image: ricardo sr.

What makes you feel good?

Go for, if you have the option, simple things. Simple things have a cleaner feel to them. Try, if possible, to feel good about things from the natural worlds. Why? Simple, the natural worlds do not recognise credit crunches, our egos, personality or any of the other paraphernalia that constitutes our world.

If it had a title, like a painting or a sculpture, we’d have to call it: The World What We Made. How many of us would actually be proud of it? I suppose it’s like the curate’s egg, good in parts.

There are fantastic things, there are things that aren’t so good and there are things that are horrendous. Terrorists, female circumcision - more properly called female genital mutilation, bureaucracy or red tape or even both are all things that can’t send out a wake up call through the sentient beings of the Universe with the shout ‘Good things happening here’.

The fantastic things make it worth while. What are they? They are those small packages of inspiration and magic, the light falling on places that have been in the dark, the symphony of causes that lead to profound moments you can’t quite put your finger on but know have happened.

Moments of genius, rarefied and complete and passing as distant glimpses of perfection. Being closer to the substance of life itself, touching precious things and feeling their texture with all your senses and knowing that you are mixed up in something beyond special.

This is to feel good, to feel the prana, chi, life-force flow through you and radiate out from your fingertips. To be vital, to be in the flow of something close to sacred, to sculpt force, to project an energy from oneself that is contagious. All of these things are confirmation that you live, you are alive and the proposition of your life is not done yet.     

image: edward dullard

Development. Fulfilment. Happiness.

I used to wonder about the size of the Universe when I was a child. I lived in an urban sprawl, right in the middle of a seething city, where millions of people lived out their various hopes, fears and dramas. At night sometimes I would listen to the sound of industry working non-stop. The stockyards and the trains shunting goods wagons about the place, the sound of steam, the noises of the urban night, sounds that get lost in the day becoming amplified and points of focus for my attention.

At these times I would wander through the various models of the Universe that I had constructed, shapes, sizes, boundaries, edges. I could never build an adequate representation of the enormity that I felt before I drifted off into sleep. It seemed impossible to comprehend quite what I was in.

The greatest mystery of all for me was just what it was all for. What purpose did it serve, what was my place within it? What reason could I try to divine from the fact that I had consciousness and was able to put the thought process together that resulted in the asking of the question?

I never fully understood, and if truth be told I still don’t, my place within the scheme of it all. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to be, what were the fundamental principles of living a life, did such things exist?

My initial response was one of hedonism. I heard people say things like, “You’re here for a good time, not a long time,” and I thought that was great. But then I lived the hedonistic life and found that it did not fill the gap in my reasoning that demanded to know why and how.

I did many of the things that young and misguided people do. I experimented, went too far, fell flat on my face, became involved in underground scenes - they still existed then. I was left with the feeling of the shallowness of it all, like it was some role play game and I found myself skeptical of friends and acquaintances who raved about drug and alcohol induced states that produced some allegedly profound result.

People that I knew crashed and burned. They died prematurely, or at least they died young. Wasteful deaths, and survivors who parked themselves in the cul de sacs of life, watching as the Universe went by, soaked in their own excesses. Who am I to judge? they may have been right, they may have had a point.

Yet I spoke to people that I no longer recognised. Miserable and shadows of the bright young things they had been. Cynical, lost and desperate. Desperate to reconnect to the initial vigour that they had felt as children. Desperate to reconnect to the mystery wanderings that told them life was a great adventure, that there was magic to be experienced and that it was all around. It simply needed a key to unlock it.

Try to avoid the pitfalls, the mantraps in the jungle. The world we discovered ourselves to be in is so far removed from the place that it could be. A child would call it unfair. An adult would try to explain it to the uncomprehending child and realise they were making excuses for the inexcusable.

Blake said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” There is no need to create a system, the system exists, a system of interconnected universal laws that define our existence. Creation of a system is not the way, understanding the system that already exists is.

True sanctuary is found in the contemplation of such matters. They are the springboard to an elevated level of perception. Getting it is not difficult. What is difficult is recognising the need and being able to act upon that. 

image: fotopusch

Happiness is not so much a destination as a journey. It is the culmination of a series of processes, namely growth and development, fulfilment and the inevitable state that summons. We struggle in the developed world with this equation because the pressures upon us are immense. The society we have created is far more complex than anything else that has existed so far in the human story and the need for success and to excel within that society is huge.

It baffles the best of us and you will meet few, if any, people who do not realise that there has to be a seed change in attitude, expectation and the method we employ to go about our lives. Happiness, it seems to me, is a fundamental requirement of all human beings. I believe that we are entitled to happiness but that this view is out of step with the engines that drive our culture.

Some philosophies would have you believe that the purpose of living is to suffer and to feel the suffering of all things. Some would have you believe that a messiah sacrificed their life to absolve you of sin and that you are therefore indebted to that messiah for your life. I believe that the purpose of life is to grow and to develop. To personally evolve and become the best that you can possibly be at whatever it is that you do. How you achieve that is a matter of choice, something else that I believe is a fundamental principle to being alive. Also that there is responsibility within that, responsibility toward others, to do no harm to other living things and to uphold a set of values that promote the best in others. 

Naturally I only touch base here. This area is, for anyone serious about their life, huge and requires a lifetime’s endeavour. Not a lifetime of graft and uncomfortably, but a lifetime of stretching to reach the next level from where you are at. It’s like a stairway, isn’t it? Each step has its preceding step, its step beyond and the step itself. They exist within an inter-connectivity that defines what they are.

There is an Irish joke about taking a journey. An old codger is asked the way to Kerry by some lost travellers and having given it some thought he says, “You know.. if I was going to Kerry, I wouldn’t start from here at all.” And that is what it’s like, development is a journey. We probably wouldn’t start from where we started but it’s our only point of departure and everything we do is relative to that originating point.

