Friday, June 26, 2009

In praise of non-happiness

I have written a little about this, and have talked about this quite a bit with friends, but I personally believe that depression has an important role to play in our lives and that holding up "perma-happy" as the ultimate state-of-mind to be in is a mistake modern society is increasingly making.

Periods of non-happiness, periods of mild depression, seem to be periods in which people stop to take stock of things, ask themselves important questions (even if it is to ask questions that have no real answers), reconsider things like partner, choice of career, health, diet, leisure, family and friends. Things that are not that unimportant in the grander scheme of things : )

But society is hostile to depression or any form of non-happiness basically, telling us in many shapes and forms to 'snap back', 'stop dwelling', 'buckle up', 'think positive', 'take a pill', 'get out', 'get laid', 'get a grip', 'get help', etc.

Recently a friend-acquaintance of mine was looking a bit down. I gave him my spiel on how I felt happiness was overrated and 'the blues' were underrated. That if he was going through a tough time that is was important, the he must be at a transition point, that it must be the right time to take stock of things and decide what is important for him and, basically, that a mild depression was not only normal but would probably turn out to be very useful. Another friend who was there reacted to my words was truly surprised to hear my words. With a lot of female intelligence, she added yes, it is normal, but pointed out  that wallowing in his blues would not do much good and that asking questions without answers could put him into a dark spiral. At first, the friend in question asked us if it was really that apparent that he wasn't 'feeling 100%' and then he smiled weakly and admitted that he was trying to deal with quite a bit including the "fact" that you can't really let on to others that you aren't doing that well (especially since he works in the service industry) which is why he was trying to hide it.

While I do realize that in extreme cases depression can become severe and lead to dangerous behavior and even suicide, but I can't help to think that, except in those cases, people can be helped if we as a society except non-happiness as normal and even useful.

An interesting sidenote to all this, and the article that sparked my blog entry comes from The Economist magazine. Here is an excerpt from that article: 
Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals

CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.

Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms  could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence. 

While the article deals with teenagers, I can't help to believe that something similar is going on with adults. The kind of crises people have at 30, 40, 50 and 60, in which oddly enough adults start to act a bit like adolescents, seem similar - people 'take advantage' of these so-called crises to stop and dwell on the circumstances of their lives, to reconsider dreams (if they are attainable, if they have slipped away, if it is 'now or never', if they have to be redefined or let go of, ...) and to reevaluate goals.

So the next time someone we know seems a bit down in the dumps, let's be supportive and make our own little contribution in the name of praise for the valuable and often spiritual growth that non-happiness can bring into our lives.

Friday, June 19, 2009

[Thoughts on] The Way of the Superior Man

I have been hearing and reading about Davide Deida, the author of The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire for some time. And I must admit to a good portion of skepticism before ordering and then reading this book. I first read something substantial about him in a spiritual magazine article, in EnlightenNext (previously What is Enlightenment?). The description did not really make me want to read the book but he just kept popping up time and again in different places - with some strongly for and others passionately against - and I decided that I needed to make up my own mind on the subject.

One of the ways I personally decide the value of a book is how much I underline (or not) the chapters I have read. Looking back through the book now I see that many passages are underlined and many others have achieved 'star status' (which means that I put an exclamation point or an asterisk next to a passage to symbolize that it is worth re-reading).

I could see how a book like this could piss of many women, feminists or egalitarians of either sex and just about everyone. But, he actually has a lot of very interesting things to say. And one of the most important things he says actually deflects most of the flak he receives as a macho pig - which is that while he talks about him and her he means whoever is playing a typically masculine or feminine role in a relationship (the masculine role can be played by the woman and vice versa).

His opinions are very clear and very 'piss or get off the pot' but many of them hit home with me. Much deeper and concentrated in terms of insights than what I considered the fluff of the Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars series. I found myself rethinking many situations with past girlfriends and understanding where I and we screwed up (mostly me though), what the source of many past frustrations actually were and how to, quite easily actually, change my behavior in the future.

