Terry Willard's Blog Space

In the last 4 parts on our Hap­pi­ness dis­cus­sion we looked at how our con­scious mind was like a rider (con­scious mind) on the back of an ele­phant (the rest of mind/body). The thing is the rider has very lit­tle author­ity to direct the ele­phant to do some­thing that it does not want to do. We went on to show there could be some very fun­da­men­tal rea­sons for this, includ­ing our very sur­vival. It comes down to that even though the rider often thinks it is in con­trol, it doesn’t always make the best deci­sions and can often lead us in the wrong direc­tion in life. That is all right, because the ele­phant usu­ally has our back, plod­ding along on its path of the tried and true way. The ele­phant only goes down the proven path and if we want to evolve emo­tion­ally, men­tally or spir­i­tu­ally we need to retrain the ele­phant on how to move onto a new path.

Now don’t get me wrong, you don’t need a new path to be happy. Look around the world, who are the happy peo­ple? Sur­pris­ingly they are not nec­es­sar­ily the wealthy or the suc­cess­ful peo­ple. They are not the peo­ple liv­ing in a great cli­mate. They are most often the peo­ple that even though they might appear poor, have a great con­nec­tions to their fam­ily, work, com­mu­nity and reli­gion. They have built a net­work of things around them that works for them. What are these things and how do we get them?

In part 3 of the Hap­pi­ness blogs we saw that the largest con­trol­lable part of hap­pi­ness is how a per­son thinks and acts. For a plant to thrive and be happy, it needs sun­light, water and good soil. In humans we can say (and this has been proven in research) that our sun­shine is Love, our water is Work (or what we do, play, work, par­ent­ing, study) and the soil is the soci­ety we are cul­ti­vated in. We can more eas­ily develop the first two (love and work) and then trans­plant our­selves into a cul­ture that helps us grow.

No man, woman, or child is an island onto him­self or her­self. We are ultra-social crea­tures and hap­pi­ness is often equated to our con­nec­tion to friends and loved ones. If you are a par­ent of kids, or even remem­ber­ing back when you where a kid, it didn’t really mat­ter what you were doing with your friends, just being with them is what made you happy.  There was a kind of flow of agree­ment there; you were tuned into the same sta­tion. You had sim­i­lar like and dis­likes. This often meant you felt a higher level of hap­pi­ness with your friend than your fam­ily, as your fam­ily didn’t really under­stand you, but your friend did. They were on the same page as you. We could say that you had a flow of ideas and feel­ings.

Work, or bet­ter stated what we ‘Do’ is also impor­tant here. This could be play­ing as a kid, your occu­pa­tion, par­ent­ing, study or even sports and exer­cise. We also get glimpses of hap­pi­ness when any one of these is in the flow. Do you remem­ber play­ing make-believe with your friends as a kid? It could have been cap­ture the flag, dolls, build­ing the ulti­mate Lego cas­tle or a play fort. When you were in a group being in the same make-believe world, hap­pi­ness flowed. Most pri­mates have been shown to want to do, to cre­ate and fig­ure things out. Even zoo mon­keys, orang­utans and goril­las want to solve prob­lems. We have a drive to make things hap­pen. You can see this with infants and play cen­ters, when their flail­ing arm move­ments start ring­ing bells and mak­ing things spin. We have a drive to develop com­pe­tence through inter­act­ing with and con­trol­ling our envi­ron­ment. It is almost as basic a need as food and water. It has been shown that this prob­lem solv­ing gives us great plea­sure and joy. In fact we get more plea­sure from mak­ing progress towards our goals than we do from achiev­ing them. Or as Shake­speare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”  I know with gar­den­ing, I get even more plea­sure being out­side work­ing the soil, weed­ing, cul­ti­vat­ing the plants and pre­serv­ing them for win­ter than even eat­ing them. But I must admit eat­ing nice crispy beans in the mid­dle of win­ter (that I know grew last sum­mer less than a hun­dred feet away), brings me lots of joy too. Was that work or play, some­times the bound­aries between these get a lit­tle fuzzy.

