Today I want to talk a bit about happiness;
Q: What does it mean to be happy?
Q: Why do we wish to be happy?
Q: How does one achieve happiness?
Aristotle was hardly a Buddhist, but his ideas about happiness are similar in many ways to Buddhist ones. First, Aristotle says that he have to be clear about what we mean when we talk about happiness. When people say someone is happy, they often are referring to a fleeting emotional state of joy or elation - think about what a kid expresses when you give her a lollipop. We can call this happiness, but it's a relatively trivial kind of happiness. So Aristotle uses the Greek word Eudaimonea to make himself more clear. Eudaimonea literally means happiness, but it comes with the connotation of long term, reflective happiness - think about the satisfaction you might feel when you are 80 years old and look back on your life. If you can say, "That was a life well lived - I wouldn't change a thing," then you are happy in a very different way than the kid with the lollipop. If we are looking for a goal, it should be Eudaimonea and not the trivial happiness of elation, since clearly the former is more important than the latter. Who would trade true peace of mind for a momentary sense of elation?
For Aristotle, becoming happy is THE goal of all human activity. That doesn't mean that everything I do makes me happy, but that everything I do is done because I think it will make me happy. I may often act without thinking or not think clearly enough to see where my true interests lie and thus end up being unhappy, but my intent is always to become happy. This is a crucial insight for Aristotle, since he thinks that most people, most of the time, don't realize this and thus act in ways which increase their short term (trivial) happiness while costing them long term eudaimonea. To drive home the point that we are all ultimately striving to attain eudaimonea, whatever we may say we are doing, he considers three alternate goals which are just as popular today as they were in 400 BC: making lots of money, becoming famous and respected, and experiencing lots of physical pleasure.
Why do people strive so hard to accumulate money? There is nothing intrinsically valuable about money - if you think about it, you quickly realize that money is just a concept and has no value at all other than what people choose to give it. So if money is valuable, it's because many people seek to have it, which must mean they think getting a bunch of money is a good goal to set themselves. For example, why do so many college students seek majors with high starting salaries after graduation? It's because, whether they think about it explicitly or not, they believe that making a lot of money will make them happy. But if they really reflect on what's important, they have to admit that happiness trumps money. Suppose I offer you a choice: you can have $1 billion, tax free, or a life of true happiness and contentment - which do you take? Aristotle would say you would be foolish to choose money over happiness and this shows that money is sought merely as a means to an end (the end being happiness), while happiness is an end in itself. The same could be said about becoming famous and respected or having pleasurable experiences. We do these, if we are honest with ourselves, because we think they will make us happy. But we should take true happiness, if it were offered, over these any day. We know, deep in our heart of hearts, that pursuing money and fame and pleasure is not really what's important, but we let social convention and habit lead us to pursue these as if they were the most important things in the world.
The trick is to always keep in mind what is most important and let this knowledge actually guide our decision making rather than merely paying it lip service. How many times have you heard someone say something like, "Yeah, of course money is not the most important thing - but it sure is nice to have." The implication is something like this: "Money is not the most important thing, but I am going to pursue it as if it were." This might be fine if getting a lot of money were actually a reliable way of becoming happy, but it's not really. This is another thing we all know in our hearts but don't always factor into our decisions. We know intellectually that there are lots of rich, famous people who experience lots of physical pleasures and yet are utterly miserable. Somehow we convince ourselves that if we could attain the material good that they have, then we would be different. We would be happy. But is there really any good evidence that this is true?