His book delves into a lot more than the him-her relationship decoding/coaching and includes chapters on parenting, on the value of friends and friendships, on being true to your journey, on how not to compromise for the wrong reasons, and many other subjects which, at the end of the day I could summarize as treating the much larger subject of how to live life without regretting the life lived. A subject that is truly one that we can all relate too and that resonated with me quite a bit. Like someone tapping you on the shoulder and - sometimes gently, sometimes more aggressively - saying, "hey you, be careful, make sure you are on course, otherwise the list of regrets may be long and painful to look at..."

An example, well if you ask so kindly here it is:

When you do your tasks the right way, they liberate your life energy so that you can attend to what really matters - the investigation, realization, and embodiment of true freedom. Do you even know what that means? Have you devoted yourself to finding out the deepest truth of your own existence? If, in this very moment, your tasks are not supporting your life in this way, you must drop them or change them so that they do. Otherwise, you are wasting your life.

The above is excerpted from a chapter entitled "Don't Get Lost in Tasks and Duties" which like many of the chapter titles are a quite clear summary of what is within the chapter. Other chapters are entitled, "Praise Her" (with a byline, I like, that begins 'The masculine grows by challenge, but the feminine grows by praise), "Don't Use your Family and your Life as an Excuse", "Live with an Open Heart Even if it Hurts", ...

I still haven't finished reading the book, and some of the later chapters are the more controversial, but I will probably relate my impressions on the rest of the book when I dig into the rest. Good stuff, but to be digested bit by small bit, like many the spiritual book.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Alon


Tuesday, June 9, 2009

[Notes on] Krishnamurti's As One Is

The full title of this small collection of talks (the former equivalent of today's podcast transmissions I guess) is As One Is - To Free the Mind of All Conditioning. And as a good friend recently pointed out, you don't really need to read the book once you read and understand the title...

In any case, this is definitely a key theme for Jiddu Krishnamurti (who I wrote about in a previous post) and the toughest injunction he left us: free your mind from all conditioning! To get there, it seems to me like he is asking each and every one of us to do two things - a permanent auto-psychoanalysis and meditation. The first is about trying to bring to light the different influences that may be operating on us (family, culture, religion, tradition, country, wealth, color of skin, place of birth, morals, society, peer pressure, expectations, desires, wants, needs, dogma, ideology, isms, etc. etc. etc.). Not to judge ourselves about them, but to try to understand them, not to avoid them or hide from them, just to bring them to the light and look them over so to speak.

The latter, meditation, is different (I get the impression) from the mainstream understanding of what meditation is or what it is for. I cannot profess to completely understand what he means when he says or talks about meditation, but most of all he tells us that if meditation is about taking control over the chattiness of the brain, or any other form of attempting to control, then that is not meditation and that is not helpful.

It is hard to relate here how dense his thinking is; dense in the sense that when I start to underline the hard-hitting ideas and sentences (as I am wont to do), I end up underlining almost the entire book. An example can get this point across and especially share with you the wonder that is Krishnamurti - the powerhouse spiritual thinker:
To stand alone is to be uncorrupted, innocent, free of all tradition, dogma, of opinion, of what another says, and so on. Such a mind does not seek because there is nothing to seek; being free, such a mind is completely still without a want, without movement. But this state is not to be achieved; it isn't a thing that you buy through discipline; it doesn't come into being by giving up sex, or practicing a certain yoga. It comes into being only when there is understanding of the ways of the self, the 'me', which shows itself through the conscious mind in everyday activity, and also in the unconscious. What matters is to understand for oneself, not through the direction of others, the total content of consciousness, which is conditioned, which is the result of society, of religion, of various impacts, impressions, memories--to understand all that conditioning and be free of it. But there is no "how" to be free. If you ask how to be free, you are not listening.
When you read Krishnamurti you also realize, because he tells you, that the whole notion of 'spiritual progress'--so dear to East and West--is not where it's at. By seeking with an objective in mind we are not truly seeking, we are simply continuing our conditioning... He also helped me to understand the difference between aloneness (something very positive as he explains it--reread the above quote for his understanding of the concept) and loneliness...

