Happiness Page 6

  The point is that science is very much in league with philosophy, religion, and art now in their common concern to understand the link between the physical and emotional dimensions of life. We are not simply captives of the bad times around us. We can think our way out of them.

  We can train ourselves to respond differently. We can learn to smile at an insult rather than strike out in response to it, with bitterness in our hearts and murder in our eyes. Human emotions are not simply only physical, nor are they not physical at all. They are a part of us that is under the control of the brain — just as is the rest of us. They are ours. We create them. We must own up to them. They are not “just the way we are.” They are the way we allow ourselves to become.

  What is even more important to the present study of happiness is the consciousness that none of the disciplines dismiss the impact of the relationship between the brain and the environment in the pursuit of happiness. The thoughts we think color the way we see life. The emotions we cultivate in ourselves have a great deal to do with the way we live with others. The way we feel about things determines the way we respond to them. The man who takes a drink when he’s angry rather than apologize for his part in the tension is a man who has allowed himself to think “insulted” rather than “misunderstood.” The woman who becomes hysterical when a child falls off a bike is the person who has never learned to be grateful for the fact that the child was not hurt rather than paralyzed by fear of the worst.

  At the spiritual level, it is one thing to depend on “the natural law” — the magnet for the moral that we say is natural to all people on earth, regardless of their race or sex or ethnicity. It is entirely another to recognize that murderous rage is a result of what goes on in the brain and so seeds the soul, as well. To forget the physical dimension of the emotions, therefore, is to ignore the very heart of the problem of happiness.

  Science knows now, with neurological precision, that what we know about the way the brain functions will have a great deal to do with the way people learn to function under stress, in times of loss, in the face of conflict, in relationship to other people.

  Psychology knows that helping people learn to be happy is every bit as important, if not more so, than helping them live with depression.

  Philosophy knows that human choice is of the essence of happiness.

  And religion knows that it is our innate desire for “happiness” — however we define it — that is at the base of the way we go through life, at the core of the choices we make, at the marrow of the way we respond at times of both moral and social struggle, and, finally, at the root of why we do what we do both to ourselves and to others.

  Both the quality of the individual human life and the character of the societies we build in pursuit of what we consider happiness are affected by this dance between the brain and the circumstances of life. Most of all, neither of them — the quality of the lives we live and the quality of the societies we build — can be ignored if we really want to know what happiness is and what it has to do with the life well-lived.

  The chief finding of science, if we never discover another single thing about it physically, is that happiness is not a fancy, not a notion, not an illusion, not the product of charlatans and rogues to keep us buying potions of nothingness. Happiness is itself both a sign and a measure of human development. It is a standard to steer by when we are tempted to let go of its pursuit in order to slip into a life that is both listless and loveless, eternally adolescent and woefully childish.

  Where life is concerned, we know now, there is no substitute for happiness. It can’t be “gotten” as if by luck. It can’t be pursued as if it were a product of something outside ourselves. It must be chosen and developed and cultivated beyond things the surveys survey. It is both in us and beyond us. It is the elixir of the spiritual life.

  chapter 10

  Hardwired for Happiness

  In 1962 scientists discovered something about the human body that not only changed our understanding of neural-anatomy but changed our very understanding of ourselves and our ideas about the purpose of life. It made Aristotle’s observation that “happiness . . . is the whole aim and end of human existence” more foresighted than ever.

  No doubt about it, the major breakthrough of the twentieth century was neither the Internet nor the pioneering explorations of space. The greatest human discovery of our time is that the human being is hardwired for happiness.

  “You and I,” says Dr. Candice Pert, pioneer in the field of brain biochemistry, “are designed for bliss. We’re meant to enjoy ourselves.”1 Pert explains the obvious truth of it all: “The brain exists to maximize pleasure,” she argues.

  Up until 1962, with the identification of the opiate receptor, emotions — feelings — were largely considered to be “spiritual elements” of the human condition, meaning outside the purview of pure science. Science dealt with material things: things that could be counted and seen. Emotions were insubstantial responses out of who knew where. Heightened energy levels, perhaps. Uncontrolled personality traits, maybe. But one thing for sure: they were certainly not physical in the truest sense of the word, meaning having form and place and function.

  But then, in 1976, neurologists discovered endorphins, morphine-like substances that attach to opiate receptors in the brain. Endorphins, or “morphine within” us as the etymology of the word implies, are natural pain relievers. But more than that, they also cause euphoric effects. They make us feel good, in other words. They give us a sense of well-being, of “happiness.” Pert calls them “the pleasure peptide.”

