XXI HAPPINESS

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—note that it is not life, liberty, and happiness. The implication is that life and liberty are to be had right here right now, but that happiness is always one step ahead of us. Is that how it is, is that how it must be? Or is ongoing happiness, being there, now and always, possible?

First, let us take a look at what happiness is. Everybody wants it, but it is remarkably elusive. We think it would be ours if only some obstacle were removed from our path or some goal reached. We get there, and yes, we feel happy, but something always happens, little things come up and the happiness dribbles away. But for a moment, there it was. Was what? It was a feeling, one of confirmation, fulfillment, and completion, of all things right. Little fears went away. Our emotional space was open and filled with light. The angst went away. The pain went away. Something good happened and chased all the bad away and we felt wonderful. But the bad came back, sometimes suddenly, but usually creeping back in unseen, through the cracks, around the edges, until there we were, back where we started. Sometimes the end of happiness was even our own doing, as if feeling good clouded our judgment, causing us to do what we later came to regret. But happiness felt good, and there it is again, just over the next rise, teasing us onward.

The Cosmic Joke
Teasing us onward—perhaps that is the evolutionary function of happiness, to keep us moving, striving, pushing forwards, with the promise of ongoing wholeness that somehow we never really get. And for that we blame ourselves, others, bad luck, the weather, our health, the gods, and anything else we can find.

Maybe it is all some cosmic joke and we are the punch line—the eternal sucker game, where the house always shorts you on your winnings. All that blame is pointless if in fact our genes have set us up as the marks in a giant swindle. All that work, and this is all I get? Why play the game at all? And yet, a question remains, one that people have struggled with for centuries—is there some way to beat the house, to make the system deliver? There are probably various winning strategies. Let’s see if Biomythology can help us find one.

Let us look at when happiness occurs. Sometimes we get it when we reach a goal or arrive at a point where the pressure is off, some obstacle overcome, and we take a well-deserved rest before moving on. Happiness can happen also in intense action or conflict, especially if things are going well. The common factor here is that, for the time being, our side in the moral struggle is on top, our character is succeeding in his role, the myth is going our way. We often get happiness from seeing ourselves (or some ally, therefore ourselves by association) make an alpha advance. The alpha advance happiness is rooted in our affirmation of the validity of our myth, as demonstrated by our recent success, and by its affirmation by the reactions of others and changes in our world as a result of that mythic upward progression. Happiness occurs when we are at peace with our myth.

We spend most of our time in pursuit of happiness. When we get it, we stop, because we feel that we have arrived. We can successfully rest on our laurels for a while, but as we do so, our myth will coast to a standstill. A stalled-out myth yields boredom and anxiety. We use continuing moral demonstration as an organizing principle in our lives. Without it our lives fall apart. For the demonstration to be credible, it must come out of significant obstacles that provide a valid test. Obstacles are the heart of any story’s plot. We need them. If they are lacking, we find new ones or add moral significance to the ones at hand. Thus we sabotage our own happiness if the world does not do it first.

In the alpha hierarchy, upward movement, not position, brings the most happiness. Thus the good feelings are inherently short-lived, even beyond the tendency of others to challenge any alpha advance which they see as threatening to their own. Acquiring the status symbol is usually more rewarding than owning it.

Can We Win?
What can we do? We could develop better myths. We could have less conflict in our moral priorities. We could become more skillful at dealing with obstacles, the problems we face. We could learn how better to play the alpha role. We could become better actors in our mythic dramas and those of others, and we could help others do the same. We could improve our group membership skills. We could be part of a more desirable crowd. We could follow smarter, more reliable alpha sources. These are all wonderful things to do, but even if we did them all, we would do no better than be more skillful players in the same happiness game, still prisoners of an evolution that is no longer in touch with what is best for the species and never was an optimum guardian of the individual. We would still be within the system.

