"The coin of health has illness on the other side. The currency of joy has sorrow on the reverse. Turn the coin of serenity and there is the stamp of worry. You always have to take what is underneath and reckon with that too. Happiness rests on sorrow, life upon death, calm upon turmoil. Each day has its night." -- Jacob Rudin
The Philosophical Setting
God bless America. I mean that with all sincerity. We are a nation of hopefuls and always have been.
We march on Washington. We cure diseases that have wracked humanity for eons. We break records and run faster-than-four-minute miles. We split atoms and conquer space. We manifest our destinies and defy the presence of gorges, rivers and mountains that threaten to block our collective will.
In our relatively short time on earth, this nation has spawned more Utopian societies and splinter religions promising immediate deliverance than any other culture in history.
We not only hope. We demand. And we do not take "no" for an answer. If we have to move mountains, we move them even if we have to do it one truck load at a time. If we have to get across enemy lines, we build stealth aircraft. We believe that nothing can stop us but ourselves.
This, in and of itself, is not a consciousness unique to our time. There have been other warrior nations and empires that have been as bold and clever as we have. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Romans have all forged paths through impossibly dense forests and forbidding deserts both concretely and metaphorically.
What is unique to modern America is that our hopefulness comes with a price tag that no other culture has ever been willing to pay. It comes at the expense of reality and the medium of exchange is our spirit.
We want to be happy. We want to be healthy. We want to be wealthy. And, I believe, this "wanting" is only natural. What is not is that we want to be wealthy without having to work all that hard or study all that much. We want to be healthy without having to eat well, sleep through the night or exercise regularly. We want happiness and love and contentment without ever having to suffer or sacrifice. And we want it now.
Of the three "wants," the third is the most troubling and potentially poses the most subtle danger of our time. The first two (health and wealth) are primarily issues of entitlement. The third want -- to be happy -- is really a deeply ingrained though fairly modern psychic need. We need to be happy at the expense of what we know to be true. We need it so badly that we are forced to deny the obvious inevitability of suffering, rendering it not only meaningless but the mark of a "loser."
A friend of mine had a conversation with a young man that made this version of "happiness" starkly clear. After the young man praised a mutual acquaintance for buying a high-end television he could barely afford, my friend said to him, "I'd rather have nothing and be loved."
To which the young man responded, "That's just loser talk."
You can see this in New Age theology a great deal, where even sickness, injury, and tragedies are by definition self-inflicted and reveal an error in our core programming. In that philosophy, which has permeated the media and popular thinking, the mystery of the universe is easily explainable: We are responsible for everything that happens to us and around us. Happiness, abundance, good health -- all these things are seen as our birthrights. So, if we are suffering, if our loved ones are suffering, well, that just means we're writing bad scripts for our lives. Or worse. We're just defective.
In some ways it is a uniquely American way of nipping God in His Achilles' heel. It says that if there is a God, then everything has to be good all the time. Evil cannot exist. Because Americans are basically a religious people, for us not to disavow God, we must disavow evil, and by extension, disavow suffering. This is dangerous because in order to do this, in order to deny the value and meaning of suffering, in order to be able to say to someone, "If you're not happy or successful something is wrong with you," we have to deny the only real hope we ever had: our souls.
The Soul as Stepchild
Now, this, this societal disavowal of eternity is a new development. At no other time in recorded history has an entire culture determined that life was spiritless, that animal and plant life, no less human life, was a random amalgam of rotating particles, a genetic ratatouille, nothing more, nothing less. It is true, as Benjamin Wiker pointed out in his book "Moral Darwinism," that materialism can be traced back to Epicurus. And it is also true that Lucretius, one of his followers, actually spoke of the world being spiritless, meaningless particulate. But that was not a widespread, embedded cultural gestalt. In the modern West our thoughts are seen as merely the empirical product of impersonal neuronal exchanges, our most intimate loves a function of anonymous hormonal cascades, our pains and our longings a problem of poor programming. And this viewpoint pervades society from the top of the ivory tower to the bottom.
In this modern, medical view of ourselves and the world in which we live, we are our bodies. We are material. As such our only legitimate concerns are the prolongation of bodily life and the feeding of bodily desire. There is no great glory in honor, no lofty sentiment or everlasting virtue in friendship, no reason to sacrifice life or limb for another, no eternity and no personal meaning in existence. There is only the gaping maw of ambition, aggression and hunger. What else is there? What else matters in a material world but matter?
