Five Ways to Happiness
One of the many benefits that arise from focus training is an increase in the baseline level of happiness. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Shinzen Young has counted the ways that cultivating skillful attention optimizes happiness. He has identified five categories.
1. Increasing Satisfaction from Pleasant Experience
Focus training increases satisfaction from pleasant experience. Increasing sensory clarity allows one to penetrate ever more deeply into the experience of pleasure in the present moment. That includes becoming aware of more subtle pleasures that were previously unnoticed, and also detecting a richer texture in pleasure sensations. This happens in part because focus training acts like a microscope, revealing a formerly invisible world of experience. Henry Miller said: “The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” So it is when giving close attention to the experience of pleasure. That is the way in which the first two focus training skills, concentration and sensory clarity, increase fulfillment from pleasure. But the third skill has an even more important role.
As much as we want to have pleasant experience, we have an unfortunate habit of sabotaging it when it arrives. And, in the deepest of ironies, the sabotage arises out of the wanting itself. We can easily fall into the habit of chasing after pleasant experience only to find that when pleasant experience is at hand we are unable to enjoy it fully because we are, out of habit, looking for the next one. The wanting blocks the having.
Even if we can focus on the pleasant experience at hand, we often find that our fear of the pleasant experience ending causes us to cling to it. Instead of enjoying the pleasant experience as it is in the present moment, we suffer by anticipating its eventual loss. This is the destructive irony of jealousy, the wanting again interfering with the fulfillment of having.
The antidote for the poisons of chasing and clinging is the third skill in focus training: contentment with just what sensory experience is arising in this moment. When we are content with what is, there is no need to chase after, or dread, what comes next. And so the development of contentment (or equanimity, acceptance, surrender to the will of God, etc.) removes these habitual obstacles to the fulfillment that can arise from pleasant experience.
So focus training increases our happiness by allowing a deeper engagement with pleasant experience with less of the craving and clinging that can block it.
2. Less Suffering from Unpleasant Experience
It may not be difficult to understand, conceptually, how focusing more intently on, and exploring more subtle details of, pleasant experience can increase fulfillment. But it is not so easy to understand how the same heightened level of focus and attention to subtle details with unpleasant experience can reduce suffering. The relief comes when your new level of attention reveals that the challenging experience is not as bad as you thought it was when you were avoiding looking at it directly. Imagine you wake up in the middle of the night and notice with alarm a large animal crouching menacingly in the corner of your room. Then, when you turn on the light, you realize it was just a chair with a robe draped over the back. So too, what seems like a very challenging body sensation breaks up into some trivial vibrations and tensions when closely examined. What initially seems like a mountain of pain turns out, when resolved by trained focus power, to be a bunch of uncomfortable molehills.
Additionally, a mental narrative often adds tremendously to the suffering. The “story” that accompanies the discomfort helps create a sense of personal “ownership”, a dualistic sense of a victimized “me” beset by an alien attacking pain. But, as Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Our trained focus power can shine a light on, and unwind, the thinking that turns discomfort into suffering. This explains how concentration and clarity can help reduce suffering from unpleasant experience, but the real sauce on the spaghetti is with equanimity.
We all resist unpleasant experience. In the sphere of action in the world, this makes the difference between survival and demise. We are “hard wired” to avoid things that cause pain, nausea, and other discomforts. But these essential, instinctive survival patterns of avoidance tend to develop into internalized habits of aversion towards the sensory experiences that accompany discomfort. It is one matter to avoid burning one's hand on a hot stove by acting carefully. It is another matter to struggle internally against the painful sensations that accompany the burn if it happens. The sensory experience of discomfort and the manner in which we process that experience are fundamentally different. The former is largely outside of our control while the later is very much within our control through focus training. Why does this matter? Because the way in which we process the sensations of discomfort that inevitably arise as part of being human determines how much we suffer.
Just as grasping for, and clinging to, pleasant experience interferes with fulfillment, turning away from, and struggling against, unpleasant experience increases suffering. It might seem like fixating on wanting something and fixating on avoiding something are opposites. But, in fact, they are the same thing: resistance to what is happening in our sensory experience in this moment. Resisting the arising and abiding of unpleasant experience amplifies the suffering by creating an adversarial relationship within your own self. You become the victim and the discomfort becomes the attacker. The more you resist, the more compelling the discomfort becomes, the more of an empowered “thing” it seems. Just as with the fixation on wanting, equanimity is the antidote to the fixation on pushing a sensory experience away.
Saying “be content with discomfort”, even if one believes that to be the answer, will probably not bring it about. The CONCEPT of not resisting discomfort does little to relieve suffering. What is needed is the transformation of the nervous system, through focus training, to recognize experientially that contentment relieves suffering. In this way, your brain learns how AND why to find contentment in the face of discomfort. This is neither a swift nor easy process. It generally requires a great deal of practice applying focus training to discomfort directly. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: “Experience keeps a dear school, but the deep brain will learn in no other.”
So, as focus training develops, the level of suffering that arises from discomfort diminishes, and happiness increases.
3. Understanding Yourself
Socrates is reported to have said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. This is, perhaps, an overstatement, as most living creatures, including many human beings, seem to regard life as worth living without needing to think much about it. But it is certain that a careful examination of what we are, what consciousness is, what the manifested world is, can be among the most rewarding of human adventures. The deepest of mysteries, consciousness itself, is close at hand for all of us. Indeed, nothing can be closer.
