Dear Reader — this blog is a direct continuation of the last entry, Wrong Views on Suffering and Happiness —What, How, the Lie and Why Part 1 — if you have not yet read that post yet please head back there and read it before you continue.
How: My 3s (memory) and 4s (imagination) plus self and self belonging give rise to my sense of happiness and my quest for it.
Me and the Bench –a recap of the aggregates:
I remember one time I was sitting on a bench, I had found a spot with the perfect balance between shade and sun. I was not too hot, not too cold –I was so comfortable and happy. As I sat, over time, the sun shifted in the sky and my perfect shade to sun ratio was lost. It was beginning to get too hot so I moved the bench under a bigger tree and again I was comfortable. It was only a little while though till I was too hot again –the shade was just disappearing! I fiddle with the bench a bit more and then I realized. That it was really only for a brief moment, out of all the moments in the day, that I could be happy and comfortable on that bench. Even with all my efforts sometimes would be too hot and others too cold. But that moment of stimuli that my #2 (feeling) interpreted as comfort was something written to my #3’s memory. Then my #4 started imagining ways to retrieve the experience to recreate or to preserve that moment again.
Whether it on trips or benches, gardens, with certain people, doing certain things,I have had times where I have felt worry free and peaceful, where life felt good. All the spin-up of something like Japan, of all my self-created “zones of comfort”, are efforts to repeat these moments. It is my 3s (memory) that remember that once upon a time I have had happy experiences and my 4s that imagine I can have them again with just a little planning. That if I control the aspects of the trip, of my life, in just the right way I can get the experiences I want and avoid what I don’t.
My own experiences of everyday life belie the fact that finding lasting and predictable happiness in my day-to-day regular life is impossible. After all, even when stuff is going pretty well, I have the constant discomfort of my to-do list, of waking , working, managing life. So my #4 looks elsewhere…I imagine a space, a place, a time, a person, a holiday, something outside of the regular (which I know is can be crap) where I can have a bit more comfort. I imagine that with enough effort I can go there, that there are predictable steps I can take, like getting on a plane and traveling, that will bring me there.
For the system to work, I need the self to come-in and be the choosy narrator, the story teller. The self, pulls together my 3s and weaves together the memory of whats comfortable so that I can create the great getaway plan using 4. The trip itself is both a result of the misunderstanding of the self (thanks #4) …that I can conjure-up a place of refuge, away from my daily life and something that will further propagate that self (where I selectively store more memories to fuel # 4 in the future)—In the small ways i.e., planner, organizer, traveler (and all the meanings I as narrator impose on these concepts) and in much bigger ways, I selectively remember the good parts and gloss the bad ones to create the narrative that it was worth it. That my great plan to escape suffering worked, at least enough to make me think that I should keep trying in order to get it closer to perfect each time.
The interesting catch however is, in the place of refuge I imagine, the terms of its comfortableness are my own creations. They reflect qualities I already value — worry-freeness, safety, cleanliness(cleanliness in particular I have watched closely and seen how much it influences my sense of comfort or safety in a space –my desire to return to a city, a restaurant, a hotel) — its my own definitions in my head that I project outwards onto a time, experience or space. But if thats true, can there really be some happy zone over there, outside my own imagination, that I can expect to be there waiting for me? And how do I reconcile it with my own changing standards of comfortableness –as a teenager, I reveled in having a messy room, a messy car; I felt like it made me a ‘rebel against the establishment’, someone who didn’t spend time on ’superficial stuff’ like cleaning? And in the end can I really trust that the signs of that happy place (rupa) that I read as safe or clean really are when I am such a selective narrator and when I lack so much information (I mean I did find hanging out in a garden in the ghetto petting some feral cat to be peaceful and safe). This then brings me to a big problem…. The Lie…