Happiness is like a tree

When I think back, my life was confusing. It is pretty strange even now, and there are still some mind parasites impacting my life negatively. But compared to the swirling fog that seems to shroud most people's thoughts, I guess I am seeing fairly clearly. Of course, who really knows the mind of another? It is hard enough to know one's own. But there are things I did not know, or at least not clearly, when I was young. I offer these now, free, in the hope of sparing others from needless suffering, and to increase their happiness.

In my previous post I wrote that pleasure was rationed, as indeed it is. You can have a lot of pleasure in a short time, or you can have a decent amount of pleasure now and then, but you can't have a lot of pleasure a lot of the time. You will burn out if you try, and fall into a depression-like state of listless suffering. So while fun is fun, it is not a source of constant happiness. On the other hand, you CAN grow more happy over time. In fact, the word "grow" is the key. (Another good word is "build".)

Happiness is like a tree, in that it needs time to grow. You can't just sit down one day and decide to be really happy, and then you go out in the world and are really happy. You can summon up some degree of cheer that way, yes, but it tends to evaporate, and it tends not to be waterproof. When even a small unpleasantness comes, the cheer bursts like a bubble and small stinging worms come out and feast on the soul. Anger, resentment, envy, hate and bitter cynicism cause blight on the soul. And because we don't know better, we are convinced that someone else destroyed our precious happiness. But that was just cheer, not happiness. Happiness is a slow-growing thing, but far more durable than mere joy.


Actually, let us look at pleasure, joy, cheer and happiness. They all represent what we could call surplus energy. They manifest in different realms or domains, though, and have different time spans.

Pleasure shows up in the domain of the body or senses. The source of pleasure does not need to be the body, though that is certainly common. But if you look at a dog, you can see the pleasure of being praised is very similar to the pleasure of being fed. There is an influx of energy, one bodily and one social, and they both manifest as pleasure. So even with us, and we can also derive pleasure from art or from spiritual experience. In fact, the highest pleasure seems to be the Samadhi or religious ecstasy, which is highly sought after by some Hindu mystics as the peak religious experience. This pleasure is as intense as that of orgasm (for those old enough to have experienced that) but lasts far longer. In fact, if one prolongs the Samadhi for long enough it will cause the end of life in the body, so-called Mahasamadhi (great ecstasy) which is the preferred way for certain eastern mystics to end their life. (This is not to say that the religious ecstacy is less in other religions, just that they don't have the tradition for reveling in it. Certainly Christianity doesn't.)

Joy is the mental manifestation of surplus energy. If you feel the urge to break into song or dance, it is joy. The joyful person moves more quickly and with more certainty, while the joyless tend to shuffle or drag their feet. But the main thrust of joy is in the mind, a feeling of surging power that is not limited to (or even anchored in) the senses. Joy is often associated with the arts: Song, music, dance can be both sources and expressions of joy, and also the slower arts like painting or sculpture, though the link is not so immediate there. There are many sources of joy, including other people. Sometimes we simply don't know, it just seems to surge or swell from wherever it hides when not in use. Joy tend to be less sharply limited than pleasure, it ebbs rather than being cut off.

Cheer is manifested strongly in the social realm. It takes the form of goodwill, an increased ability to tolerate and sympathize with others, and attempts to spread itself by cheering up those who are less energetic. The source does not need to be social, but it can be, and putting cheerful people together tend to escalate the cheer, much as putting burning pieces of wood next to each other cause them all to burn more brightly.

Happiness is manifested in the human spirit. It is longer lasting than the others, though it also will ebb and flow. We can say that the other forms ride on the back on happiness. If your underlying happiness is high, it takes little for it to flow into the shorter-lived forms. Also if your happiness is high, the opposites make less impact on you. You won't loose your cheer just because the weather is not as nice as you expected, and you don't feel suffering just because you're a little bit hungry or your joints ache just a tad. It takes more to break your stride.

People can be more or less familiar with this interior science, the observation of life qualities by looking inward. Those who are inexperienced or easily distracted tend to not see the difference between the short and long term manifestations of surplus energy. It may be better to say that happiness is an increased CAPACITY for taking in what is good. Its deep waters run stiller, but are not easily drained. Happiness is like a lake: The babbling brook that has not passed a lake will quickly rise from nothing to a boisterous river on a rainy day, and in its sudden energy it dislodges stones and runs brown with soil. But if there is a lake in its course, it will buffer the sudden swell and pass on a more steady stream of water, which does not dry out the next day when the sun returns.

The water in the brook and the water in the lake are identical, but there is great depth in the lake, and so also with happiness. There must be depth, or there is no happiness. If there is no depth, then the slightest disappointment can send one plummeting from heaven to hell, as you will see in a toddler. The toddler squeals and jumps with unrestrained joy, but some small thing happens and the toddler screams in unbearable pain. This changes when we grow up, but not equally in all of us.