Focus training begins with an examination of what we perceive, but leads to an examination of perception itself, and then to the identity of the perceiver. What do we experience in each moment, how do we experience it, and who “does” the experiencing? So the journey along this path leads to an understanding of the nature of the sense of self-identity. And what might that be? Ultimately only direct experience can answer that question. Words fail rather quickly on this road, but we can use them to point out a direction.
One way of thinking about what makes being human so difficult is that we are caught up in the habit of trying to find, and cling to, stability in a world that is nothing but change. In particular, we insist on trying to construct and maintain a sense of a separate, static, self; a personal identity that we would inhabit like a hermit crab in its shell. We weave this fabricated identity from threads of sensory perceptions. Concepts, opinions, judgments of self and others, cravings, aversions, value systems, body sensations, and on and on. Having once constructed this reified sense of self, we cling to it like a lifeboat in the ocean of change, but when the storm comes, the lifeboat turns out to be nothing but a straw.
Focus training eventually reveals the true nature of this fabricated sense of static identity. Having thus seen through the futility of being compelled and imprisoned by a mere mirage constructed of fleeting words, images, and body sensations, one becomes free. And with that freedom from the fixed, separate identity comes the ability to taste a kind of primordial perfection and a deep and abiding happiness.
4. Skill in Action
It seems a little presumptuous to say it this way, but the challenge of life can be understood as having two parts. The first part is skillfully processing our sensory experience as it arises in the present moment. The second part is acting skillfully in the world. Focus training provides a clear and direct (but not easy!) program for learning to skillfully process sensory experience. Focus training also improves the skill with which we act in the world, but not so directly and not so clearly.
Let's begin to unravel this by identifying one of the most important causes for unskillful action: emotional reactivity that arises out of a kind of emotional scar-tissue accumulated through a lifetime of traumas large and small. This emotional reactivity is often unconscious but it can still drive our actions. In fact, it is its unconscious nature that makes it most troublesome. Let's illustrate with an example. Imagine a typical minor highway traffic conflict. Somebody cuts somebody off or follows too close or drives too slowly. Very minor in the scheme of things, yet such incidents all too frequently flare up into violence. We even have a name for it. The important thing to understand about Road Rage is that it is not the result of the incident that triggered it, but rather the activation of what Shinzen Young calls the pool of poison and pain. The emotional residue of a lifetime of having been annoyed, irritated, hurt, treated badly, and so on, boils over in response to a minor event. The result is action far out of proportion to the circumstances. We carry around with us a myriad of unhealed emotional wounds that can bias our behavior in inappropriate ways, making us less effective, less happy, and making us a source of unhappiness in others. The good news is that focus training skills have three beneficial effects on this emotionally reactive scar tissue.
First, the better we get at using our focus skills for processing challenging experiences as they arise, the less we add to the accumulation of the reactive scar tissue. When we resist the sensory experience of a challenging emotion, we fail to completely “digest” it and the residue is added to the emotionally reactive “pool of poison and pain”. This accumulated reactive residue lies dormant in the brain, ready to flare up when triggered. But the better we get at our focus skills, the less reactive residue we store.
Second, when challenging emotions arise, our focus training allows us to have heightened awareness of that experience as it is happening. That heightened awareness allows us to intervene consciously in our old habit patterns and prevent the challenging emotions from driving us to unskillful action. Bringing emotional reactivity out into the sunlight of conscious attention makes it much more manageable.
Third, our focus training actually draws out and releases the accumulated emotionally reactive scar tissue. This is often experienced during focus training sessions as emotions arising for no apparent reason. It is the re-emergence of undigested emotional experience from the past. When we meet that resurfacing emotional experience with our trained focus skills, we get what amounts to a second chance to fully process and release it. And so, over time, we reduce the accumulated emotionally reactive scar tissue that can drive us to act unskillfully.
So, focus training helps us to process challenging emotions skillfully so they don't leave a residue, release stored up emotionally reactive habits from the past, and bring conscious attention to whatever emotions are arising in the present so that we may make more skillful choices about how to act. As our focus training progresses, we get better at acting skillfully in the world, our relationships with people improve, our effectiveness improves, and our emotional challenges become less challenging. All of this leads to greater happiness when acting in the world.
5. Revealing the Social Virtues
Human beings are social creatures. We evolved to live together. Deep down in our very structure, we know how. So why do we seem to be so bad at it? The answer is largely in the unconscious emotional drivenness described in the prior section. Accumulated emotionally reactive scar tissue blocks our deep social nature. With focus training, these obstacles begin to fall away, revealing our instinctive knowledge of how to get along with each other. I call this knowledge of how to be a naturally social human being the Social Virtues. These are the attitudes that make human society possible and they arise naturally with sufficient focus training.
The Social Virtues include love, kindness, compassion, gratitude, humility, cooperation, honesty, generosity, parental protectiveness, playfulness, and a spirit of service to all. Without these virtues, human society will not function well. Fortunately, they are innate in us and manifest naturally as soon as we open the way with focus training.
Not only do the Social Virtues arise naturally in us with our focus training, they also create states of happiness that we can detect ever more intensely with our increasing sensitivity. This becomes a reinforcing cycle, an upward spiral, continuously promoting our own happiness and the happiness of those around us.