MT
Copyright © 2004
by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
In process.
For other files associated with this book, see
by
Kevin Sharpe
The Graduate College,
Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, UK
Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit, Oxford, UK
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
Structure
Summary:
Overall: How can we become happy in a way that is spiritually healthy and
true? To strive for happiness we ought to follow what scientific research says
are the routes to happiness. These are also the spiritual ways to happiness.
Tension:
What would make us
happier? In particular, how can we become happier in a way that’s true to our
inmost spiritual selves?
Ending:
To follow the
scientifically established ways is to follow spiritual reality’s ways toward living in the higher range of our happiness set points.
Outstanding Points and Questions:
·
Go through what
Rebecca added to EP
·
(From my
agent.) A general audience isn’t interested in reconciling; this gets in the
way. They are, rather, interested in how to become happier. Explain the ways
that people can become happier. Subsume my intellectual question. My three
questions already are pretty loaded; e.g., the ‘afterlife’ is too religious for
secular readers. The ‘afterlife’: need a case for it.
·
Note that
words (and their definitions) like happiness are our linguistic approximations
(critical realism) (and, to some extent, models for) certain physical
realities. Therefore, the arguments by Thomists and others over the definition
of happiness are puerile unless they are trying to describe rather than define
the state of happiness that we feel, i.e., subjective well being.
·
·
- use CS Lewis' "
- God and morality must surpass or incorporate oxytocin
stuff.
How do I answer this?
God is the doer of all (take from Sir John) => God does
good and bad.
Not only will, but natural. Not that our natural state is all
bad or all good, but that we have conflicting motivations, both of which are
natural. Place of culture in this.
So what role does God have in morality, e.g., in the good?
Is a problem in all good and all bad (e.g., mothering too
much). More appropriate ways for humans to live - Jesus as the example.
Maybe this is
going too far, apart from raising the questions and in so doing, asking if
"your God is too s
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
Biochemistry Stories
Neurotransmitters: Dopamine and Seratonin
Brain Part Where Neurotransmitters Work and the
Set Range Lies
Twin Studies for Set Ranges and Genes
Evolutionary Psychology Explanations
Happiness as a Natural Phenomenon
Chapter 3:
New Plymouth Stories
Why?
Adaptation and Opponent-Process
Limits to This Search for Happiness
Conclusion:
Spirituality and Happiness
Chapter 8: Conflicting Stories
The
Spiritual’s Response: Let’s-Get-’Em
The
Spiritual’s Response: There’s More than Genes
The
Spiritual’s Response: Let’s-Have-’Em-Both
The
Spiritual’s Response: Let’s-Hope-It’ll-All-Go-Away
A Better
Relationship between Spiritual and Scientific Thinking
Happiness
Evolved into Us to Achieve
Relating
the Universe and Spiritual Reality
The
Spiritual Works as Evolution
Moving
toward Greater Wholeness-within-Diversity
Searching
for Significance in the Movements of the Universe
To Offer Meaning for Our Lives
Spirituality
Leads to Happiness Seeking
Science
Suggests How to Become Happier
Chapter 11:
Relationship Stories
Science Contributes: Happiness from
Enduring Characteristics
These
Traits May Not Cause Happiness But Accompany It
Attitudes/Behaviors
That Correlate With, Perhaps Cause, Happiness
Social
Relationships and Happiness
Happiness from Pursuing Goals in Flow
Chapter 15:
Persistence Stories
Happiness from Faith’s Beliefs
Happiness from Faith’s Belonging
Happiness from Faith’s Pursuits
Happiness from Faith’s Meaning
Happiness from What Spiritual Path?
Spirituality and the Values Gap
Smiles for Meaning and Happiness
Asking
Questions about Revelation
Asking
Questions about Resurrection
MT
I drove to my local K-Mart yesterday and tried to find a parking space. The first row I peered down had only large new SUVs and no space for my little old Honda Civic. The second row I peered down had a space between two SUVs. I felt lost in a forest of giants and hoped that the next one seeking a space wouldn’t inadvertently squash my near-hidden Civic.
The Explorer one down from my car left and a
Landcruiser pulled in, bright in silver and chrome. Out climbed (literally,
climbed) a suburban
Why does she drive a SUV? Why does she dress and adorn herself in the way she does? I wouldn’t mind her money – but that’s my story about feeling happy. Presumably, she drives her vehicle and her husband wants her to drive it because they believe it makes their lives happier: it lessens the chance of her and their kids being hurt in a car crash, she can carry more stuff, the kids feel less cramped and cranky, and the Joneses – everyone else in their street is a Jones – park their four or more SUVs in their drive way and she doesn’t want any Jones to look down on her.
Much of what we do in life comes from our desire to be happy. It is one of our strongest drives. We don’t like to feel unhappy and so desire its opposite. To avoid unhappiness and keep or increase how happy I usually feel, I buy storage boxes from K-Mart to keep my house more in order, the evening meal of chicken from A&P so I don’t succumb to hunger pangs and a lack of blood sugar, Compound-W from CVS to get rid of warts that I think make my hand look ugly, and I look into replacing the Civic with a new Subaru Outback.
Like me, most of us go about our lives
automatically pursuing happiness in ways we haven’t thought deeply about. We
assume how we might become happier. Our culture tells us what we must do,
through the ads and news broadcasts we see and hear and the books and stories
we read. We must lose our pimples and
crooked teeth. Regain youth. Attain good looks. Money. Popularity. Lots of sex.
ö
I wrote the above not knowing that, at the
same time, the two jets slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center
and a third into the Pentagon. I broke for lunch, heard the news on the Civic’s
radio on my way out, and haven’t been able to add to this writing for several
days. I am in northeast
I wanted to write here about the importance, the fundamental importance, of religion and spirituality for everyday life, including for our happiness. I wanted to associate spirituality with happiness. New Yorkers’ and the world’s response to the catastrophe, and the terrorists’ fanaticism tell us several things, including:
· Religious beliefs can so powerfully grip the whole of a person’s life that she or he can perform the most outrageous acts – including self-destruction – in the cause of the beliefs.
·
My daughters and parents in
·
Mayor Giuliani of
All these are spiritual: the religious beliefs such as the terrorists held, the shock of family and neighbors, and the caring for those in need.
Concern and compassion at such times as this attack on NYC are as integral to our spiritual nature as is hatred and destructiveness to the spiritual nature of the terrorists. Our spirituality undergirds every aspect of our lives, giving us meaning and purpose, informing us on how to behave and what to believe and feel about almost everything.
Finding greater happiness or reducing our unhappiness motivates us from deep down inside ourselves. It, therefore, must be something that spiritual belief ought to discuss and it must be something that spiritual activity tries to lead us to. We all want to be happy: whether it be by avoiding as much pain as we can, by helping those whose suffering we feel, or by being specially received in the afterlife by killing as many Americans as possible and ourselves in the process. Becoming happier has to do with our spirituality and must be closely connected to whatever we believe or think about God.
I write for those who want to live spiritual lives. Whatever we may think the word ‘spiritual’ means and whatever we may think the word ‘God’ refers to, those of us who want to live spiritually direct our lives as much as possible so we live as correctly as we can. I have just called a person who has lost a cat and has a notice up in a local supermarket asking for information. I left a message to say that, according to another notice up in the supermarket, someone else has found a cat that matches the description of the one that’s missing. Why did I phone them? Because I believe I ought to help other people whenever I reasonably can. I know how I would feel if I lost my cat. My belief and my tendency to help have become built into me. It’s part of my attempt to live a spiritual life.
We have the urge to become happier (or, the urge to become happier has us) plus we choose to live as spiritual and as upright lives as possible. We are pushed to happiness plus our conscience and insight guide us. We therefore want to follow ways to happiness that are spiritually sound or, even better, that help us develop spiritually. We want to become happier via routes that God creates for us to follow.
ö
Two weeks have now passed since the destruction
of the
I still want to increase my happiness. Would it make me happier to follow the crowd? I decided a long time ago that this doesn’t help me. I also decided that morally it is wrong to bomb innocent people even if we’ve been wronged. I fly a lot and did so last weekend; I decided that, despite the risk in flying and the hassle of well-intentioned but overly zealous security measures, I will still fly. I owe that to my students who need my presence to continue or complete their studies. I think I should follow what I feel is right rather than follow what those around me feel is right. This may make me feel more at peace with my conscience but less comfortable living in my neighborhood. Life is about making decisions and balancing out possible behaviors that come from different motivations. In the long run, following my conscience will, I believe, lead me to greater happiness. My wife-to-be is a Jew and she asked me what I would do if the Nazis came for her. I know what I’d do; I’d tell them she wasn’t here and do my utmost to protect her. That would probably lead to my death along with hers, but that’s me. A death camp wouldn’t make me happier. But being alive at her expense would make me feel even less happy.
On the other hand, I am writing this. I write. I know that getting into the flow of writing makes me feel happy. I love to sort out ideas and try to communicate them. So, I choose to write and try to find time each day to do so. That’s a decision I make toward my happiness.
If I were a fireperson and was asked to help
at the
This making of decisions is spiritual because it’s our using our God-created ability to choose. For me, it’s also spiritual because I use science’s God-created information about flow and what I have experienced about the flow I achieve through writing. We can live according to how humans have evolved (that is, how God created us), by seeking happiness via ways that work, by seeking justice via ways that work, by acting out our concern and love for others via ways that will work. We can all do this for ourselves.
ö
Apparently, most of us aim at happiness; our
culture reinforces this and we seek it through many, many means.
Thus I ask two things: What is happiness? What
does science say it is? Then, What in theory –
spiritually, popularly, scientifically – makes a person happier?
I also ask these of myself: What does happiness
feel like? When do I have it? Then, What brings me greater happiness?
Instinctively, I associate happiness with
spirituality. Is this an accurate connection; what does happiness have to do
with the spiritual path a person follows? How can we
become happier in a way that’s true to our inmost spiritual selves? Can science
justify ways to happiness that are spiritually healthy and true?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find scientifically grounded ways to increase everyone’s happiness and that, at the same time, not only rescues our world from its self-destruction, pain, and misery, but that brings us closer to God.
MT
##
Should be something about how I find
biochem more and more important in understanding behavior and states and
therefore happiness. Parallel this with my own story of biology of happiness:
depression (disthymia and diabetes) and Zoloft (also in twice below).
Biochemistry of happiness:
·
IRAS
at Star
·
·
Miriam
·
ö
Thyroid. Dragging. Lung infection? Blood test. Waiting for results. Results. Pill. Difference.
ö
Importance of biochemistry for understanding
how we function? Story of biology in the future being more important than
physics. Story of how it’s impacted on me more and more, personally and (by
implication) ideationally. Bill Wilson’s story. Linda. School prizes.
ö
Impact of diabetes on me.
ö
MT
##
Personal rejection of usual ways to happiness
## Theme:
Outlines the psychological,
biological, neurological, and evolutionary psychology stories of what happiness
is subjectively (subjective well-being), what it is objectively, how many of us
experience it, and why it functions in us as it does. Happiness evolved into
us, and this process left each of us with our own inbuilt predisposition to
happiness. It is an inherited goal with roots in our genetic being. We are all
usually happy, but we usually want to feel happy more of the time.
Tension:
We generally do feel happy yet we want more
happiness. What’s at work here?
Lead:
Happiness is feeling
‘quite nice.’
Hook:
‘She thought now…and
yet….’
Ending:
The tension in this
chapter is in the usually feeling happy yet wanting more The resolution is an
evolutionary picture. Then, how do we become happier?
Happiness is, quite simply, feeling nice. A mixture of contentment and wisdom laced with bright, shining joy. When we’re happy we feel gratitude, inner peace, satisfaction and affection for ourselves and others.
Studies of happiness have taken place worldwide.
The
Three in ten U.S. residents self-report as very
happy, and only one in ten claims to be ‘not too happy,’ according to the
University of Chicago studies. Psychologists David Myers of Hope
College, Michigan, and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois conclude from
survey results like
this on
We appear much happier than literature or the
media depict. The distinction that matters isn’t between happy and unhappy
people, but between what percentage of the time we feel happy versus unhappy,
and how happy and unhappy.
She thought now, as with eyes closed she floated, oh how perfect this is, oh I am so happy! And yet, some other nearby thought-self was saying, how can I be happy now, when everything is going very soon to be dissolved into pieces and made as if it had never been.
We all desire happiness and devote considerable time to seeking it. How to rearrange our job so it will satisfy and fulfill us more? How to get on better with our partner so we can more happily share the rest of our lives? How to ensure that we spend our next leisure more time pleasurably and constructively?
## Is
happiness-seeking the chief goal for most of us? We want other things because
we think they bring happiness? // A seeker of happiness is one aspect of
who I am, but who I am is largely in modern times (always?) a seeker of
happiness. Being happy is the chief goal of life—never reached for most of us.
(Reference the big question for this series.)
Most of us already feel happy yet most of us constantly strive to be happier. Why does this contradiction happen? What does happiness depend on? What is happiness? Let’s look first at what science says about it.
Social psychologists
call happiness, ‘subjective well-being.’ Psychological literature offers
definitions. Subjective well-being refers to the satisfaction we feel about
specific areas of our life, like work and relationships, which leads to an
overall sense of our satisfaction with life. Those of us with high subjective
well-being mostly think positively about our lives; we judge events positively.
So we mainly feel pleasant emotions. Those of us with low subjective well-being
judge events negatively and tend to experience unpleasant emotions like anger,
depression, and anxiety.
Downness isn’t the absence of upness, and vice versa. Knowledge of how much pleasant feeling we experience over time doesn’t suggest how much unpleasant feeling we experience. Some of us encounter extremely good feelings and extremely bad feelings. Wonderful highs can give way to dreadful lows. Others of us are typically happy, or depressive, or unemotional. Positive and negative emotions needn’t diametrically oppose.
Psychologists find it more appropriate, therefore, to understand subjective well-being in terms of three related aspects: the presence of positive feelings, the absence of negative feelings, and the degree of satisfaction with life.
## Mary wants the ‘unhappy’ stuff included
– we can distinguish between happiness and unhappiness and we want the former
over the latter.
To examine happiness
from the view of psychology requires a way to measure it. Most social
scientists ask their subjects to report how they feel: ‘How satisfied are you with your life as a whole
these days? Are you very satisfied? Satisfied? Not very satisfied? Not at all
satisfied?’ The studies may also include multi-item scales. But should we take
subjects’ answers at face value? Perhaps people who dub themselves ‘happy’
might actually be hiding their unhappiness (from themselves as well as from
researchers). Not usually. Many factors suggest the reliability of a person’s
self-reports of subjective well-being. The reports:
·
are fairly
consistent, remaining stable over testing periods of between
·
are fairly
consistent across the various methods for assessing happiness (even those that
use beepers to ensure sampling at random times);
·
corroborate
with information on happiness and satisfaction that family, close friends, and
clinical interviewers provide;
·
still make
sense after taking into account factors like current mood and what behavior
society favors (social desirability turns out, in fact, to enhance well-being).
Further, those who are happy:
·
report
mainly positive emotions each day;
·
remember
more positive – and fewer negative – events than do unhappy people;
·
corroborate
in their reports with other indicators of well-being; they are less
self-centered, less abusive and hostile, and more healthy than unhappy people;
·
love more,
smile more, forgive more, trust more, help more, and show more energy,
decisiveness, creativity, and friendliness than unhappy people;
·
respond
better to both positive and negative events and to therapy than do unhappy
people; and
·
feel happy
when not feeling ill, and vice versa.
All these factors lead
researchers to accept subjective, self-reports of happiness and unhappiness. We
should accept the worldwide surveys reported above that show most people are
happy most of the time. Happiness is subjective well-being. We nor
Besides a descriptive,
subjective account, what is happiness? What is it physically in our bodies?
##
Neurotransmitters work by passing information from the synapse or junction between a nerve cell and another nerve cell or a muscle. The nerve cell’s bulbous end releases them from storage when an electrical impulse moving along the nerve reaches it. They then cross the junction to dock at the other nerve cell’s receptor, like spacecraft docking at a space station, and either prompt or inhibit the impulses along the second cell. The first nerve cell reabsorbs excess neurotransmitters, but not necessarily all of them. Those that remain free-floating can influence how we feel.
Molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer
Institute directs our attention to two of the more than
Genes carry the instructions for the construction of
neurotransmitters, their receptor and reabsorption portals. They also impart
information on such things as their storage and release rates. Hence, genes can
influence the prevalence, scarcity, and activity of serotonin and dopamine,
and, in turn, whatever behaviors and feelings these neurotransmitters induce.
Researchers have found, for instance, that people who differ in the gene that
produces part of the D
The genetic view of happiness has implications for the cause of our feelings of well-being because our genetic code translates partly into how our neurology (nervous system) behaves.
##
For each of us, our happiness fluctuates within a s
This notion resembles the metabolic set range which some
scientists claim governs our weight – no matter how many cakes or chocolates we
eat, the body’s metabolism readjusts to maintain its preset weight. This could
explain why some people find it so hard to shed excess pounds, while others are
lucky enough to have figures like supermodels Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss. Scientific
studies showing
that body mass is
Although we experience temporary mood swings, we soon readjust to our genetic set range for happiness in the same way, which might explain why some of us always approach life full of hope and enthusiasm, while others seem permanently to experience the blues.
Some scientists think they have located the part of the
brain that registers happiness and where the set range mechanism works. Richard
Davidson has found that people with more activity on the left prefrontal area
of the brain experience greater happiness, while those with greater activity on
the right prefrontal area experience more negative emotions. People with the
greatest right prefrontal activity suffer from clinical depression and claim
that life holds no pleasure for them. Even very young children appear to fit
the pattern – babies of ten months tend to cry less easily when separated from
their mother for short periods if they exhibit more active left prefrontal
lobes. Further evidence derives from the work of
##
Research shows that a person’s level of happiness remains
stable over many years. In a study of
Other
Twins provide an excellent base from which to study the
degree of heritability of behavioral traits, because identical twins share
identical genes whereas fraternal twins share genes as do ordinary siblings
(roughly
Identical twins attain the same level of happiness
‘This conclusion means that the variance in adult happiness
is determined about equally by genetic factors and by the effects of
experiences unique to each individual,’ say Lykken and Tellegen. Hamer echoes
their claims: ‘These data show that the broad heritability of well-being is
Heritability raises even higher for happiness in the long
term. Lykken and Tellegen
With heritability this high, an identical twin’s self-report of well-being gives a pretty good idea of a person’s happiness.
##
Another science contributes here, evolutionary psychology. It looks at the evolutionary reasons why we have the characteristics and behavior that we do. It aims to explain human goals, beliefs, and theories in Darwinian terms – at least in part.
Why do we have these brain parts, neurochemical functioning, genes, and so on, that end with our feeling happy? Why do we have happiness?
The urge to survive and reproduce determines even the ways
in which we think, the ways in which our minds work. One leading proponent of
evolutionary psychology,
Evolutionary psychology has something to say about human happiness too. The early evolutionary psychologist, Donald Campbell, describes us as condemned ‘to live on a hedonic treadmill.’ We fanatically pursue happiness, yet, no sooner have we reached one goal, than the satisfaction fades away and we commence reaching for the next rung on the hedonic ladder. ‘As the environment becomes more pleasurable, subjective standards for gauging pleasurableness will rise,’ he explains, adding, ‘‘habituation will produce a decline in the subjective pleasurableness of the input.’ This is, of course, a theoretical statement of the idea of a genetic set range for happiness, as we discussed earlier in the chapter. We feel ecstatic on gaining a pay rise, but soon find that our material situation feels little different from before; perhaps we can live the high life more frequently, but we soon get used to that. We no longer feel happy – we want another rise. We’ve habituated and feel the need to strive once more.
What adaptive advantage does it bring to seek happiness, if
frustration and dissatisfaction constitute the net outcome?
For the evolutionary psychologist, then, the search for happiness plays the key role – our desire for pleasure keeps us on our toes, the activity expands our horizons, our resources, and our skills. Parents employ much the same catch-it-if-you-can psychology when encouraging their offspring to walk – brandishing a favorite toy lures the child into stepping towards it, moving the toy further away means that the child progresses a few steps nearer. As the toy recedes ever further, the child’s walking ability improves proportionally.
##
The many sciences that discuss human happiness have one point of focus in common: happiness as a natural phenomenon. This naturalism takes several forms – a set range for happiness encoded in our genes, neurotransmitters responsible for our states of well-being and misery, the pursuit of happiness bringing adaptive advantages that aid our survival and reproduction. Despite this apparent diversity, the materialist focus shines through. It’s our biology that directs our passionate love affair with happiness.
How do we become happier?
MT
## Pushing beyond New
·
standing
on the shoulders of my parents
·
unhappiness
at school, etc.
·
NP
worldview
MT
‘I always thought I was an ugly kid – you know – pimples,
crooked teeth, frizzy hair, skinny, glasses, and the worst curse –
flat-chested, and I also remember feeling so depressed.’ Many of us remember
our teenage years as miserable. We lost our pre-teen happiness. Thomas Szasz
captures these sentiments: ‘Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by
the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by
children to adults.’
Yet, most of us would
like to feel happier. What would do this? A lack of pimples and straight teeth?
Youth? Popular culture agrees and adds to the list: Good looks. Money. High
social status. Sex. Can we do something to earn more happiness?
Perhaps we should first ask what makes one person happier more often than another.
Three percent of people
in developing countries and five percent in developed countries favor single
child families. Does a childhood either with or without sisters or brothers
affect our happiness? Surveys of
Popular culture believes
that we experience greater unhappiness during our teen years, our mid-life
crises, and our old age. However,
·
a survey of
·
rates of
depression, suicide, career-swapping, and divorce don’t reflect a particular
unhappiness in the years of mid-life crisis;
·
parents
don’t become markedly unhappy when their children leave home.
We can’t pre-judge someone’s happiness by knowing
his or her age. We do face crises, but they arise quite independent of our
stage in life.
Women experience severe depression
and anxiety at double the rate for men. Gender affects happiness – on the face
of it. We must balance these findings with the fact that women experience both
sadness and joy more intensely than men, and that men suffer alcoholism
and antisocial personality disorders at five times the rate for women. Surveys
show that:
·
Women are as
likely as men to report themselves ‘very happy’ and ‘satisfied’ with their
lives.
·
Eighty
percent of women and
·
A
statistical digest of
·
Alex
Michalos and Ronald Ingichart summarize newer surveys of
Women report slightly higher happiness than men
when we look at positive emotions. On average, though, men and women experience
roughly the same level of happiness.
European-Americans experience only slightly more happiness than African-Americans and, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, rates of alcoholism and depression among Blacks and Whites roughly equate. Race and ethnicity poorly predict happiness.
Money and wealth doesn’t
predict happiness either:
·
The
extremely rich experience only slightly greater happiness than the average.
·
An increase
in a culture’s affluence doesn’t increase the happiness of its people. ‘Compared with 1957, Americans have twice as many cars per person – plus microwave
ovens, color TVs, VCRs, air conditioners, answering machines, and $12 billion
worth of new brand-name athletic shoes a year,’ Americans feel no happier now
than in 1957: 35% declared themselves ‘very happy’ in 1957 compared to the
slightly s
·
A steady
increase in a person’s income over
‘Happiness guru Professor
Apart from situations of dire poverty, for example in the very poorest countries. ‘Obviously, anyone who has ever worried about paying the mortgage or affording their children’s christmas presents is in no doubt that money problems and poverty cause great misery. Money troubles are also the single most important source of rows between partners, according to research by couple counselling charity Relate.’
The absence of wealth ‘can breed misery,’ write Myers and Diener, ‘yet having it is no guarantee of happiness.’
‘Whether we’re happy or sad can make a huge difference, not only to our mental and emotional well being, but also to our physical health. We can follow all the right health advice but if we’re not happy, the chances are we won’t be all that healthy either.’
‘There are clear relationships between mental and emotional states and the release of a whole range of hormones which govern our body reactions. If you feel anxious, there are very clear effects on your body. For example, you may get high blood pressure, headaches, palpitations and fatigue. What’s more, it’s a loop system so, if we don’t heed the warning signs, those hormones then influence our next mood and perpetuate the problems.’
‘Express writer Dr Craig Brown researched the connections between mind and body
for
‘The way you feel has been shown to play a role in conditions from heart disease to headaches and colds, allergies to arthritis. ‘Peptic ulcers, which if they perforate can kill you, can be brought on by an accumulation of life stresses such as family or work worries, also irregular eating patterns and smoking which tend to be responses to being worried,’ says Dr Brown.’
‘In my own nutrition practice, I found a link between unhappiness and digestive troubles. Happy people seem far less likely to suffer with symptoms such as heartburn or constipation. If we allow sadness to ‘eat away at us’, one of the first areas of the body to suffer is the gut.’
‘One reason why anxious worriers and people under pressure seem to suffer so many digestive problems could be that they literally ‘can’t stomach any more’. A churning stomach – and a peptic ulcer – can be related to ‘undigested’ stress.’
‘If, on the other hand, you smile, laugh or make a joke, the balance immediately swings in favour of the feel-good chemicals in the body and the brain. If you actually change your thought processes – your outlook on life – this balance is maintained.’
‘Something as simple as deciding to turn your mouth up at the corners rather than down will send out different messages to your body. Even if it isn’t spontaneous, the action of putting your face into ‘smile mode’ still sends positive messages to your cells and helps to rejig your perspective. When you tighten your facial muscles into a smile, the blood flow to the brain cools down which, researchers have found, makes us more relaxed.’
‘It’s a great time of year to clear out old stuff such as guilt, resentments and worry over things from the past, to let go of hopelessness and helplessness, and also to forgive ourselves and others. Not only will you be happier, freer and more positive, you will be healthier all round.’
‘A glass can be half empty or half full, depending upon your viewpoint. If you see yourself as worthless, overworked, always under pressure, always put upon, never in the right place at the right time, always tired and not worth bothering about, you programme yourself so that everything stays that way. People who say: ‘I always get two colds a year’ will probably always get two colds a year. Say: ‘I never catch colds’ and you hardly ever will.’
One’s attitude, especially happiness, can clearly help make for health. We may think that health makes for happiness, but this isn’t necessarily so. Ill people can, in some cases, be within their happiness set range.
##
Maybe in an average everyday life, our happiness does stick at roughly the same level. But what about the momentous events – like winning the lottery or giving birth to a first child? Surely, these have a long lasting effect?
Consider Rose Marie Lajoie, a Michigan Lottery winner: ‘If you are a negative person to start off, if you are a
dull person to start off, you’ll be the same way after winning the lottery,’
she says. ‘If you went
out and bought a Ferrari, a swimming pool and a new wardrobe, you’d get a great
buzz but it would not last for ever.’ ‘But if you
can’t believe that the Ferrari and the pool and the clothes won’t make you
happy, then consider a recent survey by Camelot of people who won more than
‘So many people plan their lives for a distant goal,’ explains David Lykken. ‘They believe that if they become C.E.O. or win a gold medal, their lives will rise out of humdrum ordinariness. This isn’t so. There’s a rush of glory and then it fades.’ This sounds familiar. We all recognize that euphoric feeling when we attain something precious – a coveted job or college degree, perhaps – yet the feeling doesn’t stay with us long. All too soon, we forget and move on, our eyes firmly fixed on the next goal.
‘We’ve all had circumstances change for the better as well as worse. We’ve received love, approval, and presents; passed exams and got jobs; bought clothes, cars and homes. We thought they were going to make us happy forever. But sure as night follows day, we lost our joy again and started looking for new ways to change our circumstances.’
‘We need to understand that changing outer circumstances – partner, job, home, car – is almost never the route to being happier. You only need to think back to the thousands of times your circumstances changed to realize that change alone is not the solution to your problems.’
##
What about the desperately tragic – losing a spouse or becoming permanently paralyzed, for instance. Does this affect happiness over the long term?
Surprisingly, the sting of tragedy disperses equally fast. A study of car accident victims in
Another study by researchers at
Day-to-day events do affect our happiness, but only for a short time. Diener puts a time on how long it takes people to adapt to events like gaining a promotion or losing a lover. ‘The effect on people’s mood is gone by three months, and there’s not a trace by six months,’ he says. The more recent the event, the greater its influence. The emotional results of extreme events hang around only a little longer than the day-to-day ones. Expect the effect to have dispersed within a year for more serious events like divorce, bereavement, or unemployment. The effect can last longer, of course, but this tends to indicate a clinical disease such as depression that overrides the customary set range. ‘It’s because in some sense the bad event continues to happen – there are reminders every day,’ according to Diener.
Short-term mood swings, as determined by circumstances,
differ from long term happiness, as determined by the genetic set range or base
line. ‘The ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ clearly
influence mood,’ explains Greg Carey, a behavioral geneticist at the
Why doesn’t happiness
increase with economic success? Why doesn’t our level of happiness change with
our life events?
Two psychological
principles help explain why our happiness returns to its previous level.
Consider the first, the
process of adaptation. Our happiness relates to our social as well as to
our personal experience: we compare our income, our looks, our intelligence,
and our success with our social contemporaries. How we feel, therefore, depends
on whom we use as our contrast. As our circumstances change, we change whom we
use as a comparison. When we become better off, for instance, we raise our
standard for comparison. This results in the descent of our level of happiness
to its original point. When we feel threatened or demoralized, on the other
hand, we tend to make a comparison with those less fortunate than ourselves.
This raises our spirits. Adaptation works downward as well as upward, and it
operates over the long term.
Besides adaptation,
another process helps create the relativity of happiness. It operates over the
short-term. Richard Solomon suggests, based on studies of both human and ani
Exceptions to
adaptations and opponent processes do exist. Traumatic experiences like rape,
child abuse, or war can induce permanent problems. Nearly half of the
There’s a limit to how far the pursuit of happiness benefits us, though, just as there’s a limit to how far the child can chase the toy before keeling over. As Steven Pinker points out in his book, How the Mind Works, ‘The problem is, how much fitness is worth striving for? Ice Age people would have been wasting their time if they had fretted about their lack of camping stoves, penicillin, and hunting rifles or if they had striven for them instead of better caves and spears.’ We need to decide what we can reasonably attain and we can gauge this in two ways, according to Pinker: by noticing what others have attained and by noticing how well off we are now. What others have attained gives an insight into what we might attain for ourselves. This kind of comparison gives rise to the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality – when Mr. Smith glances over the fence and sees that Mr. Jones has a glittering new greenhouse, he feels that he must have a greenhouse just the same. We always want what others have. By taking stock of how well off we are, we can reckon on being able to achieve just that little bit more, and more, and more....These two standards of comparison help ground evolutionary theory’s forecast that ‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, but not by much.’ ???there’s something wrong here with the placement of the quote???
## This leads onto the
spiritual chapter by now asking what other human traditions say about this
question of what is happiness and why we always want more.
Psychology also tells us about things that fail to make us happy. Happiness doesn’t rely significantly on external factors: economic class, age, gender, education, or race.
The first part of John
Templeton’s principle
A happy person is
not a person in a certain set of circumstances.
That’s the biological ## ???biological or something else??? story. Other traditions in our culture also provide stories about what happiness is.
Perhaps the key to happiness lies in spiritual traditions. After all, they store the accumulated human wisdom on many things including happiness – a major factor in human life. Our cultural understanding of what makes us happier fails. Do the spiritual traditions more correctly tell us how to be happier? What do the spiritual traditions say about happiness?
MT
## My tussle with religion:
·
traditional
Christianity
·
all my
phases at CH
·
parish
work
·
chaplaincy
·
·
s&r
movement
·
etc.
ö
The most devastating indictment
on my religious system of meaning came from the way I handled sex and
relationships with women.
My first love affair that got
anywhere close was with Sonia. She was
Sonia said no to my next ultra
nervous phone call and I never recovered. I continued for many years to imagine
my dream girl and me walking down along the stream that flowed near her house
and kissing and feeling and…one never knows but could always imagine where we
might have gone. It wasn’t to be. Instead, I just imagined Sonia and tried to
visualize her with no clothes on. Instead, Sonia had sex with just about every
boy I knew, including Ray (whom I thought no girl would ever won’t because he
was tall and thin and geeky and didn’t fit the Romeo model at all) who extolled
it to me one day (not knowing my overriding passion that then had blazed in my
imagination for several years), saying she was pleased because at last it was legal
for her. I asked him where they did it and he described doing it in her bedroom
and that her folks didn’t seem to mind. She evidently was pretty good at it
too, worse luck.
No other girl in my teens fit my
Sonia goddess model. I dated several more, some of whom started to match her,
but most of whom are lost in the depths of my memories.
