The Question of Happiness

[A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2013 edition of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]

Self-Actualization, Spiritual Enlightenment and Maslow’s

Hierarchy of Needs 

Sixty years ago, Abraham Maslow broke ground in the field of psychology when his “Hierarchy of Needs” suggested that there was a stepwise approach to realizing well-being. But does it conflict with the spiritual perspective that the “kingdom of heaven” is already within us?

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news.  The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be!  How much you can love!  What you can accomplish!  And what your potential is! 

~ Anne Frank

“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential – these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.”

 ~ Confucius

Psychologist Abraham Maslow wanted to know what happiness was.  Why do some people have it and others don’t? 

For Maslow, happiness is not a simple response to a favorable arrangement of external conditions.  Instead, it is innate and emerges as a by-product of a fully realized life.  Like Aristotle and Confucius before him, Maslow argued that our latent happiness occurs only when we cultivate and manifest our highest potential.  He wrapped his findings into a pyramid-shaped package known as Maslow’s hierarchy. 

            Maslow’s central claim is that human beings have five fundamental sets of needs stacked into a hierarchy.  We all begin at the bottom and work our way up – each tier of needs taking its turn in dominating our thoughts.  Many spiritual traditions teach that we become what we think about – that our thoughts construct our lives.  It’s only natural then that until each set of needs is satisfied, it’s difficult or impossible to think about anything else.  The needs of our current tier eclipse all other concerns.  Only when a set of needs is met does our attention turn to the next stage of development.   

At the base of the pyramid are the physiological needs required for survival – air, water, food, sex and sleep.  These needs form the foundation of the hierarchy. 

When these needs are met, the second stage of needs arise.  Here the focus shifts to security – keeping ourselves and our families safe. 

            With the first two sets of needs satisfied, a longing for deep and meaningful relationships emerges becoming the focus of our lives.  Our thoughts turn to love and intimacy as we cultivate authentic relationships with our friends, life partners and families. 

            The fourth need is healthy self-esteem.  Here we long to thrive in the world of achievement and accomplishment.  Our self confidence expands as our skills increase.  Proficiency blossoms into mastery.  We enjoy the honor and recognition of our peers taking our rightful place in a mutually supportive community. 

With the first four needs satisfied, the fifth and final need arises, the need for self-actualization.  Despite the high quality of our lives there is unfinished business.  Our deepest and most individually specific potentialities remain unrealized.  Here we heed the call to give expression to our innate excellence, performing the work that is uniquely ours to do.  We become self-authorizing, no longer beholden to the crowd for approval or praise.  We freely pursue the good and become autonomous moral agents, guided by deeply held principles, not group norms or the dictates of traditional authority.  We, in a word, become happy.  For Maslow, self-actualization is our highest purpose, the culmination of all the earlier stages of our development. 

Every human being carries within them this deep need for self-actualization.  Until this need is met, we will always feel vaguely restless, dissatisfied and incomplete.   As the Afghani saying goes, “What a shame, to die like a pomegranate with all of one’s seeds still locked up inside.” 

            By placing these needs in a hierarchy, Maslow makes physiological and social well-being a necessary precondition for self-actualization.  But is that true?  Might it be possible to achieve self-actualization while basic survival, security or love needs remain unsatisfied? 

             If, as many spiritual traditions claim, the kingdom of heaven is within us, what difference does it make if we’re rich or poor, loved or lonely, skillful or incompetent?  Are we not to seek first the kingdom and all else will be given to us?  Do we not find many examples of people in poverty or other hardships who nevertheless possess a remarkable measure of spiritual maturity?  If we put self-realization first, would that not re-order and re-cast all of our other so-called needs?

Two competing portraits emerge.  First, it seems reasonable to assert, with Maslow, that basic survival comes before the cultivation of our higher sensibilities.  If you have no air to breath or water to drink, it’s doubtful that spiritual growth would be your first order of business.  And until fundamental safety and security are assured, the pursuit of self-actualization seems a luxury we can ill afford.

Yet there are times when the indomitable human spirit shines brightest in times of crisis.  In the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps, Victor Frankl noted that the prisoners who chose to find meaning did.  Through sheer will power human beings can transcend the inhumanity of their conditions.

Still, it seems cavalier to claim from the safety and comfort of our middle class existence that anyone, anywhere, no matter the conditions of their lives, can realize self-actualization.  Sold into a brothel at the age of nine, becoming a heroin addict at the age of twelve and contracting AIDS at fourteen – it’s absurdly cruel to suggest that none of this impedes the fulfillment of a young girl’s potential.

