“But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
There’s a strange line we walk in our spiritual lives. One one side, there’s our programming: chase happiness to acquire it. We treat happiness like an animal we’re hunting rather than a pet. On the other side, there’s our reprogramming: let go of clinging to happiness in our practice, and it comes and visits us on its own time. We hang in the balance between these two extremes of attachment and detachment.
It’s easy to get caught up in this conceptualization, so much so that we often forget that our meditative practice is non-conceptual. When we sit, we just sit. There’s no theorizing about sitting, no intentions or motivations. We’re not renouncing or desires, clinging to them or willing them into being. We’re not manifesting anything. We’re just sitting.
In this paradox of just sitting for no reason, we start to see how other processes and results in our lives function in the same way. When we stop trying so hard to control people, we often get what we wanted the whole time. When we stop obsessing over wealth and focus on the tasks at hand, we’re often rewarded with more than we’d ever anticipated. Sometimes it’s the opposite; maybe we let go and misunderstand the purpose, and start to let ourselves go, too. Maybe awakening isn’t all we expected it to be.
The key terms are are obsession, reward, attachment, awakening, expectation. These are all actions. And all actions start with conceptualization, the decision to act on a certain thought, feeling or principle. But when we really meditate, we let go of all of this stuff, good and bad. It still floats around the periphery of our consciousness, but we don’t grab at it. We don’t decide not to grab at it. We just sit. No concepts, no intentions, no goals, no ideas. Just you being you.
This is where happiness comes in. When we break down all the barriers between ourselves and that mystical feeling we chase so fervently, we realize we can experience it whenever we want. We generate our own feelings and thoughts; the world is not wholly responsible for them, even in the most dire situations. You shorten the distance between yourself and happiness by simply letting go of all the ways you think you’ll achieve it. That’s all baggage. The way we approach happiness of all types, from spiritual bliss to material contentment, is like trying to run a marathon with a bunch of suitcases. When we can really let go of everything we think we’re supposed to do doing, everything we think we know about ourselves, we realize that we aren’t just the subject experiencing happiness, but the force creating it.
Once we recognize this, we can feel contented no matter what. It’s a slow process. But with the consistency of our practice and mindfulness comes this inevitable result of simple bliss. Our objective conditions may change, but our subjective expectations remain so close to neutral that it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes I get bored working from home. I get restless or angry. When I notice myself doing this, I simply watch my thought patterns develop. I realize they’re rooted in the subjective experience of the repetition of working from home, so I imagine my life a few years ago, when I worked full time and had 4 roommates and would kill for a quiet day alone with my cat and sunny rooftop. When we have a lot, we can look back to when we wanted what we currently have and realize the subjective nature of our disappointment. When we have a little, we can remember that even when we get everything we want, the ego is still prone to inventing problems and expectations. The key is that it doesn’t matter what we have, where we are or what we’re doing. If we can’t master the mind and remember that we create our own feelings, we’re doomed to being controlled by the perpetually dissatisfied ego. It’s all in the mind.
The more we chase in the world, the more our minds master us. We enslave ourselves with bad jobs, unhealthy relationships, maniacal ideologies and egoistic fantasies. The more we let go and learn who we are with no belongings, no ideas, nothing besides our simple being, the freer and lighter we become. Let yourself be free in this way. Experiment with it. It doesn’t mean denying yourself pleasures or avoiding negativity; it means embracing everything in your life exactly as it is.