At
Every day at college, at five in
the afternoon, we theologs (our term for seminarians) had mediation in the
chapel. Apart from when I had physics labs, I would go. I had to. I read theological
and meditative tomes, I thought, my toes froze, but most of all I wrestled and
wrote my wrestlings in a journal (which my second wife, Mary, later made fun of
so I them out). I wrestled with the demon (literarily, demon) sex. Am I bad to
desire? Yes, say the books: sex or heavy petting is only for within marriage
and only for when procreation is intended. Am I bad to desire? No, says my
conscience. But desire whom? To desire my wife once married to her is good; to
desire other women is bad. I couldn’t help and can’t help desiring: it’s good,
I concluded. I just need the right woman to desire. I want to know what her
lips feel like to kiss; her body feels like to hold and rub my hands over; what
her nether regions look like, smell like, taste like; what it’s like to put
my….Religious mediations inevitably landed me back at my source.
I entered my marriage with
Christine at
Marriage, I believed, is a
sacred contract that I can’t break. The Mothers’
I left Christine and faced a
nightmare in my own mind and, I believed, in my relationship with the church. I
didn’t. Yes, many people believed I shouldn’t have left her and I ought to
hurry back. I felt estranged from the church, but I think that was more my
feeling than the reality of the church peoples’ attitudes toward me. What it
did mean was that my sense of meaning didn’t provide me a good feeling about
myself and my decision. I had no road map to follow that could tell me how to
behave and to feel about myself, except condemnatory. The path of my life
forked: I could either stay with Christine and face an unfulfilling future (I
used to half-jokingly talk about my collecting garbage for the Dunedin City
Council, in what they then called ash cans – s
The inability for my religious
meaning system – even the liberal version I tried to live into after my late
teenage rebellion against received dogma
– to guide me adequately through these vital issues of life probably undermined
it more than did anything else. I’m pretty sure I can’t revive it.
MT
##Structure
Theme:
The cultural presumptions about what brings long-term happiness are
wrong. Where else might we turn for ideas about how to become happier? One
source is the spiritual traditions. They have been saying for a long time what
they think happiness is and how to reach it. Because of their variety, however,
they do not present a consistent story about the road to happiness.
Tension:
Is there a spiritual route to greater happiness?
Lead:
Happy days.
Hook:
Is this correct?
Ending:
Lots of clashes
between spiritually suggested ways, yet followers probably happy. Resolve the
above clashes with a way being worked out in the next chapter – the camellia
model.
The story of Mr Bean (comedian) and his neighbor over
their New Year celebrations may be such a case. Is also suggested lead for
chapter
Questions and ideas to pursue:
·
Print out my MT
·
Rebecca’s work in EP
·
Say these are caricatures and very skimpy over
the history of the idea.
·
Put in the years for all the people following.
·
I could assess each approach as I do it from the
point of view of the modern understanding of happiness as subjective well-being
and the relation to wanting more and how to get it. What would moderns say to
each approach?
·
even
happiness in the afterlife seems to be what we want now
Culture fails to tell us the way to greater happiness. Can the spiritual traditions fill this gap? Research suggests that those who find salvation are some of the happiest people around,.
Oh happy days, Oh happy days.
When Jesus washed all our sins away.
Some believers find that life picked up when Jesus saved
them and that it’s been better ever since. Do other spiritual and philosophical
traditions agree with this type of sentiment? ## Start the chapter with: happiness
= subjective well-being; happiness comes in genetically determined set ranges;
want to be high in our set range; how to do this. Spiritual contribution to
this (see summary).
Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, might
consider himself happy – he remained true to his anarchist ideals, publicizing
his views via a string of bombings which he plotted from his hand-made cabin in
Socrates avowed that the soul, or conscience constitutes the person, and that our happiness depends directly on the good or bad state of our soul. Happiness is living the good. We must know what the true good (or true happiness) consists in if we want to live happily, says Socrates, otherwise we will mistake things that aren’t really good for the true good. We always act on what’s truly good, he says, once we know what this is. To do otherwise would be to favor misery over happiness, which makes no sense.
Other early philosophers built on Socrates’ notions of objective goodness and knowledge of the good leading to enactment. Plato’s Republic introduces a discussion of the nature of justice with the following Tolkien-esque puzzle: a ring renders its wearer invisible – what reasons could the wearer have for acting justly? Invisibility provides the wearer with the chance to get up to all sorts of mischief. How many of us, if presented with such an opportunity, can honestly say that we wouldn’t take advantage of it – by nipping into Sears for a spot of cost-free shopping, for example?
Platonic justice involves a perfect balance between the three elements of the soul: reason, emotion, and desire. In a just (and so good) person, the soul exists in perfect harmony, with reliable reason governing over the more unpredictable emotion and desire. The good person finds great joy through pursuit of knowledge.## ???what is happiness here??? In fact, the greatest happiness in this life comes from intellectual speculation or ‘doing’ philosophy, according to Plato. Philosophy professors can appear some of the most rational, emotionally barren people on the block, many students might agree. But would they also agree that this state can lead to happiness?
The wearer of the magic ring will have this reason for acting justly, concludes Plato: wanting to do right because it’s right, for the sake of justice alone. Intellectual speculation tells us so, and in this way we feel at peace with ourselves and the gods. Goodness or justice in this life leads to happiness.
These thoughts extend to the afterlife. The human soul is immortal and the just will receive their greatest rewards in the life to come, even if poverty, discomfort, or illness mar their current lives. Plato’s Phaedo indicates that the true philosopher attains utmost joy only on retracting from the senses and carnal distractions. The philosopher genuinely experiences the final goal – purity of wisdom – only upon fully quitting the body. Bodily desires and frustrations act like a straitjacket and restrict our capacity for happiness.
Aristotle’s Ethics moves away from impersonal moral absolutes (doing right because it’s right) to what is most conducive to a person’s good. Aristotle, like Socrates, nominates gaining happiness as the highest good, and characterizes it as the soul acting in accordance with virtue. Children enter our world with the capacity to learn both moral virtues (governed by the irrational elements of the soul: emotions and desires) and intellectual virtues (governed by the rational elements of the soul).
Aristotle, like Plato, proclaims intellectual contemplation
the greatest happiness available to humankind. Reason constitutes the highest
virtue humans possess since it distinguishes us from other ani
The kind of themes raised by the ancient philosophers enjoy a new lease of life in the work of early Christian theologians.
Augustine of Hippo (
Augustine shifts the emphasis to happiness in the hereafter: we struggle in this life to gain eternal happiness in the next. Down with academia, he chants. Philosophical or intellectual contemplation can never lead to true wisdom and happiness. Up with altruism, he cries. Only loving God and one’s neighbor (living a morally virtuous life) guarantees a future of never ending happiness by God’s side.
The Scholastic philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (
Aquinas follows Augustine and replaces ‘intellectual contemplation’ with ‘love of God’ in the equation ‘greatest happiness = intellectual contemplation.’ We strive to know God in this life, but our struggle only ceases in the life to come. Heaven becomes our reward for loving God. It’s the only source of true happiness.
Aquinas diffuses this position a little: by living a
virtuous life, we attain some degree of happiness, albeit inferior to the
purity of eternal happiness. We gladly accept refreshments en route to
the winning post, like athletes running the
The teachings of Augustine and Aquinas color contemporary
Christianity. Their theorizing about happiness permeates today’s
spirituality.##
???Luther, Calvin???
Contemporary orthodox Christianity loses sight of the here
and now, focusing instead on happiness lying someplace else – a land of original
bliss and innocence (the Garden of Eden) or of future joy (Heaven, our eternal
and happy home where we will see God face-to-face, or the Promised Land where
we will find happiness and complete satisfaction). ‘Heaven is destination and reward,’ writes David
van Biema, ‘succor and relief from earthly trials.’ Adds Jeffrey Russell from
the
Modern spiritual leaders like Robert Schuller prefer to focus on happiness in the present. He writes about The Be Happy Attitudes: Eight Positive Attitudes that Can Transform your Life. Such charismatic and Pentecostal movements assume that religion intends for happiness. Happiness is nearness to God. We move close to God through the ‘happy clappy’ world of human togetherness, epitomized by hallelujah crying and hymn singing.## Tillich???
Not only Western religions and their philosophies focus on happiness. This motif plays a significant role in Eastern spiritual thought too.
The ancient Chinese philosophy of Confucianism teaches that not pleasure, honor, nor wealth, but virtue alone produces true happiness. Much weight rests on the notion of the family, where the life of each individual continues those of his or her ancestors, a link in the familial chain. Pursuit of happiness in the next life isn’t the primary concern. Confucianism instead encourages us to seek to expand, revitalize, and strengthen our families by living frugally, working hard, spurning selfish desires, maintaining a respectable position in society, and generally leading a virtuous life. Self-control, self-improvement, and the practice of moral virtues dominate.
Welfare of the individual gives way to welfare of the
family, social group, and even the entire human race for the Confucian. Individuals
must share their successes with the group. We can achieve ultimate happiness by
giving to society, and so by living virtuously. Happiness results from ‘knowledge, benevolence, and harmony of the group.’
The suited yuppie, cell phone in hand, symbol of late
Taoism represents a second major school of thought in
Taoists laud qualities such as receptivity, passivity, and humility, and they advise a life of natural simplicity and detachment from worldly pursuits. One of the earliest Taoist texts, the Chuang-tzu (Master Chuang), suggests that perfect happiness can’t be found on earth. What we call happiness isn’t true happiness. Money, power, beauty, and fast cars – the things that we ordinarily pursue vigorously – won’t bring happiness. Ultimate happiness for the Taoist consists in a downshifting from this rat race of materialist living. Ultimate happiness consists of ‘inaction.’
Happiness occupies pole position in Chinese life. The Chinese believe human beings can’t obtain happiness solely through their own actions because Ming (or fate) plays a role. They venerate Fu Shen, the god of happiness, and recognize the bat (fu) as the emblem of happiness.
The Buddha (born
· Life is suffering.
· Suffering involves a chain of causes.
· Suffering can cease.
· A path to cessation of suffering exists.
We all suffer because we want to retain a sense of our own identity, yet everything in the world is impermanent or transitory, and lacks a soul. People comprise aggregates or bundles of psychological elements (thoughts, feelings, sensations) and physical elements (arms, legs, head, torso) – no ‘person’ or self exists over and above the constituent parts, nothing acts as a container for these parts. Our longing for personal identity leads to a repeated cycle of death and rebirth (the ‘Wheel of Becoming’) which causes painfulness and suffering in life.
Understanding that we don’t have a permanent self or ego leads to cessation of suffering, according to Buddhist thought. By abandoning all forms of worldly desire (including the desire to attain release from the Wheel of Becoming), we move towards nirvana, the final release from the cycle of rebirth. Along the path to nirvana we must adopt the virtues of clarity, lack of desire, and universal compassion and friendliness. We finally reach nirvana through selflessness, literally through annihilation of the illusion of the self. Nirvana represents freedom from desire and frustration, pain and suffering. It represents ultimate happiness.
Happiness features in Buddhism in two other ways. The word sukha stands in opposition to dukkha, which conveys the suffering and pain of mortal existence. Sukha denotes pleasant bodily and mental feelings, and is important because it facilitates successful meditation. A happy mind is a concentrated mind, for the Buddhist.
Buddha Amitabha rules over Sukhavati (‘the Blissful’), his creation. People who worship Amitabha and repeat his name may be reborn in Sukhavati, and live there blissfully before entering nirvana. The sutras (practical summaries of the Vedic scriptures) devoted to Amitabha describe Sukhavati as a paradise filled with glory from Amitabha – exotic, bounteous, filled with beautiful flowers, trees of jewels, and wonderful fragrances. Rivers of sweet waters flow by carrying flowers – their flow is music. Beauty and comfort reign. No corpses, beasts, or hells mar the sumptuous landscape.
Waking in a lotus flower represents rebirth in Sukhavati for the faithful. All our wishes are granted here, and we no longer experience pain or sadness. The greatest happiness arises from hearing Amitabha preaching before our final entry into nirvana.
We should understand Sukhavati, in its deepest sense,
as depicting a state of mind. The descriptions, although graphic, are only
figurative. Sukhavati seems to share much in common with the Christian
conception of
Hinduism also advocates withdrawal from the world of pleasure or desire. But its underlying philosophy differs from that of Buddhism.
Hindus believe in universal determinism or the doctrine that
past events determine future ones (Sadam Hussein’s refusal to co-operate with
UN inspection teams resulted in a
The Samkhya system of Hindu thought distinguishes the world’s many selves from the one nature (or world): many eternal centers of pure consciousness versus a state of continuous flux. Nature comprises illumination, kinesis, and inertia, and we experience these three elements as pleasure, pain, and torpor. Our centers of consciousness mistake themselves for more tangible entities like human bodies, sense organs, and intellects, which they see as experiencing pleasure, pain, and torpor. But these entities actually belong to the unity of nature, and our experiences rest in pure consciousness alone. This mistake leads to our suffering.
We can arrest our suffering, suggests the Yoga system of Hindu thought. We must liberate our minds from their objectifying tendencies by discriminating between the self and nature in meditation. This allows the self to return to pure consciousness. Our suffering ceases and we attain happiness.
By the soul and Him sic. who formed it,
And implanted into it its wickedness and its piety!
Blessed is he sic. who purifies it.
Ruined is he sic. who corrupts it.
This passage taken from the Qur’an (holy book of Islam) demonstrates the Islamic belief that we are born, as clean slates, with the capacity for both good and evil. God molds this capacity by testing us throughout our lives: some of us opt for good, others for evil. God acknowledges our choices in the form of eternal reward or punishment at the Last Judgment.
And We try you with evil and good as a test; then unto Us you will be returned.
Those receiving eternal reward enter al-janna (the garden), the home of the blessed. The blessed live in luxury surrounded by rivers of milk, purified honey, and sweet tasting wine. They relax on couches, drinking, attended by wide-eyed maidens and sport fine, richly woven garments. Life here lasts for ever.
Islam, unlike either Hinduism or Buddhism, understands al-janna
(the afterlife) as a paradise where the righteous enjoy the highest of
spiritual and sensual happiness. Muhammad’s prophecy captures the spirit: in
The concept of happiness abounds in spiritual and
philosophical thought – from the teachings of the ancient Greeks, through to
contemporary Christianity, as well as in such traditions of the East as
Buddhism and Taoism. Happiness plays a pivotal role in spiritual thought – a
variety of traditions describe its nature in spiritual terms. The major
spiritual traditions invoke conceptions of happiness. Many speak of happiness
in the afterlife, while others discuss happiness in the here and now. We
experience happiness in this life as a result of virtuous thoughts and deeds,
and we secure ultimate happiness in the life to come through a combination of
that righteousness with faith in spiritual reality. They describe happiness,
however, in spiritual terms. Sometimes, they want us to shun happiness in the
here and now and take the hard road. Modern religious popularizers in the West
propose that an active and committed spiritual life leads to happiness and
success in our earthly life. To their eyes and to those of millions of
contemporary Christians, the Bible paints a picture of a gracious and loving
deity who desires everyone’s happiness. Happiness arises directly from God.
Contemporary orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, focuses on happiness
lying someplace else: in the afterlife in heaven. Some traditions involve
notions that many of us find alien, even incomprehensible. How can a Christian
understand the Buddhist idea that the void of nirvana represents
ultimate happiness?## ???Scientific
input ® diverse and contradictory
approaches. Yet all must work to produce happiness. So, it can’t be in what
they say to do, in their claims to truth.
Give a sense of the divergence of understandings
of how to be happy and how they contradict each other. Do these paths
themselves lead to happiness? Many of their adherents must have been happy, so
the answer is no. The point now is how to understand this; we can’t take the paths
themselves at face value. We need a larger scheme to hold them all as truthful.
Then a consistent way to happiness might emerge.
MT
## Despite my resume and my travel schedule,
I'm not happy from them.
·
the
need to travel, though
·
perhaps I
could explore the psychology of this
·
escape?
As I go
about my life at Oxford I see lots of different people who raise for me the
question of happiness: the old man and others in the motorized wheelchairs, the
beggars, the drunkards, the aristocrats, the dons, the students, the working
class, the shoppers, the teenagers, the tourists, the bus loads of school kids
from the Continent,…, and the US students studying spiritual thinking because
they feel that it is what they want to do to make themselves happy. I came here
to be happier.
