The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (20 page)

In Europe this ritual ecstasy persisted into the carnivals of the Middle Ages but was ruthlessly suppressed by both Calvinism and the Counter-Reformation. Dancing, originally a group practice, diminished to an activity for couples in the nineteenth century and by the late twentieth century was almost entirely a solo performance. Now you have to become your own shaman and invent your own shamanic dance.

In the modern world theistic religion became the acceptable form of transcendence – and when this faded in the twentieth century there was the secular religion of international socialism. But it has become increasingly difficult to believe in a paradise above the world or a Utopia ahead of it.

An alternative is to locate the transcendent ideal not above or ahead but in the world itself – pantheism. To escape the wrath of the faithful, pantheism has often pretended to be a version of monotheism – but it is essentially pagan. For instance, the Sufi tradition, a version of Islam that flourished in Persia at the end of the first millennium CE and still has a contemporary presence, justified its pantheism by claiming that God created the world in order to be known through it, explaining to His prophet, ‘I was a Hidden Treasure and I desired to be known, so I made the Creature that I might be known.’
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Perhaps craving for recognition is not so modern after all – God may have created the world to be worshipped as the ultimate celebrity. For the Sufis, everything in the world was an epiphany and the world was not merely enchanted but divine – a belief that inspired the poet Jelaluddin Rumi to create the dance of the whirling dervishes and poetry with an equivalent wildness.

There’s a light seed grain inside.

You fill it with yourself, or it dies.

I’m caught in this curling energy! Your hair!

Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.
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Spinoza was also a pantheist and spoke of ‘that eternal and infinite being we call God or Nature’
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, though ‘God’ may have been added to the phrase to placate believers. And poets from Wordsworth to Rilke have espoused forms of secular pantheism, which inspires the most ecstatic affirmation, because the escape from self is into a mystical unity with everything.

The most intense and lasting forms of happiness seem to derive from pantheism. I should found a Church of Latter-day Pantheists with, as prophets, Rumi, Spinoza, Wordsworth and Rilke. This religion would have the advantage of constant, serious difficulty. No one would find it easy to feel divine presence in a multiplex foyer or a departure lounge – and only Rumi himself could believe the Beloved immanent in a shopping mall. These places are more likely to encourage a Manichean belief in man as a fallen creature and the world as the realm of eternal darkness.

Naturally, our own age prefers the fast and easy route to transcendence – drugs. According to neuroscience, the problem is that the feel-good drugs – cannabis, cocaine, heroin, Ecstasy – do not replicate exactly a natural high, but produce equivalent effects by prolonging or suppressing other effects, and these prolongations and suppressions permanently damage the brain network.
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The minor short-term gains result in major long-term losses – a physiological demonstration of the truth that there is no easy, free way to paradise. On the other hand, the earned, natural highs create beneficial new associations that endure.

The other popular form of transcendence – falling in love – is also believed to produce a high without effort, but it, too, has long-term complications (see Chapter 12 for details).

For me, as a non-believer, the high of highs is exaltation, better even than sexual ecstasy, though this is a close-run thing. Fortunately, these two supreme excellences are not mutually exclusive. It may even be possible to experience both simultaneously, and those blessed with such grace will not only mystically merge in the Great Chain of Being but also be one with God in eternity and paradise.

But exaltation is elusive and rare, one of a group of heightened experiences that includes artistic inspiration, epiphany (in the sense of a mystical but secular significance, as described by Joyce and Proust), insight, problem solving and intuition. These experiences cannot be willed, arrive abruptly out of the blue, provide absolute certainty though no explanation, and are intensely pleasurable but brief. They seem entirely random and gratuitous – but the apparently unearned gift is usually the reward for persistent hard work and patience. For artistic inspiration this hard work is the discipline of learning and practising the craft. For insight and problem solving it is prolonged but unconscious thought. For intuition it is observation and analysis of experience. For epiphany it is the habit of intense attentiveness to the physical world. But what prepares the mind for exaltation, an experience that provides the ecstasy of revelation without a revelation? My hypothesis is that the brain offers exaltation as a reward for previous endeavours – a sort of buy-six-get-one-free loyalty-card deal. In return for concentration in the past, the brain will grant the eureka feeling without a eureka product. So, in a way, even exaltation has to be earned.

Naturally, the era of entitlement would like a longer-lasting version of the experience at no cost. And an American neuro-scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, did indeed have such a durable experience, though it was not exactly free.
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One morning she woke up in a mood of extreme euphoria. This was the good news. The bad news was that she was also partially paralysed and incapable of speech. She had just suffered a stroke that knocked out her left-brain hemisphere but left the right side unimpaired. This left hemisphere operates more serially, is responsible for analysing the past and preparing for the future, and maintains the constant brain chatter that constitutes consciousness. So the stroke provided Taylor with natural transcendence, taking her out of the self by disabling the brain site of the self. The right hemisphere, until recently thought to be purposeless and inert, processes information in a more parallel way and provides coherence and meaning for the sensory data of the present. It is this combination of lighter workload and greater ability to make new connections that allows the right side to produce mystical experience, epiphany, inspiration, insight and intuition. And the fact that the right side also processes sensory data from immediate surroundings means that the eureka incandescence can also make the outside world sublimely vivid. This is why mystical experiences are so similar to inspiration and insight and why the more intense the experience the stronger the accompanying pantheistic awe. Taylor described her euphoria as a profound sense of unity with all things.

