MT15 Proposal: Happier and Spiritual

A Proposal for:

In the Spirit of Happiness

Kevin Sharpe

How do I live my life so I’m happier?
What does God have to do with my happiness?
How can I feel happier yet be true to God and my spiritual self?

Overview

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 Land Cruiser pulled in, bright in silver and chrome. Out climbed (literally, climbed) a suburban New Jersey mother in her 30s wearing the latest in fashion tracksuit and makeup.

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.

We don’t hear about research into the subject. It tells us a lot about what usually doesn’t make a person happier. For instance:

Not Age. Popular culture believes that we feel happier when we’re not a teenager, old, or in a mid-life crisis. However,

· A survey of 169,776 people in 16 nations suggests otherwise.

· 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.

Not Gender. Women experience severe depression and anxiety at double the rate of men. Yet, women experience both sadness and joy more intensely than men and men suffer alcoholism and deformed personalities at five times the rate of women. Surveys show that, on average, men and women experience roughly the same level of happiness:

· Women are as likely as men to say they’re ‘very happy’ and ‘satisfied’ with their lives.

· Eighty percent of women and 80 percent of men declare themselves at least ‘fairly satisfied’ with their lives.

· A digest of 146 studies suggests that gender accounts for less than one percent of overall well-being.

· Other surveys of 18,032 college students across 39 countries conclude the same.

Not Wealth. Money and wealth doesn’t foretell happiness either, though dire poverty can predict unhappiness:

· The extremely rich experience only slightly greater happiness than the average.

· ‘Compared with 1957, Americans have twice as many cars per person,’ write psychologists David Myers of Hope College, Michigan, and Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, ‘plus microwave ovens, color TVs, VCRs, air conditioners, answering machines, and $12 billion worth of new brand-name athletic shoes a year.’ Yet Americans feel no happier now than in 1957: 35% declared themselves ‘very happy’ then compared to 32% in 1993.

· A steady increase in a person’s income over 10 years leads to no more happiness than if the income remains fixed.

Not High Events. Maybe our happiness does stick at roughly the same level in an average everyday life. But what about the momentous events like winning the lottery or giving birth to a first child?

‘If you are a negative person to start off, if you are a dull person to start off,’ says Rose Marie Lajoie, a Michigan Lottery winner, ‘you’ll be the same way after winning the lottery.’ If you went out and bought a Ferrari, a swimming pool, and a new wardrobe, you’d get a great buzz but it wouldn’t last for ever. Momentous events alter our level of happiness for a short time, but we quickly adapt and return to our normal range.

Research tells us that the things we usually look to to make us happy often don’t work.

I wrote much of the above unknowingly at the same time as 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 New Jersey, a couple of miles from Manhattan. The storage boxes, Compound-W, SUVs, and Outbacks hardly seem to matter now.

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 New Zealand and my friends in England and the US were very worried; as were millions of others for those they know and love. Many in my New Jersey town of SUV owners work in Wall Street industry. The town fell silent: no cars, no trains, no planes, no children…no one was out.

· Mayor Giuliani of New York City was as compassionate as a person can be during TV appearances. People cared for each other: struggling down the towers helping the wounded and over wrought; firefighters and police dying trying to save others; plane passengers thwarting hijackers. People care: no looting; long lines of blood donors. We want to help.

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.

Perhaps, therefore, the key to happiness lies in the spiritual traditions. After all, they store the experience of people over 1000s of years on many things, probably including happiness. Most of them also claim to have a special insight into what God thinks and how God wants us to behave. Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam – in nutshells – do address the question, as do the other traditions – Aboriginal, Jainism, Judaism, Maori, Native American, Shinto, Sufism, and so on:

Buddhism. The Buddha (born 563 BC) preached four ‘noble truths’:

· Our life is suffering.

· The suffering is caused by something.

· Suffering can cease.

· There is a path we can follow to end our suffering.

We suffer because everything in the world is temporary yet we want a sense of our permanent identity. Our longing for this personal self leads to a repeated cycle of death and rebirth, and this causes us pain and suffering.