Hook:
What is
there about
We’re
all aiming at happiness, everyone in the above groups. What do we need to do to
make ourselves happy? What is happiness? What does it have to do with the spiritual path that a person follows? Am I, or
the theological students, following a spiritual way?##
MT
## Structure
Despite this, we cannot ignore the role and wisdom of spiritual
traditions. How do they contribute to the contemporary discussion about the nature
of happiness? Unfortunately, spiritual thinkers usually react negatively to the
scientific understandings of happiness, if they react at all to it. They could,
rather, try to build together with the scientific perspective to produce one
coherent spiritual-scientific understanding, along the lines of what I call the
camellia model.
Not only is there a
contradiction between the spiritual traditions, but between them and science.
How might we resolve this tension?
Mr Bean story.
There was no mutually
agreeable solution. No happiness for the contester. Similarly for the spiritual
traditions against science?
The camellia model can
lead to a working harmony.
Mr Bean story
Outstanding
Points and Questions:
Assume the current
understanding of happiness but compare it with those of the traditions (even
happiness in the afterlife seems to be what we want now; also mentioned in
chapter
##
Religious and spiritual approaches to happiness clash in
terms of definitions. The scientific definition of happiness centers on
the notion of physical well-being. Scientists measure our happiness
levels on the basis of our subjective self-reports of well-being – if we report
feeling good, we’re happy. We might feel great after consuming our favorite
dish, or when absorbed in a challenging game of chess, and these feelings
constitute our current levels of happiness, according to science. Religious
definitions of happiness concentrate on intellectual or spiritual
satisfaction. Happiness, for the religious thinker, becomes an altogether
loftier affair. We really have to work for our happiness, whether this involves
an intellectual search for the good, or a struggle to fill our lives with
virtuous thoughts and deeds, or a quest to lose our personal identity on the
way to nirvana. Happiness, from the religious perspective, represents a
noble prize.
Scientific and spiritual approaches to happiness also clash over matters of timing. Scientists concentrate firmly on happiness in the here and now – they show no interest in happiness in the life to come. Nor would we expect them to, given the current precepts of scientific methodology. Science deals with the physical world, and, once the human body ceases to function, or dies, science becomes silent. What may or may not occur after the death of the physical body lies outside science’s remit. Its materialist methodology means that scientists study human happiness only as a physical phenomenon. Religious thinkers also discuss happiness in the here and now, but in many traditions, happiness in the life to come really steals the show. We attain ultimate happiness, a seat by God’s right hand, our place in the pastures of al-janna after the death of our bodies. And, for those religions that concentrate on the afterlife, our future non-physical happiness far surpasses anything we can experience on earth.
Can naturalistic and spiritual accounts of happiness co-exist? Should we abandon one account in favor of the other? If so, which one? And why?
Many of us will instinctively feel that happiness must comprise more than biological drives and chemical activity. This feeling may be compelling. We should take our convictions seriously.
Therefore, do we need the spiritual? End with: yes we do. We need both mutually relevant. So, how to solve the conflict so this occurs? Let’s see how spiritual thinkers respond.
How do scientists and theologians react to this clash over the nature of human happiness?
Scientists take little notice of insights from spiritual
traditions. Their ignorance reflects, at least partially, the demands of
scientific methodology, as we discussed above. They consider their job the
discovery of facts about the physical world and, since religion deals with the
spiritual world, its insights have no bearing on science. The two worlds may
co-exist, but they’re doomed, by definition, never to collide. The public also
gives science a very easy ride: British people trust the word of scientists
The stakes for religion in this conflict rate much higher, and its proponents show far more enthusiasm for defending their territory. Recent work on the science of happiness has provoked a number of different reactions from spiritually inclined thinkers. We’ve called the first the ‘Let’s-Get-’Em’ response. This involves a direct and sophisticated attack on the methods and findings of behavioral genetics.
Journalist Sharon Begley points out that several claims for
the genetic roots of various behaviors run into trouble because follow-up
studies fail to replicate the original research. Researchers have cited the
existence of single genes responsible for attributes as disparate as manic
depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and novelty seeking, yet other
researchers haven’t replicated these results, and in one case, researchers
retracted their original claim. Two separate teams of scientists recently
claimed a connection between a version of the D
While a number of claims for links between specific genes
and personality characteristics may not hold up, others do. And Begley fails to
mention the ones that do. Two independent teams of researchers, one at the
University of Utah Health Sciences Center in Salt Lake City, the other at St.
Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, England, have linked a specific gene to an
aspect of thought, for instance: the deletion of the chromosome
Begley further muddies the issue by concentrating on the
so-called OGOD model of genetics, meaning ‘one gene, one disorder’ – a single
gene alone causes a disease or, when extended to personality traits like
happiness, a single gene underlies one personality trait. Researchers have now
moved away from the OGOD strategy, suggesting instead that a configuration of
genes shapes any given behavioral trait. Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist
at the
We must, of course, view studies which can’t be replicated with extreme caution. Yet the picture isn’t nearly as bleak as Begley paints it. Researchers do replicate studies, and, more importantly, failure to replicate can even lead to increased knowledge – like the realization that, though the OGOD model may not extend to behavioral traits, multiple genes acting in concord do affect behavior. Genetic explanations remain basically sound.
Begley refers to a second line of attack which critics often
launch, this time against twin studies. Much of the genetic-basis-of-happiness
research draws on twin studies, since the difference in percentage of genes
shared between identical and fraternal twins (
A
Grant Steen, a medical researcher at the Saint Jude
Children’s
Lawrence Wright throws further doubt on twin studies in his
recent book, Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Human Identity,
in which he recounts the puzzling case of a pair of identical twins: one healthy,
the other with a fatal version of the genetic disorder muscular dystrophy. John
Burn, the doctor examining the case, concluded: ‘Even though they the twins share the same genes, a genetic trait
doesn’t have to be shared.’ We must clearly exercise caution with twin studies.
In the case of happiness, however, we have evidence from psychological studies
of individuals as well as twin studies to
Scientists used to assume that identical twins were born in
the same gestational sac and non-identicals in different sacs. Wright points
out that DNA testing has proved this reasoning faulty – roughly one third of
identical twins are born from separate placentas, and occasionally placentas belonging
to fraternals merge. He concludes: ‘Many same-sex twins who believe that they are
fraternal may actually be identical, and vice versa.’ This observation by
Wright doesn’t sound against the twin studies on happiness. The bulk of the
confusion concerns identicals who are really fraternals. Those fraternals
mistakenly placed in the identical pool will decrease the degree to
which identicals apparently attain the same level of happiness. Statistics for
identicals attaining the same happiness levels are already high (
Other critics concentrate on the ‘There’s-More-To-Us-Than-A-Bunch-Of-Genes’ response. This involves subjectivist arguments which stress that behavioral geneticists like Dean Hamer reduce the wholistic human experience of happiness to nothing but the action of genes, electrical activity, and chemicals. These critics aim to push anti-reductionism, claiming that geneticists and their popularizers ignore the real subjective realm by confounding human experience with mere physical phenomena. Walter Freeman of the University of California at Berkeley, for example, says, ‘Joy comes with activities that we share with people we have learned to trust, and that enable us to share meaning across the existential barrier that separates each of us from all others. So happiness is not made by a chemical.’ Scientists can stimulate our brains with electric currents, and we may report feeling pleasure, but happiness doesn’t consist in this. Neither does it consist in the elation people feel after taking recreational drugs, like amphetamines or cocaine. ‘There is more to brain function than chemistry or electricity,’ Freeman concludes.
Writes Mark Epstein, ‘True happiness is the ability to receive pleasure without
grasping and displeasure without condemning, confident in the knowledge that
pain and disappointment can be tolerated.’ ‘It’s worse to wake up in the morning without having a larger
purpose in life,’ says developmental psychologist Carol Ryff of the
These subjectivist responses lack substance. Neither do they
contradict behavioral genetics. Remember that Hamer’s and his colleagues’ work
only suggests genes provide a percentage of input into behavior. Hamer
claims that
The ‘Let’s-Have-’Em-Both’ response represents a more
sophisticated version of subjectivist criticisms. Proponents admit the validity
of results from behavioral genetics and other sciences, but they set up a
dualism: on one side lies the mind with its feelings and sensations, and on the
other lies the brain with its neurotransmitters. They create a unique spiritual
status for happiness, which they thereby divorce from the biological stuff of
genes and brains. The ghost in the machine. The early French philosopher René
Descartes (
One last ditch response to scientific explanations – the ‘Let’s-Hope-It’ll-All-Go-Away’ approach – employs avoidance tactics. Spiritual thinkers play a wait-and-see game: we will only approach gene studies seriously when and if someone else adequately answers all possible criticisms. These tactics look suspiciously like blind panic – akin to closing your eyes tight on approaching a busy road junction, then pumping on the gas pedal. While later research may modify the current results of the gene studies, the bulk and significance of the work will probably remain. It’s a good bet that more and more evidence will mount showing a (partial) genetic basis for such traits as human happiness. And, given the rate of progress with the Human Genome Project, this will happen quicker than we think.
We’ve reached a happiness stalemate. Neither the scientists
nor the theologians will give way. Neither party recognizes the other’s
contributions as valid, or even relevant. They converse at cross purposes, if
they converse at all. The result: voices raised in anger, an unhappy
conflagration. This needn’t be so. We’ve already begun to see how scientific
and spiritual approaches to happiness might co-exist – the genetic set range
still leaves room for mind, free will, and spirituality. Determinism doesn’t
necessarily rule the day. We need to build on, not deny, this compatibility.
But what concessions must each side make? Do the genes of the spiritually
enlightened predispose them toward great happiness? How do genes and
neurotransmitters relate to an afterlife? We should try to answer questions
like these if we want to move beyond the conflagration. Scientists and
theologians need to stop their bickering, and instead work together towards a
richer, more meaningful account of the nature of human happiness.
##
Perhaps thinkers who engage science in their spiritual
deliberations address this discrepancy. Not so. Mostly fail to consider the
subject other than in passing and then they spiritualize it into some realm
unrelated to biology. How can we understand
spiritual views about happiness in the light of its scientific nature? Does
spiritual reality want us to pursue happiness, and does spiritual reality
reward us with it in this life? How does spiritual reality relate to human
happiness? I look at what modern thinkers say about this, those who engage
science in their spiritual deliberations – people like Clayton, Drees,
Hefner, Kaufman, Peacocke, Peters, Polkinghorne, and Ward. Most pass by the subject and, if they address it at
all, they write of it in spiritual rather than biological terms. Unlike these
thinkers, we should rank happiness as a central subject because it is a prime
concern of human beings.
Theologically, it will converse with the best arguments available in the market. I don’t think any of them start where I do, though, and probably little is to be gained from them.
## Therefore, we need
to start afresh ®
model, how to work toward a relationship of mutual relevance. ???Camellia model. I could us the
stuff from the MT
MT
·
##
·
Mount
Taranaki
MT
## Structure
Summary:
Most spiritual traditions want us to be happy
and tell us – using the best of their science or cosmology – how to achieve it.
We would say now, though, that happiness evolved into us as something we want
and seek to achieve. Evolution is as much a spiritual phenomenon as a
biological or physical one because the spiritual and physical are inseparably
intertwined. Therefore, if we want to live in a truly spiritual way, we should
try to achieve happiness. Since scientific research suggests to us how the
world including ourselves operates, it can – and does – suggest what we can do
to become happier. Science’s doing this tells us how we can become spiritually
happy. If we want to know how we ought to live spiritually, look to scientific
research.
Tension:
Spiritual and scientific: I.e., $ the
challenge of method, how to resolve it.
We have seen, over the last couple of chapters, that
divergent accounts of happiness exist. On the one hand, we have the scientific
story with its materialistic talk of genes, neurotransmitters, and electrical
impulses. On the other, we have the variety of spiritual stories with their
talk of intellectual contemplation, virtuous living, and a bounteous afterlife.
They clash over what is happiness and how to achieve it. I’ve taken happiness
to be subjective well-being and, while I think that the various traditions
really are aiming at this meaning in their definitions of happiness, how they
understand the road to happiness differ. The traditions appear to contradict in
their approaches.
##$ in us a spiritual sense that helps us achieve
happiness. Use ‘spiritual sense’ because some forms of happiness go beyond the
physical (eating) and ® the spiritual, because it’s too complex to
reduce to a single explanation, because it’s important for us to accept this
spiritual sense. Religions and certain traditions have attempted to contain
this spiritual sense so that we may be happy. What are some
techniques/skills/activities for getting at our spiritual selves to decipher
what makes us happy? // Show how the various traditions used earlier
achieve this. Most spiritual traditions want us to be happy and tell us
– with the best of their science or cosmology – how to achieve it. (Not part of
argument; just rehash.) // How
biological and spiritual understandings of the nature of happiness compare –
can I say that both are right and it’s a matter of finding how to be happy?
Both stories are, in general, right if we think of divinity in an immanent
sense. Others are attempts and old ones – and we do the same with tools
available to us.
A seeker of happiness is one aspect of who I am, but who I am is largely in modern times (always?) a seeker of happiness. Being happy is the chief goal of life – never reached for most of us.
They can’t give us a pill to make us happy....We create our own joys, and we feel happiest in learning to trust each other.
Is this true?
## I’ve suggested a
camellia way of trying to build a single coherent way of understanding, a way that
builds on diversity of viewpoints and is ongoing in its growth. But how? What
can the camellia model do? What might it tell us about how we might become
happier? // Is there a spiritual way to
happiness? Yes. i.e., how to be high in our set range; in particular, what part
might spiritual traditions play in this?
Camellia ® Bacon’s method. I’m proposing a similar method. // Somehow what I need for this part of the
chapter is more than this: it’s a revolution in method: Francis Bacon! I’m
suggesting using the scientific method à la Bacon. Bacon’s and my folly?Roger
Bacon versus Francis Bacon. // Bacon’s folly. Is mine a folly? I’m
proposing a similar method. My folly? See when as much water passed under mine
as his.
## Argument starts here.
We now would say that
happiness evolved into us as one thing we want and should seek to achieve. //
Happiness evolved into us by the work of spiritual reality and forms the ‘good’
for us. // If I say, ‘spiritual reality is happiness,’ what sort of statement
am I making? Am I making an ontological statement about spiritual reality being
happy or the source of happiness? It’s really a shorthand for the universe
having evolved us entailed in the phrase ‘spiritual reality is’ and that a main
evolved thrust of ours is to be happy i.e., ‘spiritual reality is happiness and
wants us to be happy.’ // Bring in from Chapter One.
Below are three steps
to help build from here a camellia relationship.
ö
Cosmologists usually trace the origin of the universe to the
big bang, the gigantic explosion and fireball that began the universe between
Physicist Edward Tryon of
Even if Tryon’s idea holds up and the vacuum produced the big bang, darkness still surrounds the origin of the vacuum and the laws by which the quantum universe operates. Big bang cosmology says nothing about their origin. Several physicists imagine, however, that something more basic than the big bang, its products, physical laws, or the vacuum does or did exist. From it, the vacuum and the laws emerged, and these in turn produced the big bang.
Before throwing ourselves into the search for the ‘something,’ we need to confront our language. Discussion about the beginning of the universe stands on shaky ground. We want to talk about actions before the big bang and the provision of existence to the universe, but the meaning of such words as origin, beginning, created, acts, happened, and before arises from the way they apply to the ideas of time and space, in particular the notion of time passing. Before, for instance, means ‘stands in front of’ spatially or in time. Since time and space only started with the big bang, the phrase ‘before the big bang’ is senseless. Language breaks down when talking about a supposed something that happened outside of time and space. What does it mean, then, to say that something produced the big bang?
Perhaps the phrase ‘the origin of the big bang’ is meaningless. Should we give up in despair and cease all talk of objects or beings or events outside space and time? No. Though we fumble in our language, we nonetheless should humbly assume we can understand this talk, that it makes sense. But we should proceed with caution. We should tentatively apply words to a situation without space and time only after we study them and how they fit: What do the words mean in the new setting? What meanings fail to carry over to the new situation? What dangers lurk in the new use? Because of this problem with words, David Bohm studied his language of the underlying order and changed the language as a result. Perhaps proof that we do understand the words and use them correctly will lie in how well our theories hold together. We also can look at the value and soundness of any conclusions that emerge. We can test the language, subject it to experience and reason. The system of spiritual ideas that this book unravels is such an experiment and probe. It accepts the invitation.
