Outline
- Everyone tends toward being happier.
- In perfect happiness, wanting and doing are perfectly congruent.
- What you call better, you call better because you are already tending towards it.
- Reasons are not necessary for happiness.
- Unhappiness is trying to move to someplace you are already at: Happiness.
Introduction
In this talk, Bruce Di Marsico talks more about the illusion that unhappiness is in any way productive. He starts out with the simple truth: Everyone tends toward being happier. He explores the non-necessity of reasons.
Reasons are not necessary for happiness. In perfect happiness, wanting and doing are perfectly congruent; reasons don’t necessarily come into play in doing, and wanting is wanting what you are doing.
Reasons also reveal no new truth: what you call better, you call better because you are already tending towards it.
Ultimately, unhappiness is completely un-necessary and not useful because unhappiness is trying to move to someplace you are already at: Happiness.
Readings
Tending toward goodness: some people talk about it as tending toward cosmicness, Cosmic Unity. It’s what you are moving toward. Now, you can call that tending, wanting, needing, fearing, but still the nonetheless tending. You are tending toward being happier. All of you tend toward being happier. You all tend to be happy, but when you don’t get where you are going you say there must be a reason that you are not there yet. There’s got to be another reason other than merely “I am not there yet.” The reason is there is something wrong with me. And even if I wanted to instead go into, “there’s something wrong with you,” I have to assume that it shouldn’t be that way. For example, if you don’t love me, there’s something wrong with you. Why is that wrong? Why shouldn’t it be that way? What is it I am tending toward? I am tending toward you’re being happy. I am becoming “you being happy.” I am becoming, I am wanting to be, I am moving toward everything being okay, including you, it and everything.
You could walk down a street, you could see two people fighting, two other people fighting across the street and you will have the instinctive reaction that there must be something wrong with you. Allow yourself to get in touch with that. You can pick up a newspaper and read about something happening in Southeast Asia and say, there must be something wrong with me. When even objectively, it has absolutely nothing to do with you, it would seem. And yet you could say there must be something wrong with me that those two people are fighting and I am not doing anything about it.
Someone told me that the other day: There must be something wrong with me that the people are starving. And then, you could even become a little more insightful and realize you know what’s wrong with you. There must be something wrong with you to believe that there must be something wrong with you.
You could reach the level of insight that says “there must be something wrong with me for not being happy. For not being there.” You recognize that you are not all powerful, and that you are not there. Since you are tending to be there, since everything in your nature is moving toward being there, you know that, you are aware of that. “That’s what I move toward, that’s what I am moving toward.” Somehow you ask yourself “Why am I not changing. I sense that I want to change myself, or change it, or change them, or change everything, or change anything I want to change.” And at that very moment, you are changing; I have ask myself why am I not changing, and that is changing and moving, and yet I say why am I not moving. We have always assumed that we didn’t want enough, right? That’s why we constantly try to get in touch with needs and make ourselves need to kind of make up for not wanting enough. Now when you get unhappy, or feel you need something, that’s just so you can reaffirm your determination to want it more. So, somehow you’ve recognized “I don’t want it enough, because if I wanted enough, I could have it.” Where did that come from? That universal belief that if you wanted it enough, it could happen?
So, that we do have some facility there and we do flip back and forth between being special and being awful, between being good and being evil. And we kind of split ourselves and we say my body is the evil part, my mind is the good part and my mind is the bad part and my body is the good part you know. And we flip flop back and forth. We try to keep our lives as dichotomous as possible. And to believe in good’s and evil’s and mind’s and spirit’s and body’s; essentially, to divide oneself. The me here and me there. The me here and now is quite distinct from the me I hope to be and I’m going to be and I am tending toward being, and I become aware of that difference. How do I account for it in my life? I am not what I want to be, I am you know – I am not motivated, there’s something wrong with me. I am base, I am materialistic, I am attached, I am needy, whatever. And I want to free myself from that because I am tending towards that.
You can’t really be sure that you were doing what you want at the rate that you could be doing it, and that was your problem. Am I really doing my all? If I could rest assured that I was really doing my all, could I know any moments of unhappiness? If I really knew I was doing all that I could do toward what, though? Toward making people love me, toward being smarter, toward getting less messed up? We create all kinds of things that we can start believing we are doing all we can do toward. When I look ahead to see where I want to be and realize I am not there, I then look to explain why I am not there. To say that there something wrong with me. Why is there any movement towards where I am going, why am I not there already? Why is there differential in my wanting and my being?
“Because there is something wrong with you.”
If you knew there was nothing wrong with you, you wouldn’t be wanting that which you couldn’t have. For instance I wouldn’t be wanting to be over there until I was over there. And then there would be congruity in my wanting. How would I get there? I wouldn’t get there by asking what would be wrong if I never got there. However it is that I got there, it wouldn’t be because I wanted to, it would be that I got there and I wanted to. They’d be the same thing. I would get there by wanting to be here first and wanting to be here, wanting to be here and wanting to be here, and that’s how I would get there.
To summarize, why are you unhappy that you are not getting what you want? You believe you should be able to get what you want. And because you believe you should be able to get what you want, you must believe that you must have the power to get what you want. So there must be something wrong with you that you do not have what you want, and that’s why you are unhappy.
