image: lenka p

The most profound state of happiness is achieved by the following means.

To be free to exercise choice and to be able to act upon that choice.

To do meaningful works in an environment where those works are validated by the appreciation of others.

To function within a meritocracy, wherein the individual is accredited their true worth based not upon fiscal, financial or familial position.

To be free of the blight of the cult of celebrity whereby the mundane and meaningless is elevated to the position of venerated article of faith.

To be one of a kinship, a gathering of kind whose collective aim is mutual improvement wherein the object of association is progression of the best in each and thereby development of that which is sacred to each individual as their birthright and that which they hold in custodianship for all the human race.

To be able to celebrate the uniqueness of each person without the pettiness and insecurities that plague human interactions, to allow that person to flourish and evolve in their own right.

It is a step in the right direction, I believe. Freedom from the avalanche of dogmas and ignorance that render us all hamstrung and incapable. Personal liberation allied to personal responsibility must surely be the objective of any sound thinking adult.  

 image: konaboy

Surveying the happiness landscape, there is an obsession that grips a significant number of commentators on the subject and it is the money issue. Distilled into the question, can money buy happiness?

To anyone with more than just a passing interest in the state of human affairs it is abundantly clear that this is the most wide of the mark question it’s possible to pose in the endeavour to understand happiness. Happiness is a subjective quality, a diluted form of being that transcends misery but as an end in itself utterly futile. The desire to acquire or DTA is a primeval instinct that in our emancipated condition has no real place, it is something of an orphan in a developed society but more significantly for you and I in a developed individual.

Happiness is a perceived external condition that comes from the sense of fulfilment, satisfaction and integrity to purpose demonstrated by an individual. To do something because it makes you happy is not a worthy objective, being happy because you are doing something that is interconnected with a worthy objective is far more potent in terms of living a life of account.

This is where the Greek concept of eudaimonia is misinterpreted by seeing happiness through the veil of the twenty first century and a completely different set of sensibilities to those that  persuaded and motivated the Greeks. When Aristotle says that the attainment of happiness is the ultimate expression of human life he does not mean dancing around in fields and singing like an extra in an MGM musical.

His happiness is to do with assimilating a higher purpose in one’s life, pursuing that and being filled by the well-being that gives rise to. A driven man is not always a happy man in the ‘happy clappy’ sense, but take away the drive and the struggle then is to find something purposeful to do. To experience this, try visiting a community where the industrial engine that was based there has moved on or simply ceased to exist.

An individual is a community in their own right, with many different components adding up to the whole that they are. Bereft of purpose the individual or community begins to lose its way.

The question about money and happiness in this context really is a nonsense and can only serve as a distraction to those whose enquiry is more than just a passing fancy.

 image: littleredglass

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. David Hume expressed it, beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. (Moral and Political Essays, 1742).

As with happiness.

Happiness is ultimately a subjective state, a lattice held together and underpinned by those facets of the individual’s cognizance that assimilate with their beliefs about what they should derive happiness from.

Rubens painted voluptuous women that were perceived as the epitome of beauty in his age, while in the 1960s the elfin like figure of women/girls like Twiggy was eulogised as the acme of beauty.

None of it is true. None of it is untrue either. It is a matter of perception.

‘Design a formula for the 21st century’ – that was the directive from the Swiss art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist to a selection of the world’s greatest creative thinkers. The result? A series of witty, playful reflections on modern life. Words by Simon Usborne

Saturday, 20 September 2008

Damien Hirst Newton’s Colour Wheel

Einstein was famously fond of the formula. During the summer of 1905, while carrying out his duties at a Swiss patent office, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist crafted what would become the most celebrated equation in history. E = mc², his proof that an object’s mass depends on its energy, was a formula of such startling simplicity that Einstein wondered whether “the Lord might be laughing … and leading me around by the nose”. The Lord did not laugh, and Einstein’s place in history was assured, but his interest in order extended beyond the realms of science. In a more playful mood, he is said to have penned a formula for success: “If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

The desire to formulate the seemingly unformulatable – to crystallise esoteric concepts such as success into single equations – has occupied the thoughts of countless other thinkers, but perhaps nobody more than Hans Ulrich Obrist. The eminent curator and co-director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, has spent 15 years commissioning formulae from some of the biggest names in fields as diverse as mathematics and sociology, including Richard Dawkins, Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono. His brief was as concise as the most pleasing equation: “Make a formula for the 21st Century”. It flummoxed as many people as it fascinated but soon the contributions came flooding in.

