The Happiness Hypothesis

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank is reading (again) Jonathan Haidt’s great book, "The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt takes as his central metaphor for humans an small lawyer riding on top of an elephant. The elephant is the sum total of all of our unconscious urges, desires, thoughts, and feelings. The lawyer then creates explanations for what the elephant does. It has little to do whatsoever with the truth, but it creates the illusion of understanding. The book then through references to a number of psychology experiments and stoic and eastern philosophy attempts to show how pervasive our unconscious is and how we better maintain happiness while riding this the wild beast that we inhabit. Here are a few quotations that Big Frank likes:

“man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun"

Sen-ts'an, an early Chinese Zen mater, urged nonjudgmentalism as a prerequisite to following 'the perfect way' in this poem from the eighth century:

The perfect Way is only difficult for
those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then
be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference, and
Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear
before you, for or against.
The struggle between ‘for’ and
'against' is the mind's worst disease.

"Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance."