Outline
- Wanting is not unhappy, but in perfect happiness doing and wanting become coincident.
- What do you do when perfectly happy? Wait, watch, and enjoy what happens in you and around you.
- There is no problem with making up reasons to do things.
- You don’t need a reason to do something.
- As an exercise, you can question that you need your beliefs.
Introduction
In this talk, Bruce Di Marsico discusses perfect happiness.
Wanting is not unhappy, but in perfect happiness doing and wanting become coincident. Beyond “Not unhappy, and wanting to be happier” is “happy, and doing”. There is no longer a gap between wanting and doing.
What do you do when perfectly happy? Bruce Di Marsico’s suggestion is wait, watch, and enjoy what happens in you and around you. You have no reasons to do anything, and there is no problem with making up reasons to do things, and you don’t need a reason to do anything.
Wait, watch, and enjoy what happens in you and around you
What we’re really doing and all the ways we have of saying it and everything we’re after basically boils down to trying to help people to discover why they’re not allowing themselves to be happy and okay in certain circumstances.
And as simple as that is, that’s really where it is at, too. It seems to me that there might be other ways of saying it, but that’s basically what we’ll be saying. So that’s probably the single most important factor involved.
If there are other factors, whatever other factors there might be, they couldn’t possibly be as important because they would only be means or leading to that basic fact, that basic goal.
Now what would be uncovered would be some fear, some kind of fear that amounts to something like this. “If I’m not unhappy, then I will have to have more fear somehow.” The basic question again being, “Well, why aren’t we okay in certain circumstances?” Because if we were, we’d somehow have more to fear or would be something more to be unhappy about. And it usually expresses itself this way with my patients.
“If I don’t feel bad about not having what I want, then I may not want it enough to be motivated to try to get it.” Very frequently that’s pretty much the way it’s verbalized. Somehow, there’s an intrinsic recognition that wanting it is the only way to get it, and by motivating oneself is the only way. And the fear is that there’d wouldn’t be enough motivation.
Now this is the fear that I might find myself in a position where I don’t want something enough, because I want to be happier and I can’t be unless I have X. I want to be happier and I can’t be unless I have more good, more good things, more good whatever. This dynamic applies to both happy and unhappy people. For the unhappy person, the desire to get something better would be used as antidote to unhappiness. “If I had that, I wouldn’t be unhappy. If this happened, I wouldn’t be unhappy.” And for the happy person, it would be very similar. It’d be a happierness.
If I had it, I could be happier. So the whole process of desiring to motivate oneself is based on some kind of feeling of lack or deprivations. So the person is going to wind up saying is something like, “Unless I feel some lack or deprivation here, here now, I won’t be motivated toward anything there, then. I sense that I can only move through a sense of lack.”
Even the happy person will have beliefs, though these beliefs are not making themselves unhappy. They may not be saying, “I’ll be unhappy unless I get it.” What they are saying is, “I will be happier. My reasons for wanting are to be happier, so I’ll be happier if I have this and I’ll be happier if I have that,” all somehow based on, “If I don’t, I won’t be.” There’s some lack. “There’s something lacking to me now. What is it? Oh, more health or more wisdom or more money, more freedom, more whatever.”
These same basic beliefs are approached in two different ways. They’re approached by the happy person with confident that they’re not going to make themselves happy. They want it in order to be happier. They’re okay now. They just want to be happier. The person who is being unhappy in that situation, is basically saying, “I’m unhappy now and I need it in order to be happy.” But in either case, it’s kind of an antidote. It’s a kind of a filler-upper.
So the statement we find here is, “Unless I feel some lack or deprivation here and now, I won’t be motivated toward anything there and then.” The ultimate fear behind all other fears around everything else that we seem to find is this. If find, if I know, if I allow myself to know that I will be happier always under any circumstances, then how will I decide what to do? How can I answer the question, such questions as this, “Okay, what’ll I do next?” or, “What would I like to do?” How could I could even answers those questions if my happiness isn’t somehow hung up on it, if it’s not going to make me happier, if it’s not going to make happy if I’m unhappy?
In other words, it sounds like this: Once the big question is answered, my happiness is assured. My great goal in life is provided for and there’s no room for question of my happiness. What do I do now? If I were to really allow myself to believe that I would be happier no matter what I do, then what do I do? I suggest this. Wait, watch, and enjoy what happens in you and around you.
Since the big question is answered, my happiness is assured. My great goal in life is provided for. Everything that I’ve ever done anything for is really okay and it’s taken care of. And there really, really isn’t any long any question of my happiness involved in anything I do. The things I do have really have nothing to do with my happiness. Then I can wait and watch. I can enjoy what happens in me and around me. Enjoy what you do.
