Equanimity, as true happiness.
It seems like everyone is obsessed with the highly ego-centric model of happiness that is "being happy". People go to Barns and Nobles, order books from Amazon, and tire themselves over their perceived lack-of happiness in their lives. Even positive psychology is mired with the concept of happiness as an ultimate goal. A quick search on this forum will show that there's a strong bias to achieve or even maintain happiness. Yet, there is no aspect of being that is totally and wholly independent of one's situation/circumstances/state of affairs, and this is what Western thought gets wrong in my opinion.
Going off on a tangent, I believe that Confucianism is the philosophy that leads one to the sanest and equanimous society, which then leads to happiness and joy.
What are your thoughts about equanimity?
Going off on a tangent, I believe that Confucianism is the philosophy that leads one to the sanest and equanimous society, which then leads to happiness and joy.
What are your thoughts about equanimity?
Comments (49)
I have heard on the radio (Source: CKFM 102.9. 2010 plus or minus ten years) that happiness occurs when a chance event turns out to be more rewarding than expected.
In this light, and in this light only (there are other lights, I admit) the person who responds to calamity and disaster and loss and abandonment wiht a shrug on his shoulder is indeed get less negative rewarded then more; hence, their expected was "If I lose my children in burning house, I'll be devastated," but in real life they are not devasted. That's equanimity, being better than expected.
But if one trains to be equanimous, and his response is consistently such to disastrous events, then he or she probably does not experience happiness, as he has grown to expect equanimity instead of anxiety, fear, or anger.
So, in short: equanimity helps in the short run in the beginning, but hwhen it becomes routine, then it deos not generate any great ecstasy.
REMEMBER PLEASE: I based my opinion here on a tip that happiness is caused by getting better than expected results.
The word I use when I think about happiness is "peace." Buddhists talk about an end to suffering. I guess a Christian would talk about grace. I think those are in the same neighborhood as equanimity. And, yes, not the same as happiness, but as you seem to indicate, a prerequisite.
To me, happiness is taking pleasure from the world. That's why being at peace is so important - bad things are going to happen. That doesn't mean that the world is not a wonderful place. It's so neat. Fun. Funny. All those quarks swirling around, gravity waves, sex, people, corned beef sandwiches, cognitive dissonance, plaster, Robert Crumb, "Heart of Darkness," @TimeLine, natural selection, the letter "q," my friends Richard and Gail, sex, gnomes, philosophy, a galaxy far far away, pudding, me, myself, I, the word "geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung," death. Most of all, my children.
I forget, did I mention sex?
That's not right. It's acceptance, not indifference.
Quoting god must be atheist
I don't think that's right either.
I wonder how much of happiness is a matter of temperament. Some's got it and some's don't. A whole lot of people on this forum don't. Western philosophy and culture - religion - don't provide a clear route to peace, although I'm sure many would disagree. Philosophy doesn't tend to draw happy people.
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Somebody stop me please. @Baden, ban me before someone gets hurt.
Hmm, were reaching peak plasma concentrations of fermented grapes, I see.
Don't remind me of TimeLine. It was the best of times, and the worst of times.
:party:
I would happily replace neurotic worrying with equanimity, sure. But I also like things more rajasic. IOW passion is peachy, if it is focused on processes and relationships that matter to me. Even the process of creating art, for example, need not in the least involve equanimity as a rule. Sports are unfortunately not so much an issue for me these days, but there also I enjoyed really throwing myself in in ways that do not exhibit equanimity. I don't like killem competition, but competition and striving are all fine. And certainly with love, yes, peaceful moments and times are lovely. But then I want times that do not look and are not experienced as equanimity.
The reasons we get 'disturbed' by experience is because this has worked for us. We long evolved an active and affecting limbic system that means some things cause this emotional reaction and some things this. We have preferences and things we do not like. Once equanimity because THE heuristic, you are setting yourself up to treat your own self
as problematic.
you look even and accepting.
But in fact you are only accepting what is on the outside.
Inside you are waging a war against facets of yourself you cannot accept
Or you have won the war and those parts are in prisoner of war camps.
True equanimity would not look equanimous, because you would also accept your own passions, reactions, and expressive self. Buddhists and stoics tend to only accept the outside, not their insides.
Now if you tell this to a Buddhist they will often say, no, I observe my emotions and reactions and accept them.
This is like saying I accept that my baby is angry, but I do not let him move or make a sound related to that anger.
according to the news item, this is a research finding. But I can't research who did the research and wht their tools were.
You can check it out yourself: money does not make you happy, but winning money on the lottery does. Women / men don't make you happy, but falling in love does. Science / knowledge does not make you happy, but getting praise for discovering a scientific fact or writing a nice book does. ETC. A sudden influx of unexpected gain of any kind makes you happy. Your kids give you more worry and headache than pleasure, yet when you get a child, you bang your chest, "I did it!"
