my Buddhist blog number 158

Hi Everybody,
Beautiful autumn day again here in Kew. So beautiful as to be Spring -like in fact! We're in the middle of a chapter about Buddhism and happiness, and trying to illustrate that when Buddhism and indeed today's social scientists are talking about happiness they have in mind a much broader and deeper experience than might generally be thought. We ended the last episode for example by describing how this concept of happiness would certainly be strong enough to embrace the pains and the problems that we all commonly encounter and would empower us to look for the seeds of the positive in things that go wrong in our lives rather than being eaten up by the sense of loss or damage.

And both Buddhism  and today's social scientists would want to embrace several other dimensions that are difficult to wrapped up in the simple word happiness but that we would all freely recognise as central to a durable sense of well-being. Dimensions such as
- rich and positive relations with others
- a sense of accomplishment in our endeavours
- a sense of meaning and purpose in our activities, and let's not forget
- a sense of compassion and altruism

In his book Flourish psychologist Martin Seligman recounts for us a brief but very telling anecdote which goes as follows:

' My friend Stephen Post, Professor of Medical Humanities at Stony Brook tells a story about his mother. When he was a young boy and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood she would say, ' Stephen why don't you go out and help someone?' Empirically Ma Post's maxim has been put to rigorous test and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.'

So a powerful life-lesson there in just half a dozen lines. Ma Post's natural wisdom he tells us, has been put to rigorous scientific test, and it reveals that showing compassion and altruism towards others produces the single most reliable increase in our sense of well-being. Evolutionary biologists have the devils own job to explain for us the evolutionary benefits of altruism and here we have a psychologist telling us that even the smallest acts of kindness and compassion towards others can have the most powerful effect on our personal sense of well-being.

But that simple human story illustrates two other fundamental qualities that are deeply interwoven into the Buddhist understanding of well-being, both of which seem to be born out by what the scientists tell us they have learned more recently.
We look at those next time.

Best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.

my buddhist blog number 157

Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you. We're in the middle of the chapter on Buddhism and happiness and we've reached the point where I'm suggesting that perhaps well-being is perhaps a more accurate term to describe what we're talking about. Why? Because in the modern idiom it clearly expresses a much broader and deeper and mnore solidly based emotion. On one recent occasion for example when I was talking to an audience of mainly businessmen about Buddhist values, the phrase,' happiness in the workplace got a noticeably cool and somewhat cynical reception. But as soon as I switched to well-being in the work place there was an immediate understanding of what I was talking about, a much more substantial, an altogether more stable and focused state of life, than laughter and good cheer.

And once again that distinction finds support among the scientists. As Daniel Goleman explains in some detail in his book  Working with Emotional Intelligence, when comparisons are made between the effectiveness or productivity of people at work, the difference is very often found to lie not so much in the know-how or the npurely technical skills of different people, but much more broadly in their overall sense of well-being and therefore their greater capacity for handling relationships or dealing in  a calm and measured way with difficulties that arise.

But perhaps more important of all, this phrase well-being has so much greater depth and breadth and capacity that it can even embrace the idea of misfortune and challenge. Buddhism for example, when it speaks of happiness, has in mind a solid, lasting, resilient sense of well-being at the core of one's life, that can endure and be experienced even in the midst of sadness and and loss and crucial challenge. That again finds multiple echoes in the work of modern sociologists, who talk about the need to get real! They argue that optimism and happiness cannot be about being eternally cheerful. That would be hopelessly unreal. It has to be about getting up close to, and embracing the pains and problems we encounter so that we truly understand them and learn how to work through them to a better place.

They talk about the immense value that we can generate in our lives by learning to look for the seeds of the positive in things that go wrong in our lives, rather than continually being eaten up by the sense of loss or damage.

Nuff said for one episode.
Look forward to seeing you again next time.
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.

Hi Everybody,

Picking up the thread of Buddhism and Happiness, and my key point is that given that it plays such a key role in our universal motivation, let alone our Buddhist practice, it would seem just as well that we share a common understanding of what we mean when we use it, this much over-used word, rather than just assuming that we have a common understanding.

