Mystic musings

Gary Schouborg PhD - Letting Go in Everyday Life

(Amazing, here is this person, Dr. Gary Schouborg, describing the experience of Unconditional Happiness. Wow, so much of what he wrote could be me discribing it. I'm going to do some drastic editing of this page to shorten it up. I'll use (...) where I edit also use of italics and bold is mine. To read the original and view his website click the link above.)

Unconditional Happiness

During meditation, we begin to experience a happiness that is unconditional in the sense that it does not depend on our thoughts or circumstances. It is a satisfaction that abides while all our other experiences, with their pleasant and unpleasant qualities, come and go. This unconditional happiness is a sense of feeling whole, of not needing something further to be happy. We should not confuse unconditional with perfect and acceptable happiness. Perfect happiness requires that all our desires be satisfied. Acceptable happiness requires that enough be satisfied that we would rather be alive than dead. In contrast, unconditional happiness is unconditional precisely in existing however successful we may be in achieving our desires. It abides whatever our thoughts or circumstances may be.

Unconditional happiness also emerges as a unique gift (gratia, grace), something that neither we nor our circumstances have produced. Our circumstances do not produce it, because they constantly change whereas unconditional happiness abides. Nor do we produce it, though we do collaborate. Like any other gift, unconditional happiness requires both a giver and a receiver. If the receiver doesn’t have a receptive attitude, there is only a transfer of goods but not the experience of a gift. When we let go of all our thoughts in meditation, we adopt a radically receptive attitude, one that is necessary but not sufficient for unconditional happiness to emerge, just as being receptive to a gift is not sufficient for actually getting one. Who then is the giver? Precisely as unconditional, this happiness is not tied to any specifiable cause or giver. For this reason, religious traditions have called the giver God, the Absolute, Cosmic Consciousness, or Brahman. I would suggest, leaving the argument for another time, that the cause is a neuropsychological condition, perhaps the activation of endorphins in the absence of the cognitive processes that give specificity to our everyday experience. (My note: I've wondered about biological markers. It's possible I have an ongoing blast of endorphins that could be measured and documented. It would be interesting to test for some kind of biological markers and document them increasing and decreasing according to the thinking process engaged in.)

Because we do not experience unconditional happiness as having any specifiable cause, we do not experience it as occurring at any specifiable time. (My note: I wonder who the 'we' is that he refers to, does he mean that he exist in unconditional happiness or is he saying the 'human we', making him the convoy but not necessarily the receipent of truth.) What is specifiable is when we awaken to it. But because there is nothing temporally specifiable about unconditional happiness itself, we experience it as already there — outside temporal categories, so that we cannot say it goes in and out of existence. This sense of unconditional happiness as pre-existing our awakening to it is strengthened by its contrast with clinging — the illusion that to be really happy we must have something specific that we do not presently have, something that our thoughts or circumstances can give us. When we let go of that expectation, we awaken to unconditional happiness. (More accurately, some of us awaken to unconditional happiness and others are left only disillusioned. We don’t yet understand why individual experiences differ.) (My note: Ok, really... who is the 'we'?) If we yield again to that expectation, we lose unconditional happiness. This incompatibility between clinging and unconditional happiness gives the impression that the latter is a constantly existing state to which we lose access by clinging and gain access by letting go. However, all this is how we experience unconditional happiness. (My note: Ok, he's taking a branch away from my experience here. I'm thinking he isn't in the experience, he's reporting it from what he's learned and been taught. Oh ya, reading the next part, ya, he's reporting on what he's learned, letting go isn't the whole thing.) A causal explanation may tell us something different. Perhaps letting go activates endorphins, which produce unconditional happiness. In that case, though we experience unconditional happiness as a gift, we may indeed be actually producing it. Or perhaps there is some constant brain state that produces unconditional happiness, which brain state we lose access to when we cling and regain access to when we let go. This explanatory issue is an open question until we know more about the relationship between neural processes and our experience of unconditional happiness.

Conditional Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction

Experiencing unconditional happiness heightens our awareness that our ordinary experiences are conditional: transitory and interdependent. We discover that we unnecessarily create suffering for ourselves by clinging: mistakenly attributing unconditionality to merely conditional experiences. We grasp at conditional satisfactions because we mistakenly take them to be necessary for our unconditional happiness; and we rigidly avoid conditional dissatisfactions because we mistakenly suppose them to destroy our unconditional happiness. In clinging, we look for (unconditional) happiness in all the wrong (conditional) places. We therefore diminish the conditional satisfactions otherwise available to us. No longer feeling whole, we find ourselves wanting more no matter how successful we are in achieving our desires. And whatever dissatisfactions we experience only intensify our sense of incompleteness.

In contrast, if we let go of clinging to pleasant experiences, we discover that we can enjoy their momentary pleasure while maintaining our unconditional happiness. And if we let go of rigidly avoiding painful experiences, we find that at worst they go away more quickly than if we obsess about them, that their painfulness is moderated by our simultaneous experience of unconditional happiness, and that at best our disinterested observation of them may even dissolve the pain itself.

We therefore realize a second sense in which we are already happy. We have seen that we experience unconditional happiness as prior to our ordinary experience in the sense that we cannot describe the happiness itself in temporal categories. It seems timeless and in that sense predates our ordinary experience. However, our experience of unconditional happiness is temporally prior to future everyday experiences. Therefore, once we experience unconditional happiness, we are already happy before we ever engage in everyday activity. Success in everyday activity is not necessary for us to be happy. At this point, there arises the ancient problem expressed most famously in Plato’s allegory of the cave: if we are already happy, why would we pursue any goals at all? Instead of engaging in practical, everyday activity, why wouldn’t we just rest in our happiness? Indeed, it seems that a very few mystics enjoy doing just that. (My note: Ok, this is exactly what I wondered when I first experienced the imense bliss in light at the age of 16 - 17. Now he is discribing those experiencing constant unconditional happiness as mystics, so yep, it's not him.) However, most of us want to pursue other goals because we enjoy it. Once we experience unconditional happiness, our pursuits become a flowering of an inner happiness that already exists, rather than an attempt to fill a life that is incomplete.

To see how this realization transforms our everyday lives, let’s suppose that we have just lost a substantial amount of money in the stock market.

Emotional Transformation
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What most fundamentally transforms our daily lives, then, is that in letting go in meditation we begin to experience an unconditional happiness that abides while conditional pleasures and pains come and go. This unconditional happiness provides a felt perspective on the conditional goals of our everyday life, so that we do not mistakenly think that our happiness lies in achieving them. We can then invest with equanimity, because our happiness is not hostage to our results. We are disappointed by our loss, since it’s unpleasant to fail and pleasant to succeed. But we are not made unhappy, since unconditional happiness does not depend on whether our conditional life experiences are pleasant or unpleasant.

Performance Transformation
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Beyond Re-Collection
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Summary

We can learn the process of letting go in the relatively simple environment of meditation. By letting go, we learn to discern between unconditional happiness on the one hand and conditional satisfactions and dissatisfactions on the other. On returning to our everyday lives after meditation, we take time outs and let go when we find ourselves clinging to our goals, making them more important than we should. We move beyond this ad hoc management of our activity to personal transformation by identifying and letting go of habitual attitudes that continually impel us to cling. The key habit is identification, where we mistakenly believe that some conditional satisfaction can give us the unconditional happiness that we truly seek or that some conditional satisfaction can destroy our happiness. ...