It has been shown that most peo­ple approach work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a call­ing. Work ulti­mately is what you deem it. It won’t come as a big sur­prise to most that peo­ple get more joy and hap­pi­ness out of work as a call­ing than if it is just a job for a pay check to spend on the week­end. Both careers and call­ings are focused on a higher pur­pose, not just a pay­check. Most peo­ple can get sat­is­fac­tion from their work, if they apply their strengths. By find­ing out your strengths (Link here) and choos­ing work that uses your strengths you can obtain more flow in your life, and thus more moments of joy and hap­pi­ness. If you can’t find this in your “day job”, engage those strengths in some other aspect of your life such as a hobby, sports, arts, or vol­un­teer work. Ulti­mately more hap­pi­ness will come into your life if you can spend time on a reg­u­lar basis in this zone of flow.

You know this zone; you have felt it before. It might have been way back when you were a child play­ing games, or it might have been that eureka moment of an insight, that per­fect move­ment in a sport, or dur­ing or right after great sex. We all have a few of these moments. The goal is to cul­ti­vate more of these into our lives. Pos­si­bly you can cul­ti­vate this in your work (not nec­es­sar­ily the sex, unless you work in the sex trade). As the poet, Kahlil Gibran said in The Prophet  “Work is love made vis­i­ble.”

This flow is more impor­tant to our hap­pi­ness than money or mate­r­ial goods. Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi has called this flow “Vital Engage­ment”. After inter­view­ing hun­dreds of suc­cess­ful peo­ple, Mihali and his team found that once a per­son found a moment of flow in their selected field, and by cul­ti­vat­ing rela­tion­ships with like-minded peo­ple who also had found the flow, their prac­tice and val­ues deep­ened over time and it enabled them to have even longer peri­ods of flow. They defined this vital engage­ment as “a rela­tion­ship to the world that is char­ac­ter­ized both by expe­ri­ence of flow (enjoyed absorp­tion) and by mean­ing (sub­jec­tive sig­nif­i­cance).” Or to put it another way ‘”love made vis­i­ble.” These peo­ple got swept away by their projects to cre­ate a calling.

The thing is that vital engage­ment does not reside in the per­son or the envi­ron­ment; it exists in the rela­tion­ship between the two. It is the inter­face between the two. This brings us back to our old friend that I have blogged about often – coher­ence. Coher­ence lit­er­ally means hold­ing or stick­ing together. We usu­ally think of this as part of a sys­tem, or an idea or a world­view whose parts fit together in a con­sis­tent and effi­cient way. The more lev­els that are coher­ent, the more joy and hap­pi­ness flows. If your ideals, job and lifestyle do not point in the same direc­tion, you can­not have coher­ence. If you have a cer­tain phi­los­o­phy about life and your job acts in the oppo­site direc­tion, you will have a harder time hav­ing the same amount of joy and hap­pi­ness as there is a con­flict. The more lev­els of coher­ence (or Cross-Level Coher­ence) you can cre­ate in your life, the stronger it feels like enlight­en­ment. Peo­ple gain a great sense of mean­ing when there lives cohere across the three or more lev­els of their exis­tence – phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal socio­cul­tural and spir­i­tual. The feel­ing cre­ated is much big­ger than the sum of the parts. Again it is impor­tant to note that this cross-level coher­ence is cre­ated by the space between the lev­els, not by cul­ti­vat­ing or resid­ing in one level or another. If a per­son spends too much time in their mind, they can’t cre­ate this cross-level coher­ence. If a per­son spends too much time in spir­i­tual pur­suits, or even in the phys­i­cal world, they too will not have the cross-level coherence.

Now when you look around you can see how many reli­gions and spir­i­tual prac­tices have employed parts of this to help their prac­ti­tion­ers obtain a suit­able level of hap­pi­ness. Unfor­tu­nately many reli­gions around the world have suf­fered scan­dals; as with any power over peo­ple, it can eas­ily cre­ate the temp­ta­tion for some in their ranks to suc­cumb to cor­rup­tion. Many dis­en­fran­chised peo­ple are out there look­ing for another solu­tion, as the older forms of reli­gion don’t serve them anymore.