Another quote linked to the first one, and to show you how with Krishnamurti you feel like he sees us in all our ugly and petty habits, names them, brings them to the light and challenges us to do something about, i.e. understand them, here is another short passage on listening:
Do you really listen, or are you interpreting what is being said in terms of your own understanding? Are you capable of listening to anybody? Or is it that in the process of listening, various thoughts, opinions, arise so that your own knowledge and experience intervene between what is being said and your comprehension of it?
Using this (his) strict definition, I don't think anyone could 'throw the first stone'...

He also has a wonderful passage on the explanation between concentration (which is narrow and excludes) and attention (which is open and includes); the latter which he defines as complete awareness without interpretation. Which I guess is true listening.

And I will finish this post, although I will continue to read and review the book for another post in the near future, on his take on meditation that I alluded to at the outset of this post. As usual, beautiful, right on and so difficult to apply:
Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Self-knowledge is not according to some psychologist, book, or philosopher but it is to know oneself as one is from moment to moment. Do you understand? To know oneself is to observe what one thinks, how one feels, not just superficially, but to be deeply aware of what is without condemnation, without judgment, without evaluation or comparison. Try it and you will see how extraordinarily difficult it is for a mind that has been trained for centuries to compare, to condemn, to judge, to evaluate, to stop that whole process and simply to observe what is; but unless this takes place, not only at the superficial level, but right through the whole content of consciousness, there can be no delving into the profundity of the mind. Please, if you are really here to understand what is being said, it is this that we are concerned with and nothing else. Our problem is not what societies you should belong to, what kind of activities you should indulge in, what books you should read, and all that superficial business, but how to free the mind from conditioning...
To be continued...

Saturday, June 6, 2009

On George Carlin and the future of nostalgia

I recently received an e-mail from a friend entitled "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away..." with some words attributed (properly?) to George Carlin.

I am not sure that it is really from him but allow me to reproduce the main gist of the message and then react to it. Here is my excerpt from the message:
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways,but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill.
So, well, overall it is cute and makes some valid points, but in a nutshell I don't buy into it!

It seems every generation has nostalgia for the good old days, and we are just another generation with another case of 'where-did-the-good-times-go' blues... when things were better, simpler, more wholesome, cheaper, of better quality, realer, whatever, etc. etc. etc.

Come on! We have it soooo good but we don't want to admit it. Now I realize that anyone who is reading this is part of the estimated (but not by me) 1% of the world's population who has it good but even if there are lots of things we all would change about the way things are going, we also have a lot more to be thankful for today than ever before. Or at least that is the way I would like to see it, my illusion so to speak.

For anyone growing up in the States, we were enticed regularly to finish our plates because "think of all the starving kids in China"... I don't think any parents are using that line anymore. Moreover, the rising tide of China's economy is now also lifting Vietnam and starting to spillover to the economies of countries like Laos and Cambodia (along the lines of Kennedy's aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats").

Progress in health means added years of living, even for people who are diagnosed with diseases that used to mean short-term death sentences. Those extra years, in those situations, are priceless. Personally, chemotherapy and other modern developments allowed my dad to add 10 months to his life after having been told that he only had one to live.  Those extra months, while difficult, allowed him to be present at his daughter's wedding, spend quality time with the family, etc. And thanks to progress in modern medicine, and pain management, the dying process was a lot less painful than it would otherwise have been - for him and for us.

While some people do watch TV more than read, for many of the people I know this is simple not true, sorry George. Spirituality, depth, caring, giving, volunteering, spontaneous acts of kindness are there every day, at all times, if we just care to notice them more than what the news shows us about conflict and war and expressoins of violence and hatred. We don't need to turn a blind eye to the negative aspects but should learn to see the positive more often.

Any time there is a catastrophe somewhere in the world, people from all over the world send money, food, aid or themselves to help. Spontaneously. When the Tsunami hit, the outpouring of aid from all over the world that the aid agencies and NGOs received more money than they knew what to do with. Not from governments but from people like you and me.

I guess it all goes back to our original decisions about life - is it a positive or negative experience? is man inherently good or evil? is the universe inherently loving or not? If you see a loving universe then its development can only be more loving... which means that if we give it a little thought, optimism about the future should replace our illusory, i.e. the future of nostalgia should not be so bright...