What’s your formula for the 21st century? Click here to submit yours

Obrist has now published more than 100 of his favourite formulae in Formulas For Now. They range from the fun to the fundamental, via the unintelligible and, in many cases, illegible – and many do away with traditional formats in favour of diagrams, recipes, manuscripts and manifestos. The variety has delighted Obrist and the offering that tickled him most came from Richard Hamilton, the renowned painter and pioneer of pop art. Hamilton’s formula, 02 + I - 8 = p x (fa)3, where O is “the ball” and I is “the prick”, follows his limerick: “A Wrangler of Trinity Hall, had the most mathematical ball. The square of its weight, plus his prick minus eight, equalled Pi times the cube of fuck all.” “I love all the formulas in the book,” Obrist says, “but I find the combination of art, maths and humour in this one irresistible.”

The formula that first inspired Obrist was rather more vital. In an interview with a 100-year-old Albert Hoffman, the first man to synthesise LSD, the late Swiss scientist scrawled the formula for the psychedelic drug on the back of a napkin. “I found it fascinating that the life of this man could be summarised in this formula,” Obrist says, “and that an invention with so many social repercussions could be encapsulated on a napkin.”

Obrist used his contacts in the art world and beyond to invite others to offer their own formulae and the project quickly snowballed. “Whenever one arrived by e-mail I printed it out and pinned it on the wall. Little by little, it took over my life – they were everywhere.” If nothing else, publishing the book was a way to liberate the walls of Obrist’s study, but the curator turned collector is hungry for more. “This is something I want to grow over many years,” he says. “I hope it will go online and become a forum for anyone to submit ideas.” What about his own formula? “That’s my big unrealised project – despite being inspired by so many people, I still haven’t found my own answer. Perhaps I’ll put it in volume two.”

On Monday, happiness fell below 40% for the first time

WASHINGTON D.C. — The percentage of Americans experiencing a lot of happiness/enjoyment without a lot of stress/worry hit a new low for the year on Monday at 39%. The depressed mood coincides with the beginning of the turmoil on Wall Street and in the financial markets that began to unfold in the major news media on Sunday and Monday.

The index, which asks Americans 18 and older to reflect on the level of happiness and stress they experienced the day before the survey, has shown consistent upswings in mood on weekends and holidays for most Americans. Reflecting on the typical Saturday or Sunday, 58% of Americans report a lot of happiness and enjoyment without a lot of stress or worry. This drops to 46% on a typical Monday. This past weekend, Saturday was like most Saturdays (58%), but Sunday was uncharacteristic (53%), in line with the news of imminent troubles of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch. Still, the drop from Sunday to Monday was more than typical at 14 percentage points, and the drop in mood from Saturday to Monday was a full 19 points (compared to a typical 12-point drop in mood over the weekend to weekday transition).

The record low mood experienced Monday came with the news of Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch being sold to Bank of America, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average registering a record decline. The lowest previously registered measure of happiness was 41%, with two of the four occasions when the number dipped to 41% also coinciding with economic woes, specifically on March 18, when the Fed announced a rate cut in response to a weakening economic outlook and on June 9, when gas prices rose to record highs. — Raksha Arora and Jim Harter

Survey Methods

For the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.

The U.S. mood results are based on data from Jan. 2-Sept. 16, 2008, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone only).

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

To provide feedback or suggestions about how to improve Gallup.com, please e-mail feedback@gallup.com.

image: jeepz

Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

From the Los Angeles Times

Being happy has always seemed like a good idea. But now science, with research to back it up, can finally show us how to get there.