All right, then, here we are again: What can we do? There are probably various ways out; I will propose one that seems reasonable and appeals to me. Arrange the circumstances of your life so that your survival is securely taken care of. Have no risks that are sufficient to cause an ongoing level of fear. Associate with people whose myths demonstrate morals you admire. Live by a myth that is productive, constructive, and morally satisfying. That is a basis to start with.

Leaving the Alpha Game
Now, as much as you reasonably can, get off the alpha game. Realize it is largely a scam, a stacked deck, for the archaic benefit of the species, and against you, the individual. The world will not come to an end if you stop playing it. You probably don’t realize just how deeply your entire lifestyle is wrapped around this one game. Most of us play it as hard as we can and see success at it as more important than anything else in our lives.

People see the alpha game as universal and use it to establish a sense of self-worth, which they see as related to what position they can claim in the alpha hierarchy. For example, they will dress to support the extent of alpha they think will play. People try to be careful not to overplay their position, for that courts confrontation and rejection, but rather do all they feel reasonably sure of.

If you dress beneath what you could on the alpha scale, below what people assume you could credibly wear, most will conclude you think poorly of yourself, that your feeble alpha appearance attempt was all you had nerve to try. That conclusion is reasonable if one assumes you are playing the game.

The truth is that the game itself is symptomatic of poor self-image. Players seek a constant flow of approval from others, calming the fear and self-doubt most of us have. If you really are at peace with yourself, you do not need others to tell you that you are okay. What clothes you have on can be rather irrelevant beyond practicality. Your mind is free to be concerned with a wide range of other options, such as creativity, search for truth and understanding, exploring many mythic choices, and in general, being good and doing good.

The irony is that if you stop playing the alpha game, you are in a good position to win it. If you are relaxed and happy, involved in a variety of activities that are worth it for their own sake, you become attractive to others. If you are supportive of others, building up their alpha feelings, which you can do if you are not in competition with them, you become more attractive. If you are without fear and other negative emotions, without the social pain that most people carry, other people want to follow your lead and you can become irresistible.

It is easiest to win the game when you don’t need it. Usually, the worse you need it, the harder it is to get. Do it harder is not always the formula for success. Also, if you try to walk away from the game in order to win it, you won’t. You are still playing, and the appearance of leaving it is just a pose, nothing more.

Even though leaving the alpha game may give you the rewards associated with winning the game, remember that the reason to quit playing is not to win, but to move beyond the game itself. You will find it scary at first to abandon what has been a central organizing theme in your life, an activity that mythically unites you with nearly everyone else. As you establish your myth apart from the alpha game your fear will turn into feelings of liberation. Your myth will be free to go where your truth is to be found. You can become your own mythic source, free of the alpha game’s insistence on acceptance of group myth standards. You can move toward ongoing happiness.

Breaking Free
Happiness is found in mythic security, that one’s myth is developing and playing out in a satisfying, fulfilling, and engaging manner, not driven by negatives—fear, doubt, anger, guilt, worry, but by an ongoing, lively, positive, loving, exciting, happy vitality. The morals being demonstrated make all the difference, and two people, one with a negative myth and one with a positive, will live in two different worlds. The world will seem different to them because it will be different. The subset of total reality that your myth allows you to experience depends on the nature of your myth. Myth has a self-confirming quality most of the time, but it can change.

How does one change one’s myth for the better? Many people have done it. The most common way is to start doing things that move one’s life toward one’s ideals and to avoid doing anything counterproductive to that end. This method will work, but it can require a single-minded dedication of willpower to overrun any morals one may have that do not fit the master plan. One can pay a heavy price.

There is another way. The first step you have already made if you have read this entire book to here. You now know you live by a myth and what that means. The second step is to be willing and desirous of a changed life, enough to leave behind some of the comfort and security of the known and familiar. You are then ready for step three.

