set them on a harmless path.

So I know that the idea is not withdrawal ... it's a kind of transformation ... but I also have several friends who are Buddhist and though I admire and respect them greatly as people, I do notice that sometimes their 'acceptance' of everything is really just a way of not getting involved in things they don't want to be bothered with. It's not engagement and transformation, it's just .... copping out (my assessment).

But I don't know what they aspire to, of course. And since all of us seem to fall short of our own mark in this department I suppose that practicing Buddhists do too.

Jn

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Impenitent
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"...I do notice that sometimes their 'acceptance' of everything is really just a way of not getting involved in things they don't want to be bothered with. It's not engagement and transformation, it's just .... copping out (my assessment)..."

I agree. :smile: I suspect that there are people (some of my acquaintance) who have trouble engaging with life - either their capacity for empathy is over-developed or it is severely lacking - and they seek a framework which allows them to opt out of engagement.

I don't think that is loving detachment; I'm not sure that is what Buddhism teaches, either.

(I'm on an emotional rollercoaster at the moment; pls do ignore those bits in my posts where I seem to lack sense, where I'm prickly and morose; I'll regret them all when I'm past this, I know it.)

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and oftentimes we call a man cold when he is only sad." ~Robert C. Savage


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Teremia
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 6:51 am
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So the key is to be able to detach from one's own obsessions and griefs, but not from everything or everybody? I think I like this semi-Buddhist compromise! But I';n with you Impenitent, on the difficulty of it. Every time I post here, I choke up a little. Why? At the bottom there's the button that reads "Submit." And that is what I think I have to do: submit. But it's very hard. The image I have is of a great tall wall, and all I can do, after all the kicking and trying-to-climb and looking-for-ways-around, is bow my head to the ground. But even that I can't yet do.

I guess if I were better at detachment I would be leaning my back against the wall, basking in the sunlight, and looking around at the early flowers -- but that I DEFINITELY can't yet do.

I will be holding you in the Light, Impenitent. (I'm a failed Buddhist, but a modestly successful Quaker!)

yrs,
T

(My browser can't quite handle this site, by the way: until the last line or so, I have been writing in the dark. The text doesn't show up on the screen. Hence all the typos!)


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Axordil
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 3:14 pm
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I have a more Taoist perspective: why keep banging your head against the wall when there's a door right there? :)

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In some cases, firing the drummer helps.


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