And that would seem to be a genuine issue, both within and beyond Buddhism. Someone as supremely eminent in the field as Martin Seligman for example is driven to exclaim in his latest book Flourish, that the word happiness...

'...is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goals such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life..'

Almost meaningless is a bit strong perhaps, but you can see the point can't you, that the word happiness in the modern idiom, or to the modern ear, is unquestionably a bit...well a bit lightweight! To many people, and I would include myself, it means primarily such things as merriment and laughter and good cheer and smiley faces, and I don't think we can ignore those connotations as if they were unimportant. We would be doing ourselves and our discussions a disservice. Particularly since good cheer and smiley faces are certainly not what is meant by happiness, in both Buddhist teachings and in the scientific research centred around positive psychology.

Is perhaps well-being a more appropriate term?

That's where we go next time around. A good look at well-being.

See you then.
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a downlaod on Kindle.

my buddhist blog number 155

Hi Everybody,
Yet another beautiful sun-kissed autumn day here in Kew. The sunlight glinting off the golden yellow leaves that are still on the trees. The run in the park with Gatsby this morning  was pure pleasure. And as I was running this morning that remarkable and very famous Buddhist text came into my mind, ' there is no path to happiness...happiness is the path. '  I have to say it's not the first time. It often pops in to my head when I'm our running, and I just let it sit there at the back of my mind as I jog on under the trees and over the leaves with Gatsby chasing the squirrels. It is of course immensely profound with many layers of meaning and we can all approach it from many different directions, but the one that seems to work best for me is from the direction of gratitude.
Gratitude not simply in the narrow sense of being grateful to someone for something they have done, but gratitude in the broadest sense, gratitude if you like as a whole  approach to life. Gratitude for all the love that I have in my life from family and friends. Gratitude above all for the knowledge that when things get tough or difficult...as of course they often do in all our lives... then I have the Buddhist practice to enable me to stand back and marshal my energies and my wisdom to tackle the difficulty, whatever it is. And the sure knowledge that that has worked powerfully for me as a positive life strategy for the past 25 years or so.

As it happens we're in the middle of a chapter about Buddhism and happiness, because of course this is one of the many qualities that sets Buddhism apart from other major religions is that it presents itself right from the start as being about ordinary people increasing the sum total of happiness or well-being in their lives. Moreover, as we've shown in the past couple of blogs, there is now a huge amount of research from sociologists and positive psychologists that echoes that basic position, to indicate that is, that the quest for happiness is the ultimate motivational force in life...universally. That is to say it cuts across all the boundaries you can think of...national and religious and ethnic and status etc etc.. This quest for a greater sens eof well-being in life is truly universal.

So that close alignment of views does give us a very different perspective doesn't it? It means for example that this powerful and life-changing idea that Buddhism offers us, an idea that many people find unusual and hard to swallow because it is so bold and uncompromising, is doing no more than recognising the essential quality of our universal human nature. Doing no more than pointing out to us that this is the most powerful motivator in human life, and that it can be harnessed as an instrument of change, to enable us to lead fuller and richer lives.

Enough for one swallow I think!
Hope it helps understanding.
See you next time
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle. 

my Buddhist blog number 154

Hi Everybody,
Almost everybody I've spoken to over the past couple of days seems to feel a genuine low-level anxiety over the election of Mr Trump. Well perhaps not so low-level!! One very balanced very mature professional guy actually used the word ' terrifying.'And to be fair there would seem quite a bit to be fearful about if we take his own words at face value, as to what he is hell bent on doing once he gets in office. I've increased my morning daimoku substantially to lift me over this low point. It's remarkable how much it helps in thinking through to a more positive outlook on the day. Which takes us neatly through to today's topic, Buddhism and Hapiness. Last week we ended on a brilliant quote from psychologist Martin Seligman,

' Optimism is a learned skill and once learned it increases achievement at work and improves physical health. ' Brilliant.

Another psychologist and writer, Daniel Goleman makes a similar point,

'Optimism and hope -like helplessness and despair can be learned .Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call self-efficacy, the belief that one has mastery over one's life and can meet challenges as they come up.'

