A Treatise on How to Recognize and Achieve Happiness

Try this. Say two words in your mind at once, like "stop" and "go." Try to say them together or any two words you come up with. The reason you can't do it is because the little hole in the mind's hourglass only lets one little grain of thought through at a time. This means you can control whatever you want to think. That is why chanting works, if you can keep the seams closed up. That is indeed a mercy of nature. A reasonable person just has to figure out what to allow through the hole.

As for me, I manage a reasonably happy life by traveling all over the world at my own expense, playing Classical Guitar repertoire in restaurants from Copenhagen to Honolulu and taking in a few students. I also manage to be happy by contemplating whatever I want to, regardless of what I'm supposed to be worried about. That is not denial. One is entitled to one's own thoughts.

In May of 2007 I came back to the mainland from Honolulu, Hawaii where I actually spent three years as an involuntary homeless person. I say involuntary to counter an assertion made by a restaurant owner down in Tybee, Island, Georgia who I will refer to as Jones.

"So how was Hawaii," Jones asked.

"Splendid and wicked," I answered.

"Za, you've been gone for three years, must've been nice."

"Yeah even living in tents, cars and on a mat. . ." I said, and he interrupts:

"You? Homeless? The Great ZaZa?" he said, as he looks around to see if he is holding forth to a captive audience. Heads turn in my direction.

"You can call it that. . .but it was more like address -less," I said, impassioned.

"I can understand being homeless for two months, but longer than that it's by choice." he asserted.

"Jones. . .even you could not afford the rent in Hawaii. . .It costs a little over a thousand a month just to stay at the YMCA like I did from time to time. I bought a tent and lived in Waimanalo Campground and. . ."

"Well we know that you ain't a normal dude. . .you can handle that kind of thing, but I still think . . .over two months it's voluntary," he said with a chuckle.

"I don't recall asking you what you thought," I said, wanting to end his self righteous, imperial oratory. I didn't ask him for a gig either.

By the way, the above dialogue is not a pity party. My stay in the islands is more of an adventure story because I survived it and I am writing this to you from a studio apartment that I recently rented back here on the mainland because I found just enough work to pay the rent and feed me. I'm using my step-dad's car until I can find something reliable. I just keep going. I intend to love my life.

Nevertheless, I actually spent three months on the streets of Honolulu alternating short stays at the Y and at a Veteran's shelter out in Kapolei, some fifteen miles outside of town. Otherwise, I'm walking around all night long, sitting on steps here and there, reading the paper, doing Sudoku puzzles, talking to my wonderful girlfriend on my pre-paid cell, and practicing Bach. I couldn't stay with her because her landlady did not allow over night guests. Imagine that.

At daybreak I walk to Kapiolani Park near Wakiki and claim a spot on the ground in the shade near the soccer field where sometimes Denise would come and guard me during her lunch break. I'd spread out my reed mat and sleep until it got too hot and buggy, then I to go play on the street or at a few restaurants where I'm allowed to play for tips or Formaggio where on Thursday nights I actually get paid my little hundred dollar fee.

Eventually I am extended some credit and I buy a '98 Plymouth Voyager with 86,000 miles on it. I moved right in and park 30 feet from crashing waves near Blowhole, to sleep. When I get ready to leave for the mainland, the car lot buys the car back giving me half of what I paid in. I arrive in Savannah with fifteen hundred bucks, to start all over again. I intend to love my life.

Classical Guitar is not a staple in the islands. They want to hear Hula and Slack Key guitar music, Reggae, Classic Rock, and just a wee little bit of Jazz. All the good gigs are taken, going at least ten years back. I went there in search of a break; I had taken a risk and got an education in "mettle testing." I awakened my true self. I achieve humility. Which leads me to explain the principles that operate when one suffers inordinately to achieve a goal, yet continues to strive with high expectations.

I will continue, in this treatise, to share some of my own life situations with you and offer you the benefit of 57 years on earth, my training in psychology and music, coalescing all of that with some brilliant thinking from theoreticians, mystics, and philosophers that I enjoy.