In the abstract we may argue that material things don’t matter – a position especially easy to take when we already possess them.  But few would argue that the basic requirements of life are inconsequential to human happiness.  Seeds may be storehouses of great potential, but without fertile soil and other external conditions conducive to cultivation, can fruition occur?  And herein lays the confusion.  By self-actualization Maslow did not mean spiritual enlightenment or awakening – he meant the realization of one’s own specific potential.  One cannot become a masterful concert pianist without access to a piano.  One cannot become a writer of profoundly important world literature if one has not had the privilege of an education.  And neither of those things is possible in a war-torn ghetto where families are ripped apart and violent death dogs your every step.

So I guess it just depends on what you mean by happiness.  For Maslow happiness is a by-product of self-actualization and self-actualization is not possible without certain specific environmental and psychological preconditions.  For others happiness is defined as a spiritual condition unmoored from the external world. 

As in the following Zen story, our spiritual traditions tend to emphasize this second perspective.

  Master Ryokan lived alone in a tiny hut.  One night while he was away a thief snuck into the hut only to discover that there was nothing in it worth stealing.  Ryokan returned home and caught the thief warming his hands by the fire.

            “You have come such a long way to visit me,” said Ryokan, “and you should not return empty handed.  Here, please take my clothes as a gift.”

            The thief looked bewildered, took the clothes and slunk away.

            Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. 

            “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

            In this Buddhist portrait of enlightened consciousness we certainly recognize a highly evolved being.  As in the teachings of Jesus, Ryokan’s residency in the kingdom of heaven is not dependent on the satiation of lower order needs.   Still, at its core, Buddhist spirituality seeks sublimation into oneness, not the actualization of one’s individual uniqueness.  We can imagine Ryokan enlightened, but we cannot imagine him fulfilled in the western sense.  Self-actualization requires a self.  With the eradication of the ego, there is no one left to fulfill.

            It turns out that self-actualization and spiritual enlightenment are two different goals with distinct pathways and methodologies.  Self-actualization requires the realization of our uniquely individual potentialities while spiritual enlightenment transcends individuality and draws us into a unitive state with the divine. 

            If by happiness we mean our own individual happiness, then Maslow offers a compelling path.  If by happiness we mean transcendence of the separate self and immersion into the One, then the world and its woes offer little resistance – in fact our hardships might even be a catalyst hastening our spiritual ascendency.   

Afterword: The Human Potential Movement

Maslow’s hierarchy is best understood in the context of the human potential movement, a label given to the work of a disparate group of twentieth century psychologists, writers and teachers like Aldous Huxley, Carl Rogers, Victor Frankl, Alan Watts, Michael Murphy, Werner Erhard, Jean Houston and Anthony Robbins, among others. 

In the seventies Erhard was best known as the founder of EST, (Erhard Seminars Training), an influential educational platform with ideological links to Scientology that now goes by the name Landmark Education. 

Murphy founded the Esalen Institute, a Big Sur bastion of the consciousness cognoscenti, hosting seminars by the likes of Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda and Deepak Chopra.  Another frequent presence at Esalen was Abraham Maslow. 

Like other leaders of the human potential movement, Erhard and Murphy both worked hard to synthesize the insights of eastern spirituality and western psychology into a new understanding of humanity’s capacity to steer its own way out of ignorance and toward liberation.  Given the very different portraits of human nature in eastern and western philosophy, such a synthesis may not be possible.  In the west we are forever separate entities in relationship with a larger reality.  In the east we are that larger reality and our perceived individuality is one of the many illusions to be overcome. 

Still, what aligns Maslow with these other luminaries is their assertion that human beings, both collectively and individually, possess a largely untapped ability to lift themselves out of ignorance and claim their birthright as fully realized beings.  This portrait of conscious evolution – from the pursuit of basic needs to self-actualization – puts Maslow’s hierarchy front and center in the human potential movement.

Losing Weight

         Losing weight is an American obsession. It fuels the publishing industry, drives reality TV and forms the bulk of our water cooler conversations. But how does it really work? What finally spurs us to action?

         Sometimes it’s a medical diagnosis – high cholesterol, high blood sugar and reduced kidney function. You’re tired all the time, a simmering anger and depression plagues your ever step, and you’re sick of it. Even some of your XXL shirts don’t fit anymore. You can’t breathe and cut your toe nails at the same time.  You stopped tucking in your shirts years ago. You spend as little time as possible naked. Then it hits you – you’ve got the American Disease. You’re fat.

         It takes years to get fat. You have to really work at it. First, stop moving. Then, eat way more than you need, and make sure the food you eat is composed of overly-processed fat, carbohydrates and sugar. When in doubt, deep fry.

