Cyber Spirit Cafe

Jessica Grose is an insightful New York Times columnist, writing about matters of culture and daily life rather than politics or news events. Her most recent essay asks the provocative question, “Are We Happy Yet?” She begins by telling of her experience monitoring her activities three times a day with a phone app from something called TrackYourHappiness.org.

The survey … asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.”

The survey’s creators believe that the more focused we are on our activities, the more satisfaction we receive from them. Grose, however, found that her app responses were actually revealing how many necessary activities she performed (“folding laundry”) that she really didn’t want to do. But then the app itself became an issue.

As the weeks of survey-taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

Grose’s point is that focusing on being happy is probably one of the worst ways to actually achieve happiness. Yet, as we all learn in grade school, our country was seemingly founded on the notion, because we all have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And since Thomas Jefferson penned those words two-and-a-half centuries ago, our obsession with pursuing happiness has grown exponentially.

Apps like the one Grose used number in the thousands apparently. Countless books, courses, workshops, TED talks, diets, medications, websites, and YouTube videos all promise to lead us to happiness. And then there are the hope-filled experiences of visiting places like Disney’s Magic Kingdom, which claims to be “the happiest place on earth.”

One of the central tenets of all types of spirituality is that happiness is not found “out there” but discovered within us. As a result, many adopt mindfulness and meditation practices which are supposed to help us find that happiness, wherever it is hiding.

Yet, as Grose learned, studies have shown that such practices, along with others aimed at improving our sense of psychological wellbeing, are often ineffective. For those predisposed to mental health issues, learning such techniques sometimes leave them feeling even worse.

Most of the happiness optimizing programs and activities assume happiness is some “thing” we need to pursue, as Jefferson said. In our scientific age, we think we can quantify and measure it, whether in a laboratory experiment, population survey, or phone app. But Grose wisely concludes all this is barking up the wrong tree. Happiness is not something acquired but experienced, often mysteriously, in daily living.

The frenzied, overstuffed marketplace of happiness optimization will never be able to fix the fundamentals of the human condition or bring a lasting kind of purpose to a new generation. There will never be easy or straightforward answers to our most profound questions of existence, and ranking emotions feels like a diminution of their awesome power. I do not want to spend those daily walks home with my daughter wondering how they stack up against a morning run or dinner with a friend or any other moment in my day that might make me feel something. The user experience of being alive cannot be graphed.

One of the unfortunate misdirection plays of recent years has been the adoption of meditation as a technique for personal improvement, on par with exercise, dieting, or hiring a life coach. Meditation will raise your GPA and lower your blood pressure, improve your mental focus and your sex life, help you stay on task and propel you up the corporate ladder. Or so it’s claimed by one self-help guru or another.

Yet none of this has anything to do with the meditation that is at the heart of millennia of spiritual practice from around the world. While there is variation among spiritual traditions, they agree that meditation is not about acquiring or accomplishing anything. Rather, it is about a lifelong experience of seeing clearly and letting go.

A growing spiritual tradition today is nonduality, from the ancient Sanskrit word advaita, meaning “not two.” While originating in Hinduism, the belief in the unity of being can be found in almost all religious traditions, especially in their mystical expressions. Today nonduality is taught and practiced in both religious and nonreligious settings.

According to a nondual understanding, we lack nothing because our fundamental being is already complete. Suffering arises from blindness to this truth and our seeking satisfaction in what is impermanent, always changing, and ultimately disappearing.

Thus, nonduality says that happiness is, in fact, who we are. We are already happy by nature but this reality is obscured by experience. A couple years ago, our book discussion group read You Are the Happiness You Seek, by the English nondual spirituality teacher, Rupert Spira. According to Spira (and many others) there is no such thing as a “spiritual path” because there is no place to go. We’re already there! Meditation is the primary practice for this “pathless path,” as it is often called, as it facilitates our awakening to our true self, to our being as an expression of the one Self.

Our book group did get somewhat hung up on Spira’s use of the word “happy,” as often happens in discussions of this topic. While Jefferson seems to have meant the word holistically, today “being happy” is often understood more superficially, as in how we feel with a puppy in our lap or being at a Taylor Swift concert.

Broader terms like contentment or satisfaction probably come closer to the overarching experience we are seeking. But the best word is likely peace, which has a long usage in many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. Peace is more than an experience and is understood to be a state of being, or indeed, the nature of Being itself. Peace is a spiritual quality that transcends personal experience. We are unlikely to say that we are happy when we hit our thumb with a hammer, yet we could say that at the core of our being we are still at peace.

But whether you use the word happiness, peace, or something else is not the point. Rather, this is about the discovery of who we truly are and the completeness, the fullness of being, this is our nature. Our illusory separate self never genuinely acquires the peace and happiness it seeks. There is no such thing as “peace of mind.” The objects, experiences, relationships, accomplishments, status, etc. that we think make us happy all disappear over time.

What they do accomplish, however, is to briefly reveal, like the sun shining through a gap in the clouds on a stormy day, the happiness and peace that is already our true nature. When the clouds return, we think our happiness is gone when it is actually only obscured once again by experience. Awakening comes when we discover we are not our thoughts, feelings or experiences. Rather, we are the consciousness, or awareness, in which they occur, the Self which knows them but is unaffected by them.

For Spira, then, meditation is not an activity but rather the experience of Being and knowing of our Self.

Meditation is not an activity that you undertake in order to bring about a particular experience. The ‘I’ that you are is prior to the activity of meditation and cannot, therefore, depend on whether you are meditating or not. Meditation is to be knowingly the one you always and already are but may not have noticed due to your fascination with the drama of experience. Replace the word ‘meditation’ with ‘being knowingly your self’. Ramana Maharshi suggested that the highest form of meditation was simply to be…. Don’t make a distinction between everyday life and meditation.

The metaphor Jesus uses for peace and happiness is the Kingdom of God. His parables teach that finding it is often a surprise and in unexpected places. It also involves losing our supposed separate self to discover our true Self that is one with all. Yet it is available for everyone because the kingdom is all around us and within us, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. We don’t have to do anything to achieve happiness and peace because they are already closer to us than we are to ourselves.

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