Selfishness,
Happiness And Benefiting Others
Magic Keys
With the world
awash with poverty, injustice,
environmental crises, imposed confusion and
toxic
propaganda, we at Media Lens nevertheless
regularly
receive emails from people asking: "What
should I
do?"
It's an
interesting question - one that we have
ourselves asked many times in the past -
because it
is often a kind of polite euphemism for
other,
rather more bashful, questions, such as: `How
can I
find the motivation to sacrifice my own free
time,
energy, money, and perhaps even career
prospects, to
take action and get involved in some kind of
dissident activity, without feeling it's all
a
futile drop in the ocean?'
Noam Chomsky,
in his usual no-nonsense manner,
discussed the issue in conversation with
David
Barsamian of Alternative Radio:
David
Barsamian: "Often at the talks you give,
there
is a question that's always asked, and that
is,
`What should I do?' This is what you hear in
American audiences."
Noam Chomsky:
"You're right, it's American
audiences. You never hear it in the Third
World."
DB: "Why
not?"
NC:
"Because when you go to Turkey or
Colombia or
Brazil or somewhere else, they don't ask you,
`What
should I do?' They tell you what they're
doing. It's
only in highly privileged cultures that
people ask,
`What should I do?' We have every option open
to us.
None of the problems that are faced by
intellectuals
in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil or anything
like
that. We can do anything. But what people
here are
trained to believe is, we have to have
something we
can do that will be easy, that will work very
fast,
and then we can go back to our ordinary
lives. And
it doesn't work that way.
"You want
to do something, you're going to have to
be dedicated, committed, at it day after day.
You
know exactly what it is: it's educational
programs,
it's organizing, it's activism. That's the
way
things change. You want something that's
going to be
a magic key that will enable you to go back
to
watching television tomorrow? It's not
there."
(Chomsky, `Collateral Damage, an Interview
with
David Barsamian', Z Magazine, July/August,
2003)
In Chomsky's
interview, as in so many progressive
analyses, the discussion ends there. The
remedy,
then, would appear to be for us to pull
ourselves up
by our moral bootstraps: Be less selfish!
Just do
it!
But the problem
is precisely that our fingers
tugging at our moral bootstraps are enfeebled
by the
deep conviction that we have to do everything
in our
power to make +ourselves+ as happy as
possible in
the short time we are alive. This seems
particularly
to be the case given that, at present, we are
not
doing a very great job of it.
Ours, after
all, is a notoriously unhappy society.
In 2001, the Observer reported that despite
the
highest British income levels ever,
researchers had
found that most people interviewed were
profoundly
unhappy: 55 per cent said they had felt
depressed in
the previous year. (Ben Summerskill, `Retail
therapy
makes you depressed', The Observer, May 6,
2001) In
2002, it was reported that around one-third
of
British people suffer from serious depression
at any
one time. A 25-year-old today is between
three and
ten times more likely to suffer a major
depression
than one in 1950. It seems that young people
with
the highest living standards since records
began are
deeply miserable during "the best years
of their
lives". Two-thirds of Britons aged
between 15 and 35
feel depressed or unhappy.
The
hamster-wheel repetition of our commute to
work,
the endless drudgery of our jobs, the
perpetual
burden of marital and parental
responsibilities, the
self-doubts, irretrievable losses,
depressions,
illnesses and frustration, all mean that many
of us
feel we are doing all we can to keep our
heads above
water, never mind helping anyone else. Even
as we
are asking "What should I do?" we
are lamenting with
Shantideva from the 8th century: "Alas,
our sorrows
fall in endless streams!"
How can it be
sensible or reasonable for us to give
up our spare time, money or energy to help
others
when our lives are already crowded with so
much
difficulty?
If there is to
be a helpful response to the
question: "What should I do?" it
must lie in a
credible answer to another question: Is there
a
response that satisfies both our need for
happiness
and the needs of the world around us?
We believe that
people devote themselves to a
self-centred life in pursuit of several
perceived
sources of happiness: pleasure, comfort,
praise and
status. We will propose, here, however, that
not
only do these goals not deliver happiness,
but that
they are themselves the direct cause of many
of our
problems. This realisation can progressively
lead to
a response that is as beneficial to us
personally,
as it is to the world around us. The answer
to the
question of how best to look after
"number one" is
not at all what we might expect.