Quoting Coben
Quoting Coben
All the above I fully accept. With complete equanimity. In fact, I wish I had thought of saying it, and now I am sad because I had not. I should have thought of the above, for it forms one of my tenets that support my world view of the validity of causality and physicality of our existence as biological beings.
A normal person is unperturbed when things are going steady. But he is not happy; he is just not unhappy. Compared to unhappiness equanimity compares as a happy state; but compared to ecstasy, rapture, equalimity compares as a dull state. This is an opinion I can't back up with research.
Also, you can look at happiness/suffering, joy/unhappiness, pleasure/pain as part of a need/reward system. Unfulfilled needs drive you to find fulfilment, which make you happy. You are happy for a while, but it fades, and you find yourself again in a state of needing to attain happiness, normally by satisfying your one or other need. A pendulum-like progress through time. A truly equanimous person does not experience this, therefore he won't survive, at the extreme of equalimity, as no disaster, calamity, suffering affects him adversely, so he does not feel he needs to act on those, he accepts them.... and at the extreme, the person of true equalimity accepts hunger, thirst, extreme heat or cold, until he dies of starvation, dehydration, or exposure.
Mind you, he may be happy in his life that leads up to dying, and he may be happy during dying. That is the true power and logic behind the equanimous person. Does not get affected by pain, suffering, so he dies, but before he does, he is truly happy.
I donno. But none of my write here was based on research, statistics, or nuclear physics. It was all speculative, therefore invalid, rejectable, and stupid.
If you accept the above -- and you don't have to or need to, this is not scripture -- but if you do; or else if someone says, "given the above", then we can safely conclude that happiness is not caused by happiness, but happiness is actually happiness. That is, the above proves that equanimity is a state of happiness, because equanimity is a state of happiness. That is, we say we are happy when we are equanimous, therefore when we are equanimous, we are happy.
What I am trying to say is that it is an unproven, and possibly false assumption that equanimity is a state of happiness, and we can only accept that it is, if that is one of our basic premises.
Well, if they actually lost the ability to prefer or even notice any difference in experience. IOW they got no feedback at all about pain and unpleasance, then they would be handicapped and perhaps to death. But in real life they are not ignoring pleasure and pain, just not reacting to it emotionally as much as they can. So they calmly put on an extra layer, whereas someone else might blurt out 'Holy shit, that's fucking cold and run back to the house to get a better jacket.
Quoting god must be atheistI don't think most stoics and others argue that it is happiness, even happiness is something they want to be equanimous about also. I do think they think it reduces suffering, which is not quite the same thing. And also that it makes one more rational, which I doubt. Obviously in some situations it is good to remain calm, but I think that can happen anyway if one accepts ones emotions. The emotions include fear and fear can make one calm, oddly enough, if your body realizes that noise and freaking out will likely kill or harm you.
Quoting god must be atheistSteal it.
The concept of a moment in your existence where you will be truly happy is as illusionary as the concept of "the one true magic trick", and the catch is that there is none because the phrase already states that if a trick.
And the reason for you to never have to be truly happy is that you require the none happiness to understand happiness and if you know the dark there is no way that you would enjoy living in an all-white room.
1. This can be verified by research, or debunked. I demand you do the research, since you suggested this. (I am being an asshole like so many who demand me to do research on every fucking word I write.)
2. This was the basic premise of the OP. The OP's basic premise had no assumption on what most stoics and others argue abou thappiness; he was, instead, curious (or pretended to be curious) what our opinions were.
3. My objections here are worth shit, so please ignore them at will. (But not at Free Will, as that does not exist.)
I would go one step further and claim that a truly equanimic person ACTS on his own emotions, which act for him is the lack of action. He may feel hungry, thirsty, cold, but it does not affect him emotionally, or if it does, he ignores those feelings, despite the physical impulses that are present. This is what I mean by extreme equanimity.
I beleive there IS true happiness... it just does not last for very long at any time.
But hey, you have your belief, and I have mine.
And mine is not based on research, so it can be validly argued that it may or may not be a false beleif, like one in god.
Amen.
Quoting Coben
But, why? Doesn't the Buddhist have a point here? I mean, there's always some bigger fish out there. Not to sound depressive or anything, just a fact of life I suppose.
Quoting Coben
I don't know. I never got the Greek and now the inherited modern obsession with the Olympics or sport or whatnot. I usually just wallow about and eat and sleep.
Quoting Coben
This seems backward. First, one has to understand one's self to be able to engender any sort of non-trivial change. Yes?
I should state that equanimity could be even harder to achieve than happiness itself, hence why it was a term of endearment towards the Stoic sage.
I usually understand it to mean that one is living in peace with respect to other people. Yeah, there we go with "people".