Understanding that we don’t have a permanent self or ego leads to the end of suffering, Buddhist thought continues. When we abandon all forms of worldly desire (including the wish for release from the repeated cycle of death and rebirth), we move toward nirvana, the final freeing. However, to move along this path we must be clear about what we think and do, we must feel no desire, and we must care for and be friendly toward all. We finally reach nirvana through selflessness – literally through the end of our 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.

In opposition to the suffering and pain of mortal existence are pleasant feelings in body and mind. These help a person meditate successfully – a concentrating mind is a happy mind.

The second way Buddhism features happiness involves the idea that Buddha rules over Sukhavati (‘the Blissful’), his creation. People who worship Buddha 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 Buddha describe Sukhavati as a paradise filled with glory from Buddha – 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. All our wishes are granted. No corpses, beasts, or hells mar the sumptuous landscape. We no longer experience pain or sadness. The greatest happiness arises from hearing Buddha preaching before our final entry into nirvana. Sukhavati in its deepest sense depicts a state of mind. The descriptions, though graphic, are figurative. Sukhavati represents a halfway house on the road to the ultimate destination or perfect happiness. Only the nothingness of nirvana equals complete escape from the suffering of life. Only nirvana equals pure happiness.

Christianity. A friend with a staunch Roman Catholic upbringing talks of her constant sinning because she fails to say grace before every meal, pray every night, and attend church as often as possible. She feels she must overcome this tendency through acts of penance to achieve happiness in the afterlife. ‘Heaven is destination and reward,’ writes David van Biema, ‘succor and relief from earthly trials.’ Many Christians don’t see happiness for the here and now, focusing this feeling instead on someplace else: a land of original bliss and innocence (the Garden of Eden) and 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 an endless dynamic of joy,’ says Jeffrey Russell from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Christian think they base their beliefs about happiness on the life and teachings of Jesus (born about 4 BC). They understand this in various ways, only one being the reward of the afterlife. Modern spiritual leaders like Robert Schuller, for instance, not only preach the rewards of heaven, but also 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 the spiritual life leads to happiness and success here and now. Happiness is living in nearness to God. We move close to God through human togetherness, epitomized by hallelujah crying and hymn singing.

Hinduism. Hinduism preaches withdrawal from the world of pleasure or desire, but the way it thinks about this differs from the Buddhist approach.

Hindus believe that past events determine future ones. They also believe in the reincarnation or rebirth of individual souls to eternal life. These beliefs merge in the idea of karma, that we, not God, bring about all our suffering and happiness: ‘What goes around, comes around.’ Performing a morally good deed in this life notches up greater happiness for our next life, and vice versa for an evil action. Hindu philosophy places literal interpretations on karma; slanderers are supposedly reincarnated with bad breath, for example.

Some branches of Hindu thought distinguish between an eternal center of consciousness where there is no change, and the world where there are innumerable centers of activity and continuous change. We are centered on consciousness, but we mistake ourselves for more tangible things like bodies, sense organs, and intellects. These are of nature and we experience nature as pleasure, pain, and inactivity. Our mistake, therefore, leads us to experience suffering. To stop this suffering, we must free our minds from their mistake and separate ourselves from nature, allowing the self to return to pure consciousness. We can do this through meditation. Our suffering then ceases and we attain happiness.

Islam.

By the soul and Him who formed it,
And implanted into it its wickedness and its piety!
Blessed is he who purifies it.
Ruined is he who corrupts it.

This passage taken from the Qur’an (the holy book of Islam) demonstrates the Muslim 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. They live in luxury surrounded by rivers of milk, purified honey, and sweet tasting wine. They relax on couches and drink, attended by wide-eyed maidens and sport fine, richly woven garments. Life here lasts forever. The afterlife is a paradise where the righteous enjoy the highest of spiritual and sensual happiness. Muhammad’s (born about 570 AD) prophecy captures the spirit: in Paradise believers will own a pearl tent, sixty miles long, with a family in each corner, and two gardens containing silver and gold vessels.

Whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or any of many other religions, the idea of happiness abounds in and plays a pivotal role in spiritual thought. But they differ in what they say about happiness. Many speak of our feeling happiness in the here and now, while others in the afterlife. We experience happiness in this life as a result of virtuous thoughts and deeds, or we secure happiness in the life to come by living this right life and by having faith in God. Sometimes, the traditions want us to shun earthly happiness and take the hard road to heavenly happiness. Orthodox Christianity focuses on happiness lying someplace else: in the afterlife in heaven. Islamic terrorists believe in their reward through their own violent deaths. Sometimes, as with many religious popularizers in the west, traditions propose that an active and committed spiritual life leads to happiness and success in our earthly life. To the eyes of these believers and to those of millions of living Christians, the Bible paints a picture of a gracious and loving God who desires and can give everyone’s happiness now. Thus, within a spiritual tradition – let alone between traditions – ideas of when and how we gain happiness can vary greatly. Some traditions preach ideas that many others find alien, even incomprehensible. How can a Christian understand the Buddhist idea that nothingness in nirvana represents ultimate happiness?

Four major spiritual traditions say little the same about happiness apart from all aiming for our happiness. Our way to happiness, while remaining true to the spiritual, therefore, can’t be in what the spiritual traditions preach. We need another way to find out how we might become happy and yet remain true to our spiritual selves.

Science’s approach to happiness may provide this.

Social psychologists call happiness, ‘subjective well-being.’ It refers to how satisfied we feel about certain areas of our life, like work and relationships, and which lead to an overall sense of how satisfied we feel about life. Those of us with high subjective well-being mostly think positively about our lives. So we mainly feel good. Those of us with low subjective well-being think of things negatively and tend to feel unpleasant emotions like anger, depression, and anxiety.

Psychologists, therefore, understand subjective well-being in terms of three things: the presence of positive feelings, the absence of negative feelings, and how satisfied we feel with life. They have also devised ways to measure subjective well-being with questionnaires that accurately report how a person feels. I assume that subjective well-being is happiness.

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.

Science shows several things about our happiness. For each of us, for instance, our happiness moves up and down within a small range called a ‘set-point’ that we are born with. Our happiness may at times go out of this range, but it almost always returns to it. Though we experience temporary mood swings, we soon readjust to our set range for happiness. Some of us always approach life full of hope and enthusiasm, while others seem permanently to experience the blues.

Studies of happiness have taken place worldwide. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has since 1957 annually sampled about 1,500 Americans. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the Gallup Organization both conduct similar, but less frequent polls. European governments also fund studies to ascertain the happiness of their citizens.

Three in ten people in the U.S. say they feel very happy, and only one in ten claims to feel not too happy, according to the University of Chicago studies. Myers and Diener conclude from survey results like this on 1.1 million people from over the globe that most of us feel pretty happy; 93 percent of us say we feel happy (which includes very happy, pretty happy, and moderately happy) as opposed to sad or neutral. A few exceptions do exist: hospitalized alcoholics, for example, and new prison inmates, people starting psychotherapy, South African Blacks during the reign of apartheid, and students in countries with economic and political oppression.

We appear much happier than we might expect. The distinction that matters, therefore, isn’t between happy and unhappy people, but between what percentage of the time we feel happy versus unhappy, and the degree of our happiness and unhappiness. Most of us already feel happy yet most of us constantly strive to be happier. We should ask how high we are in our set range of happiness and how we can go higher in it. How might we become happier yet remain true to our spiritual selves?

It’s our disposition that matters. A National Institute of Aging study of 5,000 U.S. adults suggests that the happiest people remain relatively happy, though their work, family status, or location changes through the years. Another team at the University of California at Berkeley studied teenage boys and continued to track their lives through more than a half century. The study’s findings indicate that happy teenagers tend to turn into happy adults. Our emotions remain stable. 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 lasting traits that mark the disposition of a happy person. What traits need a person have to make sure they have a higher level of happiness? Myers lists four that study after study highlight: self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and the feeling of personal control.

