On A Definition of Human Happiness: “We want to make sure that skillful action in all of its meanings and call to service in all of its meanings is included, so that our definition of happiness is broad, including relief, fulfillment, insight in the sense of understanding yourself at all levels, including the deepest, mastery in the sense of mastery of one’s actions, and service. So we want to make sure its broad, and also deep. Most people are not even aware that happiness apart from conditions — for most people, they don’t know much about that. And that boils down to the ability to have complete sensory experiences. And that turns into… is directly related to… the ability to escape into physical and emotional suffering, escape into it, experiencing it so fully that it tastes like cleansing and empowerment. Analogously, experience pleasure as the same thing — a purification, an empowerment. Experience the arising of the ordinary self — the self that thinks about this, its confused about that, it wants this other thing — to experience the arising of the ordinary self from the extraordinary self — call it true self, call it no self, that’s a big piece of happiness independent of conditions. So we want to be sure that people’s understanding of happiness is also deep.
There are two reasons to talk about this. One is what was just mentioned — a complete paradigm of the effect of the practice will include all this. The other is a clarification thing. People often get confused by the seemingly natural dichotomous thinking — should I be working on my own personal happiness (?) or should I be engaged in service to others (?) — and that or is perceived to be exclusive, as in one or the other. But it profoundly both and, with the same skill set and same strategies applied to both, are relevant to both. As to the question should I transcend or should I take care of business? Once again, perceived as exclusive I would say that its both and, and would say that the hallmark of maturity is when we realize the complementarity of all these dimensions and it becomes one process and isn’t confusing anymore. It’s proportioned, with a portion of time and energy to this quadrant, to that quadrant, to this level, to that, and at times those proportions may change, but we shouldn’t find ourselves in some fundamental confusion about the Unity of the goals of this path.
I mention all this because of the unusual situation we find ourselves in now, with the world and a pandemic. Certainly part of what we’re called to do is… to take care of stuff in various ways. It should be evident how focus skills and techniques are relevant to effective action in the world, but its also a time where we’re sort of forced — and when I say we I mean all human beings — where we’re forced to remember the big picture. Particularly those of us who have a practice, because we’ve already been told or we know, at least we should know, that conditional happiness is impermanent. We do our best to get it, to make it last, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I know this is a bad thing. But to tell you the truth… those of you old enough to remember what it was like growing up in the US in the 1950’s, I really thought when I was eight years old, that I would experience World War III. Because of the bad relations with Russia and China, we just expected to be bombed. It was horrible. We had drills - “Get under your desk!” - like that’ll help. So not to take things lightly, I thought I’d live to see a lot worse, and I might, but that said we do our best, and conditional happiness comes to an end. Then we can work for unconditional happiness and then we have to face the final reality.
This doesn’t… for us… this is just being grown up. This is not pessimism, this is not morose. It’s just realistic. The reason people think this is a pessimistic view — and its not that we can’t make terrific improvements, in fact I think we can make this world into a kind of paradise in the next few centuries, but… impermanence. In doing that we will evolve into some other form Ummmm.. so Impermanence. Those of us that know this are prepared. We have a sense of how to be happy apart from external conditions. Some of you may know of the French philosopher Pascal said something to the effect of, All human problems stem from the fact that people can’t just sit in a room day after day with nothing else and be perfectly happy. But actually, we can. People with a practice can, meaning people with a practice have addressed happiness at this deepest level.
The world as a whole is now being forced into a kind of non-consensual ashram, a global imposed retreat, at least on a physical level. And people are freaked out, which is a bad thing, a sad thing, but also its in times like this that people are open to making changes. There’s plasticity that can be associated to times like that. I remember what it was like to go from a cushy California lifestyle at the age of twenty-five and suddenly I’m in a Japanese monastery where everyday is Samurai bootcamp training. Well it was quite a shock. And I remember how fluid I had to become to deal with that. I just had to let go of the fixated perimeter and the coagulated center, it was just so, so different. The positive spin that we take from this is that we all in one way or another have a calling here, we who understand this larger context and have resources. I think the reason people don’t want look at the limitations of conditional happiness, they may not want to look because they don’t know there’s an alternative. If there’s any alternative, then… I’ll latch onto this thing, even though it isn’t going to hold.