By Marnell Jameson, Special to The Times
September 8, 2008

True or false:

___ I would be happier if I made more money, found the perfect mate, lost 10 pounds or moved to a new house.

___ Happiness is genetic. You can’t change how happy you are any more than you can change how tall you are.
___ Success brings happiness.

Answers: False, false and false.

IF RECENT scientific research on happiness — and there has been quite a bit — has proved anything, it’s that happiness is not a goal. It’s a process. Although our tendency to be happy or not is partly inborn, it’s also partly within our control. And, perhaps more surprising, happiness brings success, not the other way around. Though many people think happiness is elusive, scientists have actually pinned it down and know how to get it.

For years, many in the field of psychology saw the science of happiness as an oxymoron. “We got no respect,” says Ed Diener, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, who began studying happiness in 1981. “Critics said you couldn’t study happiness because you couldn’t measure it.” In the mid-1990s, he and a few other researchers started to prove the naysayers wrong. As a result, Americans now have an abundance of consumer books, academic articles, journals and associations to help them find happiness.

“Many of us have material things and our basic needs met, so we are looking for what comes after that,” says Diener, co-author with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, of the forthcoming “Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth.” “Materialism isn’t bad. It’s only bad if we use it to replace other things in life like meaningful work, a good marriage, kids and friends. People are recognizing that those who make money more important than love have lower levels of life satisfaction.”

In recent months, the following titles have hit bookstore shelves: “What Happy Women Know,” “The Happiness Trap,” “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want” and “Happiness for Two.”

Christine Cardone, executive editor of psychology books for Wiley-Blackwell, whose titles include Diener’s forthcoming book, points to 2000 as the tipping point: Happiness science began to mushroom and flood society with new, positive ways of thinking. That year, Martin Seligman, then-president of the American Psychological Assn., started the positive psychology movement, which focuses on what makes people mentally healthy. That concept got out to the media, spawning more interest and research. Meanwhile, neuroscientists were discovering better ways to measure what’s going on in the brain.

“Popular interest in happiness is only one driver,” says Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Positive Psychology Center there. “The books are coming out because the science is coming out.” Academic publications have enjoyed a similar boon. Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression.

The field of happiness also now has its own publications — the Journal of Positive Psychology and the Journal of Happiness Studies — and its own professional organization, which Diener started last year. The International Positive Psychology Assn. for academics and scholars already has 3,500 members.

The trend shows no signs of slowing. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want,” believes that’s because happiness is like the Holy Grail. “People around the world want it. If you ask people what they want for their children, they’ll say for them to be happy. It’s in our Declaration of Independence. It matters to and affects everyone.”

Among the major findings of the last decade is that the pursuit of happiness is a worthy cause, Diener says. “Happiness doesn’t just feel good. It’s good for you and for society. Happy people are more successful, have better relationships, are healthier and live longer.”

Seligman adds, “We’ve learned in 10 years that happy people are more productive at work, learn more in school, get promoted more, are more creative and are liked more.”

And if that doesn’t make you happy, here’s more happy news: Around the world, happiness is on the rise.

Beyond your genes

Great if you happen to be one of the people born happy, right? Not exactly. Another major finding is that about half of our tendency toward happiness is genetic, while the rest is controlled by the individual.

Lyubomirsky and her colleagues analyzed studies on identical twins and other research and came to the conclusion that happiness is 50% genetic, 40% intentional and 10% circumstantial. “Half of your predisposition toward happiness you can’t change,” she says. “It’s in your genes. Your circumstances — where you live, your health, your work, your marriage — can be tough to change. But most people are surprised that circumstances don’t account for as much of their happiness as they think.”

Life circumstances don’t result in sustained happiness, she said, because we adapt. That new car, promotion or house feels great at first. Then we get used to it. An old but often-cited study found lottery winners were no happier than control groups after a year. That doesn’t mean that getting out of a bad job or a terrible marriage won’t give your happiness a boost. But sustaining that good feeling requires something else: deliberate control of how you act and think. That’s the 40% intentional part that Lyubomirsky and others are most interested in.

