Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, part 2

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When Thomas Jefferson imbibed John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and summarized Locke’s philosophy in this country’s foundational document, The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson made one crucial emendation. John Locke had said that people have inalienable rights – rights based in a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society – and Locke listed these rights as life, liberty, and property. Jefferson’s tweak was to say that all are endowed with “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” -- replacing "property" with "pursuit of happiness."

I appreciate Jefferson’s impulse to dig a little deeper, to ask, what is property for, and to point instead to the purpose of having property at all. That purpose is to facilitate the pursuit of happiness, which is a purpose one may well choose to pursue without much property. But this pursuit of happiness idea has been interpreted as pursuit of instant gratification of desires – when what Jefferson had more in mind, we know from his letters, was limiting desires, cultivating friendships, and rejoicing in the moment.

If Jefferson had said instead that governments are instituted among people to secure the rights to life, liberty, and the means to construct for themselves the meaningful life to which they are called, he’d have avoided the implication that every unhappiness was a bad thing, that the purpose of life was to chase away every dissatisfaction. If, instead of “pursuit of happiness,” he had spoken of the means to construct a meaningful life, then he’d have better said what his letters make clear he had in mind.

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After almost twenty years of starting up and leading Zen meditation groups -- in El Paso, Texas; Gainesville, Florida; and White Plains, New York -- I have a pretty good idea of the range of reasons people come to meditation. After a lifetime of being part of Unitarian Universalist congregations – and 17 years as a UU minister – I have to say that people coming to congregational life seem to have a wider range of reasons – and any given person is likely to have a number of them.

In Western Society, Zen is the newfangled thing that appears to offer a fix that ordinary American churches and synagogues don’t. Offer a fix. Most people that walk into a Zen center have an idea that something is wrong with them, and Zen might fix it. This talk they’ve heard about "enlightenment" sounds like just what they could use some of to straighten out what’s wrong with their life. If their Zen teacher is any good, or if they just read around much in the Zen section of the bookstore, they will be instructed that

“the life we’re already leading – this ordinary day-to-day life of ours is not the problem but, somehow, already the solution we’re looking for.” (Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide xiii)

But curative fantasy dies hard. Fantasies of being cured and brought into some model of a perfect life tend to persist. A curative fantasy, explains Barry Magid,

“is a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better.”

In this country, churches and synagogues have much deeper cultural roots than Zen centers, so in congregational life there tends to be a little less of the impulse to get fixed and a little more implicit understanding that attending and participating is not something that makes you special, or cured, but is simply a constituent of ordinary day-to-day life.

Congregational life appears to be fading from the cultural scene in the West, and increasing portions of what’s left of it are dominated by mega-churches purveying some curative fantasy of their own. Nevertheless, our culture still retains a wonderful sense of congregational life as simply an ordinary part of an ordinary life, an arena for making meaning and engaging in work that is real. Make some friends, and reflect a little bit about values and meaning – not because that will make you better, but because that’s how you be what you already are. Not that what you are is ever static.

Congregations are for making connections, having a community, learning things together, and doing some things together to ease a bit the world’s harshness. If Zen and meditation groups stick around for another couple generations, they will gradually move from the cultural space of

that place to get something called enlightenment, or bliss, or inner peace,

and move into the same cultural space that congregations have occupied when they aren’t devoted to curative fantasies:

one of the places where you play out the meaning of your life.

Zen Centers will then be understood, by members and outsiders alike, as churches and synagogues are understood: an ordinary part of an ordinary life -- a community within which to gradually age out of the genius of our youth and into the sagacity of our maturity and finally into the gentleness of our senescence. What could be more ordinary?

Unhappiness is not a disease from which we are suffering and of which we need to be cured. Depression needs to be addressed (whether at the individual level, or the family and friends level, or the social policy level), but simple unhappiness is just a part of the ebb and flow of an ordinary, full life – a way of calling our attention to the next challenge to bite off.

Meaninglessness needs to be addressed (at all appropriate levels), because we need meaning in our lives a lot more than we need happiness. If your life has meaning, you can put up with a lot of unhappiness. If your life has meaning, then unhappiness can take the form of purpose and drive.

Joyful creativity is urged on by an edge of dissatisfaction pushing us forward. Where life has meaning, we may even speak of the "joy of unhappiness" – an enjoyment of ongoing engagement with our very dissatisfaction. After all, to enjoy the fun of problem-solving – or just problem addressing -- requires having problems that feel meaningful.

So meaninglessness needs to be addressed. And isolation and alienation need to be addressed (at all appropriate levels), for those are the cousins of meaninglessness. But you don’t need to be happy all the time. If you are, fine. If you’re not, also fine.

Happiness works better as something you look back and notice has been with you as you were living out a life of meaning, rather than as something to chase after.

There’s a Zen verse that goes:

“Caught in a self-centered dream – only suffering.
Holding to self-centered thoughts – exactly the dream.
Each moment life as it is – the only teacher.
Being just this moment – compassion’s way.”

It’s not the dream that’s the problem. Humility should remind us that we don’t know reality – that our perceptions are inherently distorted by the bias machine that is our brain. So in some sense, it’s all a dream. But a self-centered dream only makes for suffering. The self-centered dream pushes against the world – to wrest our desires from a world that seems intent on withholding them. Instead, the meaningful work works with the flow of the world – as Piercy’s poem described it: “moving in a common rhythm” as “when the food must come in or the fire be put out.” We add our work to the current, rather than against the current. We don’t have to paddle upstream – but we do have to add our energy to assist in and be part of the "common rhythm."

So there’s another verse that isn’t from the Zen tradition – that every one of you, I think, knows and has known since childhood – and it is this verse I leave you with:

Row. Row. Row your boat.
Gently – down the stream.
Merrily. Merrily. Merrily. Merrily.
Life IS but a dream.

Blessed be and Amen.

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Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, part 1

Go to Part 2

“I just want them to be happy.”

It’s a sentiment commonly expressed by parents about their children. But a life of meaning – a life that feels real – is more important than happiness. Parents who say they just want their child to be happy may be talking themselves into letting go of some expectation. Secretly they were hoping the girl would go to medical school – or that the boy would become a teacher – or that their child would one day take over the family business -- and when it becomes clear that’s not going to happen, the parents coach themselves into accepting that alternative career paths are fine. So they say: “I just want her to be happy.” Or him. Or zir.

If meaning is more important than happiness, then why don’t parents say they want their child to have meaning? I’m not sure. Maybe they think “meaning” would convey that that they are projecting their own assessment of what would constitute meaning, and “happiness” seems more objective -- and feels more like you're leaving it up to the child. Or maybe they wish they could spare the child the challenges and some degree of unhappiness – the toil that may come with a life of meaning.

Another way to say "meaning" is to say that we want to be of use. Marge Piercy expressed it well in her poem, “To be of Use.”

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

It says something that we’re more likely inclined to wish happiness for our children, or perhaps for our partner, than for ourselves. You’ll hear, “I just want them to be happy,” more often than you’ll hear, “I just want to be happy.” At some level, we understand that contributing to someone else’s happiness is meaningful – that a life helping others be happy is a life of purpose, of being of use. But a life of just being happy feels rather shallow.

In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Laurence Fishburne offers Keanu Reeves the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill frees one from the machine-generated dream world and allows escape into the real world, but the "truth of reality" is harsher and more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill represents a beautiful and pleasant life without want or fear within the simulated reality of the Matrix.

We admire the one who chooses reality – with all its struggle and anguish -- over the one who chooses happiness. Nowadays "red pill" and "blue pill" have become political metaphors. Naturally, we all believe our own political opinions are the correct ones – otherwise, they wouldn’t be our opinion. But if our certainty grows rigid – if we lose the context of humility that recognizes that we could be wrong, that our opinions were formed by the same sort of hodge-podge, higgledy-piggledy brain deeply oriented by its built-in cognitive biases as every other person – then we begin to wonder how it is that other people can be so foolish or pig-headed as to disagree with us. We can fall into the trap of thinking we ourselves see reality while those others have taken the blue pill of ease and delusion. Of course, this trap is itself the blue pill. The most common blue pill there is, is the ease and delusion of thinking yourself to be among the few who have taken the red pill – that you see the truth while most other people are stuck in their dreamworld.

What this reflects, though, is that we want the red pill. We want reality, truth, meaning – and will choose the difficult challenges of meaning over meaningless comfort. Not always. There are times in every life – and in some lives more prevalently that others – when one is so worn down, tired, abused, oppressed, or in pain that one would gladly reach for a blue pill if one could. But by and large, most of us, most of the time, choose meaning over happiness – choose reality over withdrawal. Of course, discernment of reality is inherently skewed and distorted, so I might better say we choose engagement over withdrawal, for what we engage with IS our provisional sense of reality.

We choose to be present, as much as we can be, over being absent. There is that in us which stirs and moves in resonance with John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech in which he said:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard – because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

Whatever you might think of the moon mission – and its impetus to display military might -- we do yearn “for work that is real,” for undertakings that are hard – hard enough to “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

And yet, there is also that in us which is influenced by a culture obsessed with happiness. This idea that we should pursue happiness is in there -- in our hearts and the presumptions of our thought -- in most of us. And, you know, I don’t think it’s helpful.

I’ll come back to that in part 2.

Go to Part 2