But, as her left brain responded to her recovery regime, it reactivated the circuits for negative left-brain emotions such as anxiety, fearfulness, envy, resentment and anger. As psychologists have discovered, these are more powerful than positive emotions. But Taylor was not prepared to surrender her new-found sense of oneness and well-being and fought to suppress the mean left-brain effects, arriving, via a stroke and neuroscience, at a conclusion reached by the Stoics several thousand years earlier: ‘Nothing external to me had the power to take away my peace of heart and mind…I may not be in total control of what happens, but I certainly am in charge of how I choose to perceive my experience.’
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Her technique is to permit these instinctive reactions of the old reptilian brain their natural ninety seconds of life, but then to use detachment and analysis to identify them and prevent them from colonizing her mind. And she adds that, when she tries to teach her students this technique, they complain vehemently that it requires far too much mental effort – another example of the rejection of difficulty.

Taylor’s reaction to her misfortune is also the classic Stoic strategy of turning to advantage whatever happens. She is probably the only stroke victim to enthuse about the experience. But how to liberate the right brain without being paralysed by a left-brain stroke?

One possibility is meditation. There have been several brain-scan studies of experienced meditators and the research teams have reached similar conclusions – meditation increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, the executive controller responsible for focussing and maintaining attention, and decreases activity in the left brain.
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But there is no mention of increased right-side activity (although meditators themselves have often spoken of heightened awareness of immediate surroundings). This may be because meditators focus intensely on a single thing – a mantra, an image, breathing – and succeed in suppressing the fretting self on the left, but fail to make use of the liberated dreamer on the right. So rumination may be meditation plus, not only a curtailment of the nag but an encouragement of the dreamer. If I devised a suitable ritual and jargon I could make my fortune as a guru peddling Transcendental Rumination (TR).

Another possibility is that, if transcendence is accompanied by here-and-now oneness, then the reverse may also be true, and paying intense attention to the immediate environment may facilitate lift-off. This is the kind of attentiveness encouraged by writers like Joyce and Proust.

For those of an active disposition, or those who distrust anything mystical and aesthetic, there is a lower-level transcendence of self in absorption.

The American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses the term ‘flow’ to describe a deeply satisfying state of mind achieved by intense and prolonged concentration on difficult activities requiring a high level of skill.
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The experience is similar for a wide range of apparently unrelated activities, including competitive sport, mountain-climbing, professional work, playing an instrument, artistic creativity, dancing, martial arts and sex. Again the phenomenon is well known and really only a special case of happiness as by-product.

As with other methods of transcendence, this satisfaction has to be earned. Skill must first be acquired, slowly and frustratingly. There is no immediate gratification. Indeed, there may never be any. The learner may not have the aptitude or the discipline. But when the skill becomes automatic the miracle may occur – an absorption so complete that it shuts out self, place and time. Hours, even days, can go by unremarked. The self dissolves and disappears. And something strange happens. The activity seems to become not only effortless but
autonomous
– to take over, to assume control, to be running itself. So the musical instrument plays itself, the sword wields itself, the poem writes itself, the dancer does not so much dance as permit music to enter and take over the body, and the lovers do not so much make love as surrender to the vertiginous movement of the earth.

There are many paradoxes in this. Intense effort is needed to produce the sensation of effortlessness, intense consciousness to lead to unconsciousness, total control to experience the total absence of control. And only those fully in possession of the self can fully surrender it. In fact, the stronger the sense of self, the greater the rapture in escaping its tyranny.

As in meditation, the flow experience is a consequence of persistent, concentrated attention – and ‘attention’ is a key word both for Csikszentmihalyi and Zen Buddhism. The concept of flow is also familiar to Zen. Here is D.T. Suzuki, explaining how the master swordsman Takuan instructed novices: ‘Takuan’s advice is concerned with keeping the mind always in the state of ‘flowing’, for when it stops the flow is interrupted and this interruption is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of a swordsman it means death.’
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This repeated intense focus on a difficult activity is exactly what creates or enhances brain connections. And the pleasure of the flow high is so intense that it reduces the attractions of power, status and celebrity and, above all, of passive entertainment, encouraging instead a desire to experience a similar satisfaction in other activities. This is why theoretical physicists play the bongo drums.

The trick is to understand that the attention and difficulty are what bring the reward. When Csikszentmihalyi surveyed teenagers, he discovered that those with least flow activity, who watched lots of television and hung out in shopping malls, also scored lowest on all satisfaction ratings, whereas those who studied or engaged in sports scored highly on every rating – or on all except one. They believed that the mall rats and couch potatoes were having more fun, too influenced by the tyranny of cool to realize that they themselves were the blessed. This is an instance of a general rule – youth rarely realizes the value of what it has.

And how thrilling to learn, from another of Csikszentmihalyi’s surveys, that the more expensive, bulky and complex the hobby equipment, the less enjoyable the hobby. Perhaps there is a just God after all. Much more satisfying are walking and dancing, where the body is its own equipment and instrument. Walking and dancing, rhythm regular and ecstatic, the prose and poetry of the body.

The humblest flow activity, walking, is also an effective way of creating readiness for exaltation. There is a theory that bipedalism is the source of the superior human intelligence. When the human animal got up on its hind legs, the front legs became free for gesturing, which evolved into sign language and eventually speech – and this rich new verbal language massively increased brain size. Certainly, using the four limbs as pistons seems to fire up the brain.

Nietzsche, the philosopher of exaltation, was a fanatical walker. So was his arch-enemy Christ. Only the iconography shows Christ at rest; Leonardo da Vinci has him seated at the Last Supper – but a good teacher never sits. He would have been moving round with a word of reassurance here and a word of inspiration there. And most representations of the Sermon on the Mount show the customary static pose with sorrowful eyes and submissively outstretched arms. But Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film
The Gospel According to St Matthew
has Christ storming up the hill throwing freshly minted beatitudes over his shoulder to disciples scrambling, both physically and mentally, to keep up. Not the Sermon on the Mount but the Sermon on the Hoof.