Happiness can be Found Even in the Darkest Places

Happiness can be found even in the darkest places. This statement is absolutely true, purely because of one simple fact about happiness: Happiness is not a result of the world around us; it is the result of our subjective appraisal of the world.

I will give an argument for this by first looking at the question; how do we suffer?

I am going to answer this question in a slightly round about fashion. Firstly I want to make it clear that, existentially speaking, we are nothing other than our attention. We are the lookers that sit behind our eyes. Our attention is our awareness, that through which we apprehend the world. We become aware of, and apprehend whatever it is that we lay our attention upon. We are like a “focused beam of attention” shining out on the world. If you were to find you, you would have to lay hold of that thing which is aware, that thing which apprehends the world as being such and such, or so and so.

As Etsko Schuitema tells us, the thing that we have to understand about attention is that it is “value laden”. Attention functions by pulling things into relief. In order for me to apprehend a tree I must “pull” the tree into the foreground and push everything that is not the tree into the background, which includes all the stuff we are no longer aware of. This is necessarily so; if our attention did not function in this way then the world would be presented to us as an un-intelligible mush. There would be no separation between what is the tree and what is not the tree, and so I could not apprehend the tree.

Attention is guided.

The process of pulling things into relief and allowing others to fade into the background is a guided process. It is guided by our intention, i.e. it is guided by our expectations and what we value. Put simply, we pay attention to what we find important. Our attention will pull the things we find important into the foreground and push the rest into the mush of the background.

In this “guidance” lies the root of our suffering. The very fact that you are viscerally aware of something that you find insufferable shows that there is some value judgement you are making that causes it. There some expectation that you have of the world that is not getting met. We must understand that our suffering says less about the world than it does about us. We are conditioned creatures, and our conditioning causes our suffering.

We are the architects of our own suffering.

So you find the dryness insufferable and you get angry at the world for the drought it has imposed on you? Well what does that say about the world? Nothing! What does it say about you? That you are an individual who deems dryness to be bad. The very fact that you are aware of the dryness to be able to suffer it already says something about you. If you were as happy with dryness as you were with wetness, if you did not have this expectation that the environment such be humid and temperate, then the dryness would not lay such a visceral claim on your attention.

“Well what about the person who always treats me with disrespect, as though I am less than human?” Well, the fact that you are aware that the person is disrespecting you shows that you deem yourself important enough to be respected. It shows that you have the expectation that others treat you with respect. If you were to give up that sense of self-importance then you would not even notice his action of disrespect, you would pay it no mind.

We see then that our conditioning causes our suffering. If we want to end the suffering and find relief, we have to turn our attention to our conditioning. Ask yourself, what expectation do I have that is causing me to be unhappy? The control does not lay in changing the world to suit our expectations. Rather it lies in changing our expectations to suit the world. This is the case no matter how dark and die our circumstances appear to us to be.

If you are surrounded by things that you find insufferable, then the quickest cure is to the find the root in your intent, the expectations that are shaping your attention such that it cannot escape the insufferable stimulus. Once you have found the expectation and let go of it, you will instantly find ease from the suffering and happiness even in the darkest place.

The world is never a complete morass of unpleasant stimulus. In fact no stimulus is in itself unpleasant. It is us who interpret stimuli and make them unpleasant. No matter how dark the situation, there will always be something to savour, so long as you can wrestle your attention away from the thing that you find insufferable, by releasing your expectation that the world should be like this or like that.