· Those of us who are happy tend to have high self-esteem – we like ourselves – especially in the cultures of the west that emphasize the individual. We have a high opinion of ourselves. Eighty-five percent of Americans voted ‘having a good self-image or self-respect’ as very important, and zero percent voted it unimportant, according to a Gallup poll. We agree with statements like, ‘I have good ideas,’ and ‘I’m a lot of fun to be with.’ We frequently rate ourselves healthier, less prejudiced, more intelligent, more ethical, and more sociable than average. These kinds of feelings help cushion us against the demons of anxiety and depression, and so bolster our happiness.

· Those of us who are happy tend to feel optimistic – we exude hope and feel able to succeed at what we do. We agree with statements like, ‘I expect to succeed when I take on something new.’ The least healthy in a class that graduated from Harvard University 34 years prior are those who felt the gloomiest when seniors. Increased optimism means better health and more success, which in turn lead to greater happiness.

· Those of us who are happy tend to feel in control of our lives. Deprivation of control, such as that experienced by prisoners, residents of nursing homes, and those in oppressive countries, leads to poorer health and lower morale. Allowing such people to make decisions about their living conditions makes them feel happier. Controlling our own time also leads to happiness. Psychologist Michael Argyle of Oxford University comments that happy people ‘are punctual and efficient,’ while unhappy people ‘postpone things and are inefficient.’ Feeling in power because we feel in control helps us do better at school, cope better with stress, and enjoy life more.

· Those of us who are happy tend to be extroverts – we feel self-confident and mix easily with others – contrary to the idea that stillness and quiet lead to happiness. Happiness tends to go with extroversion, both individually and in company, whether living alone or with others, whether living in urban or rural neighborhoods, whether working by ourselves or in a group. Extroverts are more likely to marry, find good jobs, and make close friends. These achievements lead to greater satisfaction with life.

A higher level of happiness comes from higher self-esteem, a greater sense of control over life, and a more an outgoing, optimistic personality. To be happier, we need more of a certain set of attitudes.

It isn’t easy all of a sudden to change our attitudes and behaviors. It is unlikely that the results will stick if I decide right now to think more highly of myself from now on. We can do something, though, and go part of the way to change. We might, for instance, take part in certain activities and get into certain situations that go along with greater happiness – as in experiments where people who mimic high self-esteem feel better about themselves. Behavior changes often change attitudes.

Something we might do and that could help change our attitudes and make us happier is to develop and keep up social relationships.

Western culture emphasizes the individual. This allows for personal control, a chance to be the person we want to be, and to express our opinions, abilities, and feelings. ‘Individualists enjoy independence and take pride in their achievements,’ Myers suggests. These possibilities encourage happiness. ‘But,’ Myers adds, ‘at a price.’ Rampant emphasis on the individual risks isolation and detachment. Twenty-five percent of U.S. residents now live alone as compared to eight percent 50 years ago. Martin Seligman contends that the current high rate of depression – ‘a new plague,’ he calls it, among the young and middle-aged – stems in part from poor social bonds. He blames ‘rampant individualism’ for our saturation in mental ill health and the hopelessness that infects the Yuppie life style.

How might we reverse this and head back to the happiness that comes with life lived in community? 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 National Opinion Research Center’s finding that 39 percent of married adults whether women or men – as opposed to 24 percent of never-married adults – report being ‘very happy.’ The happiness plusses of close relationships with family and friends apparently outweigh the stresses and strains that such relationships can also produce.

Besides developing satisfying relationships with family and friends, what else might we do to help change our attitudes and make us happier?

Of those who occupy their leisure time with hobbies and arts, four percent experience apathy and 39 percent satisfaction. To talk with a friend brings most of us more happiness than viewing TV, to garden more than power boating. Thai villagers and Alpine farmers, like many others in traditional societies, work the daylight hours and then enjoy themselves by carving, playing musical instruments, weaving, or the like – activities that fully engage them.