Logically, not much.
It is no wonder that we are so busy with facelifts, implants, and Viagra™. It is no wonder we worry more about the accumulation of goods than we do about relationships. It is no wonder we fret more about getting our 15 minutes of fame than about giving love. Given our materialism, the fear, the terror, really, of standing face to face with evil, of even being in the same room as suffering makes a great deal of sense. If we are, in fact, our bodies and nothing but our bodies we must not only deny suffering, we must deny death itself because there is nothing for us beyond that. And if we deny death, we must deny life. It is a vicious cycle, an ouroboros committed only to its own continuity.
Even those arenas in which one would expect to find the greatest sense of spirituality and the deepest understanding of suffering it has been modernized and distorted. Of all the scriptures in the Bible, it seems that no matter what channel you turn to the message of the modern Evangelical movement ("The Prosperity Gospel") is the same as corporate America: Ask and ye shall receive. It is the modern, media spin on the Doctrine of the Elect and Predestination: How do we know you have found God's favor? Because you're successful. How do you get to be successful? By God's favor.
So, the goal is to be successful, to acquire wealth, prestige and power. Somewhere along the line even the ministers have forgotten:
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
For the Love of a Dog
In writing this article, I had to ask myself: Why shouldn't I avoid suffering? What's in it for me, for anyone? It's a fair question. And the answer I came up with was this: By being present for suffering, we become present for the whole of life, not just the niceties. And the reward is nothing less than the ability to love fully. This is not a philosophical point. It is a most pragmatic, palpable benefit and the only one that really means anything after all. When I think of all the things I did as a young adult to make myself "happy," all the risks I took, all the hurt I created in myself and others -- all in the name of happiness, I literally shudder. I rarely actually felt happy and almost never felt deep love. The mantra "whatever makes you happy" ran my life but gave me nothing but heartache.
I am reminded of a book C.S. Lewis wrote ("The Four Loves") in which he said (and I paraphrase): If you would love you would suffer. We cannot even love a dog without at one point or another feeling the pain of loss, assuming we outlive the dog. The greatest of all things -- love -- is itself most intimately bound with suffering. It is a poignant irony, I think. In our attempt to avoid suffering, we cut ourselves off from the one thing that can mitigate it: each other.
One of my dogs, Ty, died about a couple of years ago. Of our four dogs, Ty was the one most closely bonded to me. I found him when I volunteered at a shelter, a simple act of kindness he apparently never forgot. He followed me around from room to room, happy to be anywhere in my vicinity, overjoyed at my return even from the bathroom. When he got sick, I took care of him. I knew what was coming. I knew that inevitably I would feel the pain of his loss. Would I, should I have not loved him? Should I have stopped caring for him?
This is what Pope Benedict had to say when asked a similar question:
Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain. When we know that the way of love -- this exodus, this going out of oneself -- is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.
Follow Judith Acosta on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VerbalFirstAid
Can Money Buy Happiness?: Scientific American
The American Dream: Happiness, Say Teens
What Does Happiness Mean? : Lifestyle :: American Express OPEN Forum
Thank you for this article.
Read Barbara's Ehreinreich's "Bright-Sided".
It seems they have the support of those who want the USA to rule the World.
I know some of his comments are based on our Family History with a renter refusing to pay rent. The County refused to evict them because they has no where to put such a large Family. So his grandfather had lost 1000's and almost went Bankrupt. Then one property I own now a County refuses to allow me to open a Business there even though a Business had operated for 30 year before I bought the property.
But it made me think when was the last time I had know happiness in my life. Over 38 years ago in Thailand on leave from the Marine Corp I rented a motorcycle and just traveled around seeing different small Villages and the Buddhist Temples with kids playing soccer. That one week in 38 years ago and I do not have a memory of being happy as a kid. Seems out whole Family had a holes ripped in it from the Law Enforcements lack of Law Enforcement in Unicoi, Tennessee.
The Sheriff danced for the wealthy man dad sold it to.