The Pitfalls Of Personal Happiness - How
Pleasure
Chews and Grinds
One section of
Aryadeva's classic 3rd century work
on philosophy, Four Hundred Stanzas, is
entitled,
remarkably: "Abandoning Belief In
Pleasure".
Aryadeva argued
that the idea of positive pleasure
free from suffering is an illusion - what we
label
`pleasurable' is actually a moment of relief
from
one discomfort before the arising of another
discomfort has become noticeable. Aryadeva
gave an
example as a template for understanding all
`pleasurable' experiences:
"When the
discomfort of carrying a load on the right
shoulder for a long time becomes intense and
one
moves it on to the left one, it is merely
that a
slight pain which is beginning stops the
intense
pain already produced, not that there is no
discomfort at all. How can there be pleasure
while a
new and different pain is beginning or while
intense
pain is stopping?" (Aryadeva and
Gyel-tsap, Yogic
Deeds of Bodhisattvas, Snow Lion, 1994, p.93)
What we
experience as `pleasure' in eating,
drinking, sitting after standing, coming in
from the
cold, winning money and applause, and so on,
involves relief from one discomfort as
another
begins (itself soon becoming uncomfortable).
Although we are merely caught between one
decreasing
and one increasing form of suffering, we
label the
feeling `pleasurable', and believe the label.
Aryadeva presents a vivid analogy:
"When a
rich man, vomiting into a gold pot, sees his
servant vomit into a clay one, though
vomiting is
equally unpleasant for both, he thinks how
prosperous he is. Like the rich man who feels
delighted, one mistakes for real pleasure the
feeling of satisfaction when pain has been
alleviated and becomes less acute; but there
is no
real pleasure." (p.92)
That this is
the case becomes clear when we continue
the `pleasurable' action, for example of
eating,
which soon becomes uncomfortable: "With
the
intensification of pleasure, its opposite is
seen to
occur." (p.88)
Perhaps this
`pleasurable' cycling between
constantly diminishing and increasing
discomforts
explains why, as the French philosopher
Montaigne
observed, "Pleasure chews and grinds
us." And as for
a pleasurable activity relentlessly pursued,
Aryadeva paints a grim picture:
"It is
like King Asoka's prison called `Pleasant
Abode' where one could first choose one's
favourite
form of behaviour, but since no other could
then be
adopted, this eventually became
painful." (p.89)
And it does
indeed seem that when individuals fill
their lives with all the pleasures money can
buy,
they find themselves, oddly, no closer to
happiness.
Researchers surveying Illinois state lottery
winners
and British pool winners found that the
initial
happiness at winning eventually wore off and
the
winner returned to their usual range of
happiness.
Likewise, a recent sample of 49 super-rich
people
found that 37% were less happy than the
national
average (See: Howard Cutler and The Dalai
Lama, The
Art of Happiness, Hodder & Stoughton,
1998, p.10) In
another study, there was no difference
between the
happiness level of 22 lottery winners and
comparison
samples of average people or paraplegics.
In his book,
Man's Search For Meaning, psychiatrist
Victor Frankl discussed this remarkable
relativity
of happiness and suffering based on his
experience
as a survivor of the Nazi death camps. Frankl
explains how, after a train journey under
appalling
conditions, he and his fellow prisoners
expected to
arrive at Auschwitz to face imminent death.
When
they did arrive, however, they found that
they were
in fact at a much smaller camp where they
were not
in imminent danger of being killed.
Disinterred from
their train, the prisoners were forced to
endure a
murderous all-night punishment parade in
freezing
conditions. The results were remarkable:
"All
through the night and late into the next
morning, we had to stand outside, frozen and
soaked
to the skin after the strain of our long
journey.