Work can provide this. ‘When work is a pleasure,’ Maksim Gorky claimed a century ago, ‘life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.’ Not only do the employed tend to feel more satisfaction and happiness than the unemployed, and the satisfyingly employed more than the merely employed, but positive feelings at work flow over into general life. Employment can mean much more than money in the bank. Work defines for many of us who we are. 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 Brooklyn fire fighter, who saves a piece of life.’ Work can supply meaning to life. It can provide us a sense of belonging to a cooperative team with a common purpose.

Work can sometimes fail to satisfy, though. 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 over-skilled for the task at hand – which leads to boredom. Between boredom and anxiety falls the best state where our tasks match our skills, engaging us and keeping us busy. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and education at the University of Chicago, calls this state ‘flow.’ When we are absorbed in an activity and time flies by, we experience flow: we best engage our skills and talents. Flow leads to satisfaction, a sense of meaning, purpose, control, and…happiness.

Csikszentmihalyi first observed this state he calls ‘soul contentment’ when studying artists who spent hours absorbed in their work. They concentrated purely on their creation, toiling for the sake of the art alone, not for money, fame, or other extrinsic reward. Numerous other activities besides artistic creation can result in flow: climbing a mountain, writing a book, weaving a rug, playing tennis, mopping a floor. Any of us, doing just about anything, can experience flow and the creativity and happiness that come with it, provided the activity challenges and wholeheartedly absorbs us, catching us up in itself. ‘Every flow activity provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality,’ Csikszentmihalyi concludes from his research. ‘It’s the attitude that counts.’

Science suggests how the world – including ourselves – works. It, therefore, tells us what we can do to become happier: we might, among other things, lead a life of flow and develop close friendships. We should open ourselves to such scientific findings (noting the revisable nature of all scientific research) in our quest for greater happiness.

The findings of science tell us not only how to become happier, but how to become happier spiritually. This claim may seem odd because we usually apply the word ‘spiritual’ to something other than the only physical and natural. How does increasing happiness through scientifically proven ways relate to our spiritual selves? How is this becoming happier spiritually?

The answer to this depends on how we understand God. God is responsible for all that happens and for everything that is, was, and will be. Everything and every event, therefore, is of God and therefore is spiritual. In particular, all of each of us is spiritual.

The activity of God produces the world that science seeks to describe. Science therefore tells us how God works, how the spiritual operates. Science studies the spiritual. In particular, scientific research on how behaviors promote happiness tells us how the spiritual operates vis-à-vis happiness, and helps us devise ways to increase our happiness spiritually.

In our culture, however, we single out aspects of our being and behavior as especially spiritual; to help us understand life and live it comfortably, we divide it into compartments. I attend church on Sunday and live as everyone else does the rest of the week. Western culture thereby artificially isolates a sense of ‘spiritual’ in which our spiritual self refers to a ‘moreness’ that surpasses what we do or are physically. I feel happy eating my favorite meal of roast lamb. But some forms of happiness – listening to the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday,’ or lying with my lover, or viewing the Remarkable Mountains across Lake Wakatipu, or engaging myself fully in my writing – exceed eating my favorite foods. That ‘extra,’ we normally say, is spiritual. The spiritual and the physical highlight different facets of the same thing but still view the same thing. They so intertwine with and depend on each other that we cannot separate them.

We are born with a desire to be happy. This is both a biological and spiritual urge. We are also born with aggressiveness and other negative feelings and behaviors; is pursuing them also a spiritual activity? Further, writing this could so engross me that I fail to notice a fire about to consume children trapped in the building opposite; happiness-increasing activities such as flow could absorb me so much that I don’t see something wrong in front of me. Thus, wrong or ill-pursued happiness seeking exists. There is a moral dimension to happiness seeking that the spiritual also concerns itself with and which my above reliance on scientific research failed to address.

To understand the spiritual place of happiness, aggression, and moral decision making shows our capacity for free will.

We think highly of freedom. We hold it top as a virtue for each individual, for each society, and, increasingly, for other animals and nature. An aspect of our freedom is free will. A dictionary would define ‘free will’ as our freedom to decide or choose between alternatives. Free will exists and we experience it. I choose with my free will to edit this writing though my sense of obligation – under pressure from others and myself to finish before deadline – in part influences my choice.

