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Happiness and pleasure
I once knew a scholar who studied happiness. He did so because he wanted to be happy and was not. The only way to be happy is to practice being happy. Also, being happy is far more beneficial to ourselves and to others than is an intellectual pursuit of happiness, which can leave us obsessed about happiness and even miserable. Misery grows from the desire for happiness as an outcome of its study when that desired outcome does not manifest itself in our lives.
Studying happiness is ineffective. Experiencing it is essential, and experience happens in the body, which cannot be separated from mind. When consciousness or unconsciousness–both mind–connect with something external to the body, from words in a book or a classroom to autumn leaves to the tunes a brother plays on the piano to the blood we see and the pain we feel after tumbling onto pavement from a bicycle to the fur we stroke on the back of a beloved cat–we feel that connection as a sensation in the body. Thus, body and mind are one. The sensation may be obvious, like the softness of an animal’s fur on our fingers, the ache that remains from a fall, or sensation may be so subtle that we are unaware of it unless we have trained ourselves to feel subtle sensations throughout our bodies.
As with pleasure, most people think that happiness is an occasional and discontinuous experience. They’re happy because they win a marathon or it’s their birthday or they’re eating the perfectly ripe peach. Race over, birthday gone, peach eaten and they’re back to the flatness, depression, vague dissatisfaction, or other non-happiness and non-pleasure that is usual for them. They feel pleasure because they’re having an orgasm or sunning themselves at the beach, chatting with a close friend, or landing in a city that enchants them. Orgasm faded away, clouds covering the sun, conversation past, trouble with the taxi driver from the airport, and the pleasure has ended.
In the above examples, I could exchange the happy ones with the pleasurable ones, because, as I experience life and name its components, happiness and pleasure are equivalent terms that describe what can be the ground of living from which one thinks, acts, and speaks, the moment to moment feeling of one’s daily life. Self-study as the observation of sensation, which is observation of the body as mind/the mind as body, takes one into that happy and pleasurable groundedness. Self-study is the practice of happiness.
- October 11, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 1
I love this pair of photos and particularly the second one! The gentle tilt of the lamp and your body and the comparable glow of each, the strong graceful bases framed by silky halos, the stillness and illumination, and the observation of yourself while you bask in your literal and figurative glow.