Fix Your Myth
Fix your myth. Look hard at the myth you are actually living, not the one you would like to think you are living, or the one lived by your image to others, but the real myth you are living. If you have trouble seeing your myth, read Appendix A, Personal Myth Analysis. Consider the sentence “And the moral of this story is _____.” List everything that could go into that blank when the story is your present myth. Have a look at the list. Does it describe the world you want to live in? If not, make another moral list which does. Now, realistically considering your situation and capabilities write a credible story that demonstrates the preferred morals. What actions does your character take in it? What other characters are in the cast? Find them, and do the actions the new myth asks of your character. Your life will then become a demonstration of the desired morals. Keep doing it. The strength of story on the human mind will remake your world.

It is impossible to have total control over your moral package. Anyone who says he does is lying or denying. Much of our moral package is beyond our awareness or deeply rooted in our genetics or early imprinting and very resistant to change. But there is still a lot we can do with it.

Talk Five Minutes
There is a technique you can use to bring up morals that are normally beneath your awareness. It is quick and requires no special training. You need a helper, someone you trust and feel safe to be fully open with. The technique is called Talk Five Minutes.

Morals are demonstrated in the answers to story question, so one way to find morals is to answer a question. The answer will then suggest a statement about the larger reality. Suppose what you want to change is that you are too fat. A good question to ask yourself would be “Why do I eat too much?” You already have some stock answer you tell yourself, yet you still can’t stop. That’s because that answer is a cover or at least incomplete. There are answers you need that are below your awareness. From those answers you can figure out the morals.

At the start of Talk Five Minutes the helper will ask you your question, in this example “Why do you eat too much?” What you do is answer the question. Try to give a short answer, no more than a sentence or two. Then, without stopping, stalling, digressing or repeating yourself, give another and another and another for the next five minutes.

The helper watches the clock and tells you when your five minutes are up. In addition, it is the helper’s job to make sure you keep answering the question and to tell you, forcefully if necessary, when you are digressing from answering the question, repeating past answers, stopping or stalling “it’s like, well, you know, let me think, oh, um, like, you know, no wait a minute.” At such points it is often effective if the helper just repeats the question.

Five minutes is a long time to fill with short answers. Most people will run out of answers long before five minutes are up. First come your stock answers, then those from the group myth, the common knowledge. Next perhaps come the answers you are embarrassed about, then maybe some answers you think are trivial or silly, or wrong. Then you run out of answers and there is still a lot of time left to go. You have to keep talking. What to do? You start running around inside your mind, looking desperately everywhere for answers, finding them here and there and hurling them out the door as you madly search for more to keep your mouth going. Five minutes can be a long time.

In the latter minutes you will hear yourself saying things you never heard before. Where did that one come from? That is what you are after. Even so, keep talking. You are in the zone and besides, your five minutes aren’t up yet. Don’t worry about remembering what you say. That is the helper’s job. A tape recorder might be useful here.

What is happening that gives you access to previously unknown answers? Talk Five Minutes is a game and like any game it has special roles for the players. The role here is to answer the question quickly as many ways as you can, no matter what. So you do, if you get into the spirit of the game and accept the role, and out come the answers. A big job of the helper is to apply social pressure when necessary to keep you in the game role.

Why couldn’t you think of all these answers before? The reason is role behavior. Roles tell us what to do but they also tell us what not to do. Similarly, they tell us what to think and what not to think. During your five minutes you did not consider when to paint the garage nor if it will rain this weekend. You focused on the question at hand. One explanation of the new answers is that with the role demanding you produce a steady stream of them, you think them up for the first time, right there on the spot. Spontaneous creation may be the origin of some of your new answers, but others probably have been down in your mind a long time but inappropriate to think of in any of your normal roles. In the hectic race to keep the answers coming, the normal filters of your conscious mind get overridden and let ideas come up from below.

Further Fix
Here are some guidelines to a better myth. You will be happier if your character wins in your myth. To win, your character needs to demonstrate the morals it attempts, so choose morals whose demonstration is possible. Otherwise you are heading into a lot of frustration.

In addition to optimum morals, you will be happier with the right obstacles. We do not have total control of the obstacles in our myth; life is good at throwing a full range of them our way. Nevertheless many of our obstacles are of our own choosing and we get to decide what actions to take when we confront our various obstacles.