Will, including free will, emerges from our biological evolution. Free will requires, for instance, self-awareness – that we can see ourselves from outside ourselves – a characteristic that arises from our natural but highly developed abilities to be conscious and to remember. The degree of our self-awareness and therefore ability to choose is a human talent that, because it is so much more developed in us than in other known animals, distinguishes us from them.

Because of our development into free-willing people, though, life became more complex. Because we evolved beyond being automatons, we now must choose ways to behave that are best for us, including those that lead to greater happiness. We now must choose between often competing, perhaps conflicting, urges, many of which are good or desirable.

Choices allow us to balance happiness with its competing drives and each of us can choose how to achieve that balance. We can ask what ‘happiness is best for me’ means. What is ‘best for me’ is also something our self-awareness enables us to decide – from our memories about what our previous decisions lead to and from cultural wisdom about what others’ decisions lead to. We can ask: What balances my happiness with other things, like justice? Where do I place my priorities in life? We can discern the limits for our happiness seeking in each situation. The ‘best’ way to act emerges from a constant process of discovery, a discovery of who we are in relation to each of the urges that compete within us and a discovery of what each urge means for us.

Decision-making between urges is especially significant spiritually because we use our free will to choose and to reach a balance between them. This unique ability of ours equals, in more traditional terms, self-awareness at the heart of God. Self-awareness is the human image of God. Spirituality (traditionally, God’s way for us) asks our self-awareness to develop ourselves as best we can. To be spiritual means to take account of all the aspects of ourselves and to decide between them toward what we consider is best for us. To be spiritual means to ask how we might balance our urges and abilities, and then to seek it. In particular, if we want to gain more happiness in a spiritual way, we should decide how we might balance the drive for greater happiness with the other demands on us (what is more important for us to choose) – including that we seek justice – and try to achieve it.

To seek greater happiness is not a natural drive that we must follow under the direction of science or anything or anyone else. We can decide if we want greater happiness and, if we do want it, how we might achieve it – possibly with help from scientific research – and how we might balance it with other urges.

To seek greater happiness requires that we continually decide what to do. Life keeps on changing.

Two weeks have now passed since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Over this time, I have felt numb and my feet have felt that I was dragging along in sticky goo; only yesterday did these feelings mostly lift. I see and hear and read around me two strong reactions. One, we should lash out in anger and bomb some place, probably Afghanistan, into dust. Two, we shouldn’t fly any more.

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 is Jewish 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 World Trade Center, I would have done so despite my desire to write. That’s a decision I also make toward my priorities in life.

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.

______________________________________________________

Proposed Chapters.

1. Scientific Stories (What Happiness Is)

· We Feel Happy and Yet Want More

· Subjective Well-Being

· Neurotransmitters: Dopamine and Seratonin

· Set Ranges

· The Part of the Brain Where Neurotransmitters Work and the Set Range Lies

· Twin Studies for Set Ranges and Genes

· Explanations from Evolutionary Psychology

· Happiness as a Natural Phenomenon

2. Cultural Stories (What Makes Us Happy)

· Not Children

· Not Age

· Not Gender

· Not Race

· Not Wealth

· Not Health

· Not High Events

· Not Low Events

· Why? Adaptation and Opponent-Processes

· Limits to This Search for Happiness

3. Spiritual Stories (What Makes Us Happy)

· Socrates

· Plato

· Aristotle

· Augustine

· Aquinas

· Contemporary Christianity

· Confucianism

· Taoism

· Buddhism

· Hinduism

· Islam

· Judaism

4. Conflicting Stories (Scientific Versus Cultural Versus Spiritual Stories)

· Clashes

· Do We Need the Spiritual?