We know there’s an alternative, we know for sure, we know the details. We have a lot to give. At many levels. So for us… we freak out like everyone else but… not quite like everyone else. We utilize the adversity to optimal growth. So this is my second experience of running a retreat in the midst of a crisis. I actually mentioned the first night, the 911 attack hit smack dab in the middle of a ten-day retreat in Virginia, not all that far from the areas that had been effected. I remember the retreat managers came to me at that time when everyone goes off to practice in motion, so we were done with the guidance, the retreat managers came and whispered in my ear, it happened only a few minutes before and of course the understanding was at the start confusing and distorted, at first I thought we were at war. It took quite a while for a realistic assessment on what occurred — and we were close to the action, at first thinking were we going to see bombs dropped or something like that. One Zen Master I used to work with used to ay, “What are you going to do when the earthquake comes?” There’s going to be some sort of earthquake… and that was an earthquake.
And I remember, out of Auto-Think, in talk space arose, paraphrasing, the words from Yeats, just came to my mind, “The center will hold.” In other words, we’re not just going to let this retreat just dissipate, even if we are at war. We’re going to hold it and keep the center as much as possible, including keeping the silence. And it was amazing how everyone rose to the occasion, the center did hold. And our Methodist Minster hosts, a Cristian Protestant venue we were at in rural Virginia , I think they saw the power of mindfulness by the way we all just self-organized into something amazingly effective. Two years later much to my amazement those ministers asked me to give a talk to their Christian youth group. With Catholicism we get that all the time, not as much with Protestants especially down south in the US, but the whole thing was enormously empowering. And I suspect that many of us who have now experienced and completed this strange new way of being together even as we’ve been apart, I think many of us may have that sense we’ve been empowered by this. I certainly do.
You can imagine that the talking circle after processing the attack, processing it for five days in silence, of course people who needed to make calls, did that, but essentially we kept the silence. And the talking circle was very different. And we walked out there with the sense that… and those of you who were in this country at that time remember it was very, very strange for several weeks after that… but we all knew that we had something to give. Remember the ox herding pictures, the 10th step, the substance which is just nothing, there’s the appearance which is everything, and there is entering the marketplace with hand outstretched. You have these goodies and you don’t push them on anyone, but if people have the eye to see, they’ll recognize you’re Santa Claus with a big sack of… toys for all ages. So that’s a theme for us to consider.
On the more analytic side, it occurred to me, there’s something everyone of us can do, at one level or another, in this situation, to optimize what Shakespeare called The Uses of Adversity. One level is institutions. And of course within institutions there’s everything from your neighborhood whatever to your municipal, state provincial and even national government. I understand several cities are actually officially telling people to meditate, and using the ‘M’ word, so things that things that we could do to help the institutions we have connection with to bring in these practices to create resources. So there are things we can do at that level. Then there are things we can do with the world meditation community. We just ran a pretty effective retreat having never done this before, because our structures have been so carefully thought through. Every aspect has been so carefully organized and paired down to a lean machine that gets the job done. Other meditation organizations may or may not know they can run these types of programs, to great effect. I certainly noticed more carry over into daily life effects from this retreat than from a retreat where we just leave everything. everyone says, what about in between retreats? And so doing the retreat at home, with all the consequences, karmic and otherwise, Wow. We did it. And other practice groups that may be entirely based on a physical location, they may not realize, that that we can very effective practice, even during this time of official social isolation around the world. So we can, some of us, can reach out to other communities and say, Unified just did this, it worked out quite well. So we already have a proven format.
Then there’s the level of reaching out to the people around the world who may now be ready for a practice perhaps because they’ve bottomed out on conditional happiness and at the same time they’re being forced into this a Sacris Simplicitas, a sacred simplicity, although it may look like the opposite of that, so we may be able to reach people who are now ready who weren’t ready a few weeks ago. There’s that level. And finally there’s the level on a fundamental level, that of our own personal example, the subtle teaching. The support that every practitioner gives, simply by being a practitioner. It may be subtle, but its not insignificant, especially the cumulative effect on the people around us. I mentioned teaching The Practitioner Purifies The Land. Everywhere we go, we pick up the poison and the pain, sympathetically vibrate with it, process it, so that we’re helping others and helping ourselves, almost on auto pilot at the primordial level of the senses. This is a significant contribution that we can all make.
We think of the uses of adversity… it’s from Shakepeare actually, As You Like It. I saw this as a nice summary of the way I like to think of our situation. Yes, we’re going to take care of business. We’re not going to give conditional happiness short shrift. But let us remember: ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” (Deep Bow)