In her research, Lyubomirsky led controlled studies to determine what behaviors positively affect happiness, and has come up with at least 12 strategies that measurably increase levels. For instance, one strategy she’s tested is the practice of gratitude. In her gratitude study, she had a group of 57 subjects express gratitude once a week in a journal. A second group of 58 expressed gratitude in a journal three times a week. And a control group of 32 did nothing. At the end of six weeks, she retested all three groups and found a significant increase in happiness in the first one. (The participants who journaled three times a week showed less change, perhaps because the exercise didn’t feel as fresh, she theorized.)

She and other researchers also recommend practicing forgiveness, savoring positive moments and becoming more involved in your church, synagogue or religious organization. “Not every strategy fits everyone,” she says. “People need to try a few to find which ones work.”

Happiness defined

Although Lyubomirsky likes to let people define happiness for themselves, clinically, she describes it as “a combination of frequent positive emotions, plus the sense that your life is good.”

Seligman, who has written several books on the subject, including the bestselling “Authentic Happiness,” says it’s the pursuit of engaging and meaningful activities. By engaging, he means being in a state of flow or “at one with the music.” You get so absorbed in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. But one person’s flow is another person’s torture. What puts you in a state of flow is usually an activity that uses your strengths and talents. It’s even better when it’s part of your work.

“Meaningful” would be using what you’re best at to serve others or to participate in a cause that’s bigger than yourself. (To find out what you’re good at, or your strengths, Seligman offers a free survey on his website, www.authentichappiness.org.)

“Your purpose doesn’t have to be giant,” says Dan Baker, a psychologist who founded the life enhancement program at Canyon Ranch in Tucson and is the author of “What Happy Women Know.” “If you’re 17, your purpose can be getting into the college of your choice. When you’re a parent, it can be getting your kids off to school safely and prepared for each day. You don’t have to adopt a Romanian orphan or build a church in Chile.”

What happiness isn’t, Diener adds, is getting everything right in your life. “A man might think, ‘If I get the right education, the right job and the right wife, I’ll be happy.’ But that’s not how it works. For instance, once basic needs are met, the effects of income on happiness get smaller and smaller. That’s because happiness lies in the way you live and look at the world.

“If you have no goal other than your personal happiness, you’ll never achieve it. If you want to be happy, pursue something else vigorously and happiness will catch up with you.”

External factors

Although happiness is largely up to the individual, new research shows that what’s going on around you — specifically how much personal freedom you have — also plays a role.

In a paper published in the July issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, lead researcher Ronald Inglehart, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, refuted the long-held belief that happiness among societies is constant. His research concluded that significant and enduring changes in happiness can occur not only for individuals, but also for entire societies.

The study, which Seligman calls the best he’s seen on happiness in five years, analyzed polls taken from 1981 to 2007 by the World Values Survey. The surveys consisted of 88 countries containing 90% of the world’s population, and measured happiness and overall life satisfaction. Among the 52 countries that completed all the surveys over the 17-year period, happiness rose in 45 of them, or 86%. In six countries, it declined, and in one (Australia), levels showed no change. Overall, happiness increased 6.8 percentage points.

Inglehart credits economic development, democratization and increasing social tolerance for the happiness bump. Economic gains that bring more food, clothing, shelter, medical care and longer life can result in a substantial increase in subjective well-being for poor societies, he says.

But once a society reaches a certain threshold, further economic growth brings only minimal gains. Among the richest societies, increases in income are only weakly linked with higher levels of subjective well-being.

While economic growth helps promote happiness for some, democratization and rising social tolerance contribute even more. Democracy provides more choice, which promotes happiness. Support for gender equality and tolerance of people who are different from oneself are also strongly linked, not just because tolerant people are happier, but because living in a tolerant society enhances everyone’s freedom, Inglehart says.