  Neurologists found that, when they stimulated these peptides in the brain, people came up with totally distinct emotional responses or emotional memories.

  Clearly, emotional responses, whatever their spiritual content, are as much physical as they are “mental”; they can be found and manipulated and changed. They are an energy. They create the link between the spiritual and the physical dimensions of life. And, most surprisingly of all, their greatest functions are bonding and pleasure.

  The human being, then, is not a robotized body. We are integrated beings whose state of mind determines the climate of our lives.

  It is a mind-shattering insight, this awareness that happiness is not an idea. It is a “thing,” a real dimension of the human brain to be attended to, to be understood. The reality of happiness as a natural state of life has a life-giving impact on us. It washes away in a deluge of emotions everything we were ever taught about the relationship between body and soul, between the emotions and reason, between the meaning of life and the experiences of life. Emotions are not nothing. We created them and they create us.

  We do not “think” as disembodied brains. We think with the information the body gives us. And in this case, the information — the very existence of opiate receptors and neuropeptides — is that life is meant to be more than suffering.

  But if that is physically true, then it is also true that a state of life called “happiness” is more than a momentary impression, imposed on us from outside ourselves, that it is not just a sensation but a property of the mind. It is a built-in and permanent state. “Happiness” is a function of being human. It is part of the fiber of the self. It is there for our taking. It is part of the reason we exist. It is a measure of what it means to be fully human.

  When the scriptures say of God, then, that God “wishes us well and not woe,” the argument is a real one. We have been physically designed to be happy. Physically designed.

  The potential for happiness has been built into our very bodies. It waits for our fulfillment.

  Concepts like that require a whole new rethinking of what life is really meant to be about, of what being human implies, of what humanity has a right to demand for itself, yes, but of itself, as well. It gives the lie to the notion that the spiritual life is to be about “suffering,” and “offering it up,” and repressing the sel
f, and, most of all, about ranking pain above joy.

  Only in modern history did happiness become a “human right.” Up until then, the human being could be born and die, could go through an entire lifetime thinking only about how to bear the pain that would be imposed on us rather than how to gain joy, let alone a sense of general satisfaction, the realization of well-being.

  Joy, in earlier ages, came to be regarded as spiritually suspect, superficial, unmeritorious. Life, these generations knew, was a test of surrender to the worst so that someday, perhaps, somewhere else, something better would be available to us.

  Even today there are strains of that kind of thinking that plague us still. The world around us, one culture after another, is replete with such ideas yet. “Real men,” we have learned, are those who can take pain and give pain. “Real women” are meant to endure, to suffer, to spend themselves for others without a thought for their own joy. “No pain, no gain,” we say cavalierly when what we really mean is that the good things of life can be won only by enduring enough suffering to merit them.

  In the midst of that kind of thinking, the very thought of an emotional geography of the brain has had a life-changing impact. It is the mind-shattering insight of the twentieth century. If emotions are physical, if happiness is built into the brain, then all the old fears about enjoyment and pleasure as signs of making a truce with the body, with our “lower” selves, with the “weaknesses” in us are heresy.

  The alliance between mind and body, such neurology signals, washes away in a deluge of emotions everything we were ever taught about the negative relationship between body and soul, about the constant innate antagonism between the emotions and reason, about the natural danger of things material and the unreasonable exaltation of reason.

  The idea that the mind was pure reason, the sole rational enemy of our bodies, is, it seems, out of harmony with the science that tells us that the human body is hardwired for happiness. Pleasure is not alien to us as rational creatures, not a dangerous interloper meant to be transcended, to be ignored.

  Pleasure, and its contribution to happiness, is the part of us that makes life sweet. It makes the pressures of life bearable and fills us with the love of life. It gives us the energy to go on when it would be easier simply to quit. It enables people with terminal illnesses to live fuller lives longer. It enables us to face every storm life has to offer because we have the happiness it takes to bear it. It challenges us not to deny our emotions but to determine which of them we should concentrate on at any given time.

  The human being is the only creature who can choose, Pert says, what we will attend to in life. And it is this that is the human being’s “happiness control.”

  The truth is, then, that to chase the dream of happiness is not a useless exercise. We are not victims of our fantasies; we are our own shapers of them. We know when what we want is out of reach, and we know, likewise, when it is reachable but by another route. Then, science is clear, we need — if we are really seeking happiness and not simply allowing ourselves to slide into a kind of perverse masochism — to change direction.

  chapter 11

  Happiness Is a Goal

  The implications of contemporary science for the understanding, not only of the physiology of happiness but also for its place in our own lives, are serious. They make us look again at the way we are living life and ask not only what’s missing from there but why.