Now we are ready to ask, What is the something that produced the big bang?
The Restaurant at the Beginning of the Universe doesn’t serve a ‘free lunch’ – or breakfast, for that matter. However many times we ask the question of the origin of the universe and however many layers we push it back through, we always end with something unexplained. Theories leave some matters unjustified; each starts with something. Willem Drees develops this point in his book Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God. The big bang theory assumes four things about the universe, he tells us: the laws of physics, the three dimensions of space and one of time, the conditions of the universe at its initial moment, and the existence of the universe. The nothing from which the universe arose is, in Drees’s words, ‘not an absolute nothing.’
Stephen Hawking employs the anthropic principle to explain
the pre–big bang something. At the base of a universe lies a set of laws. Just
as changing the combination of ingredients for a cake leads to different tastes
and textures, so different sets of laws produce different universes. The
anthropic principle shows that the evolution of creatures able to probe natural
laws requires a special environment in the universe and, the Cambridge
physicist adds, only one theory of cosmic beginnings or one set of laws leads
to a universe with those special settings. Since the inquisitive creatures
(namely we) do exist, cosmologists must choose that theory. If we want our cake
to taste sweet, we must include in it a form of sugar. Thus, this universe
could only possess the laws it has. Hawking also concludes – adding a further
difference between his theory and the others Drees looks at – that the universe
could only start with the initial conditions it did. Physicist David Schramm of
the
Notice that Hawking’s argument assumes the preexistence of a form of logic, what Schramm calls ‘consistency.’ Hawking’s cosmology tweaks the imagination. It also helps solve a problem.
Our usual idea of time and space assumes a shape or structure (a ‘geometry’) for the universe, writes Bohm, that builds on the mathematical idea of a continuum or a line. Remember drawing a line in geometry? You had to keep your pencil on the paper or else you broke the line into several segments. A line flows continuously. It comprises an infinite number of points lying side by side. And remember marking a dot to indicate a point? Though your pencil spot occupied space, it only approximated the real point, because the real point took up zero room. Thus, points can lie very close together and their pencil marks coincide but the points remain distinct. The space-time continuum declares that events fall at different points and even those very close together can be separated. On the other hand, quantum theory demands that the opposite pervades the universe: no matter where they lie on a line, no matter how distinct they appear on the sheet of paper, points connect with each other.
I’ve seen watches advertised that not only tell the hour, minute, second, date, day, and year for here and every conceivable place on the globe, but they also act as a stopwatch, an alarm clock (with several settings per day), and a radio and automatically adjust themselves when daylight savings time starts and finishes. But faced with all those options, I doubt I would ever figure out and remember what all the buttons do and how to operate them; the excess of features would interfere with my basic needs for a watch. The space-time continuum also possesses too many features, and these interfere with attempts to understand what happens from the point of view of quantum physics.
To shop for a pen, you must decide among different colors, widths of line, gold or plastic, short-life or long-life, three colors in one or a single color, a box of twelve or a single unit. Or you could purchase the basic, no-frills store brand for less than the others. If none of these suit you, you could always grab a piece of charcoal from the remnants of last night’s fire. Princetonian John Wheeler introduces the ‘pregeometry’ to replace the continuum with its surplus of features. The pregeometry resembles charcoal in its bare-bones quality; the continuum compares to a name-brand pen with a fluorescent barrel and medium point. A preexisting form of logic, the pregeometry creates a more basic structure or geometry than the continuum, without its problems. Both relativity and quantum theory assume the existence of the pregeometry.
Rather than using Wheeler’s penetrating yet speculative word pregeometry, I opt for the more neutral and simpler term: subuniverse. The pregeometry is a subuniverse. Physicists may disagree with Wheeler over what the big bang requires, whether it calls for a geometry or for, say, a primitive form of logic. They may agree, however, that it requires something and that the something embraces at least the subuniverse. Wheeler travels a different path to the same conclusion I draw from Hawking: the preexistence of a basic form of logic.
Besides a prelogic, something else preexists, as Drees points out:
Even if theories are perfect and complete, they do not answer the question of why there is anything which behaves according to those theories. The mystery of existence is unassailable. It remains possible, therefore, to understand the Universe as a gift, as grace.
Something bestows existence on the universe, raising it from a conjecture that may or may not happen to a reality. Hawking similarly notes,
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.
The mystery – the gift of which Drees writes and the fire to which Hawking refers – plus a preexisting logic from which the laws of the universe develop lie in the subuniverse. They provide the universe, Wheeler writes, ‘with a way to come into being.’ The subuniverse gives existence to the universe, and its actions are the laws of nature.
A child, once born, can live without its mother. The subuniverse conferred existence on the universe, but then what happened to the subuniverse? We usually think the universe grants itself existence through time and imparts reality to its laws, that it, in other words, assumes the function of the subuniverse. Did the subuniverse shut down with the big bang? To survive, a person – a baby, especially – needs other people. Perhaps the universe similarly requires its subuniverse. After all, time and space don’t apply to the subuniverse, because it exists outside them and creates them. Public resolve and money set up the local fire brigade, and it will exist and operate for the foreseeable future because the original act includes daily financial backing. The subuniverse’s initial provision of existence is the same as supplying it throughout time. One act covers all time because the act continues on forever. The subuniverse produced the universe and its parts. It continues to give them existence moment by moment, and its continuing acts of empowerment we describe as the rule of natural laws. The subuniverse pumps as the heart of the universe.
Besides a statement like this, what words describe the subuniverse? In several articles, Bohm and Basil Hiley show how the underlying order of wholeness satisfies Wheeler’s search for a pregeometry. The order produces existence for the universe and everything in it and operates by logic; as the universe’s mother, the underlying subuniverse continuously gives it birth and rationality throughout time. It may provide it with more as well. You might recall these Ash Wednesday words: ‘Remember thou art but dust, and to dust thou shalt return.’ The underlying subuniverse forms the dust to which the universe we experience returns for ceaseless resurrection. The unfolding-enfolding theory provides a rich language for exploring how the subuniverse created the big bang and continues to endow the universe with existence.
As the universe derives from the Divine, so, many spiritual
traditions would say, it reflects directly and intimately basic characteristics
of the Divine. We can apply this to the laws or reasoning of the universe and
the Divine. As the features of the pot reflect the mind of the potter, the
basic laws of the universe arise from the Divine and reflect the Divine’s own
reasoning. Spiritual tradition associates creation with the rational mind of
the Divine. Thomas Torrance, a Scot, emphasizes something else as well. The
universe arises from not only the Divine’s reasoning but also,
Like many others, you may think the Divine initially created
the universe from nothing, say through the big bang. Spelling out this
doctrine, however, leads to debate, even hostility, as in the creationism
fracas. What does ‘from nothing’ mean? Did the Divine form it from primordial
dust, the void of Genesis
‘The Divine creates out of nothing at the beginning.’ ‘The Divine continuously accords existence to the created universe, moment by moment.’ In many belief systems, the creator role of the Divine divides in two: the creator and the sustainer. ‘To sustain,’ defines Webster’s, is ‘to keep in existence.’
Nothing in nature arises out of nothing. Everything in it emanates from something else, the product of strings of generations, each of which unfolds from the underlying subuniverse. Robert Russell suggests that this idea of Bohm’s resembles the spiritual belief that everything depends for its existence on the Divine’s sustaining power. Just as anything in the universe of our experience exists because of the continuous unfolding of the underlying subuniverse, so, for believers, the existence of anything relies on the continuous and creative activity of the Divine as its sustainer. The Divine causes the universe to exist and to perpetuate. The Divine continually produces each item, relationship, and feeling; the Divine carries out everything, produces everything (subjective, objective, or from any other category), gives it existence moment by moment, and is responsible for all changes or nonchanges in each object and system, moment by moment. The Divine achieves this by unfolding the potential that is of the Divine. It pumps as the heart of the universe. Thus, the suggestion that the Divine is the subuniverse yields the traditional doctrines of original creation and of continuous creating and sustaining. It wraps flesh around the word sustainer.
But, you may think, events happen because of natural laws. The universe is a self-determining, self-empowering, self-existing, and self-perpetuating entity; it grants itself existence through time and imparts reality to its laws. It carries out everything itself. You may concede that a subuniverse performs these functions, but still you would think of it as natural.
So, what causes the universe to exist and behave as it does: the universe itself, or the divinity as the subuniverse, unfolding existence through every moment of time and point of space? Both. The subuniverse Divine is that aspect of the universe that gives it existence and causes it to behave consistently. The force of natural laws lies in their attachment to the subuniverse Divine. They don’t refer to Platonic-like powers that exist at different level than the universe. We need to evict the separation between the Divine and the universe and thus quash the dual agent answer to the question of what brings everything about. Even the usual understanding of the sustaining function of the Divine enshrines this separation, this philosophy of independent objects, because it thinks the Divine holds things in existence while remaining apart from them. We incline toward the image of ourselves acting on objects outside of ourselves. My fingers touch the keys of my computer, for instance. But, what if we think of my fingers operating on their own? They then become an aspect of the keys and my thoughts transfer directly from my mind to the screen. Similarly, the Divine acts in a law-like manner to unfold from the divine self the regularities in how things affect each other.
The subuniverse divinity resembles a basic hamburger: just the meat and plain white bun, no ketchup, pickles, sesame seeds, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes, relish, onions, pineapple, or cheese. At this point, I abstain from adding meanings to the basic functions for the Divine (that the subuniverse operates according to a form of logic and that it dispenses reality to the universe and effectiveness to its laws). I abstain from adding meanings such as the Christian belief that the creator becomes a particular human being, Jesus Christ. I start from scratch.
But, does this generate a redundant idea for the Divine? If the word applies to everything, then it’s empty, a tautology like the statement ‘all water is wet.’ It says little to claim the Divine causes everything. Does it make spiritual ideas, as the Dane, Viggo Mortensen, phrases it: ‘nothing but words – words that we could just as well do without?’ Though the idea of the Divine and the idea of the subuniverse fit harmoniously, would that of the universe suffice?
A hundred years ago, the idea of ATM cards made no sense. Slide a plastic (what’s that?) card with a magnetic (magnetic?) strip into a machine and money appears? It knows the balance in your account? Circumstances change and, along with them, our experience and our language. The lack of language for something says naught about its existence.
This is also true for the image of what underlies the universe of our experience. To offer meaning for our lives, the idea of the Divine requires more than the creator and sustainer functions. A basic hamburger may knock the edge off your appetite, but it will fail to zing your taste buds. It’s difficult at the moment to say exactly what will emerge as we expand the language. If we slowly build an appropriate language, matching the growing experience of the reality with our words and ideas, the subuniverse picture of the Divine may turn out as real and as useful as ATMs and plastic cards. Far from superfluous, as Mortensen might claim, the idea may inform and include more functions (inspiring worship and grounding values, for example) than could scientific theories. Such spice for the creator assumption will emerge as we further explore the Divine.
ö
What is spiritual thought really about? What is its subject? Really, it’s about human life and making sense of living. Its object, what it centrally talks about, is spiritual reality (otherwise known as ‘God’; the reality called ‘God’). ‘Spiritual reality’ is the lens, the hard core theory, through which spiritual thought peers at and tries to make sense of existence.
We need a new story that makes primary the reality of the human, not making matter primary (or at least not only that). Yet I need to bring out also that matter is endless depths and mysterious. Margaret Wertheim agrees with the problem as I see it. But I think she and others have an inadequate view of matter, that she’s bought into the materialists’ definition of matter.
This chapter introduces the method that I’ll use to reach my
conclusions about the nature of happiness and the relationship between
happiness and spiritual reality. I.e., about how to bring the human side specifically
into our understanding of spiritual reality.
My
method: How this works is based on science (especially to our being what we
should be) with spiritual reality being the Universe-as-a-Whole.
Some of the ideas about theological method that I carry with me include:
· spiritual thinking is about model making;
· ‘spiritual reality’ is the lens through which spiritual thinking looks at reality;
· spiritual thought is subject to experience – the experience it is based on is public and repeatable;
· everything is potential data for thinking spiritually.
## Note concerning
this last point… Religious experience, practices, morality, meaning, purpose,
faith healing, etc. as natural phenomena i.e., a natural spiritual reality.
Spinoza? Whitehead?
## Say how this is the next step in developing my method.
Evolution is an aspect of the spiritual at work.
My big assumption.
The previous chapter asked us to search for values to inform our lives in tune with the divinely unfolded universe. I suspect we will find a clue for this in the history of the universe, in the way it has developed since its inception.
Tucked away in reflections on his and David Bohm’s metaphysics and physics is Basil Hiley’s observation that the beginning of the universe introduced nonlocality. All particles in the universe locked together nonlocally, meaning that all simultaneous quantum events associated with them correlated with each other. Locality had yet to exist. It emerges from the laws of physics applied to an expanding, big bang universe: only when the universe began to expand did fission happen, the particles collide, and eventually locality appear. Locality and separation go hand in hand.
With the expansion appeared the macro universe. Almost everything here relates in a local or classical manner, with the exceptions usually occurring below it, at the quantum level. As expansion continues, locality increases. As the universe increases in size, it proceeds from nonlocality to the existence of locality to the dominance of locality. Locality is required for a macro universe and, therefore, us to exist.
The scene Hiley paints depends on the universe not turning back to how it existed previously; the universe proceeds in one direction, plotting an irreversible course through time. ‘You can’t go home again,’ writes Thomas Wolfe. Drop the concrete block you lifted, and you lose the energy you exerted when raising it.
Locality generally exists at a lower energy level than nonlocality because locality represents less organization. To start with, it fails to correlate distant and simultaneous events. Science calls this relationship between energy levels and degrees of organization the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy (a measure of disorder) always increases. The universe continuously winds down, scattering its energy right from the initial moment of the big bang.
The terms locality, nonlocality, and entropy relate in various ways, some of which we’ve discussed. Other terms require introduction, and further relationships between them merit examination. A picture begins to emerge of two sets of ideas: locality, the macro universe, and separation on one side, and nonlocality and the quantum universe on the other. The histories that await introduction balance the pairing on the nonlocality or wholeness side.
One of the continuing events through time is the increase in
separation, which is opposed by increasing complexity. Some parts of the
universe join together rather than move apart. This reflects fusion versus fission, of fusion of the
simple to create the more complex versus fission and the emergence of locality
to domination. The growth of children after they gain some independence from
their parents resembles the growth in complexity in the universe. From
childhood friendships with a strong dose of self-centeredness, children move
out to friends in a self-giving way. Usually, they sooner or later find a life
in a close relationship with a significant other. These relationships are
formed from different people and experiences than those of their childhood, and
they tie the world of the now-grown child into a web of relationships in which
each person retains autonomy.
The universe began with extremely high energy and the
tendency to lose it. It started out simple, eventually producing more complex
objects, such as suns and planets that store and spend energy. We also see
around us biological, social, even chemical and physical systems that increase
in energy. A baby starts off s
Ilya Prigogine describes a process by which a something can increase in complexity: an unstable system that uses energy and changes chaotically can settle at a stable point with a higher energy level. When you turn off a leaky tap, water at first swirls around the rim of the tap until it gathers enough stability to form a drip. Prigogine even shows the inevitability of such processes, given physical laws.
The growth in complexity of systems such as Prigogine
describes assumes the irreversibility in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In
this, it mirrors a requirement Hiley notes for the move from nonlocality to
locality. But critics point out that the Second Law means everything in the
universe must run down and, therefore, not grow in complexity. They forget a
factor, however. Babies grow larger and more complex by absorbing energy from
plants and ani
You could think of your body as a collection of organs: brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, skin. These connect with each other to form, with other bits of tissues, the body. But they connect in such a way that the body takes on a life of its own. If one organ suffers, every organ suffers, and the body as a whole suffers. The whole becomes a person who experiences a life impossible for the bundle of organs. That the universe becomes more complex by fusion means some of its parts connect more and more with each other. Different elements join together to form a whole or a system, relating with each other more within the system than when out of it. An increase in a system’s internal connections characterizes its increase in complexity. Further, systems may merge together to form super-systems, which may merge to form super-super-systems. Individual people combine to form a community, communities combine to form a region, regions combine to form a country. Systems of systems also demonstrate the increase in the complexity of links.
A whole causes its elements to behave organically in clusters, all together, or individually, in ways that differ from how they would act by themselves. In subtle reflections of its wholeness, a complex system directs its parts in its self-regulation, self-maintenance, and defense. These actions of the whole exceed what interactions between the individual parts might achieve. Actions of parts fail to explain behaviors of wholes.