And yet we were all very pleased! There was
no
chimney in this camp and Auschwitz was a long
way
off." (Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning,
Pocket
Books, 1985, pp.65-66)
Whether rich or
poor, no matter how comfortable or
distressing our condition, we apply the label
`pleasure' to an experience that involves a
mere
decrease in suffering. No matter how much we
try,
`pleasure' of this kind must involve
discomfort and
its temporary reduction; it must grind us
with its
inherent suffering. This is why Buddhist
sages have
argued that a life spent in pursuit of
pleasure is
like sitting on a pin - every move you makes
leads
to suffering.
The Search For Status - Bogus Celebrity
How many
writers, including dissident writers, are
motivated by the desire `to be someone' - to
achieve
praise, status and reputation, even fame? We
at
Media Lens have received supportive emails
from some
of the writers we respect and admire most,
and also
from many of our readers. What is so
remarkable is
the capacity of the egotistical mind to
quickly lose
the initial sense of satisfaction gained from
this.
As with other
desires, the 'pleasure' experienced
involves relief from an uncomfortable
situation -
doubts and anxieties about our ability to do
what we
are doing effectively, for example. But as
these
doubts are partially reduced, positive
comments -
like food to a full stomach - rapidly lose
their
power to give the original pleasure. This is
not at
all to say, by the way, that supportive
emails are
irrelevant to us - they remain highly valued
and
important to us, regardless of the
titillation they
may or may not give our egos.
There are other
problems with the pursuit of praise
and status. It is easy to reflect on the fact
that
many writers, for example - no matter how
incompetent and hateful their work - receive
positive comments from readers. Hitler, after
all,
was adored by millions - positive comments
proved
nothing at all about him, so what do they
prove
about us? Shantideva writes:
"Why
should I be pleased when people praise me?
Others there will be who scorn and criticise.
And why despondent when I'm blamed,
Since there'll be others who think well of
me?"
(Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva,
Shambhala,
1997, p.113)
Like all
desires, praise and fame seem to promise
much, but the actual experience surely comes
fraught
with unexpected dissatisfaction,
disappointments and
difficulties.
The comedian
Charlie Chaplin said of his fame:
"I wanted
to enjoy it all without reservation, but I
kept thinking the world had gone crazy. If a
few
slapstick comedies could arouse such
excitement, was
there not something bogus about all
celebrity? I had
always thought I would like the public's
attention,
and here it was - paradoxically isolating me
with a
depressing sense of loneliness."
(Quoted, David
Giles, Illusions of Immortality - A
Psychology Of
Fame And Celebrity, Macmillan Press, 2000,
p.91)
Who would have
guessed that achieving unprecedented
success as a comedian would leave someone
like
Chaplin, not delighted by his triumph, but in
despair at the superficiality of his fellow
man? And
who would believe that the adoration of
millions
could result, not in endless delight, but in
loneliness and depression?
In his book,
Illusions of Immortality, David Giles
describes some of the adverse consequences of
fame:
"Probably
the single most important cause of
unhappiness reported by celebrities is the
effect of
having to deal with so many people all the
time. The
loss of privacy is one aspect of this... The
more
social interactions we have, the more we have
to
compromise our `true' selves - eventually
something
snaps." (Giles, p.92)
In 60 BC,
Cicero complained that, despite the
"droves of friends" surrounding
him, he was unable
to find one with whom he could "fetch a
private
sigh". Rousseau wrote: "As soon as
I had a name, I
ceased to have friends." (p.95)
Giles comments:
"On
meeting each new acquaintance, the question
becomes not so much, `Does this person like
me for
who I am?' but `Does this person like me for
what I
am?'" (p.95)
We might think
the rich and powerful live contented
and happy lives - but high-ranking
politicians and
business moguls are slaves to their
positions.
Aryadeva examines the issue in discussion
with an
imaginary king:
"Assertion:
Pride is appropriate because a king is
free to enjoy all objects.
"Answer:
It is not appropriate. What wrongly appears
as a cause for superlative happiness to you,
king,
is seen as a source of suffering by those
with
discriminating wisdom and disciplined sense.
Since
you experience uninterrupted suffering in the
process of protecting large communities of
people
and must live by working for others, it is
not a
cause only for happiness." (p.119)
In other words,
status and power come with ten
thousand Lilliputian ropes of stressful
responsibility and commitment, which take us
very
far from a sense of individual freedom and
perfect
enjoyment.