The fact that happiness and our understanding of it are on the rise bode well. “In the future, more people will understand the nature of happiness and its process,” Baker says. “They will understand that they have to take an active role if they want it.”

Apparently, more people around the world are getting that message. “It’s true,” Seligman says. “We’re happier. And more happiness in the world is a great thing.”

image: mahesh khanna

Wow. It’s official, everybody is an expert on happiness… or at least so it seems.

 When I started this blog my objective was to generate a buzz about my project, The Mechanics of Happiness - How to Engineer a Positive Approach To Your Life, which is a series of six books addressing different aspects of our lives. Someone told me, it’s what you do if you want to make a splash, blogging - it’s web 2.0, so I did it.

The results have been somewhat piecemeal but it’s become something I enjoy doing, dare I say it’s something I find fulfilling and now a component of my own personal happiness.

I have, for many years, worked with people in the area of personal development and have become accustomed to some quite gritty exchanges. It is the way if you are in the business of dealing with some of the ogres that lurk in people’s, including my own of course, shadowier parts. So I thought it would be the case with this old interface with the world, yet it hasn’t quite worked out that way so far.

It seems that there is a huge buffet, if you Google ‘happiness blogs’, where everyone adds to the table of plenty and I can’t help but wonder if so much expertise exists why there is such an intrinsic malcontentment abroad. Is this a case of the emperor’s new clothes? Is happiness to the naughties what peace and love was to the sixties?

Don’t be shy, speak to me, I’d like to hear what you have to say.

PS The title is a classic by the Buzzcocks

image: projectarchive.net

Marina Kamenev

Feeling sad? Researchers at the University of Leicester reckon you might just be in the wrong country. According to Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at Leicester who developed the first “World Map of Happiness,” Denmark is the happiest nation in the world.

White’s research used a battery of statistical data, plus the subjective responses of 80,000 people worldwide, to map out well-being across 178 countries. Denmark and five other European countries, including Switzerland, Austria, and Iceland, came out in the top 10, while Zimbabwe and Burundi pulled up the bottom.

Not surprisingly, the countries that are happiest are those that are healthy, wealthy, and wise. “The most significant factors were health, the level of poverty, and access to basic education,” White says. Population size also plays a role. Smaller countries with greater social cohesion and a stronger sense of national identity tended to score better, while those with the largest populations fared worse. China came in No. 82, India ranked 125, and Russia was 167. The U.S. came in at 23.

IT’S SUBJECTIVE.

White’s study, to be published later this year, was developed in part as a response to the British media’s fascination with life satisfaction. A recent BBC survey concluded that 81% of Britain’s population would rather the government make them happier than richer.

Despite its often bleak weather, England ranked relatively happy at 41. “There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator along with measures of wealth,” White says. “We wanted to illustrate the effects of global poverty on subjective well-being to remind people that if they want to address unhappiness as an issue the need is greatest in other parts of the world.”

To produce the “Happy Map,” White dug deep. He analyzed data from a variety of sources including UNESCO, the CIA, The New Economics Foundation, and the World Health Organization. He then examined the responses of 80,000 people surveyed worldwide.

MONEY STILL COUNTS.

Good health may be the key to happiness, but money helps open the door. Wealthier countries, such as Switzerland (2) and Luxembourg (10) scored high on the index. Not surprisingly, most African countries, which have little of either; scored poorly. Zimbabwe, which has an AIDS rate of 25%, an average life expectancy of 39, and an 80% poverty rate, ranked near the bottom at 177. Meanwhile, the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis gave fellow Africans in Burundi, ranked 178, even less to smile about, despite their having a slightly lower poverty rate of 68%.

Capitalism, meanwhile, fared quite well. Free-market systems are sometimes blamed for producing unhappiness due to insecurity and competition, but the U.S. was No. 23 and all the top-ranking European countries are firmly capitalist—albeit of a social-democratic flavor.

White says the only real surprise in his findings was how low many Asian countries scored. China is 82, Japan 90, and India an unhappy 125. “These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity, which other researchers have associated with well-being,” he says.