If you find that you make up reasons for doing things even, enjoy that. You don’t have to fool yourself, though, that these so called reasons are anything more than made up. You don’t have to say, “Therefore my happiness or happierness depends on this, my happiness or happierness depends on that.” If you find yourself making plans for the future, well, you could enjoy that game. You don’t have to pretend that you have a reason to do that.
You don’t have to present that your reason has anything to do with happiness. If you do make a belief, if you make up a belief, if you make believe that your behavior, somehow that the reason for your behavior is to make you happier, you don’t have to pretend that you aren’t believing that. But you could know that made up belief is only a made up belief, and you could reaffirm your knowledge that the question has been settled once and for all, that you’ve settled it for yourself.
So do you see that in the investigation if you continue investigating the basic goal, the basic question for the option method is: Why aren’t my clients, why aren’t the people that I’m trying to help, allowing themselves to be happy and okay in certain circumstances? Then all the right questions will come if that’s my goal, that’s my mind. Somehow they’re going to be devised just to fit that, that ultimate question, “Why aren’t you allowing yourself to be happy in these situations?”
I said we have asking it knowing that they have other fears. That, ideally, is the best question. For somebody who is into Option and knows what we’re talking about, if I were to say, “Why are you not allowing yourself to be okay in these circumstances?” You would know what I’m talking about by not allowing themselves. But because we know the fears that other people feel that don’t allow that, we have very special, appropriate questions taking their fears into account.
So since that’s what we’re after, we’re going to find answers basically that amount to: If I’m not unhappy, if I don’t make myself unhappy, then I’m going to have more to be afraid, because I’m not going to want what I want. I’m not going to be believing that I need it. It might even boil down to: Hey, if I can be happy now without it, then why do I even want it? Why should I want it? So I have to kind of believe that I need it on some level, even as a happy person. I need it to be happier. I need it to be happy.
In the happier person there tends to be a difference. The unhappy person tends to need it and only it. That’s the big difference. The happy persona says, “Well, I don’t need it, but I need something like it.” Maybe it’s much wider net cast for things you believe you need. Well, if one doesn’t make it, so what. I’ll have this. I don’t really need it to be happy.
But it would just help me to be happier. And so that kind of an attitude is not fearful. There’s no horror. There’s no pain in not having it, and wanting something else instead. But there’s still that kind of belief that things will make them happier, to be wanting of something, to be lacking in it.
If you have the question in your mind of, “How do I determine how to do that? How I decide how to do that? I’ve been sitting all night with a cigarette, should I or shouldn’t I? What reasons do I have to light it? What reasons wouldn’t I have to light it?” Needing reasons because you have got to try to hang it on your happiness, but yet you know your happiness may have nothing to do with it.
I’ve always found my experience has been that I’m not really happy, I want something that I’m going to do. I want it before I do it. When I’m happy, I’m doing what I want to do. There’s a different thing. Then, what I’m doing, I’m wanting.
There is an experience of wanting, but it’s so congruous and identical to doing, so that I’m doing what I’m wanting, and there isn’t a question of “will I do what I want, or what will I want, and will I do what I want to do”, because there’s no distance between my wanting and doing.
That would hearken back to the example last week of no child wants to walk, in itself. Instead, he wants to get something, and walking seems the best way. Now if he’s really happy, he will be doing and wanting at the same moment, and there wouldn’t be a question. He’d be wanting to walk as he’s walking, but he wouldn’t want to walk before he walked.
Wanting becomes obsolete as you are doing. If you put clothes on yourself, all of the things that you have on, you wouldn’t think that you want to wear them. It’s not necessary to want, desire. It’s obsolete. It’s irrelevant. Wanting was only to go the next step.
Do you want to breathe? Or do you just do breathing. There is lots that you neither want nor don’t want, you just do, and it’s not relevant and you solved that question a long time ago. And yet do we can get hung up and have lots of feelings about: Will I do what I want to do? And if I’m not unhappy, will I really do it? There are lots of things we do in our life without being unhappy.
Once the question is solved, if I knew that I would be always happier under any circumstance in the future, what will I do? If that becomes a question, and I don’t know that it has to be a question for us, that we have to ask ourselves, “What will I do?” But if we do, if we find ourselves in the course of where we’ve been and whatever reason asking ourselves, “Okay, what will I do?” I don’t know that it has to be answered by saying this for happiness or that for unhappiness.
One could just simply make up a belief. If you equally like vanilla and chocolate ice cream, how do you make the decision that you like vanilla or chocolate? We resort to the most absurd distinctions in order to make that decision. But we feel we have to have some kind of a reason because we can’t decide. You can resort to such things – and people do – “Well, last time, I had vanilla, so this time I’ll have chocolate.” And all of a sudden you’ve created a system, a standard, called “variety” as a means by which to judge things. Last time I had vanilla. Oh, so that’s my reason this time for not having chocolate or for having chocolate. They don’t have anything to do with each other, as if somehow the vanilla ice cream is still in the stomach or still in their taste buds or whatever.
And some people wouldn’t even attempt to say things like, “I’m sick of vanilla. I think I’ll have chocolate,” and I wouldn’t have to go that far to be able to choose between two equals. Up rises the god of variety. And now when everything else is equal and you’ve got no other basis to make the choice on, you could always make the choice and claim variety as your reason. And there may be lots of things like that. Sameness becomes another basis for criteria. We have people who will choose because, “That’s what I did choose. I’ll choose the other this time because I choose it last time.” So sameness becomes the reason. And all of the so called virtues are ways of making distinctions for happiness somewhere, it has to have something to do with my happiness.
Now if we do that there, why would we have to fool ourselves into thinking that that’s some kind of rational, logical, real distinction? Why can’t we be content to know that it’s a game we play in order to make the distinction, in order to make the choice? I just go for vanilla, and somehow I let my liver say that, or somehow my in grown toenail could say chocolate. But I don’t have to know what my reason was for whatever just came out of my mouth.
If we can do that and just say, “I don’t need to know the reason because my happiness is not at stake”. The question of our happiness being at stake is really unnecessary because our happiness is not really at stake unless we make it at stake.
Questions for Reflection
Here, the questions are offered by Bruce Di Marsico in the original talk.
Perhaps an exercise that vocalizes the belief or the knowledge that I am happy and will be happier, would be a very valuable exercise for us to do so that if we were to get in touch for ourselves wherever we are and any time of the day or night or wherever we are, we would be in touch with, “I’m happy and will always be happier.”
When we say that, what might happen is that certain objections will come up with inside us, and our fears will bring up suggestions like, “Oh, no. Remember this?” or, “Aren’t you afraid of that?” Because whatever is preventing us from truly believing that and truly knowing it may very well come up, come to mind. So now if we continue to – as each of those fears come up, if we expose them, we could expose then some verbalization, saying it and hearing yourself using the sentence. And so we can tune in on ourselves.
The idea is to vocalize and verbalize that we are happier and we will always be happy. As the objections come up, we refuse them. We can rebuke. We can challenge the way that we’ve never bothered to do before, while we’ve ignored them, while we’ve made belief as if happiness is really being threatened by that knowledge that I have nothing to fear, that I’m really going to be happier becomes a threat.
And our big question all the time that you all ask me all the time is, “Bruce, how come I know that my happiness is at stake, but I don’t really know?” We may find that this is going to answer that question. So now if a belief comes up, you could always verbalize, “That is a lie, a myth, a false belief.”
Our happiness is not at stake. I am going to happier. It’s a mistake that I believe it’s just not true or it’s unreal or it’s bullshit or it’s merely an unnecessary caution. I don’t need it. Or, it’s an excess protection. Somehow, it’s an unnecessary.
As each one comes up, it gets the opportunity to be rebutted. If we simply refuse to give them credence, and recognize them as myths. If we simply refuse to give them credibility. I don’t have to believe that, it can’t survive.
I am not denying that there many things I believe I have to be unhappy about. I am denying that I need to believe that. You understand the extension? I’m not denying the fear’s existence. I’m not denying that it exists. I’m not denying that I believe it as a reason to be unhappy. I’m not denying my own beliefs. What I am denying is that I need to believe that.
Sure, I believe that I’m going to be unhappy if. . . I know I believe that. But what I’m denying is that I need to have that fear, not that I have it. I’m not denying that. I’m denying that I need it. So in no way can you get into suppression or fooling yourself because the whole purpose of this wouldn’t allow that to happen.
They don’t have to be denied. It’s not the same as saying I shouldn’t be unhappy. Because, see, the reason I say it’s a lie is important. When I say it’s a lie, my reason is it’s refuted because I know that I really am happy and I really will be happier. Now if it was refuted because I should be happy or I should be happier, that I could deny. But it can’t be denied and it won’t be into suppression if I’m refuting it because I know I’ll be happier.
The belief cannot survive if you really believe that it’s not necessary. You will never hold onto a feeling that you don’t think you need. Every time we’ve ever explored fears together, every time we’ve ever looked at our fears, as soon as we saw we didn’t need it, we let it go, right? We only held it ’cause we felt we needed to be happy. You’re not going to wear any more armor than you think you need.
I don’t need to fear that I’m going to forget. That’s excess. I don’t need that fear. I know because I know I’m going to be happier. So what’s my forgetting and remembering have to do with anything? Now what if you forget to play the game? What if you forget to refute? Okay, that fear is unnecessary because I’m going to be happier.
I know that I can refute it, because. I am the greatest authority on myself that there is. Each of us will become the greatest possibility authorities on our own happiness.
And we have the right to say to ourselves that that belief is nonsense. You have that right because we know the truth because we’re the authority. I know that I make myself unhappy, so I have the authority to tell myself that this is unnecessary.
Meditation for the Week
Wait, watch, and enjoy what happens in you and around you.