Dependent Arising - The Curious Nature Of
Problems
The difficulty
that underlies the entire attempt to
achieve personal happiness through
self-centred
goals relates to the whole nature of what it
is to
have a `problem'.
A problem does
not exist in splendid isolation as a
concrete fact in the real world. Instead,
problems
arise in dependence on our definition of
happiness.
If, for example, we have set our heart on a
particular person or object, anything that
interferes with the attainment of that goal
will
obviously be labelled `a problem'.
We are not
angry with a romantic rival simply
because he or she exists, but because he or
she
threatens to take away what we believe will
make us
happy - he or she is therefore `a problem'.
In
response, we may become irate, frustrated,
jealous,
furiously angry and even violent. If, on the
other
hand, we do not believe that a particular
person is
an important source of happiness, then the
person
who might otherwise have been a rival is no
longer
an obstacle - the problem has literally
ceased to
exist in the same way that a rainbow
disappears when
a cloud obscures the sun.
The point is
that this is true of all problems.
Belief in happiness through the satisfaction
of
self-centred desires automatically creates
conditions in which thousands of problem
`rainbows'
can arise. As we identify a must-have
partner, job,
car, house, level of success, we thereby
instantly
generate vast numbers of `problems' in
relation to
them.
If we realise
that none of these things actually can
give rise to lasting happiness - that they
tie us to
an endlessly rotating wheel of suffering,
diminishing discomfort (pleasure), and
arising
discomfort - then our problems begin to
diminish in
number and intensity.
To the extent
that we lose faith in the power of
desired objects to provide happiness, we
dismantle
the conditions that lead us to define certain
events
as `problems'. And just this, according to
the
world's major spiritual traditions, is a
state of
genuine peace and happiness.
How can we test
this remarkable claim? We might
argue, after all, that a life without desire
would
be a life of unrelenting boredom. But, on
reflection, we can realise that boredom is
precisely
what we feel when we are blocked from
satisfying a
desire - from talking to a prospective
partner
chatting to our friends at the next table,
from
moving to a better job in some fantastic
place.
Boredom is not a condition without desire; it
is a
condition in which desire is both present and
frustrated.
So how can we
experience a condition, perhaps only
temporarily, in which our normal focus on
selfish
concerns giving rise to `problems' is
temporarily
`switched off' or diverted in a way that
tests the
truth of the proposition being made here?
The answer is
that we can `switch off' our normal
focus on our own problems and happiness by
focusing
on the problems and happiness of someone
else.
Victor Frankl described this brilliantly. In
a
situation of deep despair on a work team in a
frozen
death camp, a casual comment from a fellow
prisoner
caused Frankl to remember the face of his
wife who
was also imprisoned. He writes that his mind
imagined her face "with an uncanny
acuteness":
"Then I
grasped the meaning of the greatest secret
that human poetry and human thought and
belief have
to impart: The salvation of man is through
love and
in love. I understood how a man who has
nothing left
in this world still may know bliss, be it
only for a
brief moment, in the contemplation of his
beloved.
In a position of utter desolation... in such
a
position man can, through loving
contemplation of
the image he carries of his beloved, achieve
fulfilment." (Frankl, op.cit., p.57)
By focusing
concern away from our own welfare, a
loving and compassionate mind has the power
to
annihilate problems even in the most extreme
conditions. Problems exist in dependence on a
self-centred focus, and so feelings of love
or
compassion free the mind from problems.
Psychologists
often tell us that much modern
depression results from people comparing
themselves
to others who are better off. As Montesquieu
wrote:
"If we
only wanted to be happy, it would be easy;
but we want to be happier than other people,
and
that is almost always difficult, since we
think them
happier than they are."
It also makes
sense, then, that deep reflection on
the infinitely worse suffering of others - a
standard practice in many cultures - gives
rise to a
stable feeling of contentment and well-being.
Thus
one Buddhist meditation recommends:
"On seeing
a wretched man, unlucky, unfortunate, in
every way a fit object for compassion,
unsightly,
reduced to utter misery with hands and feet
cut off,
sitting in the shelter for the helpless with
a pot
placed before him, with a mass of maggots
oozing
from his arms and legs, and moaning,
compassion
should be felt for him in this way: `This
being has
indeed been reduced to misery; if only he
could be
freed from his suffering!'"
Again, our
problems are not concrete realities -
they literally shrink in our minds when set
alongside, even imaginatively, the far worse
sufferings of others. Science is beginning to
support the idea that compassion of this kind
is
indeed a powerful antidote to personal
unhappiness.
On September
14, the New York Times reported from
the University of Wisconsin, where Richard
Davidson,
director of the Laboratory for Affective
Neuroscience, is currently studying brain
activity
found in Buddhist monks meditating on
compassion.
Davidson says:
"It's
something they do every day, and they have
special exercises where they envision
negative
events, something that causes anger or
irritability,
and then transform it and infuse it with an
antidote, which is compassion. They say they
are
able to do it just like that." (Stephen
S. Hall `Is
Buddhism Good for Your Health?', The New York
Times,
September 14, 2003)
Davidson's
research has previously found that people
who have high levels of brain activity in the
left
prefrontal cortex of the brain simultaneously
report
positive, happy states of mind, such as zeal,
enthusiasm, joy, vigour and mental buoyancy.
On the
other hand, Davidson found that high levels
of
activity in a parallel site on the other side
of the
brain - in the right prefrontal areas -
correlate
with reports of distressing emotions such as
sadness, anxiety and worry. Experiments on
one monk,
a "geshe", generated remarkable
results. Davidson
reports:
"Something
very interesting and exciting emerged
from this. We recorded the brain activity of
the
geshe and were able to compare his brain
activity to
the other individuals who participated in
experiments in my laboratory over the last
couple of
years... The geshe had the most extreme
positive
value [indicating happiness] out of the
entire
hundred and seventy-five that we had ever
tested at
that point." (Daniel Goleman, Disturbing
Emotions -
And How We Can Overcome Them, Bloomsbury,
2003,
p.339)
Davidson
describes the geshe as "an outlier"
on the
graph - his reading was "three standard
deviations
to the left", far beyond the rest of the
bell curve
for positive emotion and happiness.
In the New York
Times article describing these
results, journalist Stephen Hall comments
that "the
fact that the brain can learn, adapt and
molecularly
restructure itself in response to experience
and
training suggests that meditation may leave a
biological residue in the brain".
Stephen Kosslyn, a
Harvard neuroscientist comments:
"This fits
into the whole neuroscience literature of
expertise where taxi drivers are studied for
their
spatial memory and concert musicians are
studied for
their sense of pitch. If you do something,
anything,
even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight
hours a
day, there's going to be something in your
brain
that's different from someone who didn't do
that.
It's just got to be."
Conclusion - Motivation For Dissent
Possible
options for all who ask "What should I
do?"
are clear. The first thing we can do is
reflect on
our own experience of life in considering the
possibility that the self-centred pursuit of
pleasurable experiences does not deliver on
its
promises.
Forever placing
our needs, our problems, at the
centre of our focus in this way ensures that
they
always seem enormous. By focusing with
compassion
and love on the (often far worse) problems of
others, we can reduce our perception of the
importance and severity of our own problems,
even in
the most difficult circumstances.
We can
consider, then, that compassionate thoughts
and actions - working to relieve the
suffering and
increase the happiness of others - can be a
powerful
path, not an obstacle, to our own personal
happiness; that these can act as an antidote
to the
catastrophic problems caused precisely +by+
our
single-minded attempts to make just ourselves
happy.
The problem, then, is not that we already
have too
much on our plate to be concerned about
others, but
that we have too much on our plate +because+
we are
not concerned about others. This need not be
taken
on anyone's advice - it is something we can
consider
in relation to our experiences of everyday
life. As
we reflect on these possibilities, and
perhaps
progressively erode our faith in the delusive
happiness of self-centred living, we may well
find
ourselves naturally seeking out opportunities
to
benefit others.
Motivation is
not a problem for anyone who accepts
the extraordinary truth contained in Yeshe
Aro's
ancient prescription for happiness:
"On this
depends my liberation: to assist others -
nothing else."
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