  “Most people,” Abraham Lincoln said, “are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

  We might have been allowed to ignore a statement like that fifty years ago. But not now. Happiness, the world said then, was a matter of caste. Or maybe a matter of virtue. Or perhaps a matter of luck. Or even a matter of merit. But surely not a matter of personal accountability, let alone mental choice.

  If anything, happiness — if there really were such a thing — was more a fluke than a hope. Sometimes, for some people, perhaps, it came with the territory — with wealth or with station, with freedom or with power — but it certainly did not come as a state of life for the many, for us.

  But the findings of modern science change all of that. The truth is, we learn, happiness is meant to be a state of life. A state of anybody’s life. Yours and mine. We were not born to be the outcast children of a loving God. Life is not meant to be an endurance test. If anything, the garden of anybody’s paradise is part of the chemistry of the human body. It is up to us to make it real.

  This also answers the question of how it is that paraplegics and prisoners, old and young, the dying and the healthy, often to our eternal surprise, confound us with their declarations of contentment. Or, conversely, it also explains how it is that people who have everything can seem so bereft, so unsettled, so dissatisfied with all the things the rest of us are sure would make any person happy.

  Rahman III of Spain wrote in the tenth century: “I have now reigned about fifty years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.” Clearly, it is possible “to have it all” and still not have the happiness we seek, the kind that lasts, the kind that transcends all the various and fleeting flavors of it.

  The one major problem with Rahman’s statement, we know now, is that happiness does not “fall to my lot.” Happiness is not a matter of pure luck. Not if science is correct. Happiness is something I’m made for, provided I am willing to develop it within myself.

  Happiness, we begin to understand, is a goal, not an accident. Nor is it a kind of superfluity in life. Instead, it is of the essence of life. If we are born with the ability to be happy, then it begins to dawn on us: we each, somehow, are answerable for being the happiness that we are meant to be. Just as we are meant to be able to learn, or to speak, or to read, or to relate to other human beings, we are meant to develop our capacity and inherent aptitude for happiness.

  If we are, as brain science tells us, “made for bliss,” then it is up to us to discover for ourselves what bliss is for us so that we can bend our souls to becoming what we are meant to be. We have a destiny within us that we are meant to achieve. We are meant to be happy. We are not meant to go through life waiting for someone else to make us happy, to work miracles for us that we should be making for ourselves.

  But that implies, too, that we are meant to drain the dross from the gold. We will need to distinguish between pleasure and joy, between a surfeit of sensual delights and a down-deep sense of the rightness of being alive, of happiness. The new car will be new only so long. Then what will we want? The escapades will end. Then what will we need to keep us satisfied? Obviously, all excitement is not happiness. Nor does all pleasure lead to happiness. Happiness is what remains when the excitement is long over and the pleasure has been satisfied.

  The awful truth comes quickly in life: pleasure and happiness are not synonyms. Children go from one toy to another; adults go from one thrill to another, from one lover to another, and end up as restless as when they began. The only lesson in the whole process is simply that the hectic search for new titillations is nothing more than a smorgasbord of pleasure, not a lifetime of happiness. Nor does the frantic search for physical satisfactions end in contentment when we’re adults.

  The problem is that pleasure is a momentary stimulation of the senses. Ice cream is wonderful — until we have eaten too much of it. Money is important — till we discover the parts of life that money can’t buy. Freedom is exhilarating — till we realize that we’re lost because we don’t know what to do with it or where we’re going in life. Then, alone in an apartment, isolated in a prison cell, or insulated in a mansion, we are thrown back on our own devices to determine what it is that would really bring us
the contentment and serenity and sense of fulfillment we need to call life “good.”

  At that point, our understanding of the very nature of happiness and its meaning for us takes on a new glow. “Follow your bliss,” said Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and definer of universal thought. And, in his explanation of what he meant by the term, he gives us an insight into the distinction between pleasure and happiness. He explained:

  If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

  Happiness, it seems, at least on one level, is finding out where we fit, where we are most ourselves, where there is no struggle between who we are and what we do, between where we are and where we want to be, between what we’re doing and what we really want to do. Then time stops for us. It is no longer, as the Irish say, a matter of “grinding one more day out of it until the great day comes.” No, when we are happy — truly happy — we are already in a part of the paradise prepared for us since the beginning of time.

  The only real question, then, is what is it that sustains the happiness within long after the stars of the day cease to sparkle and the moon loses its shine and the rising sun of the day that follows brings with it as much mist as it does new light.