Dan Gilbert: Stumbling on Happiness

Well, I completely blew off the month of October, 2012. So now I've made a Second-Tier Vow (not as much energy put into it as a First-Tier Vow) to redouble my efforts and write more. After all, if one wants to become skilled at writing, one should...well, write.

Recently I became aware of Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, whose book Stumbling on Happiness reveals some amazing research on what makes people happy.

Click on the book cover to go to the official website.

This is a book that I'm going to have to get, as soon as I can budget for it (money being tight right now). In the meantime, there's a video of a TEDtalks presentation ("The Surprising Science of Happiness") given by Dan Gilbert which apparently covers some of the material presented in the book. The clip can be viewed at either the TEDtalks site or on YouTube. Here's a link to the YouTube version:

Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness

One of the amazing results of research (a factoid?) presented by Gilbert in this lecture: people who won the lottery, and people who became paraplegic (lost the use of arms and/or legs) rate as psychologically equally happy with their lives one year after the event. In fact, on the bar graph Gilbert presents of the data, the paraplegic group is just a tick happier than the lottery winners!

Screencap from Dan Gilbert's TEDtalks presentation.

This is somehow stunning — yet not unexpected — to me. My spiritual tradition teaches that happiness is not dependent on external things like wealth or social standing or political power — or any particular situation or location. Happiness is a quality of mind and a way of reacting to the content of our mental processes. You cultivate happiness; it's not something that you find somewhere. But this little illustration from Dr. Gilbert brings home the point in stunning clarity. You probably thought, as I did, "Wow...if a severely disadvantaged person such as a paraplegic is happier with his or her life than I am, then something's wrong here."

An important point that I've heard several spiritual teachers/wise people from various cultures, religions or societies emphasize is that even happiness can be an impediment to your own mental health. Or more precisely, the craving for or clinging to happiness can paradoxically cause unhappiness if your quest for happiness doesn't succeed. Therefore, you need to create happiness in whatever situation or experience you happen to find yourself in, in the moment.

Paradoxically, for me to find happiness, I have to drop even the idea of happiness, and to settle back and find value in, and be grateful for, whatever I'm experiencing in this moment — pleasant, unpleasant, neutral.

Physican, meditator and Huffington Post contributor Mark Hyman touches on this in his essay, "Why Doing Nothing is the Key to Happiness:"

What matters most in life is the quality of our experience, the ability to be awake to what is real and true in our lives, for the difficult and the happy times, to be awake to each person we touch, to our own experience, to the moment we are in, to the simple, sweet, and alive gifts of a smile, a touch, a kind deed, the breeze on our skin, or a firefly flickering in the early summer night.

But that is harder than it sounds. Our monkey mind gets in the way. In order to pay attention we need to be quiet, to be practiced at stillness, to know the habits of our mind and be skilled at dancing with them, not to be controlled or dominated by them. To witness the thoughts and feelings we have without having them overwhelm, dominate, and control our lives.

So that is my task now, to paradoxically find happiness by not seeking it.

—Tony

A Few Quotes Concerning Substance Abuse, Addiction and the Human Mind

“Drugs can bring about meaningful experiences, but the one who takes a drug has not made causes for such effects. He has just temporarily altered nature, like injecting a monkey with hormones that send him shooting up a tree to pick coconuts. Such experiences my be true but not good or good but not true, whereas the Dharma is always both good and true.” — Achaan Chah, A Still Forest Pool

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“Between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space lies our freedom.” — Bob Stahl, PhD, from his GoogleTechTalks video presentation on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu5irWStNvA

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“During the late 1970s and early 1980s, (Robin) Williams had an addiction to cocaine; he has stated that he has since quit. Williams was a close friend of and frequent partier alongside John Belushi. He says the death of his friend and the birth of his son prompted him to quit drugs: ‘Was it a wake-up call? Oh yeah, on a huge level. The grand jury helped too.’” — from the Wikipedia entry on Robin Williams, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams

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“Though one were to conquer a million men in battle, that man who conquers himself is the greater victor.” — The Dhammapada, verse 103

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“The way of the vow: SAJJA

“The Pali word ‘sacca’ (usually spelt sajja and pronounced sat-cha) means a solemn declaration about the active fulfillment of a truth.

“According to Luangpor Charoen, (Abbot of Thamkrabok Monastery), the physical detox is only 5% of the Thamkrabok treatment. You must do the remaining 95% of the work in your mind and through your action.

“If you want to enter the drug-detox area and start with the purification of your body, you will have to go through the ceremony of SAJJA. The Sajja is a very essential element here in Thamkrabok. It might be the most serious and the most important thing you have done so far in your life.

“The Sajja looks like a vow. But it is far more than just a promise ‘to be a good guy’ or ‘a good girl’ from now on, having nothing to do anymore with consuming or promoting alcohol or other drugs.

“Sajja is a sacred act that, if you believe in it, will connect you with your will power and with something ‘beyond’. Something that is far more existential than the fight against the drugs! It connects you with a teaching. This teaching is not given in the form of intellectual lectures. But it will be there for you in any moment you really want it strongly enough and when you are ready for it.”

— from the website for Wat Thamkrabok, a legendary drug treatment center and Buddhist monastery in Thailand