Taking the Mickey

mickey-mouse

Happiness is a funny sort of a thing. It’s a funny sort of a thing because despite the fact that happiness is (supposedly) so very important to us, we don’t actually know anything about it! We have ideas about it for sure, but these ideas have nothing to do with the actual reality. Even psychologists have odd ideas about happiness; especially psychologists, we might say! Anyone who studies happiness (and other states of mind) in a rational / intellectual sort of a way is bound to be wide of the mark; they’re bound to be wide of the mark because happiness is in no way a rational / intellectual sort of a thing. That would be like a respected academic professor delivering a lecture on humour – it’s not an academic we want for this job but a stand-up comedian! It’s no good talking about being funny; the guy actually has to be funny!

 

Where we miss the mark is by being serious about humour, or serious about happiness. Seriousness has no happiness in it, any more than it has any humour in it. Happiness is not in any way something that can be studied or ‘understood from the outside’. If you are happy yourself then you know all there is to know about it and if you’re not then all the study, all the intellectualization in the world isn’t going to bring you any closer. We even hear sometimes (from ‘the experts’!) that happiness is a mechanical sort of a thing – the result of endorphin molecules acting on brain cells. This truly is the most spectacular nonsense – how can a neuro-chemical ‘reward system’ ever give rise to happiness? How can there be such a thing as a ‘biology of happiness’, or a ‘neuro-anatomy of happiness’? If this were so then taking a drug such as heroin or morphine or methadone would make us happy and it doesn’t. Ask any long-term heroin user – the heroin buzz has nothing to do with happiness. It produces pleasure, that’s all, and pleasure is not at all the same thing as happiness. How could we as a culture be foolish enough to confuse pleasure with happiness? It says something about us that we talk about happiness in this mechanical way, as if it were something that could be pre-programmed, as if it were something that could be produced to order by manipulating molecules. We demean happiness by assuming that it is just part of our brain chemistry, something that evolution has put there in order to motivate us to play the biological survival game.

 

Happiness – as we would know if we had any wisdom in us at all – cannot be deliberately brought about, either by biological hard-wired programmes or by psychological means. There can be no such thing as ‘a method to make us happy’, for all that every charlatan under the sun is forever trying to tell us that there is. They are of course only trying to tell us that there is so that they can make a quick buck out of us, but the irony here is that they assume ‘making a quick buck’ will make them happy, and it won’t! There is no such thing as a method to make us happy any more than there is such a thing as a ‘therapy’ to make us happy. Happiness is completely out of our control, which for a control-based culture such as ours is a very hard thing to swallow. This is not at all what we want to hear – in fact we’re determined not to hear it, which is why we are so prepared to listen to all of the spurious ten-a-penny experts we have spouting nonsense on the subject at every available opportunity.

 

The simple (if unpalatable) truth is that the more addicted to control we are the less happy we are going to be. Addiction to control, addiction to the need to manipulate everything all the time, only brings about misery, in various shades and colours. The reason for this is because happiness is about letting go and the rational mind has nothing to contribute as far as letting go. It only gets in the way. Happiness – we might say – is when the thinking mind (which is all about ‘holding on’) has no involvement at all with what is going on. If the thinking mind has anything at all to do with what is going on then there will be no happiness. This is like the question of ‘how much involvement vampires ought to have in the management of the national blood-bank?’ – this is clearly a trick question because the only degree of involvement that works is no involvement! If the thinking mind gets any sort of foot-hold at all then you can forget it – its misery not happiness we’re going to get if we enlist the help of the thinking mind…

 

Everything thought touches becomes old, as Krishnamurti says. It becomes instantly old and there’s no happiness in the old. There might be nostalgia – but nostalgia is really just a disguised form of misery. Thought can’t help making everything old – that’s what it does, that’s how it works. Thought only registers data that that has been filed away in the appropriate mental category and nothing that is made up of mental categories can ever be new! The system of thought turns everything into a bureaucracy and bureaucracy is always the enemy of life. Life is after all a spontaneous process and the one thing bureaucracy is never going to tolerate is a spontaneous process. If the appropriate forms haven’t been correctly filled in then you can forget about it!

 

Thought creates a ready-made world for us to live in and everything in that world is old. There is absolutely no way that anything new (anything that has not been pre-programmed) can ever happen in the realm of thought. Not if we waited a billion billion years could this ever get to happen! This being the case – as we can plainly see it to be – how could we possible hope to obtain happiness via the mechanisms and pathways of thought? This being the case, why – we might ask – are we all sitting around patiently waiting for this to happen, for this to come to pass? Why are we listening so obediently to all of these so-called experts telling us about what happiness is and telling us what steps we need to take, what ‘helpful habits’ we need to be cultivating? All they are doing is selling us the system and there is no happiness to be had in the system. This is the one ingredient that’s not in it. No one ever got to be happy by going along with the accepted way of seeing things; no one ever got to be happy (or ‘mentally healthy’) by conforming to the system.

 

Naturally we can’t say anything (or know anything) about happiness. All saying, all knowing is done by the thinking mind and the thinking mind is the fly in the ointment as far as happiness is concerned. A bigger and fatter fly there never was – it’s practically the size of a pigeon! What need would there would there be to describe or define or in any way commentate upon happiness? When we are happy there is no need for analysis. Analysis both comes out of unhappiness and goes on to create further unhappiness. When we’re happy there’s no need to be saying anything, thinking anything. All thought, all analysis, all commentary is redundant. All descriptions or definitions are beside the point. Do you need someone to come and analyze a joke for you when you’re enjoying it? Descriptions and definitions are not just ‘beside the point’ – they unfailingly take us into the world of thought, which is a sterile world, a world in which nothing new can ever happen…

 

We keep on imagining that there can be such a thing as happiness within the world which thought has created (which is – generally speaking – the only world that we know). Everything in this world is a ‘mind-created image’ and there can a ‘mind-created image of happiness’ just the same as there can be a mind-created image of anything. In this ‘simulated world’ there can be a mind-created image of happiness and a mind-created image of ‘who we are’, and we can often enough put the two together and imagine as a result that we genuinely are happy, that everything really is rosy in the garden. This however is no more than just another fiction. Everything in the realm of thought is a fiction – fiction is what it is made of. Imaging that we can find happiness in this consensual mind-created world is like imagining that Mickey Mouse is a real person!

 

Every adult you meet lives in ‘the world of thought’. We all do. That’s what makes us ‘adults’ – the fact that we’re taking the socially-prescribed game seriously. This is what deadens our creativity and our spontaneity. That’s what cuts us off from our ‘inner child’. Entering into this world (without knowing that we are doing so) is part of what we call ‘growing up’; we all buy into ‘the world that thought has created’ and once we have bought into it it’s very hard to leave – it’s very hard to leave because we don’t know we’re in it! We’ve forgotten how not to be in it. We think that this is the only world there is, and that’s why we’re as miserable and cantankerous as we are…

 

Happiness is not a chemical any more than it is a mental image, any more than it is a reward for being a good organism, or a good consumer, or for performing appropriately in whatever socially-prescribed role we’ve been given. Happiness has nothing to do with evolution and ‘the survival of the fittest’ any more than it has something to do with the consensus social reality by whose rules we are artificially bound. The only way we can ever find happiness is by going beyond the game, not by learning to play it better! The only way to find happiness is by venturing beyond the consensus reality, which is the world that has been created by thought, and no one can tell us how to do this. This is what Joseph Campbell calls ‘the Hero’s Journey‘. How can we be instructed how to go beyond instructions? How can there be a rule telling us how to venture beyond the programmed world, the known world, which is the world of rules?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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