Locality appears when particles start to separate in
fission, and later it dominates the macro universe. Nonlocality loses its
universality. But does nonlocality emerge at the macro level when the simple
fuse to form the complex? Complexity relates separated elements without
immediate and physical contact. This could constitute a form of nonlocality, a
‘macro nonlocality’ of the locally related. This ‘nonlocality,’ though, fails
to conform to the instantaneous, quantum type. To avoid confusion, I refrain
from calling macro-level wholeness ‘nonlocal’ but instead say a type of
connection or correlation or wholeness emerges at the macro level. (To confuse
the discussion further, nonlocality at the quantum level may hold together
complexity at the macro level. Consciousness occurs to me as an example, as the
discussion of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s model in chapter
Wholeness (through complexity) requires the emergence of locality because it needs the parts to link together. Wholeness-with-diversity emerges from separation.
Evolution is a history of the universe that builds on both increasing wholeness and the continuing emergence of locality, which creates even greater degrees of wholeness. As a word, evolution means several things.
· Usually, it refers to the process called neo-Darwinian evolution, by which biological species emerge and change. Two moths on a tree illustrate the theory of evolution in childhood science books. One moth blends in with the bark and the other stands out. Industrial pollution has dirtied this species of tree, common in the area, and the original moth either changes its camouflage or else becomes fodder for its predators. Natural selection achieves the change in color and pattern by removing the moths with the original coloring and encouraging the variant with the darker markings; those that blend in survive their hunters, those that stand out don’t. And the survivors produce offspring with an increased tendency for the darker markings. Neo-Darwinism is a simple procedure that draws together existing processes: a species of reproducing organisms that varies genetically (perhaps by random mutations), plus natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest,’ which works on the variations.
Neo-Darwinism requires a way for genes to vary. As a source for this, biologists accept random mutations of genes through errors in their production or contact with radioactivity.
· Scientists recently offered several other explanations for mutations, all controversial. Mutations can arise, for instance, spontaneously in cells and bacteria under pressure, as when deprived of nutrition. The organism generates the variations on which selection acts, and, in some cases, this mutating process appears adaptive. Hereditary diseases in humans involve some of these instances.
· Evolution proceeds from an observation or a descriptive theory to become an explanation. We look for evolutionary explanations for phenomena and traits. For example, we explain the appendix as something that evolved to help us digest certain foods at a stage in our evolutionary history but which now serves no purpose. It’s harmless, and natural selection has yet to pressure our genes to remove it.
· Biological evolution may require some organisms to move to a higher state of complexity and this may affect the genes, so the change passes on to future generations.
· Hypothetically, suggests Lee Smolin, universes can reproduce through black holes. On the other side of a black hole exists a white hole into a universe and through which energy, stars, and other celestial matter emerge or explode. The more appropriate the conditions for the existence of black holes, the more black holes exist in the universe, and the more universes spin off the parent universe, each with a tendency for the prevalence of the same conditions. Natural selection tends to choose universes with the right conditions for the existence of black holes (or an abundance of black holes) and whose offspring universes possess the black-hole–producing conditions. As in this theory of Smolin, neo-Darwinism can apply to other aspects of reality than the biological.
· One type of evolution, not neo-Darwinian, concerns the history of physical things from the moment of the big bang. Cosmology describes such development in the universe, and geology describes the physical development of the earth.
Plate tectonics tells
part of this story. The earth’s crust divides into adjoining, moving plates
that carry the continents embedded in them. About
·
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If scientists hear, or read about a good idea, they pass it onto their colleagues and students. They mention it in their articles and their lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up in an earlier draft of this chapter, ‘Memes should be regarded as living structures. . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation. . . . The meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in nervous systems of individuals the world over.’
This sociocultural evolution can progress rapidly compared with biological neo-Darwinism. Changes in genes can take a long time to alter the genetic makeup and hence behavior of all members of a species. But ideas like the computer chip can surface in one day, spread rapidly, and stay forever.
We can chart these evolutionary histories from a human point of view:
· Increasing entropy (the Second Law of Thermodynamics: irreversibility) – necessary for:
· Locality – the emergence of the macro universe and therefore necessary for:
· Increasing complexity – that appears necessary for, or at least associated with:
· Evolution in its various forms.
Neo-Darwinian and other forms of evolution result from the expansion of the universe and the wholeness that the subuniverse represents. This is how the subuniverse unfolds through time.
Evolutionary processes seem to move away from wholeness (quantum, nonlocal, whole), but they don’t. Two days before I wrote this, news broke of the discovery of life on Mars – incorrectly, it turned out – and a few months ago astronomers announced the existence of planets outside our solar system. Complexity grows and evolution proceeds throughout the universe. At this stage of its life, the universe moves toward a different type of wholeness than the quantum – though it may still involve nonlocality: a wholeness of internal connections that arises from the evolution of life and other phenomena, and from the development of complex systems.
The universe avoids a static status quo that sounds like the conservative politic of ‘what’s good enough for my grandparents is good enough for my grandchildren.’ The histories of the universe depict the universe moving in various ways, at present toward greater wholeness-with-diversity. A question immediately arises: Moving toward what end point? And that question becomes, What do these histories mean? What’s their significance?
Mutations and natural selection represent two natural processes that, when they work together, change the course of the universe. Tensions exist between the laws of the universe and its initial state, and from this tension the universe moves. Change need mean nothing more than this. Change may alter the universe without any larger significance. But why the tension in the first place? Why the potential for ‘history’ versus ‘maintaining the status quo?’ We think meaning must repose there. Another way to phrase this asks: If wholeness remains the aim of and the basic property of the universe, why pass through the process of separation?
Robert Russell asks if the order in Bohm’s universe leads to
beauty, design, or purpose. If order occurs in what the subuniverse unfolds,
does it suggest the intentional design of a creator? Perhaps this design
implies that the creator means something by creating the universe. Russell
thinks so. I disagree. The subuniverse model inspires a way to talk about the
interaction of the Divine with the universe. But I fail to see in Bohm’s
writings a clear picture of a purpose for the universe, of a movement of the
universe toward a goal, or of movement in a specific direction for a purpose.
In the Christian approach to history, the universe goes somewhere, from
creation to its fulfillment. It moves from its genesis – ‘In the beginning of creation,
when the Divine made heaven and earth’ – toward its salvation at the end of
time – ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth’ (Gen.
We still search for significance in the movements of the
universe. Consider the relationship between the Divine and nonlocality. Does
the Divine associate more with nonlocality and complexity than with separation
and locality? Perhaps connections tune more into the Divine than does
separation. As the sponsor of wholeness, the Divine may appear to favor them.
But then locality and separation would act against the Divine. We might even
call them evil, but, in fact, they don’t and aren’t. The subuniverse Divine is
alocal; the Divine is neither local nor nonlocal. To suggest the evil nature of
locality adds an unthought-out moral dimension to the Divine that I want to
avoid. While the Divine does sponsor wholeness, including nonlocality, locality
helps to achieve it. The Divine promotes locality as much as nonlocality. We
need to look again for a basis for value and meaning because, as reiterated at
the end of chapter
Our abilities, including our mental capacities, evolved. In particular, meaning evolved and is specific to humans. Humans project this property onto the Divine. Events may Mean something (the divine, transcended form of meaning), but we don’t know what this entails. Thus, the histories of the universe possess no Meaning – neither does the universe, neither does a strawberry – other than what we provide. To ask for the Meaning of the histories is to project human categories too far at present.
But we need to project. What ought we to project then?
We evolved what and who we are. We emerge as a product of the tendency of the universe to increase in wholeness at the macro level, as evolving beings set in the evolving universe. The last chapters spoke of wholeness-with-diversity and the previous chapter said we need more resources on values. Wholeness-with-diversity tells us little about values. Clues to our nature and our relationship to the subuniverse Divine lie in our evolution. Values are social phenomena that appear deep in the life of all humans in community, perhaps throughout the existence of the hominid line. Meaning, purpose, morality, and the content of morals find their roots in our story.
I say: Happiness evolved into us by the work of spiritual reality and forms the good for us. We should try to achieve it. We should open ourselves to the insights of science (= spiritual reality’s ways) on how to achieve it.
Many factors – external, competing drives, etc. – inhibit our happiness, so when a spiritual tradition says, ‘Spiritual reality is happiness,’ it is also saying how we might increase our happiness. This is a scientific matter that may draw upon spiritual wisdom as hypotheses, for instance – see the conclusion in my Bohm book in helping to develop our wisdom about happiness. Spiritual thinking needs science.
Traditional spiritual terms need translating.
The sciences are spiritual thought and morality rolled into one.
##
Therefore, if we want to be truly spiritual =spiritual reality’s way for us, we
should try to achieve happiness. This is also trying to achieve spiritual
happiness.
Say how this is the
next step in developing my method.
Spiritual terms have no meaning outside us and to
know about that that is outside ourselves and creates the systems (i.e.,
Spiritual reality) can only be known through the results of that creating.
Explain the logic
here.
‘If we want to be
truly spiritual….’ This is the big choice we have to make, like the Christian
choice in MT
As happiness evolved
into us by spiritual reality, it forms the good for us.
## Since scientific research suggests to us how the
world including ourselves operates, it can – and does – suggest what we can do
to become happier.
Say how this is the next step in developing my method.
Now to explain the
above three points further. They
constitute my theological method.
I’m crossing the naturalistic divide? Fact =
value? Not necessarily so severe because we need to decide if we want greater
happiness.
This is the next
chapter.
The focus
methodologically is the LoL/social science research: these are the ways that
are best for us to live. Further, spiritual reality created us with these so
these are what spiritual reality has in mind for us; these are the morality of
spiritual reality for us.
As with JT: not denying traditional spiritual truths, but the new stuff
from science is in addition and builds on them.
What does this mean
that spiritual traditions can also contribute? In the camellia approach, this
needs to happen.
Scientific versus spiritual understandings of happiness ® clash ® my
method for developing a system of spiritual thought ®
spiritual
reality wants us to be happy. // What does science say about how to
become happier?
MT
##
Happiness in relationships:
·
with
Leslie
·
story
of our meeting
·
That
woman at the German conference
·
·
the
bridge in
MT
## Each of us has an inbuilt
predisposition to happiness. Scientific research also reveals to us that we can
access the high part of our potential range by adopting certain attitudes and
following certain behaviors: by sharing close personal relationships, for
example, or living in a culture that evaluates events positively, experiencing
flow in work and play, or being people of faith. We might work toward these if
we want to raise our chances of greater happiness. Here, spiritual traditions
can contribute. Happiness is tied to having meaning in life, and belonging to
and believing in a spiritual tradition often provide this. How we achieve this
is peculiar to each individual; we need to understand our own sense of the
spiritual. For instance, achieving a state of flow can increase our happiness
but flow requires challenge and what challenges one person may not challenge
another. The question now is, ‘What is the best spiritual way for me as a
unique and modern person?’
I suppose that what I
want here are many examples of people in
Outstanding
Points and Questions:
·
Don’t have anything about God or spiritual reality in
this chapter, except in the title. Reiterate the methodology stuff and scatter
throughout the ‘God wants us to do this…’ phrase.
·
There may
be lots of stuff in EP
·
How does what the spiritual ways say about how we should behave to be happy
compare with the psychology stuff?
·
Can I include here more of the LoL stuff on
happiness?
·
My point may be: what does spiritual reality want
of us wo happiness? How ought we from a spiritual point of view to increase our
level in our set range? Rephrase the book as ‘from a spiritual point of view’
versus ‘spiritual reality wants.’
·
I think
I’ve solved the problem by saying that the spiritual traditions can provide the
sense of meaning that appears to be the main prerequisite for happiness in the
sense that we understand it.
·
The book
is not about cause and effect, but about correlation.
·
To achieve
happiness we need to understand our sense of spirituality – it may include
tradition all or in part, or none. We all have within us the spiritual to be
happy.
There must be many self-help
books on getting happy.
Lead and Hook
Am I happier to live here? I love
it, but should it make a huge difference? That has to do with reaching higher
parts of my set range. But maybe that’s the point: I am about as happy here as
I was in
One assessment of
happiness rates a child of a slum in a South American city, who daily picks
through garbage dumps for food, happier than a well cared for child in an
affluent North American suburb. [Yet, slum inhabitants can be very unhappy. Saw
in chapter
This book explores the
different understandings of happiness and points us toward the deeper and
longer type: this is what we really want.## ???is this joy???
‘You can never find happiness by searching because then
you’re implying that it is outside yourself….All you need to do is choose it,
not chase it….’ But choose what?
Compare this with
the quotations from Pascal and then reconcile the two accounts. This may better
go somewhere in this chapter. Is it the hunt or is not the hunt that’s going to
bring happiness? Neither. For it’s in the process of doing something, perhaps
even hunting for happiness, that brings happiness.
##‘People tend to
think happiness is to be found in the pursuit of worldly pleasures: in
divertissements like hunting, dancing, sports and games….The philosophers have
always laughed at this….Pascal, however, goes a step further than the
philosophers, whose analysis, he contends, evinces a facile and dangerous
utopianism. As he points out, men cannot find a true universal justice or a
true, lasting happiness; such things are beyond their feeble reach…. And so
with the crowd’s attitude towards happiness. The high-minded philosophers
insist that we should find happiness in ourselves. But the effect of doing
nothing, of contemplating oneself, is to be forced to confront one’s weakness,
isolation and inevitable death. Yes, the people are wrong to believe the things
they pursue will make them happy – they never do. But the pursuit itself
distracts them from the full horror of their predicament; it wards off ennui.
‘Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance,
ienQIanae.slen have decided…not to think about such things.’ And rightly so:
‘Ordinary people have some very sound opinions. For instance…in choosing
diversion and preferring the hunt to the capture.’…But Pascal’s fragments, of
course, are less concerned to get a perspective on the right, complex attitude
to man’s vain quest for earthly justice and happiness, than to get one on man
himself. The argument here, however, has the same basic structure. Human nature
displays, we have seen, a bewildering mixture of spiritual and bestial
qualities, to which none of the traditional philosophical systems can do
justice.’TLS
As Chapter One reported,
we generally retain our level of happiness, despite the exceptions. We still
don’t know, however, what makes one person happier than another. If a person’s
level of happiness disregards age, race, sex, and most income brackets, who
feels the happiest? What does the greatest level of happiness depend upon?
A National Institute of
Aging study of
What are these ‘enduring
characteristics,’ though?
##???These
are to say what we are to do and not to do???
Other sciences beyond behavioral genetics and neuroscience contribute
to this discussion. Psychology explores activities that activate our happiness
– sharing in stellar sex or consuming delicious dinners, perhaps. Psychologist
David Myers lists four character traits that make for happy people:## //
Those of us blessed with a happy disposition seem to keep it. To find what the
greatest level of happiness depends on, we ought, therefore, to seek the
enduring traits that mark a happy person. Study after study highlights four of
them: self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and the feeling of personal control.
Those of us who are happy:
·
They have high self-esteem – they like
themselves. Eighty-five per cent of Americans voted ‘having a good
self-image or self-respect’ as very important, and zero percent voted it
unimportant, according to a
·
Happy people feel optimistic – they exude hope
and feel able to succeed at tasks they undertake. Increased optimism means
better health, which in turn leads to greater happiness. A study of
·
Happy people are extroverts – they feel
self-confident and mix easily with others. Extroverts are more likely to marry,
find good jobs, and make close friends, according to research by Ed Diener and
Keith Magnus of the
·
Happy people feel in control of their lives.
Allowing prisoners, nursing home patients, and employees to make decisions
about their environment and its running results in increases in happiness.
Controlling our own time also leads to happiness. Psychologist
The so-called ‘happy farms’ scattered across the
Other factors, like
cultural worldview, can affect happiness. Some cultures look at the world as a
friendly and manageable place. Some cultures approach the world with negative emotions,
like guilt, anxiety, and anger. Different cultural frameworks contribute to
differing levels of happiness, even in the face of similar life situations.
Values and goals also
contribute to happiness levels. Possessing objectives, progressing toward them,
and avoiding conflict among them – all occur with higher happiness, according
to Robert Emmons. Diener and Frank Fujita also
found that assets like money, intelligence, and ability to get along socially
go along with high happiness if they bear on an individual’s goals. (This helps
explain why income levels predict happiness in poor countries and why
self-esteem levels predict happiness in wealthy countries that prize
individualism.) Happiness isn’t a passive reaction to an amiable situation; it
arises from engagement in worthwhile activities and from striving to achieve
personal objectives.
