Ornoth

One the many lessons of meditation practice is impulse control. I don’t like that itch or that knee pain, but I’m trying to stay still right now. Can I relinquish the need to scratch or to adjust my position? What happens if I try?

In meditation, the underlying motives behind such movements—even these trivial ones—are brought into conscious awareness and examined.

And for me, these examinations have led me toward an interesting idea: that the root cause of almost all our movement is dissatisfaction with life as it is, and desire for things to be otherwise.

Humans—perhaps even all living organisms—are programmed to seek out pleasure and avoid the unpleasant.

From infancy, every movement we make is either to move toward and grab something we want, or to move away from or throw away something we don’t want. All because we have been programmed to believe that we’ll have the best life experience if we get what we want and avoid what we don’t.

And to a large degree, that works pretty well for us. We gravitate toward the people, the foods, and the music we like, and do our best to avoid those we dislike. And whether we’re infants or adolescents or adults, we usually do our damnedest to get what we want, or avoid enduring what we don’t want.

This drive is so basic and unexamined that the vast majority of what we do in life is in the service of this particular concept of “making things better”. We go through life wedded to the idea that perhaps someday we will reach some magical place where we are “happy”, needing nothing more to be fulfilled.

Few people actually think about what true happiness would look like. If we were truly happy, all that infantile want-based grabbing and throwing away behavior would be unnecessary. What would it be like to be truly happy? Wouldn’t all that motion which is impelled by desire and aversion simply cease?

And that’s what I’d like to talk about now: the idea that every volitional movement we make is an expression (or a manifestation) of our dissatisfaction with the way things are.

That in itself is an interesting insight that few people ever investigate. But if one were to take that idea seriously and allow it to actually inform our decisions, it would result in a life that is structured very differently than most of us experience and pursue in modern America.

I suppose it’s becoming a familiar trope that we cannot find happiness in the never-ending quest to change our world to better suit us, and that peace can only come through internal growth, so that our happiness isn’t dependent on forcing external circumstances to be “just right”.

But what that might look like is not so obvious at first.

So that’s one hypothesis: that if we were truly happy and at peace with life as it is, all that extraneous movement would simply stop. But that’s a very linear, American way of looking at it. What if we turned the underlying cause and effect relationship on its head?

One of the more useful techniques in modern psychology is cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is often summarized as “fake it till you make it”. Patients are asked to model attributes and practice behaviors they wish to manifest—such as confidence, strength, or independence—even if they don’t necessarily feel that way internally. The idea is that maintaining the appearance of a desired effect can be part of the cause that eventually makes the effect feel “real”.

If we approached the question of happiness and movement in the same manner, we flip the idea that “happiness causes motionlessness” idea on its head, and come up with a new hypothesis: “motionlessness creates happiness”.

Preposterous, right? Sure, the idea that sitting still might make us happier sounds ludicrous to most of us at first, but it’s actually the basis of many meditation practices. The benefits of silence and physical and mental stillness underlie the Buddhist samatha practice of calming the mind, as well as most yogic and Western derivatives.

Just ask the average Joe off the street to describe what meditation is and he’ll say ”sitting still and being quiet“. Ask him what it’s supposed to accomplish, and he’ll use words like: relaxation, stillness, calmness, tranquility, and peacefulness. The idea that stillness can somehow contribute to happiness is not as alien as our instincts tell us. In fact, it’s been around for centuries.

Practicing and strengthening our ability to be motionless can lead us toward a deeper understanding that all our grabbing what we want and throwing away what we don’t cannot make us happy. And that perhaps our best route to happiness is to practice quelling the impulses that underlie all that grabbing and throwing: learning how to relate mindfully to our desires and aversions, rather than be mindlessly ruled by them.

The hard-bitten Americans in the audience will have an instinctive reaction to this. What, do we just stop moving, then? That won’t make me any happier! Do you expect us to just give up all hope of making this a better world for ourselves and our children?

No, progress inevitably march on. But it’s vital to see that the things American culture has told us lead to happiness simply have not and will never work. We don’t have to give up on progress and development, but we do have to accept that despite how much the conditions of our lives have improved, we aren’t significantly happier people, nor will our children be.

There’s a very real limit to what scientific progress has done (or can do) for us and our species in our quest for happiness. It’s about time we tried something else! Your happiness is what’s at stake.

I challenge you to put serious effort into exploring these kinds of alternatives, rather than blindly believing the illusion that getting what we want will someday make us “happy”. If more people did so, not only would we be significantly happier with our lives, but it would constitute meaningful progress, too: arguably the greatest advancement in human social and ethical development in two thousand years!