I don't claim to have the complete prescription for happiness but I have come across a few good nuggets here and there. I've stumbled upon positive treasure troves both mystical and empirical that enable me to attach an exponent to my personal quest for whatever my concept of happiness is.

Before proceeding further, let me repeat for you, a little nugget from my own unconscious. This is not an affirmation. I refer to it as an "Inscript." If it resonates with you, I suggest that you print it out with a 48 point font and tape it up somewhere or write it in longhand so you can see it across the room. Here goes:

-I Intend To Love My Life-

If you want to be happy, it is good to start with an intention like that. It has a mystical quality that arouses your unconscious thinking. If you don't intend to love your life then this is not the essay for you nor is the Inscript I'll bet you could write a beautiful personal essay that Inscript as a theme.

Some of the stuff that we find in theoretical treasure troves by great thinkers makes for a hard, tedious, scholastic read. . . on purpose, with sentences of cross-talk and incomprehensible contradictions running the whole length of a page. As a hobby, I decode some of this literature and put it in a more digestible form so that I can understand it and use it. As I understand it, I want to share it with you so let's get on down to it, starting with my latest discovery.

Bertrand Russell (1972-1970 / British) has offered humanity some good rational thinking in the form of a book entitled: : "The Quest For Happiness" published by W.W. Norton, reissued 1996. I discovered Bertrand Russell when I read that T. S. Eliot, my second favorite poet, had studied with him; I never heard of him while in school. We studied mostly Viennese and German theorists leaving us to survey William James and other comers on our own.

It is widely accepted in high literary circles that poets are prophets, the ultimate person of letters. . . so I couldn't wait to get my hands on anything by Bertrand Russell. I am not disappointed. Russell is somewhat of a poet but not a writer of verse-a poet still. I should just recommend the book to you and be done with it, but since some of the content makes me happy, frees me, and helps me think about happiness; I want to tell you of some of his concepts. In his book, he says that he wants to help. With you, I want to do the same, with assistance from Russell, as well as P. D. Ouspensky, Dostoevsky, and Gurdjieff.. Before moving on into the minds of these theorists, mystics, and writers I want to mention just a few things about religion, existentialism, and suffering.

I've learned more out of school anyway where I have more time to read and continue to study with no teacher biases getting in the way, nor the resistance I put up when I come across things that I don't want to input like some of the Nietzsche that I was forced to memorize. No I'm not a Nietzsche batterer. The man was smart. He had to blow his brains out to shut the thinking off. Too much. He had some brilliant moments but my further research reveals that he may have pilfered some stuff from Aristotle like his whole superman concepts.

I do love Socrates. After my own homelessness, I accepted that unless a philosopher has been homeless, like Socrates, he is going to have little to tell me. Oh, the arrogance and pride of the deprived. Now a short word about religion.

Sundry surveys have revealed that most people in modern and primitive societies religion and rituals of some kind. Some folks go to their respective houses of worship, pray and still privately lead miserable lives. They accept that suffering is a part of the way life is to be taken. The fine art of suffering can be found in the writings of existentialism to the extent that one can lose grasp of what existentialism is in the first place.

I've heard so many meanings for existentialism, but when I study the works of its writers from Kierekgaard (the alleged inventor of it) to Dostoevsky's brilliant "Crime and Punishment" I see a common thread of hopelessness and tension. Existentialist writers usually show some human who is tossed around by fate and appears absolutely helpless to do anything about it, from Yeshua (Jesus) to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Existentialism is portrayed in the Death of Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, being killed by a rival faction, which creates another branch of Islam--The Shi'a or Shiites. Their devout love for Hussein is borne of his suffering, which leads me to a commonly understood thesis. . . .Perhaps there can be no religion without suffering of a martyr or as Paul said "no remission of sins without the shedding of blood."

So then, to say that your life is existential means to some degree you accept that you are stuck with the cards you've been dealt. From my point of view, some of that is true and some of it isn't. Maybe some of you can recall instances where you have "paid your dues" in painfully attempting to achieve happiness. I've heard the expression: "It was just not meant to be," from the mixed lament of people I've encountered over the years. That is an existential acceptance of destiny. The expression may not be absolute verity.

Destiny may indeed be a two sided dynamic like everything else in nature. The antithetical aspect of destiny could well be that destiny itself is an illusion, that you always have a chance to contemplate and effect a fortunate outcome, against all surmountable or even insurmountable odds. Then there is a religious assertion out of the east that declares that The Almighty has pre-existent knowledge of everything that will occur. That may indeed be true but this essay cannot prove the existence of a deity although I secretly hope that the pre-existent knowledge for my life will spare me and you, too many more vicissitudes.

II

G.I. Gurdjieff, my other favorite philosopher and mystic talks about the value of "conscious suffering" which makes it easier to understand one's immediate suffering or even he need to do so. Gurdjieff's concept relates to your knowing that you are going through a grind, like working on a degree for instance, in order to achieve some noble end. While I practice Bach Fugue in A minor on guitar, there is a bit of suffering that I experience that is indeed conscious and necessary. This particular suffering leads to the happiness of playing the music with the Chinese expression: "double happy" manifesting when people applaud months later.

Sometimes, more often than not, I consciously suffer through a given student's music lesson if the pupil has not practiced or has annoying habits like playing staccato (short, choppy) instead of Legato (smooth, connected). Some students will do the opposite of what I ask, just to annoy me. Some of them don't practice ,especially the adults, so they can torture me for the money. Of course the rewards are immeasurable if I am able to effect change in the student and bring them to a heretofore, unimaginable level of competence which in turn elevates my confidence in my teaching skills.

Here is the down side: If the students get it wrong again and again, it ruins my enjoyment of music and I begin to suffer unconsciously, brood and pout out of dissatisfaction with something that may never change. In this case, to be happy, I take a break from teaching but then suffer from the missed income.

Suffering "unconsciously" is a theme that we will explore from Bertrand Russell's point of view. My humble essay is not a treatise on suffering but I must explore extremes and use the Kantian models of: Thesis -what we say is true; Antithesis -the opposite view; and Synthesis -what we make of it all by weighing those extremes, in an effort to offer you as many little nuggets as possible. For a simpler answer, as I'm brooding some 35 years ago, I asked my sainted grandfather T.J. Flanagan .

"Poppa, why is life so hard?"
"It wouldn't be happy otherwise," he answered, immediately.

III

In the first chapter of The Conquest of Happiness, Mr. Russell asks "What makes people unhappy." We can make broad strokes by turning on the news or reading articles on the Internet to see what kind of trouble civilization has gotten itself into. Russell says that the "symptoms of excessive concentration, lack of interest in anything but the struggle, the incapacity for play, and disinterest in others are signs of an intrinsic (pure) unhappiness for which there may be no direct cause."(Russell, 15)

It is this that apparently afflicts us beside what is on the list beneath our view-the list that resides in our unconscious where outer world misery reflects upon our inner mirror without our permission. Our unhappiness can be therefore unconscious. We are all familiar with the model of "I don't feel so good but I can't put my finger on it," or telling ourselves "You felt good a minute ago, so now what's up with this?" Let's first assume that the people experiencing these models have no somatic (physical) basis for mental illness and we simply suffer from a low adjustment quotient.

Serious behavioral problems should be referred to the pros. My essay is just for those of us who become disappointed, maladjusted, and pout inordinately as a result of Jefferson's pursuit of happiness. We intend to not set ourselves up for disappointment and sabotage relationships be they professional or otherwise. We intend to adjust easier, to unpleasant but manageable surprises without compromising our person hood and esteem. Most of all we intend to have reasons to smile more. We intend to love our lives. Can you say that to yourself and mean it?

Try it out loud: "I Intend To Love My Life." Can you discuss with yourself what that means although creditors are calling you at work, your son is in jail and the dish ran away with the spoon?