         Then tell yourself that you prefer this kind of food. You need it. It makes you happy. And all other manner of lies.

         All this was happening to me. It was time to change. I’d tasted freedom before – in decades past I’d quit cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. I knew how to let things go. But my work wasn’t done. Food was my final frontier.

         My decision to lose weight was a child of many mothers. One was my doctor at Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Mikus. He watched me slip further and further away from the ideal. Like any good teacher, he matched the lesson to the student. He knew I’d take a rather intellectual approach to the whole thing so he suggested a couple of books by Michael Pollan, Food Rules and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Then I watched some documentaries, Food, Inc. and King Corn. My reeducation had begun. Like most Americans, I had no idea where my food came from or what it even was – and more importantly, why it was killing me. Dr. Mikus and Michael Pollan became my gurus. But I still wasn’t free.

         I’ve been a member of 24 Hour Fitness for fifteen years. I’d been a gym dabbler, going through periods of total commitment and even longer periods of total absence. Something was missing.

         The final straw was my nephrologist. I didn’t even know what a nephrologist was. Now I had one. There were sudden concerns about my kidney function.  After he read my labs he sent me an email. The subject header read, “Moderate Kidney Disease, Chronic.” He kept saying it’s not as bad as it sounds. Good, because it sounds terrible.

         The good news – it was reversible. All I had to do was, well, everything.

         I needed help. I needed structure. I needed a map. I needed a team. As with any recovery process, the fastest way to fail is to white knuckle it alone.  The wise words of my friend Anne Day kept sounding in my ear, “Allow it to be easy.”

         I Googled Medifast and made an appointment. I sat down with Coleen and Tran at the Mission Valley center. We did a thorough body analysis and wrote a plan – three months to lose twenty five pounds, then a year of follow-up counseling. Eating five small meals and drinking a half gallon of water a day. Making sure the nutritional balance was right, and geared toward fat burning. I don’t really understand it – it’s science. I’m more of an art guy. But I trusted my growing team of advisors and surrendered to their superior knowledge.

         The results have been startling. In the first three weeks I lost fifteen pounds, most of the way toward my goal. Suddenly I can breathe and cut my toenails at the same time again.

         Another important voice in my Greek chorus of cheerleaders was Louise Hay and her classic book You Can Heal Your Life. The undisputed queen of New Age optimism, Hay offers a compelling portrait of New Thought claims with deep roots in the world’s ancient wisdom traditions, namely, that our life is a product of our thoughts. I immediately typed several of her affirmations on a note in my iPhone and read them out loud every day. My favorite one is, “I nourish myself with spiritual food and I am satisfied and free.” When you say that to yourself everyday something weird happens – it becomes true. Now I can drive by In-N-Out and Chipotle without even a ripple of craving. Doughnuts have become invisible. The smell of pizza in the Costco Food Court no longer sends me on a downward spiral of longing and loathing.

         A few weeks ago I posted something on Facebook about an annoying moment at the gym. The woman on the elliptical machine next to me was talking so loud on her phone that I couldn’t focus on the music blaring out of my iPod’s ear buds. All I could hear was her. Tim Flannery, multiple World Series winning third base coach for the San Francisco Giants and musical friend, commented on my thread. “Turn off the music and concentrate on running and getting stronger.” I typed that into my iPhone too, immediately appointing Tim as my honorary personal trainer. When a world champion athlete and professional coach gives you free advice, you take it. For years my central focus at the gym was my iTunes playlist – Son Volt, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and the like. Now I leave my iPod at home. I run. I focus on my breathing. I feel myself getting stronger.

         Then other voices joined the chorus. Magazine articles from the New Yorker, Shambhala Sun and Unity Magazine crossed my path. It’s as if the universe were conspiring for my success. Wherever I turned I kept getting the message that weight loss fails if it comes from a place of self-loathing. The foundation of any successful health-restoration plan has to be a deep sense of self-respect and self-love. You can’t go to the gym thinking I’m mad at myself, I’ve got to lose weight, who I am now is wrong and bad and I have to change. You’ve got to go to the gym thinking, I’m so excited about the prospect of liberating the real me from years of neglect, I am willing to do whatever it takes to become who I really am by letting go of everything and anything that doesn’t serve my highest good. Real weight loss can never be grounded in a negative body image. Something far more primal and fundamental is at stake. Your body is a miracle of flesh, bone, muscle, sinew, ligament, fluid, chemicals, electricity and spirit. Your well-being depends on its optimal functioning. In my case, there is a lean, mean, vibrant, energetic man somewhere under this fat suit. And he wants to come out and play.