Why do I say that? Someone asked me what made me qualified to talk about happiness in a way that wasn’t a patronising, ‘I am happy, you should be too.’ It being that there is no formal qualification in happiness, no degree course or doctor of happiness PhD to be studies for the matter is one of subjective assessment. However happiness is, I believe, a fundamental requirement of all human beings in order that they flourish and prosper.

Development is not an easy option. Self improvement requires going through one’s life with a fine toothed comb and challenging whatever that process delivers up that is at odds with your intention to improve yourself. You are the author of your own story, you create your own reality and the truth for you is whatever you want it to be. That can be a main road to misery or reveille to wake up and live the life you truly want to live.     

image: donna deestea

I am the funniest person you will ever meet.

Give me the opportunity and I will have you crying with laughter and begging for mercy because your sides ache that much. You don’t believe me? You should.

I come from a long line of stand up comedians.

The thing that has enabled me to endure is being able to see the funny side of things. I look at our world, I listen to people and I have to take it all with a pinch of salt. Some people take themselves too seriously, and I do include myself in that po faced band but fortunately for me it is an occasional affliction. You have to chill once in a while.

Why not?

image: fuelli 

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination - Immanuel Kant

Consider being born here with every opportunity that presents itself. What is your greatest joy? What is the source from which you derive the greatest satisfaction? Here are a few informal pointers.

Try to treat every situation as if it were brand new.

Familiarity is a big hurdle to overcome if you allow it to take root in your attitude. Every person you ever meet has their dreams and their hopes. They have their desires whether they have been able to fulfil them or not. Every situation has its potential outcomes that are dashed upon the rocks of familiarity. Expect more, expect better, from yourself and from others. That is not a licence for tyranny it is a disposition advisory. What you invest in something is what you can expect to receive from it, the something here is your life and all that it entails. If you want extraordinary things then you must lead an extraordinary life, do not fall into the trap of thinking that simply because you are you there is an entitlement.

When I find myself in need of a new perspective I summon the state of being a stranger in a strange land. What does this mean? Have you been to a foreign country, with a culture, language, social structure and a frequency quite different to what you are accustomed to? Everything is different and you see it through the eyes of one who is an outsider because you are not soaked in the provenance of what has brought that state of affairs about. You are, in a sense, immune to its luggage or history.

As such you can have insight into things and see them as they actually are without having to process the accompanying baggage through your filters. In time you become imbued with some of the local character and you lose that freshness of perspective and the initial clear vision dissipates.

The initial freshness is the perspective to get. How do you do this? The method is a form of self modelling. You must feel how you felt when you were aware of being in a place you had no history with. In order to reconnect with that state ask yourself, what did it feel like, what did you notice about yourself within it, how did you react? The best way to be is completely impartial, when in the state of objectivity you are able to see things as close to how they actually are as it is possible to see them. There is a childlike quality to what you see, stripped bare of cynicism, ennui and the great stifler: familiarity.

Turn that vision on to your own circumstance or situation from time to time and you will get far greater insight into what you are doing than if you treat your life with disregard. The same is true for other people, other situations and the places you discover yourself in. Walk along the avenues of your life with the perception of a stranger at times and see how it makes you feel. Imagine it were brand new and this was your first encounter with it.

Attitude is everything

The single most important factor in your life is attitude. Anything can be dealt with, disease, pestilence, outrageous fortune - these things are all manageable, the crucial factor is attitude. You define your own world. You create the reality that you engage with and this is circumscribed by the attitude you bring to bear upon anything. What you deal with is almost circumstantial, it is how you deal with it that gives definition to who and what you are.

Consider your life as being a set of unknown parameters caused to come together by a set of circumstances you know nothing about. You find yourself in a mix of sensory impressions and situations brought into being by the similar experience of others just like you, all facing the same set of factors that for them represent their own lives. That situation may be poised to become something other than what it is, but what it will become for you is determined by your attitude.

Are you open to the possibility of something massive happening, are you open at all? Or have you become weary and beaten by an unkind world? How you perceive it is determined by you, there are no conspiracies, no networks of ignominy out to confound you. There is only the Universe, an objective state of being and the fact that you have a life within it - you are in a state of animate engagement.

Attitude is a stream from which you may always draw sustenance, it is a refreshing agency within all our lives if we so choose or it can be an exclusion zone. As a self defining individual, the choice is there for you to make.

Simplicity is closer to the truth

What does your brain love to do? Do you give it time to do those things? Brains sometimes get convoluted, they become a bit smart, sophisticated and they can lose their way in the huge scheme we are a part of. Remind them that it’s actually very simple.

The fabric of our lives an undeniably complex assembly of causes and events, arisings, structures, assembles comings and goings. We interact with things, we engage with things, we participate in a theatre of exchanges and who we are is the aggregate of all those happenings. It is, therefore, eminently reasonable within all this to perceive it as a complex and extremely sophisticated cascade. It is, but that will keep you for ever on the outside of it, spun off like a child trying to jump on a whirling merry-go-round.

At the core of the merry-go-round there is stillness. A tranquility that pervades all other states and represents the canvas upon which the complexity of our lives is daubed. This is where to be. Be in the stillness, where all things are simple, donot allow yourself to become excommunicated from the true substance of creation and live on the periphery of things. The periphery is always chaos driven by the collective ignorance of those who have placed themselves there. The curious thing being that they are ignorant of their plight.

In this place all manner of strange and peculiar things can come about, hence the saying, ‘in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.’ Keep it oh so simple, stay at the core of things and your returns will be far more rewarding and sustainable.