There still has to be an influx of happy content, of course, and certain sources are more reliable than others. But there could be books written about that, and in fact already are. I may or may not revisit it, as the weirdness takes me. Have this for today!

Pleasure rations

I know I've written about this occasionally in the past, but it's been a while now. It is fairly simple, but understanding it could change the world. Your world first, and the shared world if more people "get" it.

There is no known limit to happiness, but pleasure is strictly rationed.

Let us focus on the simple part here. Pleasure is rationed. There is an upper limit to how much pleasure a person can experience over a set amount of time. This is biochemical and follows from the way the brain operates. It is also perfectly reasonable. Another case of intelligent design, whether or not you think intelligent design happens by accident... you simply would want it to be that way if you want your sentient species to survive. It is not a flaw, it is a necessary limitation.

In our more or less natural state, pleasure is used by our instincts to reward us for doing our best to keep the genes alive. If we are hungry, eating brings us pleasure. In fact, it does even if we are not especially hungry, but then only certain foods. Likewise if we are thirsty, drinking brings pleasure; but if we are full, plain water is just icky. And sexual pleasure is a reward for bringing our genes onward to a new generation (although it certainly has many other functions these days). Again, each coitus is more pleasurable if you haven't just had one, and for women there is generally more pleasure around estrus (ovulation), all other things being equal (and sometimes even if not). There are many other pleasures, some of them less obvious, like the joy of dancing or simply listening to music. I am not sure what the evolutionary psychologists explain music with, actually. I think I have already made my point though.

If we were rewarded for everything we did, we would be rewarded for nothing. For this reason, pleasure MUST be rationed. Otherwise we would simply establish pleasure as the baseline, and any lack of pleasure would be considered suffering. In fact, most of the suffering in Europe and America would be considered pleasure by people in the least developed countries, where hunger is the norm and clean water only exists briefly when it occasionally falls down from the sky.

You cannot save up your "pleasure ration" indefinitely; it leaks away over time, but quite a bit of time. This applies both generally and specifically. I once read an otherwise OK novel in which the male protagonist had sexual intercourse for the first times in several years. Let me assure you, it does not build up like that. A couple months is probably the maximum, possibly less for most people. But the misunderstanding is easy to explain: For the opposite is true. If we eat our pleasure ration immediately, it doesn't renew immediately. The more intense our pleasures, and the more of them we have in a row, the less our capacity for new pleasure for a while.

The most extreme case of this is pleasure drugs. These are designed to directly stimulate the brain to enhance pleasure, and they work. (Not saying this from personal experience of course, in case the law enforcement is reading.) But these drugs "burn out" their users, so that life feels like hell when the high wears off. This is not just in comparison with the pleasure. No, everyday life really feels less than blah, it feels like suffering. The brain experiences everyday life as a horrible mixture of pain, fear and boredom. Ordinary pleasures are tame, bland and lifeless. The pleasure account is drained, there is nothing left. The physical pleasures are there, but they do not cause the pleasure reaction. It has been used already.

Other pleasures do not have the same raw power to burn out all your pleasure in on glorious bonfire, but the effect is the same only to a lesser degree. If you chase pleasures, boredom will chase you in turn.

Conversely, if you don't use your pleasure ration, your capacity for pleasure will increase for a while. It seems to follow the same curves as market saturation in economics: The rise is steep at first, then gradually tapers off to reach a plateau. Since each person has their own "thermostat" for pleasure, it makes sense that the timescale may also vary. But this is why someone like me can experience ecstatic pleasure from simple Japanese pop songs, where the dedicated pleasure seeker needs bungee jumping and unprotected sex with strangers for the same intensity.
Actually it is not quite that simple, since each of us also have an optimal stimulation level. Some people need noise while others need quiet, the first need risk while the second need safety. But the thing is, people of the quiet type do not get cheated on their pleasure. They just derive it from less spectacular things. Again, changing your basic mental constitution requires divine intervention or decades of meditation (which may well be a subset of divine intervention). You can temporarily change by taking the right drugs, as people do with depression, but you better know what you do.

If you are depressed for entirely clinical reasons, brain does not work as described in the instruction manual, then by all means take drugs to get it running normally. But if you have simply used up your pleasure ration, then no, that won't work, and will quite possibly make things worse. There is no potion of Restore Magic in real life. You need to go on with your life quietly until your magic bar is restored enough to cast the spell of pleasure again.
Because I am all alone and can't praise or blame others for my feelings, I have observed myself for years and take all this for granted. But most people don't know it yet. They are surrounded by others and naturally think their pleasure or suffering comes from others. They often keep seeking for the one person that can make everything right and ensure that they live pleasurably ever after. This won't work.

Now that you know, you can choose to keep lying to yourself, but this will only make you stupid, not happy. It is also very expensive, both in money, time, and your soul which is rotting from lack of attention. For while pleasure is rationed, happiness is mostly lying fallow. Few are those who look for it, and fewer the guides that can help them find it.

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