In regards to unconscious unhappiness Mr. Russell tells us that our reason for unhappiness " lies in the social system and partly in individual psychology which of course is itself, to a considerable extent, a product of the social system required to promote happiness" (Russell, 16).

The social system provides the feedback loop that perpetuates itself as far as our expectations are concerned when we seek to get our happiness from our interaction with people and institutions from whom and from which, we require that they make us happy. Many of us dress, buy cars, boats, homes and all the rest--for others to enjoy or envy. If you were stranded on a desert island for ten years alone; would you shave, comb your hair, or even dress at all? I know, you are not on a desert island, which is precisely my point. If your personal psychology, meaning the way you predict and control your behavior, is totally a product of the social system then you are not you yet.

Gurdjieff told P.D. Ouspensky on their first meeting that everyone is asleep.. I know what it is like to wake up, so much so that I have to quell my enthusiasm if I have no way to express the new me. Are you awake?How do you know? Are those good questions?

Now if you can, write down the people (loved ones, friends, dogs, associates) that make you happy-even if they give you just a joke to make you laugh now and again. Don't set the standards too high such that you have no one to list. It may be a stranger you met three days ago that made you see the absurdity of some aspect of life.

As for institutions, it may be a mosque, church, synagogue, temple, club, a music group or some organization you send money to for starving children. Add as much to the plus column as you can. Go ahead, try it now. If you really want to get good at it, go buy a little pad and call it your "Oh Goody" book, writing the title on the outside. On the inside, list every good thing that happens throughout a given day. At the proverbial end of the day--look and see what you have, in spite of the accompanying vicissitudes. Gurdjieff said that for every good road, there is a bad one running right next to it. It doesn't mean you will run off of the good road and end up on the bad one.

I've got another Inscript for you. This one is a talisman for good luck. Print this one and watch what happens.

-Anticipate The Good Today-

You'll find that even the bad is good. Just this afternoon a gig is canceled at the last minute, fifteen minutes prior to show time because too many reservations were canceled at the restaurant. I am out of the money on one hand but I will miss the jolts of second hand smoke to be had around the venue. Second hand smoke causes me to wheeze when I sleep. The more I'm away from it, the better I breathe. I can make money next week. Let me breath this week. It's good. I anticipate that something good will happen today too. Remember, this is a treatise on how to be happy. First you have to intend to be so and increase your expectations of it.

IV

Here is a fascinating concept: Gurdjieff's student, P. D. Ouspensky wrote of the possibility of reincarnating into the past. Imagine that. We think that everything moves forward in time otherwise we have a hard time thinking that P. D. is serious. I take it another way, combining Gurdjieff's concept of "re-seeing."

Straight to the chase: If you have the capacity to look back at a past event in your life and see it from a different point of view or "see a thing
clearly" as Dostoevsky recommends in "Notes From The Underground," you may be able to get past a trauma that is keeping you unconsciously unhappy. You may be witnessing it incorrectly in your memory when something else altogether may have happened. Call it a rationale if you must but if you can mentally reincarnate back to those events, live through them again and see how necessary and purposeful some of it may have been, then you may be able to not only forgive yourself, but let yourself so completely off the hook, that you can go on and live, think about something else and maybe smile more. Which leads me to a concept from Tai Chi referred to as "Smile Down."

When you lay down to sleep, breathe deeply and smile. Send this smile down into your body as you exhale. The reason it works is not only do to "chi" distribution but. . .your hypothalamus (in your brain) is an alchemist who transmutes your thoughts and moods into chemicals then sends them out to all of your cells. I hope these recommendations work out for you.

Intend to Love Your Life . . . .Anticipate The Good Today.

References: Bertrand Russell "The Conquest of Happiness" (W.W.Norton and Company 1996)
P. D. Ouspensky "In Search of The Miraculous" (Harcourt Inc. 2001)
C.S Knott "Teachings of Gurdjieff": A Pupil's Journal (Arkana)
Fyodor Dostoevsky "Notes From The Underground" (Plain Label Books)