For many years, I considered myself "protected" because no one I knew and loved had died. I even told a few friends that being my friend was a good way for them to stay healthy! :) I was joking, of course, but statistically, I *was* rather at the far end of the curve. I was thankful for this, but I never thought I *deserved* my statistical fluke in any way, and I never thought it would last forever. I DID worry that when (not if) deep grief came into my life, I would not be able to handle it.
I'm 62 now, and still a bit of a fluke. I have lost, and grieved for, pets. My grandparents died, and I did lose my father fifteen years ago, and still miss him. I've only suffered through the loss of one close friend, though. But I know this will not always be true. My husband is nine years older than I am, and with a somewhat iffy heart. And chance can always intervene; my healthy grown children could be in an accident, or an earthquake, or... (and Or and Or and Or.)
But while I haven't had to deal much with this part of life, I do know it's a part. I've known lesser suffering, and ache for friends who suffer. But while I'm often not *happy* I've learned to know, and cherish, joy. Joy goes on, even when one is unhappy.
Wonderful article. Thanks again.
And like I tried to remind someone else (just a bit below), everyone really does have suffering. Buddha was right. There is no getting away from it. And there's no need to measure it by some gauge or ruler of "who's suffered most." That is pointless. Pain is pain. And when it's your pain, it hurts.
Thank you so much, Kate, for sharing. I appreciate your candor.
Others have failed us also. Western medicine has tried to ignore eastern medicine for centuries and has used all sorts of economic practices to minimize the application of eastern medicine. The cost of western healthcare, the ineffectiveness of drugs to cure problems, and the inefficiency of psychological counselling are making ignoring eastern practices more impossible every day.
Energy work has even been abused by those who say we can have or do anything by setting our intention. This is only partially true because they don't teach the negative energy result of selfishness.
Buddhism may have many more answers than western religions, but I think that it is also helpful to try to understand the energy work that goes behind the principals. Reiki, which was created by a Buddhist, uses the principals of Not worrying or being angry, but being grateful, productive and kind. Worry and anger are simply bad energy that interfers with healtful energy flow. Gratitude, productivity and kindness create positive energy connections.
I think that rather than focus on the results that we produce, happiness, wealth, health,..., it is more useful to focus on what produces those results, not just on a religious or philosophical level, but also on the energetic level. If someone is being selfish, it is better to be kind to them, or is it better to not be kind and teach them that selfishness is unproductive. The lack of kindness maybe more likely to impress them.
Really, really true. You can't "energize" your way up spiritually if you keep reaching down.
Well said.
As lovely as the article was on the first read, it is even more so on the second read because of its depth.
I made a reference to energy in a response below because I try to look at life in those terms as a relatively new energy healer. It is possible that the energetic connections between beings, and even things, are what gives life its greatest meaning.
The basis of energy healing is that life depends upon energy flow, primarily electromagnetic, in the form of ions, charged particles, and the energy fields that form around that flow. The fields extend beyond the body and interact with the energy fields of others. The energy fields are controlled by a spectrum of mental states, from simple intent, emotions, philosophy, spirituality and religion. Love is one of the greatest controllers for linking beings via their energy fields. I suggest that Ty and you may have been very well attuned to each other and he completely appreciated your love. I like to think that the energy of our departed loved ones remain with us.
I think that some religions have failed us by not disclosing the fact that they use energy practices and by not teaching those energy practices. Instead, those secret practices are used for manipulating followers for competitive reasons. When people are praying together to the same god they are at least connecting to each others energy, thus the religious experience.
I just think that energy work is very close to our existance, closer than religion, and that it should be studied and practiced much more than it is. The individual learning and growth potential is unfathomable.
I learned Tong Ren healing about 8 years ago and quickly grew out of any discomfort with being around seriously ill people because it gave me the ability to substantively help them. The part time palliative care that I have given to several people using Tong Ren was much more effective that what I did while watching my father pass before I learned Tong Ren.
Energy work is so close to our existance that the mere practice of it in healing others can help the healer in the same way that yoga and tai chi helps practitioners.
The effect goes beyond physical problems and also provides mental improvement.
If anyone is curious, group Tong Ren sessions can be viewed live at www.tongrenstation.com. The best sessions are Monday and Wednesday at 5 pm EST and Saturday at 5:30 pm EST.
And I am proud that I have learned a lot about me, and grown a lot as a person, from these
very painful experiences