ARE WE HAPPY YET?

White admits that happiness is subjective. But he defends his research on the grounds that his study focused on life satisfaction rather than brief emotional states. “The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial, and educational needs in other parts of the world.”

One of the study’s intentions was to see how Britain, given media preoccupation with well-being, fared compared to other parts of the globe. His conclusion: “The current concern with happiness levels in the U.K. may well be a case of the ‘worried well.’”

To take a tour of the world’s happiest countries, click here.

Marina Kamenev is an intern in BusinessWeek’s London bureau.

image: colpo di fulmine

NEW YORK: People who don’t think life is worth living are more likely to die within the next few years, research from Japan shows.The increased death risk was mainly due to cardiovascular disease and external causes — most commonly, suicide.

image: yoshiko 314

Like most things, there are two states of happiness. Those that are circumstantial and those that are induced. Circumstantial can be seen as fortuitous and not really the result of any conscious process on the part of the individual. Induced is where the individual has actually taken the time and made the effort to engineer the state at a conscious level.

Serendipity may well characterise the journey that leads to the first state. It is a state of happy chance and good fortune on the part of the individual and is, I suspect, given the nature of our contemporary world, an increasingly rare phenomenon.

Take the simplest route to induced happiness, exercise regularly and as vigorously as you can. Why? Because your body secretes endorphins which are known euphemistically as ‘happy hormones’ and raise your sense of well-being. It is a quick fix and places you in the driving seat. Try to avoid making major decisions without doing some form of exercise beforehand, whether it be a brisk walk or a full on aerobic workout at the gym.

The release of endorphins into your bloodstream will colour your critical faculties and enhance your mood generally and is far more likely to result in your decisions or meditations being positive.

 Some people love the esoteric, so here’s something for you to try for size.

Two agents, serotonin and melatonin influence us in subtle yet powerful ways. They can be seen as precursors to various states ranging from tiredness to euphoria. Psychedelic drugs, the things that hippies championed and claimed lead to altered states of perception, have been found to trigger serotonin release. Serotonin is also known as a happy hormone and is cited as a cure, among other things, for depression.

Drugs such as the psychedelics are referred to as the lazy man’s way to enlightenment. And this is true, enhanced perceptions, awareness, understandings and ‘heightened consciousness’ are accessible through the effects of the drugs. The thing is that the perceptions are soon forgotten because they are artificially triggered altered states and for most people are a meaningless splash in a pool of well-being.

In esoteric lore the pineal gland is often ascribed as the seat of the third eye, a name to describe enlightened perception. The pineal gland, a small organ at the centre of the brain, releases melatonin which also regulates serotonin secretions, this in response to varying intensities of light. Dimming light leads to sleep, brightening light leads to awakening and so on.

The antecedent to these chemical releases is the mediator tryptophan which is a naturally occurring amino acid that has to be sourced externally, the body doesn’t produce it. Various foods are rich in tryptophan, certain fruits are good sources.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Siddhartha Gautama was meditating in his usual spot beneath a bo tree, a fig, when he received enlightenment or was awakened (became Buddha). The fig is a rich source of tryptophan and being within the emanation of the bo tree would more than likely have enhanced the process of an individual upon a conscious development journey.

When exposed to bright light, melatonin levels decrease which causes an increase in serotonin secretions. Illumination or enlightenment is the way in which an elevated level of consciousness is described, with the caveat that such a state is transcendental to language and can only be suggested or hinted at. 

Curiously the cartoon character Popeye is also, knowingly or unknowingly, a reference to the pineal gland or third eye becoming active. Popeye’s method was to transfer himself from mediocrity to superhuman by eating spinach - another of the superfoods -  which triggered a sequence of extraordinary transformations that made him temporarily invincible, capable, strong and so on.

The art for the personal developer is to be able to access these different states in a conscious and self electing way rather than to be subject to the whims and vagaries of a world beyond your control.

The study of these bits of esoterica is extremely rewarding and opens up a huge territory here for those of you who are looking for clues.