What does a higher level
of happiness come from? It involves high self-esteem, a sense of control over
life, and an outgoing, optimistic personality. In addition, our view of the
world and our having values and goals influence our level of happiness.
Myers and Diener warn us, however, not to think that happiness causes these traits. Psychologists have yet to understand fully the connection between the characteristics and happiness – the traits may cause it, or vice versa. Perhaps happiness induces extroversion. On the other hand, extroversion may induce happiness. Experiments show that people who mimic high self-esteem feel better about themselves; perhaps we can achieve happiness by acting in specific ways. Further, outgoing people appear more cheerful and more relaxed in the company of others – perhaps this explains why they usually marry earlier, have more friends, and land better jobs than introverts.
Our genes also appear to
play a role in our level of happiness – as twin studies show – and influence
our susceptibility to the above traits.## ???this may be better with the later discussion on purpose since I bring
in genes there???
Positive self-esteem, a sense of control, an outgoing and
optimistic personality, a friendly view of the world, and possession of values
and goals – all influence happiness. This introduces the second half of Templeton’s principle
A happy person is a person with a certain set of attitudes.
The two halves of the principle
together state, modified because of the survey results about near universal
happiness:
The happiest person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.
## Attitudes ® meaning. ‘Using your financial power to make the world a better place has a built-in,
feelgood factor. By buying in s
Researchers pursue the
happiness-attitudes connection further. Are there specific activities and
situations that correlate with, if not cause, higher degrees of happiness,
possibly by the way they influence the above traits?
## Mary knows
stuff about a group (‘Quando’?) that is like a religious group but without a
god but that functions as a community to optimize the members’ happiness.
Individualistic cultures
allow personal control, a chance to enact the inner self in the outer self, and
to express opinion, ability, and feeling. These possibilities encourage
happiness, but risk isolation and detachment. Chapter
life is inevitably full of personal failures. Our stocks go down, people we love reject us, we write bad papers, we don’t get the job we want, we give bad lectures. When larger, benevolent institutions (God, nation, family) are available, they help us cope with personal loss and give us a framework for hope. Without faith in these institutions, we interpret personal failures as catastrophic. They seem to last forever and contaminate all of life. The new emphasis on the self raises the chances that we will blame these misfortunes, losses and disappointments on ourselves and thus depress ourselves.
Either the emphasis on individualism alone or the loss of faith in institutions [religion, country, family] alone would increase our vulnerability to depression. The recent combination of the two, I believe, is a surefire recipe for an epidemic of depression.
Robert Bellah agrees: ‘Part of what’s missing…is a sense of connectedness, belonging, mutuality, being part of a people.’
The individualism that surfaces in Yuppieness causes
hopelessness. So says
‘Rampant individualism carries with it two seeds of its own destruction,’ concludes Seligman. ‘First, a society that exalts the individual to the extent ours now does will be ridden with depression.... Second, and perhaps most important, is meaninglessness [, a lack of] attachment to something larger than [us].’
More than nine out of
ten people find marriage still the best alternative to living alone. Three in four
married people profess their spouse as their best friend, and four in five
would choose the same person were they to marry again. These facts illuminate
the
This result doesn’t
depend on the gender of the married person. European surveys and a review of
The link between
marriage and happiness can work the other way, not just from marriage to
happiness. Those of us who are happy make for more attractive partners and so
become better marriage candidates. Perhaps happier people tend to marry more
than less happy people.
Marriage can also lead
to unhappiness; says Henry Ward Beecher: ‘Well-married a person is winged; ill-matched, shackled.’ Marriages that break up can
cause much misery too. Even afterwards, only
Overall, the plusses of
close relationships with family and friends tend to outweigh the stresses and
strains that such relationships can produce. A close, stable relationship
provides strong
MT
##
How important writing is to me:
· my tussle with this:
· broken marriages
· fear of death
· depression
· going on and off Zoloft
·
happiness
through it
·
my
flow/zone
MT
ö
Higher levels of
happiness can come with other opportunities than close relationships. The
unemployed tend to feel less satisfied than the happily employed. Maksim Gorky
claimed a century ago that, ‘when work is a pleasure, life is a
joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.’ Recent studies of work satisfaction
Studs Terkel speaks of ‘the Chicago piano tuner, who seeks and finds the sound that delights; the
bookbinder, who saves a piece of history; the
Work can sometimes fail
to satisfy. We may feel overwhelmed – when we lack the time or requisite skills
to fulfill a task – which leads to stress and anxiety. We may feel underwhelmed
– when we have too little work to fill our time or when we feel overskilled for
the task at hand – which leads to boredom. Between boredom and anxiety falls
the optimum state where tasks match our skills, engaging us and keeping us
busy. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this state ‘flow.’ Flow leads to happiness.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and
education at the
‘We shouldn’t rely on external things to make us happy. Explore creativity, fun
and play instead….Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the
##‘‘Every flow activity provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of
transporting the person into a new reality,’ he says.’
‘NO MATTER what
you’re doing – painting a picture or mopping a floor – providing you are caught
up in your task, it can be creative. It’s the attitude that counts.’
‘‘We hunger for
what might be called creative living,’ says Julia Cameron, author of The
Artist’s Way, ‘an expanded sense of creativity which we can use in business and
in relationships. I have seen lives transformed by the simple process of
recovering our creative powers.’’
‘Best of all,
she insists that we can all be creative – and happy. ‘No matter what your age
or your life path, it is not too late, egotistical or silly to work on your
creativity.’’
MT
I have lost seven children, so far, in my life. The latest loss happened yesterday.
The first two, conceived in
The problem started when she was about six months pregnant
and we didn’t know we were to have twins. It was cold and damp in the
The Lamaze classes had been going well. Pant, pant breathe; pant, pant, breathe. I was learning to be a good beginning father.
The contractions persisted and so, about
The phone rang about
The contractions had stopped all right. Then they restarted about two hours later. The nursing staff had changed and the new ones didn’t believe Christine when she told them she was having contractions in her back; everyone has them in their front! They wouldn’t give her the drug to stop the labor. Shortly, she dilated and they called me.
Peter emerged shortly after I arrived in the delivery room.
A bit late for pant, pant, blows. People remarked how s
They fed Christine tranquillizers and she remained asleep or non-compus-mentus for much of the remaining week. I remember not seeing her much; she was out of it in a room by herself and I had to deal with Peter’s few days. Plus visitors. Then the funeral. Christine was still out of it then. The doctors expressed concern about her. I wonder if she ever really dealt with this day.
Peter was baptized but I can’t remember whether by me or someone else; probably the hospital chaplain. Perhaps Keri was too. I don’t know.
I thought he’d live. He flailed too, but in an incubator and
more vigorously. He looked like Christine’s father with a big chest and
upside-down face. Dark hair. He looked so s
The funeral at St Peter’s started with Dad carrying the
white casket with the two of them in it. Very s
Keri and Peter received a cremation. Etched into a wall of
memories in
The church did not bring me peace as I mourned. Neither did I demand that God tell me the reasons for taking Christine’s and my Koonalda offspring.
My father’s tears offered me a s
The next year,
The next year, Christine and I had a beautiful, healthy baby girl, Miriam.
ö
I lost my third child in
Four days before my parents called to tell me that my sister, Karen, had been in a most horrific car accident and there was a chance she wouldn’t survive. She was driving in a head-on collision. The back of her seat had snapped off and she ended in the back seat under the engine.
I flew to New Plymouth and, with my parents, drove the hundred miles to Wanganui to where she was hospitalized. All we could do was to visit when we could.
We stayed in my parents’ caravan (the
I felt very torn. Christine was all right: emotionally
distraught, but physically OK. So I stayed another day or so, until Karen was
on the mend, and then flew back to
Karen survived and, the following year, Christine and I had another beautiful, healthy baby girl, Kiri. The name ‘Kiri’ was what we had wanted to call Keri. (We had both a girl’s and a boy’s name selected for our first child because we didn’t know what gender would arrive and, being twins, they used up both our choices). ‘Kiri’ is a Maori name, however (it means ‘skin’ or the ‘person’), and we weren’t brave enough at that point to face the racism we thought she and we would receive.
The next Christmas, Karen gave me a picture: Salvador Dali’s painting of Jesus on the cross. It had been on the back seat of her car when it crashed (she was a salesperson and this was one of her samples) and was the only thing in the car to remain unscathed.
ö
I lost my fourth and fifth children when I lived in
I left Christine in
We were and remain close, though we continue to live oceans apart.
ö
I lost my sixth child in
My child is the magazine Science & Spirit, which I had started over a decade before as Science & Religion News, and which had grown to an international, bimonthly, moderately circulating glossy publication. It still had a way to go ‘til I felt it was a success, though. The legal conditions of the loss require that I not say anything disparaging about those involved, and so I must restrict myself to the barest of bare facts and something of how I felt…and feel.
ö
Yesterday, in September
There’s more than one way to skin a cat…not that I would ever skin a cat. Cuddle and tickle, yes; skin, no. Talking about cats, the owners of the house Leslie and I are staying in have a cat, grey and white, who is very shy. They brought her here over the summer. When they left, they couldn’t find her. She spends her time out in the woods. They thought a fox might have killed her. But she meowed our first night here and we’ve put food and milk out for her, which disappears every night. I’ve just seen her out the window. Persistence is the name of the game. She has faith that we’d feed her and we have faith that she’ll be OK living as she wants to.
MT
ö
To be in a close
relationship or in a state of flow can increase happiness. Religion can significantly
affect our mental health too, as we saw in Chapter
Today’s believers do stand out as prime examples of happy
people. The highly religious declare themselves very happy at twice the rate of
those with the lowest spiritual commitment, according to a recent
Modern religious thinkers propose that an active and committed spiritual life leads to happiness. To their eyes and to those of millions of contemporary Christians, the Bible paints a picture of a gracious and loving deity who desires everyone’s happiness. Happiness arises directly from spiritual reality.
Why##???amplify???
does faith correlate with well-being? We previously explored whether
the close and
Modern life is askew, declares the
· ‘hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns’;
· a break down in our communities;
· the passing away of civility;
· the alienation of our ‘acquisitive and competitive corporate culture,’ which runs amok;
· a ‘sleeping sickness’ that infects the soul.
‘We lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are.’
Where might our happiness come from?
What we need, suggests Hillary Rodham Clinton, is a ‘reformation of the human spirit.’ Her
diagnosis finds
Perhaps the turn around has started. The year
Sigmund Freud thought religion illusory. It nibbles away at soundness of mind. It can become a type of illness in which religious people obsess and feel guilty. They push down their emotions and hold back their sexual feelings. Many writers concur with Freud; thinkers often assume the irrelevance of religion for happiness or the repression by religion of happiness. Perhaps Freud is wrong, though. Perhaps spiritual wealth, assuming we gather it, brings the happiness we desire.
Jesus didn’t extend to his followers release from the suffering and evil of their life on earth. Yet European and North American surveys, numerous of them, show that religious people more frequently than the nonreligious feel happy and pleased with their lives:
·
·
Nine thousand Europeans participated in a
survey. The ‘very happy’ included
·
Morris Okun and William Stock surveyed the
research and learned that religiosity and health best predict the happiness of
older people. ‘When I feel cranky,’ a
religious
· Mothers of children disabled developmentally suffer less depression if deeply religious than if irreligious. Women recently widowed feel more joy if they frequently attend synagogue or church than if inactive religiously. Parents with a child who dies of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome more easily find meaning in the tragedy if they are religiously committed than if irreligious. Those recently divorced, disabled, bereaved, seriously ill, or unemployed maintain more of life’s joy if their faith is strong. ‘Religious faith buffers the negative effects of trauma on well-being,’ suggests Christopher Ellison.
·
Religious adherents, at least in the
We all die; religiosity doesn’t save us from that. Neither does faith prevent all stress and pain. The above studies do suggest, however, that religiosity leads to greater strength and happiness in routine life and in crises. It helps us cope with growing old. The religious among us tend to live longer and enjoy greater physical and mental health. Faith also helps socially.
What does religiosity supply that links it positively with joy and psychological and physical fitness?
The need to belong is important to religion. Most religious adherents know the kind of people who belong to a particular religion, but they don’t know the belief system of their own religion in its broad sweep let alone in its subtleties. Joining and leaving religious groups¾including mainstream religion, sects, and cults¾depend more on social bonds than on beliefs. Perhaps, then, religious involvement increases happiness because adherents connect with others socially. Not so; researchers can factor out the effect of social involvement, and the happiness-religiosity link persists.
We should then ask what else does today’s culture omit and
that faith provides. Studies suggest that it supplies a sense of purpose and
meaning. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research says we feel happiest when our life
flows with a unifying theme. (Chapters One and Two discuss Csikszentmihalyi’s
work in more depth.) We feel best when our life centers on a goal that
overrides all others and supplies them with meaning. One person’s life may flow
around painting. Another around social justice. Another around discovering the
intricacies of quantum physics. Another around expressing the nuances and
passions of life through literature.
Life in community can help the development of a sense of flow and the resultant purpose and commitment to something greater than us – God, family, nation, an objective. Our ideas grow when we share them with others. We strengthen with interaction, whether positive in outcome (the resolve of an Alcoholics Anonymous group) or negative (the resolve of a terrorist cohort). ‘The self is a very poor site for finding meaning,’ writes Seligman. A private faith is tough to sustain.
A communal faith can thus supply us with something larger than us. We find meaning when we discover and follow such a faith. It furnishes this because it equips us with, in Seligman’s words, ‘an attachment to something larger than the lonely self.’
Faith can provide even more. Many of us find, Ellison
discovered, that meditation and prayer heighten the awareness of close
relationships. Gallup and Margaret Poloma write that
‘We all benefit from being connected to a caring community,’ writes Myers, ‘from a sense of significance, from experiencing humility and deep acceptance, from a focus beyond ourselves, and from a perspective on life’s tragedies, especially death.’[i] We look for something more and we may find it in ‘a vision of life that is both conservative and radical: conserving social wisdom accumulated over generations, while questioning the well-traveled road of our individualism and materialism.’[ii]
To belong to a spiritual community can lead to engagement with people in need, and this activity can increase our happiness. Service – altruism and selflessness – correlates with happiness, as Chapter Twelve discussed. We feel good when we do good. Our self-esteem increases. We raise our eyes from ourselves and become more in flow. Active participation in a communal religious activity can increase compassion, which in turn increases happiness.
To belong to a spiritual community and to focus beyond ourselves can expand happiness, not only our own, but that of others.
Don Browning studied a Pentecostal Apostolic Church of God
in
Robert Woodson believes that the most potent service a community can offer will assuage ‘the hunger...for meaning.’[iv] Spiritually rooted programs may not always succeed. Programs that do work, however, usually build from a spiritual foundation.
A
Research links faith in community with societal health and well-being, as well with personal health, well-being, and life satisfaction. Thus we can say,
Happiness comes from spiritual wealth.
We’ve also seen that money and possessions don’t necessarily
produce well-being. These two conclusions together produce John Templeton’s
principle
Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth.[v]
More research into these
alternatives is necessary before we can adequately explain the correlation
between faith and happiness.
Who feels happiest?
Science tells us this: Sex, race, and income usually fail to predict it. We
can’t purchase it. Knowing our traits – whether we share close personal
relationships, whether our culture evaluates events positively, whether we
experience flow in work and play, whether we are people of faith – all these
factors provide insight into our level of happiness. We might work toward these
if we want to raise our chances of greater happiness. Concrete
activities (engaging in rewarding pastimes, or making lasting friendships)
leading to joy. Each of us has an inbuilt
predisposition to happiness. We can access the high part of our potential range
by adopting certain attitudes and following certain behaviors. This is
following the spiritual path. Templeton’s principle might now read:
The happiest
person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a
person with a certain approach to life.## ???Its doing this also tell us how we can become spiritually happy and happy spiritually.???
## It’s
following a path that ® happiness. Look at examples of faith paths.
I could assess each approach as I do it from the
point of view of modern the understanding of happiness as happiness and the
relation to wanting more and how to get it. What would moderns say to each
approach? This may contradict with my later saying that a spiritual path ® happiness, but I do ask what paths are
appropriate for moderns.