If I was really flowing with it and congruent to all there was, I could be aware that I can make you be what I want you to be, only to the extent that I can. I can change you, in so far as I can change you, and that’s fine, and I can’t change you in so far as I can’t.
If I believe there is something wrong with you, it always comes back as “there’s something wrong with me.” I have to suffer by my judgments.
What if you break that cycle, and end all so-called rational thought? You’d be some kind of an animal but it would be a new kind, it would a human animal. Not “just” some kind of animal, but what you would be is that you would be the kind of thing that you were tending to be. You’d be the kind of thing that you were and perhaps we’d call that human, perhaps we’d call it angelic, perhaps we would call it base, I don’t know. But that would all depend upon where we were. But you would be all you could possibly be, and knowing it.
You’re wondering why you haven’t got happiness and how to get it, because you want it, and that’s how you know you haven’t got it, sure. That is the most irrational thing in the world you see. How could I want happiness if I had already had it? By not believing you had it. What you call better, you call better because you are already tending toward it. And that’s your way of helping yourself get there, and you don’t need any help. So, you are hoping that you could help yourself to get somewhere by calling it a better place to be, but that’s only because you are going there on the first place.
I could say “I am going where I am going.” And that would be very full description, as total description as I can imagine. And is it a better place? Well, I am going there. Is it an impossible place to go to? Well, I am going there.
The “have to’s” are gone, the “should’s” are gone, the choices are gone, but yet the choice is there. I’m really in touch that I am freely choosing to go there and also in touch that if I don’t freely choose to go there, I am still going there.
When you are a therapist, you basically have people coming in and asking you “what’s wrong with me, and how can I be more of what I am, and how can I be more of what I want to be? And how can I move faster toward where I want to go? How am I keeping myself back from doing what I want? Why am I unhappy? I am unhappy you know and I am not getting what I want.” And basically, what they are saying is there’s something wrong with them.
I see the process as being a gradual one where more and more we allow ourselves not to believe that there’s something wrong with me in this particular thing or in that area. Or as we work through the beliefs, and we decide we don’t have to be unhappy, that we didn’t really need to be unhappy, we don’t have to be. That was a way of allowing ourselves to believe that in that case there’s nothing wrong with me.
Where does the concept of karma come from? Where does the concept of falling innocence come from? All of you are innocent. You just believed you weren’t. Then the struggle back to innocence is to get back to where you already are, and you know it’s somehow an impossibility, because you’re there, but believing you are not and trying to get where you believe you are not. You keep trying to move on to some place that you are already at. If you are innocent but you believe you are not, isn’t that as good as being guilty? Isn’t that as good as karma? Is that the same as karma really being there? If you are a happy person and you believe you are unhappy, isn’t that as good as being unhappy? And doesn’t that the same as unhappiness exists?
The belief that there is something wrong with you is karma. The belief that there’s something wrong at all. Freud thought that you could actually work in a chronological sense, let’s say back to when you were two years old, and in each of those various stages when you plowed into another really big, “there must be something wrong with me”, that could be addressed. I don’t see why it has to be chronological at all, because it’s that you are doing it now. I think he was doing that because he believed there was something wrong with him too and them too. And this does not have to be chronological, but there is that sense of unraveling. You we talk about as peeling of an onion, but with many of my patients, I help them work on the one thing that they are unhappy about and lots of other unhappiness disappeared. So, we explain that by saying that the cause, the belief that was behind the one, when that was dealt with, it also dealt with all the other areas of their behavior that that same belief was behind.
I’ve asked my patients “What are you trying to get me to do for you? What are you trying to help me to get you to do?” And somehow, it always was “give me permission so it’ll help me find a way to give myself permission, to let myself be okay in these circumstances and to not believe that there is anything wrong with me, and yet know that I can still move, that to not believe something is wrong with me won’t kill my movement. That allowing myself to believe that there’s nothing wrong with me will not stop me from ever moving.”
What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t believe that there was something wrong with you? What you are afraid of is it if you stopped believing that there was something wrong with you, that in itself might be because there was something wrong with you, that in itself maybe a big mistake. And it would be proved that there was indeed something wrong with you. And so, if you stopped believing that there was something wrong with you, you’d really have to believe that there was something wrong with you. That it might be that what’s wrong with you is to believe that there is nothing wrong with you.
Any schizophrenics, especially paranoids, that I’ve worked with, the ones that we consider the most disturbed, the ones that we say have the most wrong with them, are the ones that have attributed to just about everything in their life, that there was something wrong with them. You haven’t done it with everything. Some of you have done it in more things than in others, but these people have done it in every little thing that didn’t go their way. They said there was something wrong with them.
What do you grow up believing there’s wrong with you? For few years, you believe what’s wrong with you is that you are small and then after a while you believe what’s wrong with you is that you are a girl, there’s always some reason to account for what’s wrong with you. There must be something missing. And when you started getting all the things that you thought should cure you, what was wrong with you then? You are still not right. You’ve gotten money, you gotten age, you’ve gotten whatever it was. Whatever “it” is really is not the cause of any unhappiness whatsoever.
Questions for Reflection
What would you do, if you had no reasons to do anything, and no reasons not to do anything?
Meditation for the Week
Unhappiness is trying to move to someplace you are already at: Happiness.