Opening Up to Happiness

I approached her dilemma not just as a psychotherapist, but as a longtime Buddhist. For Buddhism holds the promise of more than just common unhappiness in life; it sees the pursuit of happiness as our life goal and teaches techniques of mental development to achieve it. To the Dalai Lama, "the purpose of life is to be happy." He wrote those very words in the foreword to my new book Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy From a Buddhist Perspective (Basic Books, 1995).

"On its own," he goes on to say, "no amount of technological development can lead to lasting happiness. What is almost always missing is a corresponding inner development." By inner development the Dalai Lama means something other than mastering the latest version of Microsoft Word. He is talking about cleaning up our mental environment so that real happiness can be both uncovered and sustained.

Americans have a peculiar relationship to happiness. On the one hand, we consider happiness a right, and we are eager for it, as the advertising world knows. We do everything in our power to try to possess it, most particularly in materialistic form.

On the other hand, we tend to denigrate the pursuit of happiness as something shallow or superficial, akin to taking up woodcarving or scuba diving. But, as the Dalai Lama always emphasizes, happiness is not a hobby, nor is it a trivial pursuit. It is a fundamental drive as basic as those of sex or aggression, but not often as legitimized in our cynical, postmodern culture. In fact, Americans are waking up to the Dalai Lama's point: Materialistic comforts by themselves have not led to lasting happiness. Having reached that conclusion, however, we do not often see another way, and retreat into our comforts, barricading ourselves from what appears to be a hostile and threatening world. Acquiring and protecting, we continue to crave a happiness that seems both deserved and out of reach.

My experience as a psychiatrist trained in Western medicine and in the philosophy and practice of Buddhism has given me a unique perspective. I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

All the Wrong Places

Buddhism and psychoanalysis teach us that the very ways we seek happiness actually block us from finding it. Our first mistake is in trying to wipe out all sources of displeasure and search for a perennial state of well-being that, for most of us in our deepest fantasies, resembles nothing so much as a prolonged erotic reverie. One of my patients said it best with his adolescent fantasies of romantic love. He described his perfect woman as someone who would faithfully leave him with an erection every time she exited the house.

This approach to happiness is instinctual, deriving from our earliest experiences, when intense emotional states of pleasure and gratification inevitably are interrupted by absence and frustration, evoking equally intense states of rage or anxiety. Anyone's first response would be to try to preserve the pleasurable states and eliminate the unpleasurable ones. Even as adults we rarely come to terms with the fact that good and bad are two sides of the same coin, that those who make pleasures possible are also the source of our misery. In Western society, with its extended family structure and rabid pursuit of individualism, people often find themselves with nowhere to turn for support in dealing with these feelings. In more traditional Eastern societies, there is a much greater social and familial support system that helps people contain their anguish.

However much we, as adults, think we have come to terms with the fact that no one can be all good or all bad, we are still intolerant of frustrations to our own pleasure. We continue to grasp at the very objects that have previously disappointed us. A wealthy patient of mine exemplifies this predicament. After a gourmet meal, he craves a cognac. After the cognac, a cigarette; after the cigarette he will want to make love; after making love, another cigarette. Soon, he begins to crave sleep, preferably without any disturbing dreams. His search for happiness through pleasures of the senses seemed to never have an end, and he was not happy. We think only of manipulating the external world; we never stop to examine ourselves.