· Science Ignores the Spiritual

· The Spiritual Response: Let’s-Get-’Em

· The Spiritual Response: There’s More than Genes

· The Spiritual Response: Let’s-Hope-It’ll-All-Go-Away

· Working Together

· Other Approaches

· A Better Relationship between Spiritual and Scientific Thinking

5. Telling Stories (Science Tells Spiritual Stories)

· The Origins of the Universe

· Relating the Universe and Spiritual Reality

· To Offer Meaning for Our Lives

· How to Think Spiritually

· Science Suggests How to Become Happier

6. How-To Stories (Scientific Yet Spiritual Stories)

· Science Contributes

· Happy Traits

· Social Relationships and Happiness

7. Flow Stories (An Important Scientific Yet Spiritual Approach to Happiness)

· Flow and Happiness

· Purposes and Goals

· Intentions

· Happiness from Pursuing Goals in Flow

· Preparation for Flow

8. Faith Stories (An Adequate Spiritual Path to Happiness)

· Happiness and Religion

· Happiness from Faith’s God

· Happiness from Faith’s Beliefs

· Happiness from Faith’s Belonging

· Happiness from Faith’s Pursuits

· Happiness from Faith’s Meaning

· Happiness and Faith

· Happiness from What Spiritual Path?

· Western Society’s Value Gap

· Justice and Happiness

· Spirituality and the Values Gap

· An Adequate Spiritual Path

9. Revised Stories (A Western Spiritual Path to Happiness)

· Restating Revelation

· Restating Resurrection

· Smiles for Meaning and Happiness

______________________________________________________

Style. I aim to raise spiritual ideas to the lay level. I’m interested in where research on a subject might lead to in the future.

Audience. My audience is general, including not only those who ascribe to a religion, but disaffected and thinking spiritual people and those interested in the broader aspects of scientific research. People will want to buy this book who seek greater happiness in tried-and-true ways, yet ways that are true to their deepest selves and to the heart of the universe.

Competition. Books on happiness abound. Books on spirituality and happiness abound too. Several books on science and happiness have also appeared. The following list offers a sample:

· Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual, by Dennis Prager (New York: ReganBooks), provides tried and true insights and techniques to help us find lasting happiness.

· Happiness Now! Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast, by Robert Holden (London: Hodder & Stoughton), describes techniques and principles for how to be happy.

· The God Instinct: Heeding Your Heart’s Unrest, by Tom Stella (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books), is a Quaker book that says that we can be happy by trusting in God.

· The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, by The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler (New York: Riverhead Books), mixes a Buddhist perspective with common sense to show how we can live with inner peace.

· Human Happiness and Morality: A Brief Introduction to Ethics, by Robert Almeder (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books), surveys major ethical traditions to define happiness and then relates it to morality.

· The Psychology of Happiness, by Michael Argyle (London: Routledge), provides the results of social psychological research on happiness and how, on the basis of this, we can enhance it.

In the Spirit of Happiness is unique because it offers a broad scientific yet spiritual avenue to happiness, one that compares and contrasts itself with common sense, and therefore speaks in a unified voice to both our secular and spiritual sides, to our full selves.

Length, Delivery Date. The book will be about 70,000 words long. I expect to complete it within nine months of signing a contract for its publication.

Biography. For 35 years, I have been studying the nexus of science and spirituality. Currently, I also work in prehistoric archaeology, exploring human line markings and the evolution of language. I have published four books (Has Science Displaced the Soul? Debating Love and Happiness; Sleuthing the Divine: The Nexus of Science and Spirit; David Bohm’s World: New Science and New Religion; and From Science to an Adequate Mythology), have one slotted for publication in 2006, Science of God, have edited several more, and written many articles and academic papers. In the 1980s and 1990s, I founded, published, and edited the magazine, Science & Spirit. I began then, and continue to edit the book series, ‘Theology and the Sciences,’ for Fortress Press. Three other books await publishers: Dreaming Time, Natural Morality, and Our Ancestors Touch Us.

I am a professor in the Graduate College of Union Institute & University, Cincinnati (a non-traditional learning-at-a-distance program, where I supervise and advise doctoral students), am a member of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, and co-direct the Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit. My academic background includes doctorates in mathematics and in religious studies. I frequently speak at academic conferences in science and religion.

For more details, see the accompanying Curriculum Vitae or visit my web site www.ksharpe.com.