This brings in the work on the nature of belief
systems. It could also relate to the new work on the biology of meaning.
My
Starting Point: Modern Life. What is necessary to live life fully and well?
Food, drink, sex, companionship, meaning, etc. I could try to understand the
(my) spiritual dimensions for each of these. Perhaps the most relevant will be
meaning. What sort of meaning? Fulfilling work is one. ??? This
looks like it’s going to bring in the LoL stuff into my metaphysics –
wonderful!!!??? A sense of where one’s life is going is another.
// Christian Tradition and Spiritual thought:
Their Importance. But how important? My conclusion that we shouldn’t bow to
received doctrines because they are received. They must be winnowed. Especially
deal with spiritual reality as omnipotent (problem of evil: accepting the will
of spiritual reality), spiritual reality as totally beyond (just need
transcendence), and Jesus died for our sins (an interpretation of Jesus’ death
and resurrection). It still seems important, though, to interact with received
doctrines. // The history of
This also involves the relationship between spiritual reality and us, that spiritual reality wants us to follow
a path of meaning, not necessarily (at least at this stage of the discussion –
I make a case for other divinely wanted requirements later on) a particular
path.
MT
##
HOW IS THIS HAPPIER AND SPIRITUAL?
·
say it
by doing it
·
no
need to get into the nature of God
MT
ö
I constructed the prior parts of this book independent of a spiritual orientation. Now I introduce several specifically Christian matters that build on this.
Ideas central to Christian system of spiritual ideas include ‘revelation’ (a disclosure of divine will or truth, specifically the revelation who is Jesus Christ) and ‘resurrection’ (the rising of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion, and the rising of the dead). These create Christian ideas because they center on Jesus. Many other ideas exist in this system of theories, but these two lie most centrally. Christian theology includes the idea of ‘creation’ it in its base of ideas, but not in its focus.
I speak in a specifically Christian context here and address the words of that tradition. I want to fill these words with fresh meaning drawn from what I stated above concerning the nature of spiritual reality and that makes sense to me.
Christianity says that Jesus is the revelation of spiritual reality, the incarnation. I need to understand the context of their belief. Contexts hide meanings. The first Americans I saw, for instance, spoke in a language that stumped me; someone else told me those others spoke ‘Yank.’ Hearing a southern drawl like that now makes me realize that a Yank is a Yankee, someone from New England, or at least from the north. In the U.S., the word possesses a context of meaning that outsiders probably know nothing about; how could outsiders they feel the latent hostility here of many southerners for northerners?
The traditional Christian context for ‘Jesus is the revelation of spiritual reality’ hides many beliefs: What is spiritual reality? Why would spiritual reality want to become a human being? What does it mean for Jesus to be both spiritual reality and human? Answers need to feel true to the spiritual ideas I stated above. I accept revelation and resurrection as terms to explain, but I will not import orthodox interpretations along with them. New wine requires new wine skins.
So, I rescind a phrase in the definition of ‘revelation’ (‘a disclosure of divine will or truth, specifically the revelation who is Jesus Christ’). Specifically, I reject the existence of divine will or truth, as these project too personal a nature onto spiritual reality. By revelation, I refer, rather, to the disclosure of specific truths about human nature. Spiritual reality is the subuniverse, the unfolder of everything, so self-revelation by spiritual reality to humanity would disclose specific truths about human nature within the context of all that exists, existed, and will exist.
To provide a context that helps us understand the nature of the revelation and thus what spiritual reality would self-reveal, I ask: Why would spiritual reality self-reveal?
Spiritual traditions started as tribal and animistic, where people saw nature as shot through with power that they could influence by ritual. It then expanded its pools of adherents so that a tradition applied to larger tribal groups. This stage saw the advent of spiritual traditions such as those of the Greeks and Vedic Indians, who believed in a high spiritual reality or supreme being beyond animistic and tribal spiritual realities and powers. The personalities of the spiritual realitys become more pronounced, with speculation about the ultimate nature of reality and personal devotion moving to the fore. Then, starting about the sixth century b.c.e., what we now know as the major religions began to form. The teachings of Confucius and Lao-tzu in China expressed new mystical and ethical insights. The Upanishads and the Buddha gave birth to a new form of the spiritual quest in India. And in Israel, Moses and other prophets preached a monotheism that stood against the beliefs of surrounding tribes. Jesus and Christianity emerged out of Judaism. The Judaic and Christian traditions also influenced Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Over this period of human history, some spiritual traditions became international across cultures, tied to the spread of settled agricultural societies and related to the development of trans-kin altruism beyond the boundaries of related tribes. Spiritual traditions faced natural selection of a cultural type and few passed the test of time. The Hellenistic religion of the Greeks and Romans failed to survive, for instance. Spirituality participated in the evolutionary story of humanity and played an essential role in forging cohesion among a variety of cultures.
So, to the question ‘Why would spiritual reality self-reveal?’ I respond: at that juncture of human (cultural) evolution or development, key figures disclosed truths about human nature, and around them movements emerged that grew to change the course of history. Self-revelations of spiritual reality became necessary around two thousand years ago (give or take 600 years) for the next natural stage in the evolution of cultures to occur. Christianity, one of the transnational traditions, obviously did survive. Jesus founded it, or at least formed the focus of its founders Paul, Peter, and other of Jesus’ followers, and of all its adherents.
What form might a self-revelation of spiritual reality require? Why a person?
A cat named Fred once lived with me in a house beside a busy road. One evening, Fred failed to return home, an unusual event. I had noticed her on the other side of the road on occasions, so I feared the worst. After an hour searching on both sides of the road and calling her name innumerable times, I finally heard a weak and plaintive meow from under a shrub. A vehicle had hit her. She survived with operations and much care, but I would still see her on the other side when she was better. How could I warn her of the dangers and tell her not to cross? All my talking and affection achieved no ounce of good. I would have to become a cat and convince her in cat talk of the perils of the road. Similarly, so my Christmas sermon would explain, spiritual reality had to become a human being to tell us about its nature with regard to ourselves. For a message to have the best chance of communicating effectively to us at all human levels, it must come from a person.
A revelation as a person can communicate to us at all personal levels, but does that establish it as a revelation of spiritual reality? Every person, everything we know of – even inspiration – is a self-revelation of spiritual reality, because all unfold from spiritual reality the subuniverse. Spiritual reality self-reveals in Jesus and all the other prophets.
Why should we devote ourselves to Jesus, then, rather than to any of the other great teachers? Because we choose to. Many people raise George Washington high on a pedestal, while no one that I know elevates King George III of Britain, monarch during the revolutionary wars. Many significant individuals have lived and many live now. Some of these we choose as more central. The Jesus movement, along with several others, stands the test of time; it formed and still forms much of the backbone of western civilization. I choose it because of this and my desire to continue as an active part of this culture.
Jesus Christ is a revelation of spiritual reality that I select to follow and believe. To choose this way is to leap in faith, to commit myself, to become a Christian. Rather than existing as a theoretical assumption, to accept Jesus as the central revelation of spiritual reality means to believe in the centrality of what Jesus said and showed, and to try to follow its implications for my life. If I became a cat and Fred accepted me as the provider of meaning for her life, she might stop crossing the road.
Why should spiritual reality want to self-reveal? I wish to communicate with you; the human race wishes to communicate with extraterrestrials; spiritual reality wishes to communicate with us. Arthur Peacocke follows this route when he tries to understand why spiritual reality wants to self-reveal. A personal God wants to self-disclose and would do so in a personal form. But as I have overemphasized already, I shy away from using words like moral, or purpose of spiritual reality. The properties of spiritual reality may so far exceed our human ones that they cease to resemble ours, and to claim the person-likeness of spiritual reality dangerously projects human qualities onto something we can as yet hardly fathom. Thus, unlike Peacocke, I hesitate to personify spiritual reality and decline to talk of spiritual reality as ‘wanting’ to do anything, including self-reveal. Rather, spiritual reality self-communicates as a natural part or progression of the evolution of culture; spiritual reality unfolds it all and this self-communication follows that pattern. Western culture directed a portion of that evolution when it chose Jesus as its focus.
What does Jesus reveal? Jesus’ revelation focuses on the experiences that touch the heart of our lives: love (altruism), inspiration, hope, suffering, and death, for instance. It tells us, first, that we should interpret and approach life in terms of altruistic love for each other, in terms of actions for the disadvantaged. The Christian model provides a general approach for how to live this out in everyday life. As Jesus tells the rich young man, ‘Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor’ (Luke 18:22). Or as James writes, ‘Coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it’ (James 1:27).
Michael Ruse objects to the strong love command from his sociobiological point of view because he says it runs against what we would consider biologically natural. To forgive someone 490 times, he says, is irresponsible. Like a biblical fundamentalist, he interprets the commission as something we could literally achieve. The Christian love command, however, instead creates an ideal that no one will fulfill to the letter. To achieve a lofty goal, we must aim for something higher still.
Around us, our goals seem low. We fill our cities with filth. As individuals, corporations, government bodies, we dump garbage beside roads, into waterways – everywhere. Such selfish actions need to balance with our need for survival, which in turn requires the survival of our environment. For the human species to continue and for the repair and maintenance of the social and cosmic environment, we must limit our self-centered qualities (also necessary for survival), because their overuse threatens the survival of our species. We must hold them in balance. Jesus’ love example pushes altruism and therefore biological ‘altruism’; it can achieve this balance.
Biological ‘altruism’ generates altruism, the attitude that
spiritual reality (our biological rootedness) prompts us to hold toward each
other. Thus, this self-revelation by spiritual reality – our perception of the
life and teachings of the man Jesus Christ – fits with the laws of nature.
Spiritual reality works this way. The second aspect of Jesus’ revelation aligns
altruism with spiritual reality, the whole that is the subuniverse.
Christians like to say, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8).## WHICH TRANSLATION?
After ‘revelation,’ ‘resurrection’ forms the second plank of Christian belief. Jesus died and Joseph of Arimathaea placed his body in a tomb. After a couple of days, according to Luke’s Gospel,
· women went into the tomb to prepare his body for full burial, but he had disappeared;
· Peter also found the tomb empty;
· Jesus walked and ate with two of his disciples on the road to a village called Emmaus;
· Jesus appeared to his eleven remaining apostles, talked with them, showed them his hands and feet, and ate with them.
Was he only a force in his followers’ minds, like George Washington in the minds of living American idealists? Did he have a physical body? Was he a ghost like Casper? Something happened to the person of Jesus after his death by which he continued in some form of life and interacted with others. This seems an indisputable base. But what did happen and what it means aroused and continues to arouse controversy. What happened historically, and where does interpretation begin? Like John Polkinghorne, I can’t say what form the resurrection of Jesus took, but it’s the fact of the resurrection that is more important than what emerged from the tomb between Jesus’ temporary burial and the arrival of the women. The resurrection dominates the empty tomb.
What does Jesus’ resurrection signify? The full impact of spiritual reality’s self-revelation requires the event that we call the resurrection. It helps interpret the life of Jesus and hence its meaning for us. Conversely, to understand or recognize his resurrection requires an understanding of who he was and is. The meaning of this resurrection, something that happened to Jesus, also calls upon the revelation. Logically, for Christians, the two are inseparable.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the decline of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe. It signifies for some people that liberal democracy and its fellow consumerism will succeed in the end. Though the analogy is limited, the resurrection similarly signifies to those of the Christian faith that Jesus’ altruistic way will succeed in the end. Altruism will win, biological ‘altruism’ will win, and humanity will survive. Evil and suffering continue, but as Jesus suffered pain and humiliation and Spiritual reality left them alone, so the best will happen through them and in spite of them. Altruism exists to the end, and the universe becomes more whole: this is the hope in the alternative way of Jesus. Resurrection, therefore, emerges from biology and culture to become significant and important for us in the evolutionary survival of the human species.
For Christians, Jesus indicates the essential properties for being human. His resurrection establishes hope in the success of the way of altruism, that this way will beat rival ways of life. It also grounds a second hope, that there is more to our lives than bodily death. Jesus’ resurrection suggests our resurrection, our life after death. If he can do it, so can we.
But what is this ‘more’? What is eternal life? The system of spiritual ideas outlined in these pages emphasizes a wholeness in which entities retain their individuality but unite within the whole, which in turn affects the behavior of each. Similarly, all time exists in the subuniverse. It contains no divisions: I always existed there and I always will. The subuniverse expressed me in its unfolding that is me now, on earth, my body, mind, spirit, and experiences. I never leave the wholeness, and while on earth I only weakly perceive it. Each of us will experience an individualized afterlife within the whole into which we enfold. Each of us will affect all other events, even more than we recognize now. Each of us will implicitly contain all other persons, everything, and the whole. All of us will, all of the time, constantly connect with all other parts of reality, past, present, and all the possibilities for the future. Life after death reels in wholeness. We will then explore the endless possibilities of the subuniverse. Resurrected Jesus exemplifies this universal wholeness.
Altruistic behavior by humans marks the best way of life within the web of connections that is the universe-as-a-whole. It helps hold the structure of the web together, like an elastic glue, which in turn centers life after death. Thus, the two hopes the resurrection of Jesus imparts – eternal life and the success of altruism – relate closely.
This thumbnail system of spiritual ideas centers on the resurrection, on the wholeness that the subuniverse unfolds. I can say,
· wholeness comes first (the subuniverse – see Chapter 5), which leads to
· evolution and the evolution of humans, which leads to
· the revelation of Jesus (altruism), which leads to
· Jesus’ resurrection, which signifies
· life after death, which is a form of
· wholeness.
The resurrection speaks of our life’s mystery in the greatest of all mysteries: wholeness, spiritual reality as the subuniverse.
Note the partial nature of resurrection. It neglects our physical bodies, for instance. Knowing little about wholes, I remain mum about the details of my resurrected state.
‘All right,’ said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!’ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 78.
Our smiles continue on. I lay aside the question of what of me or what of the universe resurrects and what fails to, why that occurs, and how it adds up. I lay aside some matters, but I answer other more important ones. I try with them to create the rudiments of a system of Christian spiritual ideas. I want the Christian emphasis because I think the religion for western society needs to root itself in Judaism and Christianity, given its cultural heritage. To develop along Christian lines, the ideas must center on Jesus the Christ, and it must relate positively to the Christian tradition. But Western culture grows in an international context, which means it involves more and more other cultural traditions. The motivator, Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is a Mormon who quotes liberally from a variety of wisdom traditions: ancient Egyptian, Native American, Greek, Hebrew, Christian, Chinese, Indian. ##[Covey uses the word ‘habit’ rather than use an especially religious or theological idea.]##My system ideas should do likewise, adding the wisdom of other traditions to what it receives from its predecessors.
## Perhaps the addition I make in
this book to some of the ideas of MT01 re Spiritual reality is to develop a way
of talking about spiritual reality/Spiritual reality that’s not personal.
Evolution (= the
spiritual unfolding) goes through cultural evolution as this requires trans-kin
religions. It continues to unfold through, for example, scientific research.
How does this scientific research relate to Christianity and its truths (see
JT’s polemics)? Need to talk about the relationship of science to the
spiritual’s self-revelation. Need for the personal aspect of Spiritual reality.
The way of altruism is
one way to find meaning in life. Is it the best way to do so?
Spiritual thinking comes in
especially with the last question, though it ought to be intertwined with all
the elements, including morality and explanation. How do my spiritual ideas
specifically come in? How does it relate to the biology of meaning and the LoL
stuff? Perhaps it should be based on the LoL/social psychology research on
meaning – perhaps there’s
a lot more on this than I’ve so far come across. How does an awareness of uaaw relate
to my sense of life’s meaning? Look at how I react to Mary’s illness, to my
own, to the challenges and opportunities of life, to the sense of adventure. It
gives a sense of hope (resurrection through interconnectedness), a sense of the
possibility of greater significance (spiritual reality transcending our
properties), etc. The life experiences become a key criteria for evaluating a
system of spiritual thought. ??? what
sort of faith is most appropriate for happiness in the modern world???##
##Summary:
Overall: How can we become happy in
a way that is spiritually healthy and true? To strive for happiness we ought to
follow what scientific research says are the routes to happiness. These are
also the spiritual ways to happiness.
Tension:
What would make us happier? In particular, how
can we become happier in a way that’s true to our inmost spiritual selves?
Ending:
To follow the scientifically established ways is
to follow spiritual reality’s ways toward living in the higher range of our
happiness set points.##