         They call it weight loss. But that’s just a by-product. What you’re really losing is a mistaken worldview, a battery of delusional notions that conspire against your highest good, a grim and toxic narrative that binds you to a slowly suicidal path. When you lose weight, what you’re really losing is a mistaken notion of where your joy lies. This is a story about mental emancipation, not physical transformation. When we re-invent and re-imagine our relationship with food and with our body, we are virtually reborn. Spiritual nourishment is so much more delicious than recreational eating. Food is medicine, a sacred connection to the embodied energy of the cosmos, not cheap entertainment. When you come to see food as it really is, you come to see yourself as you really are. Then your destructive habits drop away one by one and you begin to respect yourself. You experience an abundance of joy no plate could ever hold. And you come to rest in the knowledge that letting go is the only way to get everything you really want. 

Transience

“You can’t step in the same river twice.” ~ Heraclitus

         This just in from the Department of the Painfully Obvious: everything changes.

         The transient nature of life puts us in a precarious position.  Lulled into complacency by the apparent solidity of the world, again and again we are shocked, shocked I say, by life’s sudden transitions – the terrible phone call, the cancer diagnosis, the death of a friend.  Like Charlie Brown we fervently believe that this time Lucy will hold the football in place.  But every time we go to kick it, it isn’t there.

         Intellectually we know that everything born dies, every day turns to night and every song fades into silence.  But like a sharp pain this awareness is dulled by the narcosis of forgetfulness.  Like nodding drunkards we fall over and over into the unconscious illusion that all of this will last, that we have more time, that there is always tomorrow.  Actually, there isn’t.

         There is only now.

         And when you reach out to grab it, even it is gone, replaced by another now moment.  That’s why grasping is so futile.  There is nothing to grasp.

         In Buddhism this fundamental fact is known as anitya or impermanence.  But don’t take Buddha’s word for it.  Life itself provides us with an ever-growing mound of incontrovertible evidence.

         If one follows this reasonable premise to its logical conclusion, we arrive at another core Buddhist teaching, shunyata.  Shunyata is usually translated as “emptiness” or “the void,” but those approximations distort as much as they reveal.

         What shunyata actually conveys is the fundamentally indefinable nature of reality.  Whatever all of this is, it is beyond all concepts and cannot be turned into a thought, let alone a word.  Shunyata is the field of pure potentiality out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return.  Yet shunyata itself remains ever formless.  So in that sense it is empty of fixed forms.  But it is most definitely not nothing.

         Shunyata is like a clear sky and things are like clouds.  Clouds arise and take form, last a while, then disperse, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly.  This is the nature of all things.  As he lay down to die, the Buddha left his students with one last thought.  It was something he had said many times before, but given the situation, he thought they ought to hear it one last time.  “Remember this,” he said, “all forms arise and all forms fade.” 

         Knowing this enables us to navigate the strange and beautiful arcs of our lives with a modicum of dignity and joy, knowing that we don’t own any of it, it is all borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning.  Even in the face of the transience of all things it would be wrong to conclude that nothing matters – quite the contrary.  Everything matters, and more than you ever thought possible.

         Every fleeting moment has a magical quality, a sacred ordinariness that we mostly miss, caught as we often are in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.  Only when we come back to this now moment do we tap into the real. 

         There is no such thing as the past.  What we call the past is just a thought, a memory of a previous event, captured and pinned like a dead butterfly on a cork board.  Time spent wallowing in the past is time stolen from the now. 

         The future is even less real than the past because it hasn’t even happened yet.  It’s just speculation and fantasy.  Dwelling in the future, whether in pleasant fantasy or torturous worry, is also time stolen from the now.

         We cannot change the past.  It is forever out of reach.  The future is equally elusive and beyond our grasp.  What we call the past or the future is only a thought and thoughts by their very nature exist only in the now.  We are only and forever rooted in the now.  Now is the only place we will ever be.  This is where we think, act, feel, love, share, and have our being.  And yet most of us spend very little time here, caught forever in thoughts of the past or the future.

         Buddhist practice seeks to draw us out of our thought-world and back into an immediate awareness of our authentic nature.  But what is it going to take to get us out of our head and back into our heart?

         Meditation, devotion, prayer, service, loving-kindness, empathy, compassion – these are the core practices of all spiritual traditions.  As the Tibetan saying goes, “Want to go to hell?  Think of yourself.  Want to go to heaven?  Think of others.” 

         Before this kind of advanced practice can really take root – it takes great courage, stamina and habituation to truly be compassionate – a good way to jump-start your road to spiritual recovery is to get out in nature.  It’s difficult to stay stuck in your head when you’re walking across fallow grassland in a cold winter wind under a deep blue sky with a murder of crows swirling around you in Van Gogh spirals, the smell of rain on distant mountains awakening ancient bonds nearly forgotten in the discordant isolation of city life.  For one blessed moment you are pulled out of your precious thought-stream and suddenly find yourself standing still with both feet on the ground at the center of the universe and everything is turning in one endless web of interconnected being.  There is no path, there are no crows, there is no you – there is only the achingly beautiful totality, all of it shimmering with infinite significance, all of it radiant with loving-kindness.

         Another good way to begin awakening is through music.  Of all the art forms music most plainly reminds us of the fundamental emptiness of reality.  It’s invisible and ungraspable.  It exists only in this now moment.  We do not control it.  We experience it fully only to the extent that we are able to come out of our thoughts and enter the present, allowing its myriad waves to wash over us and rock us gently into sweet surrender.  Music, all music, is about seduction.  It pursues us until we relent.  And when we do, we are rewarded with reverence and communion – reverence for the sacred nature of all that is and communion with our own unity with the sacred.  In the depths of music the secret of our infinite value is revealed, not as a thought, but as a direct, immediate experience that transcends thought.  This is why we listen to our favorite music over and over again.  We long for that union, that affirmation of our deep and abiding significance, our ultimate oneness with the source.  The harmonies and rhythms of music wordlessly replicate the intricacies and nuances of reality itself, and in this reproduction we behold a mirror in which we can better see ourselves.

             When things change, and they will – when those we love are taken from us, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly and without warning, when we find ourselves all alone in a field with nothing but the wind to hold onto, we are drawn into a powerful and liberating awareness.  We see through our tears that no matter what there is an unbroken light, an unchanging love that binds it all together, despite the apparent transience.

Drunk on Teachings

A version of this article first appeared in the A to Zen column in the March/April 2013 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise.   Instead, seek what they sought.”

                                                                                    – Matsuo Basho

In a famous scene in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus challenges his disciples with a pop quiz. “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like,” he said.

Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a just messenger.”

Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”

“I am not your teacher,” said Jesus.  “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

Then Jesus pulled Thomas aside and whispered three sayings to him in secret.  When Thomas returned to the other disciples they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?”

“If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you.”

Not a pretty picture.  But an important one.

With one simple question, Zen Master Jesus was able to discern something vitally important about his students.  Simon Peter and Matthew were all too willing to label Jesus and reduce him to a definition.  Only Thomas’s agnosticism articulated the deeper truth of Jesus’ ineffability. 

We will never know the three sayings that Jesus spoke to his star pupil.  But that’s not the point.  The point is Thomas’s readiness to receive them.  In fact, our hunger to know those three sayings plainly demonstrates our attachment to crude definitions and pat answers.  We say we don’t like dogma, but we really do – when it’s our dogma.

To go one step further, is Jesus suggesting that our slavish attachment to concepts and doctrines, no matter how sacred, is a barrier to our experience of God?  Although we risk the wrath of those who hold more traditional Christian notions of the unique divinity of Christ, our willingness to engage with this question is ultimately a sign of hope.  Jesus himself, in no uncertain terms, openly ridicules his disciple’s devotional attachment to Jesus the person.  Simon Peter and Matthew (and many among us) are suspended at the level of personality-worship and fail to see through the façade.  As Joseph Campbell points out, every image of God is a mask.  The masks of God serve a dual purpose.  Initially they draw our attention toward God, but in the end they hide God from us.  The final barrier between us and God is the mask that we have created.  If you want to know God, you must forget everything you know about God.  Our cherished idea of God is the last mask that must be ripped away.

By his own words, Jesus is not the source of the “bubbling spring”, he is simply tending it.  We drink a little truth and like drunks we get loud and proud and want to tell everyone we know all of our beautiful theories.  As usual, Jesus hits on just the right metaphor.

In psychotherapy this phenomenon is known as transference.  As we experience increasing well-being under the expert guidance of a skilled therapist, we mistakenly transfer those good feelings onto the person helping us.  Every therapist, guru, minister, mentor and teacher has had to thwart the loving but misguided devotions of grateful disciples.  We fall in love with the messenger and miss the message.  This mistake blinds us to the reality that the joy and freedom we feel is welling up from within us.  The teacher is merely “tending the spring” of which each of us is a channel.  In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s image, we are each a fountain in a beautiful garden, unaware that we are all drawing from the same well.  In the cold, sober light of morning, in this beautiful garden, let us realize our oneness with the divine beyond the limitations of all teachings.