Interestingly, the evidence suggests just the opposite. Psychologists have lately begun doing research on what makes people happy (in the new field of positive psychology). If you track college students from the time they enter college until 30 years after graduation, you can find out what actually makes them happy. It turns out that money is not really important. To be more specific, if you have very, very little money (like below the poverty line) it's hard to be happy. But the converse - that having lots of money makes you really happy - is simply not true. Beyond the poverty threshold, the amount of money you have doesn't matter - people who make $10 million a year are no more happy statistically than people who make $20,000 a year. What does truly matter are 1) a good relationship with your family, 2) having good friends, 3) your health and 4) enjoying the job you do. So if you are rational about how you seek happiness, you should spend far less time thinking about money and fame and all that and far more time working on your relationships, staying healthy, and trying to make sure you get a job you love. But how many people actually do this? How many of you have really thought carefully about what it is you want to do after graduation and whether it will actually make you happy? In my experience as an advisor, I find that most students don't think much beyond what they can make or what their parents want them to do. Many don't think about their careers at all, and just assume that their major will somehow land them a position they will find personally rewarding without even having a clear idea of what such a job would look like. This just shows that people are not good at being rational, even when the stakes are clearly high - in this case, their long term happiness.
Or here is another example: we all know, rationally, that we should eat better than we do. We have had solid evidence for many years that the American diet is terribly unhealthy and is slowly killing us with epidemic levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Yet how many of us have really made an effort to find out what is healthy to eat and change our diets accordingly. Is it truly rational to favor the fleeting pleasure you get out of a double cheeseburger over your long term health? Of course, not, yet that is precisely what most of us do. Incidentally, if you want a really good book on the science of nutrition, you should read The China Study by Colin Campbell.
The problem is that it's hard to make yourself act on this sort of analysis, even if you admit it makes perfect sense. Later we will talk about Buddhist techniques designed to help motivate you to act in the proper way, but let's look at what Aristotle had to say about the motivational problem. For Aristotle, since we all seek happiness and we understand that most people are bad at attaining happiness, we should be very careful about the choices we make. In other words, we need to be rational and make careful decisions about our lives, not simply respond to emotional whims or go along with what other people say. The difficulty is that reason is not the only force we have to deal with in our psychology. Aristotle (and Plato before him) put this in the form of a famous analogy: the human mind is like a chariot. The horses are the passions (emotions) and the appetites (instincts), while the charioteer represents reason. There is nothing wrong with the passions and appetites, since without them the chariot would never move. On the other hand, if the charioteer allows the horses to do as they wish, not only will he not win the race, but he is likely to end up face down in the dirt with his chariot on top of him. The trick of being a good charioteer is thus to keep an eye on the ultimate goal and manage the horses' efforts in such a way that you achieve that goal. In other words, your reason should always be in overall control. You do this, according to Aristotle, by diligently working to develop the right character. You think carefully about how best to act and then you force yourself to do the rational thing over and over until it becomes second nature to you. By developing the right mental habits, you take what initially involved a lot of rational thought and transform it into something that is more like instinct. Buddhists agree with Aristotle about the ultimate goal in life being happiness (though they would extend this to include the happiness of other sentient beings) and also about the importance of maintaining rational control at all times.
Right, so back to work: for today, we are going to move our meditation up to 20 minutes per session, where it will stay for the rest of the semester. This is the minimum time you need to meditate in order to do serious work. 30 minutes is much better, but for some people this is a challenge. In the end, I decided that I would rather you have plenty of time to get comfortable with 20 minute sessions than try to push things and have people straining to get through 30 minutes. Of course, you should feel free to push the time up in your own sessions between classes if you feel comfortable with that. When you get to the point where you can meditate for one hour and really enjoy the experience, you will know that you have really learned something, but this will take far longer to achieve than we have with each other this semester!
So today we add one final phase to the breathing concentrative technique we have been using. The first 15 minutes are unchanged: count at the beginning of each breath, then count at the end of each breath, then no counting at all. During the final 5 minutes, you are to focus your attention on the tips of your nostrils, where the breath first enters (leaves) the body. You will find that this is relatively easy when you are breathing in, because you will feel a cool sensation. However, as you will soon discover, the sensations are much more subtle when you are breathing out. Thus, you will need to maintain your focus carefully. As with everything else, the precise area of your body you concentrate on is arbitrary - if you prefer, you could concentrate on the center of your forehead or whatever. It is interesting to see how the choice of body part affects the meditation experience, but I will have to let you discover all that on your own time...:)