So they are saying, we have a clear choice. If it so happens that we have built the absence of hope into our lives up till now, or even pessimism and despair, once we become fully self-aware of that situation, we can learn how to replace those negative life states with optimism and hope. That is a powerful modern confirmation of the proposition that Buddhism has always presented to us. A Buddhist practice is entirely about building a wholly capable who can do precisely what Goleman is talking about, having the courage and the resilience to meet ' those challenges as they come up,' rather than being knocked down or disabled by them.

So Buddhism, with it's essential humanism and its focus on the power of the human spirit sets out to define greater happiness for oneself and others as the fundamental objective of human life. Not in some after life, but in the here and now. And as I write that, after many years of Buddhist practice, I am intensely aware of just how bold and uncompromising and value-creating that is as a vision of life. No if's and but's and maybe's. That it says is what we are seeking. And it's all the more remarkable in that it was set out all those years ago when life was considerably rougher and tougher and certainly less forgiving than it is now.

And once again the extraordinary thing is just how closely that principle accords with the views of today's evolutionary biologists and positive psychologists who argue, strictly on the basis of their research that the quest for happiness is the ultimate motivational force in life. What does ' ultimate ' mean in this context? It means that it doesn't require any further definition. It speaks for itself. We may initially express it to ourselves in other terms; we want to be healthy for example, or have better relationships, or a better job, or achieve a qualification and many other items of desire that we might list, but all those items are only important in the sense that they contribute to our happiness. They are stepping stones if you like on the way to our ultimate goal.

Nuff said for today.
Best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.

my buddhist blog number 153

Hi Everybody,
I can't remember an autumn as beautiful as this one. My run through the woods  in the morning with Gatsby is just a joy with this wonderful backdrop of reds and yellows and browns all around, and the ground carpeted in golden leaves. I think its because its been so dry and so still, so that the leaves are still largely on the trees instead of being soggy piles on the ground. Gatsby's not interested in the colours. His focus is entirely on the squirrel population!

OK so we've just started the chapter on Buddhism and Happiness. , and one of the fundamental qualities that we might argue, sets Buddhism so clearly apart  is that it presents itself right from the start as being about ordinary people attaining happiness in this lifetime. Not happiness in some heaven after death. Or in some idealised utopian life space in this world. Or some vision of a pleasant life we might hope to achieve when this or that qualification or situation has been achieved, or this or that obstacle has been removed.

And that word ' when' is important too. Many of us can find ourselves mentally trapped in the prison of the
' when' as it has been called by the psychologists; this tendency to persuade ourselves that only when this or that change has taken place, only then we might perhaps achieve that happiness we seek. It becomes if you like a self-imposed barrier to moving to a better place.

The way Buddhism responds to that situation is to say that we need to recognise the immense power that resides in our freedom of choice. That whether we realise it or not, whether we believe it or not, we have within us all the resources we need to choose and establish in our lives a stable sense of well-being in our lives. Not when anything has been added, or removed, but now. It argues strongly that we can learn, that we can train ourselves to achieve that goal now. Not just in the good and golden times, but at any time. Mo matter how challenging and disturbing the vicissitudes and circumstances of our life may be.

That is of course a huge and potentially life-changing idea, but it is also so unusual, so counter-intuitive, that it is extremely difficult for most of us to come anywhere near accepting it when we first encounter it. It just doesn't make sense we say to, ourselves. There must be some sort of catch. It took me personally a very long time to learn that there isn't. That the catch is primarily our lack of self-belief, our lack of conviction in ourselves. And it was only much later that I came to learn that this  same promise, this same perception if you like, which is utterly central to Buddhist belief, is echoed in the work of many of today's sociologists. Martin Seligman for example, Professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, and one of the founding fathers of the growing school  of positive psychologists,;

'Optimism is a learned skill. Once learned it increases achievement at work and improves physical health.'

That's a crucial point that he is making isn't it? It's not just about having a nice warm feeling within. The happiness associated with optimism he is saying, is life-giving, it serves it serves to enhance and improve the entire spectrum of our lives, at work and at play.

Enough for today.
Hope it all adds up for you.
See you next time.
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon as a paperback and on Kindle as a download.