The Pursuit of Happiness.

There is an old Jewish story about a poor man who complained to his Rabbi that his cottage was so cramped and small he could only take it as a sign of God’s judgement. The Rabbi pondered and then asked, ‘Do you own any animals?’

‘Yes’, said the man, a cow, a goat and some chickens.”

”Take them into the house with you.” The Rabbi’s advice seemed strange but he did as he was told.  So the next time they met the Rabbi asked how things were going. ”Terrible,” he replied, ‘The cow’s tail is in everything, the goat stinks and the chickens crap everywhere! What shall I do?”

The Rabbi strokes his beard, ‘Now, get rid of the cow.’ The man is entirely perplexed and goes home muttering at the Rabbi’s contradictory advice but the next time the Rabbi asks how things are he has perked up a bit,..

‘Well, some improvement, but the goat is eating everything it can and the chickens roost in every available spot. My wife and children are going mad. What shall I do?’

‘Kick the goat out,” replies the Rabbi.

The next time they meet the man seems more relieved but the chickens are dusty and loud….

‘Now put them back in their coop,’ suggests the Rabbi. The following day he rushes over to the Rabbi saying, ‘thank you, thank you, my house feels like a palace, my family are so happy and I’ve never slept so well.., oh joy!”

On the face of it this story is a moral admonishment to be happy with what you have because life can always get worse.

‘I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.’ Helen Keller.

It teaches the importance of gratitude but more to the point it demonstrates that gratitude’s transformation, it’s capacity to suffuse life with meaning and excitement, has little or nothing to do with circumstance.

In everyday life the bad tempered person will find any number of reasons out there in the world to be as grouchy today as he was yesterday. The bountiful personality will find the same number of reasons, from the same data, to have yet another great day.

How you feel about events depends on what shoes you happen to be wearing at the time. Whatever you are unconsciously identified with is going to run your ship and determine how you think and feel regardless of what is going on at the time. We feel gripped from without when we are enslaved from within.

‘The way out is by the door, why do people not use this method?’ Confucius.

People often say of therapy that you can’t change the past, as though it was something fixed in stone. But ‘remembering’ is not as obvious as it looks, largely because children easily abdicate their own point of view to keep in step with others and so remember things from other people’s perspective, like having a single window in a house that doesn’t even belong to you looking out over landscape that looks alien but isn’t…

Recalling life events from your own point of view can be a quest all of its own, let alone from what inner vantage point you might then face the world in the here and now.

The Japanese have a folk tale of a man who comes across three stone cutters. He asks the first what he is doing,..

”Just eating shit’, says the poor man, ‘having to chisel away at this fucking stone all day. It’s humiliating, I might as well be a prisoner doing hard labour.”

He asks the second man what he is doing…

”I’m earning enough to feed my family and clothe my kids. I’m learning skills and working together with this crew of masons.”

He asks the third man what he is doing..

‘I am building a cathedral…’

If you didn’t check in with the other workers you might be tempted to feel sorry for the cruel fate of the first stone cutter, to identify with his feeling of being so constrained and done to…. He doesn’t see that the shittyness of life is something he carries around inside him. He projects it onto whatever the world offers him, devaluing so as not to feel devalued,  identifying with a compensatory function for whom nothing is ever good enough. And so it isn’t. You could crown him king and it would still be shit.

”We do not see things they way they are. We see them the way we are.” Torah

All too often our freedoms are pinned on the outcome of events, what happens on the outside. It’s a version of passively waiting around for someone to rescue you dressed up as virtue. You want the suffering caused-by-the-outside to stop.

I was once involved with an unfeeling woman who ’caused’ me no end of suffering and unrequited love. Then I dreamed that I was trying to explain something so that she would finally-understand-me, when all of a sudden the perspective pulled back so that I was now looking on and could see that I was dressed as Robin from Batman…

I was boy wonder..

rescuing the damsel in distress.

My suffering was not because of anything she had said or done. It was because I was inflated and believed myself capable of saving her from herself, when in fact I was quite out of my depth and had woefully overestimated myself. The dream was chiding me, ‘get out of your super-hero garb and you’ll feel a lot better.’

So I did,

and I did.

”Our suffering is as much created by railing against the circumstances at hand as by those circumstances themselves.’ L. van der Post.

When you find yourself suffering in an apparently needless way it’s difficult to ask the question, ‘what in me feels this way?’ You’re too close to it for perspective. After a while the answer comes out that you’re identified with some corner of the psyche that is not getting it’s way and that the many other mansions of your inner world aren’t getting lived in.

Perhaps it’s easier to ask, in a quieter moment, ‘On what does happiness depend?’  Any concrete answer, much as you might want to nail it down, is identical with suffering. Why? Because it makes aliveness conditional, narrows options, refuses the unscripted and prejudges meaning. It’s the beginning of fending life off rather than adapting and growing.

What this means is that the pursuit of happiness, given the status of constitutional right for many and collectively synonymous with freedom, is at the root of much human misery. It’s not just that your happiness might be at the expense of someone else but that the wish for life to be other than it is actually prescribes joy. It narrows the band width for engagement with life and so has the opposite of its intentions..

This is not to say that you shouldn’t strive for anything. Wanting nice things is not the problem. It’s having to have them and feeling failed if you don’t that will put a crimp in your day.