happiness and unhappiness

What would a "happy" life look like for me?

I'm not sure but I'm probably living it.

All of life is a tension of opposites, is it not? Happiness exists only in contradistinction to its opposite, unhappiness (or misery or sorrow or suffering). Only when the opposites are in fairly close proximity do we feel the intensity of one or the other. If you've had a biopsy for a suspected cancer, you may be waiting for the result with feelings of anxiety, even dread. When it comes back negative, you feel a rush of relief and joy. For a while, life seems rich and wonderful--a gift. But the intensity of contrast wears off as a function of time, and you return to your previous state of tension along the happiness-unhappiness axis.

Writers, like other people, tend to measure success in terms of social rewards such as prestige and earnings. But if an intelligent, objective person looks at those rewards carefully, there is not much to them. I think about, say, Conrad Black, the once-Canadian tycoon now languishing in hoosegow in Florida. Wealthy, prominent, and successful by just about any social yardstick except his own, he sought, Gatsby-like, to attain to some limit or singularity of social success and glamor, to "suck on the pap of wonder" (I think those were Fitzgerald's words) by becoming a British lord and joining the "real" nobility.

It was not to be. Or rather, it was--but then ended, spectacularly and suddenly, generating a contrast-experience in the downward direction.

The psychologist Victor Frankl says that life does not provide the answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. Our lives, our living situations, are, basically, our answer--so far--to the questions put to us by life. Each problem or dilemma in life is another question, and our response is our answer to that question.

Whatever my feelings about toiling in obscurity, this toil and this obscurity are the result of choices I have made--my answers to the questions set by my life. If I don't like that, then I have a new question to answer. But my Buddhist training tells me to have caution. The restless search for a better deal in life is the hallmark of the human realm, and is itself a manifestation of suffering--of living in samsara.

The best definition of samsara that I've come across is "wanting things to be other than they are". Here's something to try: if you find yourself wishing things were other than they are, take a deliberate break from that way of thinking. For a few moments, just accept the way things are and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice then how your mind feels. To the extent that you can do this, you have had a taste of nirvana.

For me, to be in a state of tension between happiness and unhappiness is the way things are. Well, why not?

do your own thing

Last night: half a Sleep Aid, followed by a much better night's sleep. Do I move thus down the treacherous slope of drug dependency, as so many artists (and others) have before me?

What a difference to my outlook it makes, though. Instead of being buffeted by feelings of helplessness, inadequacy, pessimism, and guilt, I feel a kind of composure and even enthusiasm for my life and its quirks--warts and all, you might say.

Apart from the Sleep Aid, another source of uplift yesterday was reading further into Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow. This book came out in 1962 as a follow-up to his seminal Motivation and Personality, published in 1954 (a copy of which is now winging its way to me via the mail). It's actually a compilation of lectures on various aspects of his psychological thinking, fleshing out and extending some ideas from the earlier work. My copy, a 1968 Insight paperback, is in bad shape--two edges have been blackened with felt pen in an effort to obliterate the name of a previous owner, a certain Kratz; and the glue on the spine has turned brittle so that the pages snap away from it as I turn them--indeed the worst of any book I've bought online, such that I think the seller misrepresented its condition and should not have offered it sight unseen. But the content is excellent, and I'm drinking it in avidly.

"What makes people neurotic?" With this question Maslow launches chapter 3, "Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation". He sketches in the answer he found:

My answer was that neurosis seemed at its core, and in its beginning, to be a deficiency disease, born out of being deprived of certain satisfactions which I called needs in the same sense that water and amino acids and calcium are needs, namely that their absence produces illness. Most neuroses involved, along with other complex determinants, ungratified wishes for safety, for belongingness and identification, for close love relationships, and for respect and prestige. When these deficiencies were eliminated, sicknesses tended to disappear.

Maslow does not use the word need to point vaguely at our various wishes, hopes, demands, or cravings. Rather, it points to a specific thing the lack of which results in characteristic types of illness, in exactly the same way that a lack of water, vitamin C, or calcium leads to characteristic illness in the body. We need water, vitamin C, and calcium in order to be healthy; the Buddha and Jesus also needed them. Maslow says we also need safety, belonging, love, and respect in order to be healthy. If these needs aren't met, then we develop deficiency syndromes which broadly can be called the neuroses.

When we lack any of these things, they motivate our behavior. If we're not loved, then our lives become shaped by that lack, how we seek to fill the void, or compensate for not having it.

But these "deficiency needs" are not the whole story. When they're all satisfied, we don't simply come to rest and do nothing. Rather, a new set of motivations or needs opens up: what Maslow calls the "being needs"--the drive for self-actualization. These needs are manifested by psychologically healthy people, and they are never gratified in the sense of "plugging a hole", as are the deficiency needs. With being-needs, the more gratified they are, the more intensely the need is felt, and the more it serves as motivation to go further with it.

In addition, while the deficiency needs are generic, or "species needs", in the sense that they are needed by everyone just by virtue of being a human being, the being-needs are highly individual; their exact direction varies according to the talents, interests, and vocation of the specific person. With the being-needs, it's really different strokes for different folks. You might be fulfilled by tightrope-walking across a canyon; I might be fulfilled by designing origami airplanes. These interests arise from the peculiarities of our individual natures.