The ideal myth will have the right array of obstacles. If they are all too difficult, life is too hard and our efforts yield futility and we get worn out trying. If they are all too easy, life becomes trivial and we get bored. If they are all of medium difficulty, we will still need relief from that intensity of action. A variety is best, giving an up and down quality to the flow of dramatic action in our lives, times of intensity and times of rest.

In addition, the obstacles should challenge many of our morals, not just one or two over and over or else the myth will become too narrow.

The obstacles should be such that by taking action on them our moral package evolves. Our deeds should be such that we learn from them so that the myth moves forward rather than grinding endlessly over the same old territory or just fighting to stand its ground.

Another key to happiness is to know at what point to be satisfied with your actions and moral demonstrations. Avoid excessive, unrealistic expectations such that no matter what you do or what happens to you, you never come out ahead, you never win, you are always behind. The secret here is to develop a clear sense of Good Enough. Have a clear sense of when you have enough, work enough, try enough, are enough. This is not to sell your life short, but to avoid the trap of perfection, of standards that can never be met. You may not get quite as far, but you will be happier doing so.

Good Enough does not mean low standards that lead to sloppiness, clumsiness, or incompetence. Good Enough means just that: sufficient standards for the situation at hand. Now and then perfection is called for. Every month I reconcile my checkbook with the bank statement until they agree to the penny and any errors that I or the bank has made have been found and dealt with.

In most cases perfection is impossible. You cannot saw a board to exactly six inches long. There will always be an error. You have to decide how close is good enough. The same goes for nearly everything you do, whether you are baking a pie, driving to work, or talking to your mother. At some point you need to let it be good enough.

If your skills or resources are changing, you will face the decision of what is good enough for now. If you are taking piano lessons, you will play better next month , so what is good enough for now will be insufficient by then. What is good enough will change as your skills improve, but what they are today will help you determine what is good enough for now.

Similarly, if your income is rising, let the apartment you rent today be good enough for now even though you will be in a better one next year.

This is not to say your ideals should be no greater than your present situation, but that you should not make yourself crazy and destroy the rest of your life in extreme, endless pursuit of them.

A great benefit of having a sense of enough is that you can live in a world of abundance. At last you can relax, you can let yourself off the hook, you can be satisfied. Life doesn’t have to be an endless struggle where you never can win because you never can finish, you are never there.

You may have difficulty becoming able to let your life be Good Enough. The modern world does not want you to feel that way. You are supposed to feel insufficient and in need so you will play the alpha game and overconsume and sell yourself out to the crowd in various other ways. To have a sense of enough and life in its abundance you will have to turn away from many of the siren songs of modern life and be your own person, taking authority over your myth so you can live in happiness.

Understand that happiness is not the same as fun, laughter, pleasure, excitement, thrills, or gaiety. Happy people will experience their share of those feelings, perhaps more than their share, but happiness itself is different. It is rightness in one’s world. This is not to say one cannot be happy when everything is going wrong around oneself, one certainly can. The rightness is on another level. You are at peace with your myth. You are at one with your myth.

The Source Within
In my own pursuit of happiness I have tried to be in tune with my own internal mythic source. What has worked out best for me has been to look for authority within myself. I do not prefer to take in information on how to live from outside unquestioningly, on faith but rather to work it out for myself. I ask myself questions and I get answers. The process works best if I am calm, relaxed, unthreatened and unhurried. I ask, and usually I think of an answer, sometimes immediately, sometimes a little longer. It may not be a final answer, but it tends to be a productive answer, more right than warranted by the information available at the time. Being my own alpha source has done much to help me with happiness. For help with how to do this, see Appendix C, Original Thought.

There are other ways to get there. Being with the right group of people will do a lot, because they will have a group myth that works well with your own. Happiness can also come from a commitment to work or a cause that is a good match for your myth. Ongoing productive creativity works well.

Another approach is to find happy people. Make friends with them, spend time with them, be involved with them. Learn from them and the resulting group myth you create. You will develop a better life.