LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider Buddhist and Stoic prescriptions for the "existential illness" that finds us deluded, grasping, and erroneously attaching to the impermanent world's chintzy shiny baubles. Both traditions propose therapies.
Our campus counseling center sent out a flyer yesterday, advertising its services "free of charge" to the campus community. Freer still for many of us, and more effective, might simply be a walk in the woods or down the street. Or on a sandwalk.
Positive emotions come into play on a good walk. For the Stoics emotions were "problematic because they are inseparable from faulty beliefs," but that surely is a faulty overstatement. Some emotions lead us down the wrong path, others make us feel at home in the woods and the universe and our own skin. Jennifer Michael Hecht puts it well in Doubt: A History, in her discussion of "graceful-life philosophies" which offers a lovely forest metaphor for happiness:
The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in 
a forest… we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some *blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest… Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time.
RAIN is a nice counseling acronym (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identification), the gist of which is that you are not your pain. Let it go.
Buddhist awakening involves an end of rebirth, when karma stops "accumulating." Doesn't that just mean an end, full-stop? Is that cure possibly not worse than the disease? Or is that very question emblematic of western delusion?
Jhanas are states of "deep concentration" or "absorptions" meant to facilitate "detachment from worldly delights." I've written about that, I'm still trying to understand why I'd ever want to plug my springs of delight. For the attainment of nirvana, presumably. But that sounds mystical. Doesn't have to, according to our author. "A 'little nirvana' could consist in a state of more contentment and less reactivity." Nothing wrong with that. We're all suffering from less contentment and more reactivity than is healthy, mentally or physically. A little forest bath couldn't hurt.
Buddhist awakening involves an end of rebirth, when karma stops "accumulating." Doesn't that just mean an end, full-stop? Is that cure possibly not worse than the disease? Or is that very question emblematic of western delusion?
Jhanas are states of "deep concentration" or "absorptions" meant to facilitate "detachment from worldly delights." I've written about that, I'm still trying to understand why I'd ever want to plug my springs of delight. For the attainment of nirvana, presumably. But that sounds mystical. Doesn't have to, according to our author. "A 'little nirvana' could consist in a state of more contentment and less reactivity." Nothing wrong with that. We're all suffering from less contentment and more reactivity than is healthy, mentally or physically. A little forest bath couldn't hurt.
I've been learning the origins of Buddhism in relation to ancient Indian culture for of my course on world civilizations. But in relation to a philosophy the Four Noble Truths really intrigues me. The first being that suffering occurs, the second being because we have attachments and the third describing how to end suffering. So the goal of the philosophy being to end suffering. But the word "suffer" has an interesting definition. I'm not sure if this works in the original language but the archaic use of suffer was to let something happen or permit it to. Meaning that one can suffer more than just pain but also joy and happiness. So its curious to think of Buddhism as more of the stoic belief where even to suffer happiness must be prevented, and it makes me wonder if that was an idea inherent to the philosophy that may have been lost in translation.
ReplyDeleteThe promise of the Four Noble Truths, or Buddhist philosophy, is the end of suffering, duhkha. The First Noble Truth, that all is suffering, is an instruction to understand the truth of duhkha. While duhkha can relate to the sense of unpleasant sensations, it is better understood as dissatisfaction. This relates to the Stoic goal of tranquility. The first two truths tell us that that all existence is characterized by suffering, and that the suffering is caused by desire. Suffering is dissatisfaction, the coming together with what one does not like, and being separate from what one does like. It is not attaining what one desires. Existence is characterized by the personality. Desire and craving attach to the personality, and it attracts them to itself. The personality makes the objects of desire objects of attachment, and thus provides the basis of dissatisfaction, or suffering. Desire is not itself bad; it is part of human nature. It depends on the object of desire. Desire for enlightenment is good.
ReplyDeleteThe third truth is that suffering can be ended by the elimination of the cravings for objects of attachment. But the elimination of suffering alone is insufficient for liberation and tranquility. The fact that the personality, the ego, is seen as an independently existing ‘I’ leads to placing special value on everything associated with it. Once one recognizes that the independent ‘I’ is not essential, desire and craving fade away.
Suffering, dissatisfaction in life, is caused by desire and cravings by the ego. Realizing that this ego, this personality, is not essential to who you truly are will cause the unhealthy desires and attachments to be eliminated, and produce an end to suffering and the achievement of liberation from any vestige of what you think of as the self, the personality. The Buddha’s fourth noble truth provides the way to do this. It is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.
Right. Buddhist suffering is bound up with attachment. Alleviation of suffering requires a specific sort of detachment. I still have trouble with this, the same trouble I wrestled with in first trying to come to terms with Jamesian pure experience...
Delete"The purity of pure experience is not that of renunciation in the eastern sense, of personal desires and attachments. James was quite at home with the idea that we are the particular bundles of wants, preferences, valuations, and (especially) experiences, and actions that uniquely individuate each of us. As they change and grow, or stagnate, so do we. The people, places, and things to which we sustain voluntary attachments are the most important constituents of our respective identities. To renounce them, or detach from them, would be to die. What then, we will wonder, is so pure about pure experience? The answer, in a word, is immediacy. It retains the combined senses of presence, concentrated attentiveness, and (to whatever extent is humanly possible) presuppositionlessness, an indispensable element of experiences that are unbiased and open to novelty. Pure experience is momentarily forgetful of past and future, and so in that sense transcendent of time. But past and future in the particularity of our attachment to them, through the particular window of appreciation we all bring to our own experience of the world, are conditions of continuity: we bring that attachment with us (or it brings us) to the bar of experience; we have our marvelously forgetful, briefly untethered moments of vision, insight, and delight, and then we fumble again for the reassuring tug of the rope of memory and anticipation that carries us forward into a future that may be transformed by the afterglow of what went before. True enough, for James "you can reach a state of consciousness called 'clear consciousness' in which the mind is perfectly lucid, without being caught up in discursive thoughts."2 We can reach such a state, but James does not advise futile efforts to stay there. Life presses forward. Unlike the rose under Emerson's window, whose aura of timelessness and perfection depends upon its own utter lack of self-regarding consciousness combined with our aesthetic and anthropomorphizing, projective regard for its form, we must strive to win and retain our limited perfections. We are not "perfect in every moment of [our] existence." But then neither, really, is the rose: ask a gardener..."