Maslow goes on to list 13 characteristics of psychologically healthy people--those who have (more or less) gratified their "D-needs" and are attending to their "B-needs":

1) Superior perception of reality.

2) Increased acceptance of self, of others, and of nature.

3) Increased spontaneity.

4) Increase in problem-centering.

5) Increased detachment and desire for privacy.

6) Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.

7) Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.

8) Higher frequency of peak experiences.

9) Increased identification with the human species.

10) Changed (improved) interperonal relations.

11) More democratic character structure.

12) Greatly increased creativeness.

13) Certain changes in the value system.


Here is a cornucopia of things to think about. I'll single out three items from the list: spontaneity, privacy, and resistance to enculturation. Briefly put, the healthy person, even while feeling more fellowship with the human race as a whole, seeks autonomy from it in order to pursue his own interests and passions. The healthy person, recognizing both the uniqueness and the validity of his particular interests, engages with them fully and unapologetically, while acknowledging and appreciating the right of everyone else to do the same.

Sounds good to me. It puts me in mind of a quote attributed to Einstein that I found recently:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Summing up: My worries and angst are symptoms of neurosis which is the product of certain deficiencies. The inspiration, interest, and passion I feel for working on my creative projects, regardless of how strange, implausible, or irrelevant they may seem from a culturally normal perspective, are signs of mental health--following the path of self-actualization.

I do have to see to my deficiencies. But never should I stop actualizing myself!

And friends, that goes for all of us. Do your own thing, and I'll do mine.

in the pre-predawn

Once again sleeplessness drove me from bed, this time at about 4:00, into the cold darkness of the house. It was too late for whisky so I poured myself a glass of cranberry juice, twisted on the knobs for our electric heat (–2° C outside), pulled the living-room furniture back into its regular daytime configuration (seating not aimed at the TV), opened up Asimov's Guide to the Bible (Old Testament), and started reading.

I'd woken at around 2:45. By 4:00 I could tell that my racing thoughts would lead me only further into wakefulness. Might as well get up and do something productive.

And it was productive. While my mind is engaged with something to do, it is not distracted by worries and problems. I read up on Exodus, highlighting as I went.

Is there any use knowing things about Exodus? Isaac Asimov must have thought so. He wrote two good-sized guides to the Bible, even though he was a chemist (I think) by training and a sci-fi author by avocation. His interests were truly wide-ranging, and for that reason alone I like him and am inclined to trust him. His tone is always interested, balanced; skeptical but also open-minded--a brace of mental qualities that I particularly admire and regard as traits of the greatest minds. Without apparent effort, he brings tremendous erudition to any topic, seamlessly working all kinds of nuggets of otherwise hard-to-find information into his exposition. Asimov's prose style itself is a model of simplicity and clarity.

An hour and a quarter (and two glasses of cranberry juice) later, I was feeling the chill, and my eyes were feeling gritty and unrested. I stalked back up to bed and crawled in to warm up and rest my eyes for the last 15 minutes before the alarm went off and it was time to formally start the day.

megaphobia

I'm an insomniac.

In truth, I'm not sure when one becomes entitled to use that label--how many wakeful nights qualify you?

Certainly this last one was wakeful. I woke around 1:30 and felt my mind drawn into the vortex of concern. By 2:30 I knew it was hopeless. I donned the sweats I'd left on the chair against this likelihood, and took myself downstairs to read. I cranked on the heat in the living-room, poured myself a scotch, opened up Asimov's Guide to the Old Testament, and got highlighting.

With my mind drawn to issues other than my own life, fatigue and befuddlement set in. But I could tell there was still a sharp edge in it. I returned to bed at around 4:00 to wait out the time till the 5:30 alarm. Then: up and at 'em!

It's not unrelated to my post yesterday about Pluto and Saturn. One of the points that caught my attention while I was typing notes from Howard Sasportas's The Gods of Change was a reference to Abraham Maslow's concept of "the Jonah complex". This was the term he gave to the fear of one's own destiny or calling--the principal obstacle to self-actualization. Sasportas continues:

Why should we fear our own greatness? One reason is a fear of responsibility. If we fully acknowledged our potential talents, we would have to shoulder the burden of doing something to develop them. Another reason for denying our full potentiality might be the fear of the power it would give us. We wouldn't be able to be "little" anymore. Would we use our power wisely, or would we mishandle it? Or maybe we are afraid that if we were truly in touch with living our greatness, other people would be envious and resentful of our achievements. Transiting Pluto, in making us more aware of what is buried in us, may ask that we confront these fears in order to grow into the self that we truly are.

Jonah (whose name means "dove"), ordered by Yahweh to prophesy to Nineveh (capital of Assyria), tries to dodge the task, catching a boat to Tarshish. A violent storm comes up, and the sailors, casting lots to discover the cause, find out that it is Jonah. Jonah confesses that this is the case, and that the sea will calm if he is thrown overboard. Jonah would rather die than face his mission. The sailors, in desperation, take his advice and chuck him over. He is swallowed by a "great fish" and remains in its belly for three days before being vomited ashore, safe and sound.

I'm not sure what I think of the Jonah complex, but I know it relates to me, because I felt a cold finger move into my core when I read about it.

One decision I came to was to read some Maslow. I ordered a book by him yesterday.

Fear of one's own greatness. Hmm...how about megaphobia? Yes: I offer that term to psychology--as well as a basket of symptoms.