Outline
- Any application of the Option Method is founded within the Option Attitude.
- The two fundamental forms of motivation are wanting and needing.
- Ultimately, happiness has no motivation. To want to be happier is a denial that you are already perfectly happy.
- A belief about happiness is ultimately a false belief about something lacking in your being.
- Beliefs about happiness are motivations to “cure” a lack in your being, and since nothing is missing from your being, no beliefs are necessary for happiness.
- Believing is believing with the whole body.
- If you wanting happiness, then you already know happiness.
Introduction
In this talk, Bruce Di Marsico discusses the inherent nature of happiness.
First, he clarifies that any application of the Option Method is founded within the Option Attitude, or knowing happiness. The Option Method, though, can be a method to re-discover the Option Attitude.
He clarifies that believing is believing with the whole body; the mind/body distinction is archaic and false.
He discusses wanting to be happy. The two fundamental forms of motivation are wanting and needing, but ultimately, happiness has no motivation. To want to be happier is a denial that you are already perfectly happy.
Beliefs about happiness are motivations to “cure” a lack in your being, and since nothing is missing from your being, no beliefs are necessary for happiness. A belief about happiness is ultimately a false belief about something lacking in your being.
If you wanting happiness, then you already know happiness, because you cannot want what you cannot conceive of, and so your wanting happiness reveals that you know what your happiness is. There is only the question of consenting to your knowledge of happiness.
No Beliefs are Necessary
When will we stop forgetting; when will we start remembering? This is only another way of saying when will we really be happy, or when will we believe what we know. When will we stop forgetting that we don’t have to be unhappy?
The attitude of the method really makes that model unnecessary, but without the model, one part of the attitude might always have been missing. So in a sense, you have the attitude, and you have the model, and sometimes there is something a little missing in the attitude that the model helps you to restore. Sometimes there is a little something missing in the model that your attitude can help to restore.
I think that it is an important thing to remember: that any work with anyone, including yourself, is based on your attitude. Sometimes you may feel that there is something missing in your attitude, and if you go back to the model of the method, “Why are you unhappy, etc.” that may help you restore to your attitude what would be missing, and the attitude may restore the method. If you can’t remember the method, you might just go back to your attitude and rediscover the method.
There are two fundamental belief states of motivation: needing to be happy and wanting to be happy. Motivation means tending towards. We can motivate ourselves by wanting: happy if I get it or happy if I avoid it. So if we are using happiness as the goal of our motivation and we believe that we are happy if we get happiness, if I want to become happy, I am happy if I get happiness. “Unhappy if I don’t get it” would be the belief of needing to be happy and unhappy if I don’t get it as a way of motivating myself to get the happiness. So basically, those two beliefs on the kinds of being are really two kinds of motivation towards happiness.
In many ways they are the same thing and they are the two ways people use to become happy. They either need to become happy or they want to become happy.
There is a third kind of motivation, which because it is ignored, the other two come into play. You could call it God, or peace with a capital P or happiness with a capital H or destiny with a capital D, it hardly matters because it is all inadequate. What does that have to do with motivation? Simply that if one needs any motivation, either wanting or needing, one is denying knowing. Simply even if one is wanting to become happy, that wanting to become happy would be in some way a denial. It would be a way of saying I need to try, that the trying is necessary in some way.
This is progressing from trying, from using need—unhappiness—to motivate ourselves to be happy, to understanding that a happier state, a more pleasant way to try to be happy is by using happiness to become happy, and by wanting to be happy, and by not being unhappy if we are not. The third state, which we can call “no belief”, shows us that in that state, there couldn’t be any question of trying, and shows that wanting and needing are both in a way a kind of lie.
What we get down to is that beliefs and motivations are the same thing and the very fact that we believe we need motivation of any sort is to say that it is not yet so. If I am tending towards going over to that side of the room, that in itself is an admission that I am not yet there. If I were to know myself to be over there, it would be inadequate somehow to say that I wanted to be there. I was there a few moments ago and here I am now. To say that I tend towards being here right now becomes totally irrelevant because I am here. I know myself to be here.
Some things, like our own nature, things that are essential to our own being, have to be surer than just tending towards. We can all tend towards going to the kitchen later, which we would all kind-of-notice in ourselves as a wanting. We would become aware of our tendency towards going to the kitchen and discovering that we want to go there for coffee. But that still is a very uncertain thing, that still is not sure, and that kitchen may fall down before we get there or we may fall down before we get there. Tending toward something in itself does not give any surety or any certainty of achievement. So in wanting things, somehow, no matter how we motivate ourselves, that motivation itself never gives any surety of your goal.
But there are some things that we just can’t tolerate that with and one of them is happiness. We cannot allow for ourselves for happiness to be an uncertain thing. Insofar as it is to us uncertain, we resort to these two types of motivation (wanting and needing) in order to tend toward it, because we believe it is uncertain. And only if a thing is not certain, do you have to tend toward it. Only if a thing is certain can you in a sense forget it and ignore it, which accounts for why we would forget our happiness, even though we are always there, and why we would be unhappy: simply because happiness must be certain.
How could something that is so important to us be forgotten all the time? Simple. It is not so important to remember. Why not? We don’t forget that we wanted to go home tonight and yet in so many ways it would be much less important to any of you than your own happiness. But there is no way that any of you would forget that you wanted to go home. But when you want to go home to happiness, go home to your real self, how can you forget that? And yet you seem to.
It could be because we are simply caught up in that whole thing of motivation, the whole thing of desire and the whole thing of needing, that insofar as we want to become happier we are much happier than when we need to be happy, and are believing we need something to be happy and that we will be unhappy without this or that. We are in that state of non-being which is a state believing “I am lacking, I am non-existing, not fully existing, and I need something to complete my existence.”
The state of becoming happier, is still presuming I am not yet fully existing, but that I am being born, I am coming into existing, I am coming into fullness, that I am still not yet complete but I am wanting to be. In itself, it is a kind of denial of fulfillment. The denial is warranted only by the evidence. We all have enough evidence to say that we are still becoming happier. So that the fact that we can deny that we are perfectly happy doesn’t seem to be unwarranted. It seems to be a perfectly sane thing to do, logical, sensible. But by the very fact that it implies that denial, that that denial is part of it, we will have to vacillate between the wanting and needing, and stay in the beliefs all the time.
We will still use beliefs as a motivation. We will still motivate ourselves because we want to or need to because we have a reason. We don’t just do because we do. Whereas when we are knowing being—which is the same as knowing doing—we do at that point because we do; we be because we be. We are whatever we are. We want what we want. And in that way, wanting at that point is not the wanting as in “wanting to be happy”. In the state of knowing being, there can very well be a sense of wanting but that sense of wanting is no different than knowing. My wanting to do something is just simply my knowing to do it—my knowing that it will be, my knowing that it is to be done. If we try to see that in terms of our happiness, it might make a little sense.
If you know that you are happy, there isn’t any question of beliefs. When there is no longer any question about it and there is no longer any tending toward it, there is no reason for beliefs. Beliefs have no raison d’être. They have no justification. They have no value, in fact. And if you look from that point back, you see that the only value beliefs had were to deceive. That to believe anything was to confess your not knowing, was to deny knowing. I am not talking about the belief that Paris is in France. That is not necessarily what concerns us. But there is certainly no value in terms of our happiness, to believe that this will help us to be happy or that will help us to be happy or this is evidence that we are not, and that is evidence that we are. And there is no value in any of those beliefs about ourselves, especially beliefs about our potential for being, and beliefs about where we are at this very moment.
Believing meant acting, beliefs aren’t just a mental set, an intellectual construct, and when we turn something into a belief, it doesn’t just exist as some kind of a symbol in the brain but it exists throughout the whole body as an act, which the body can manifest.
A belief is not in the so-called brain; a belief is in the mind and the mind is between the top of the scalp and the bottom of the soles of the feet. If you feel what we call a psychosomatic pain, that is your mind because your mind is at that point in your side or your leg or wherever the pain happens to be. The whole idea that your mind is in your head is archaic. So believing is believing with the whole body. What is knowing with then?
I think if you look more closely, you will see that believing is with the body in a certain way. It is actually a destruction of the body. Believing always manifests itself in the body as some kind of a problem, as something uncomfortable.
So, the more we believe, the less of our body we will have. The stronger the beliefs, the stronger the pain. And so every belief is a hole in the body—if you want to see it that way, if you understand it. It is a void in the mind because it implies a not being yet.
If I believe something about myself, I am saying I am not being something yet that I want to be.
Because of our experience in this world, we have come to very much learn that we could want things to be true but just because we want them, that doesn’t mean they are so. All of you think you have a lot of evidence that has proven to you that you have wanted many things but couldn’t always get what you want. What if that is simply just not true? But because you have been believing that you could want something and not have it, you have also been believing this about your own state of mind. You have believing this about your own destiny. You have been believing this about your own happiness. But is it knowledge? Do you really know that wanting doesn’t make it so? Or have you just been believing that way all of your life?
Because wanting and knowing are not different. And your wanting happiness is a revelation to yourself that you know what happiness is. Otherwise, how could you want it? You can’t want something that you can’t even conceive of. Your wanting happiness demonstrates that you already know what your happiness is. And consenting to that knowledge is happiness.
Questions for Reflection
What do you want?
What do you like?
What don’t you like?
Do you feel bad in any way about wanting what you want, liking what you like, and not liking what you don’t like?
If there were no practical or social consequences for wanting what you want, liking what you like, and not liking what you don’t like, in fact, if your desires were socially valued, would you still feel bad about your desires?
If so, explore in this way:
I want ______ and I don’t want this apparent consequence of wanting it: ______
I like ______ and I don’t like this apparent consequence of wanting it: ______
I don’t like ______ and I don’t like this apparent consequence of wanting it: ______
Which do you want more? What you want, in itself, or to avoid the apparent consequences of wanting?
Is there a dilemma, or could you merely want both what you desire in itself, and to avoid the apparent consequences of wanting it, and want one of them more than the other?
Meditation for the Week
Beliefs about happiness are motivations to “cure” a lack in your being, and since nothing is missing from your being, no beliefs are necessary for happiness.