As in the 1999 film the Matrix, once you take the red pill (the painful truth), it is hard to go back to the blue pill (bliss­ful igno­rance of illu­sion). Once the truth is revealed, it doesn’t cre­ate hap­pi­ness; in fact quite the oppo­site, with lots of pain and con­fu­sion per­sist­ing after this point. This has dri­ven many peo­ple into states of depres­sion. Now the rider and the ele­phant are work­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. There is a lack of coher­ence. The ele­phant has been trained in the old sys­tem; it needs to be re-trained to see a new way.  To cre­ate cross-level coher­ence we can’t just talk about recy­cling, we have to do it. If you have spir­i­tual prac­tice on the week­end, but work at frack­ing for oil dur­ing your ‘day-job’; you will ulti­mately have a hard time find­ing coher­ence. We can’t just talk about liv­ing within har­mony with our planet – we have to achieve it. We have been plod­ding along on this con­sumer tread­mill for so long, our ele­phant knows no other way. Again it lives on a Like-O-Meter level. We have to train it to have bet­ter tastes. Maybe not so much sugar and an appre­ci­a­tion for the deeper spices of life.

In part 4 we dis­cussed five processes that have been shown to cre­ate more hap­pi­ness for a per­son. If we fig­ure out what they have in com­mon, maybe it can help us cus­tomize activ­i­ties that work for each and every one of us. As you might have guessed by now, four out of the five solu­tions cre­ate cross-level coher­ence – med­i­ta­tion, cog­ni­tive ther­apy, med­i­c­i­nal mush­rooms and flower essence. This is not to sell short the Prozac; it has its place. It is not a long-term solu­tion. It only gives us the chem­i­cal (hor­monal, body based) feel­ing of coher­ence. It does not have this cross-level func­tion, thus isn’t a long term solu­tion. It has proven to be great for a hold­ing pat­tern for a per­son to be able to gain the per­sonal power to start re-training the ele­phant. Metaphor­i­cally we can say it is a weaker blue pill that can sedate the flood of infor­ma­tion and feel­ings that come after tak­ing the red pill.  It can curb the depres­sion while we work on deeper issues.

The other four meth­ods help us build a deeper level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the rider and the ele­phant. Med­i­ta­tion both calms the mind and devel­ops a sense of spir­i­tual well being. Cog­ni­tive Ther­apy slows down the neg­a­tive chat­ter in the brain and gives us a chance to live deeper. The Med­i­c­i­nal Mush­rooms grow from great com­mu­ni­ties of mycelium, bathed in the earth vibra­tion of Gaia; this also helps calm the mind and body, and cre­ates a greater level of coher­ence on more than one level. Flower Essences are made from the sub­tle vibra­tion of the flow­ers, calm­ing our emo­tions and mind, help­ing us reach deeper into coher­ence. Of course using more than one of these ther­a­pies at the same time can help us cre­ate a deeper cross-level coherence.

Ulti­mately we have to find our per­sonal form of cross-level coher­ence. It is hard to fol­low a reli­gion that preaches love, com­pas­sion and virtue yet sup­ports war or ter­ror­ism. It is hard to sup­port a gov­ern­ment that speaks of free­dom for all, but cre­ates racial, finan­cial and cul­tural inequal­i­ties. Atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in the name of a reli­gion or gov­ern­ment don’t increase a person’s feel­ings of cross-level coherence.

Many have reached into higher realms to cre­ate coher­ence from mys­ti­cism. This is a con­cept about tran­scend­ing the self and merg­ing with some­thing larger than self. Many reli­gions and sects around the world have employed this and cre­ated states of “cos­mic con­scious­ness”. This cre­ates extended peri­ods of bliss, supreme peace, and illu­mi­na­tion. One of the ways to do this is by using rit­u­als that involve repet­i­tive move­ment, such as danc­ing, drum­ming, chant­ing and the likes. This too can cre­ate high lev­els of coher­ence. For it to cre­ate cross-level coher­ence, the feel­ing and insights achieved in these states have to be incor­po­rated into other areas of a person’s life.

We have to engage these dif­fer­ent lev­els for the rider and the ele­phant to move in coher­ence.  As we are both the rider and the ele­phant, again hap­pi­ness comes from the flow in the space between the lev­els. You can’t find it, buy it, or obtain it. It is in the very exis­tence of the flow itself. Some call this the Tao.