I see what you did there. So, you have denied the attainment of happiness, and inverted the issue to then attain equanimity with others by not trying to be happy. This is worth contemplating over for me.
NOt sure what you mean by bigger fish.Quoting Wallows
Then that's what you like. I mean, I am certainly not going to tell someone else they should want tumult and passion and competition sometimes. If that doesn't interest you, then it doesn't.
I am responding mainly to the idea that we, as in everyone, should want equanimity and all that entails.Quoting Wallows
I agree, but in many New Age, Stoic, Buddhist environs you will be instructed to accept as an observer whatever is happening. They may or may not accept emotions, but on in the sense that they watch them, rather than letting them express, and disidentify with them.
What do you mean by "disidentify with them"?
They are not you. You train yourself to watch them as if they were something other than you. They do this with thoughts also and any phenomena. In fact we all do this now and then. I lost control of my anger. Not,I got so pissed off I showed other people that facet of me. Heck people take a lot of pills to get rid of their anger, but not so many ask for amputations and organ removal.
I think the key juncture here is that in Buddhism, they can tell themselves they are accepting emotions. IOW they notice a feeling of anger and remain equanimous in relation to it. But that anger is being diconnected from expression, action, even the subtle changing the expression of the face or tone of voice. It's just another cloud in the perceptual field.
That's a disidentifcation and a cutting off of a natural flow.
Is it natural to disidentify with one's emotions? Is it even possible?
How?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3956/on-disidentification/p1
I peeked at the other thread. Depression is a very complex phenomenon, and if we take the example of the Buddhists, we are talking about decades of discipline. Leonard Cohen, a famous Buddhist, never really managed to Buddhism away his depression.
But depression or a depressive pattern is not an emotion. It is a pattern with cognitive (thinky mind stuff) and emotional and interpersonal and location and work and family pattern, with varying forms for different people.
To see how complicated this is I truly recommend this book...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/163286830X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
We often are told to think of depression as something inside us. But it is obvious to most people not connection to pharma/psychiatry that depression is connected to our connections. The book will not give you the direct specific answer you need, but it might get you to respect the dissatisfaction you have, see some general directions to start improving things, and to stop pathologizing yourself, if you are.
The pharma model for depression and 'wrong feelings' in general is philosophically bankrupt.
I will definitely give it a read. Thanks.
The heretobyfollowing are not subject to having been researched in the works of Hume, Pythagoras and Anaxagoreas.
So you can get incredibly upset and smash the toilet seat down angrily if you break a shoe-lace; a person with aquimonity can beat a work horse cruelly if the horse laughs at him behind his back; a person can teach his pet monkey to tease and aggrevate his pet turtle to a tizz, because these are not dealings with people?
I am yanking your chain (if I achieved that, I don't know). Of course, people are involved in the equiaminity of and aquiacantamous person, but they are not the only ones being involved.
No, I am not drunk. I don't drink or use street drugs. But I do drink coffee, and it has the capacity to make me giddy.
Nah, you're fine. I've seen worse. Sobriety is one hell of a drug, if you can tolerate the high, and no comedown!
"Reality is for those who can't handle drugs." True.
"Drugs are for those who can't handle reality." True.
But what about us, my kind, who can't handle either?
Maybe... maybe I should learn how to wallow. Yep. That's the ticket.
HEY! EUREKA!!
Yes, now you see the way...
Congratulations! You are the first person in the history of Philosophy to connect smashing toilet seats with broken shoe laces. How was this crucial connection overlooked for so long?
Nobody has done the research.
This is just one more shining example that you MUST RESEARCH EVERYTHING YOU POST.
I don't quite get what you're saying here. What's an "egocentric" model versus an alternate model? But more confusing is "no aspect of being that is totally and wholly independent . . . " What are you referring to there?
So, why do people (I can't really speak for others here apart from myself) go to psychologists and psychiatrists? To feel happy, I surmise, or at the very least, to feel less unhappy (although, usually that realization is achieved after some substantial therapy). But, "being happy" strikes me as an ego-centric desire or need professed by an unhappy individual. Whereas, on the other end, actually "being happy" is held onto like a precious good like some fools gold or some such. That's the gist of my theorizing about the "egocentric model of happiness" hereabouts.
I hope this might help answer your perplexion with the other part of your post. If not, let me know if I can be more clear.
An egocentric model is where you go to a therapist to make yourself happy. An alternative model is when you go to the therapist to make the therapist happy. An alternate model is when you once go to make yourself happy, then next time to make the therapist happy, then next time yourself,then next time the therapist... etc.
I think suffering is certainly a motive,but there is something else. To be unified. To work well with oneself. To play well together. To be able to express yourself, to not sit in guilt and shame. To be out of one's own way. Yes, in general, I think this is less unhappy and happy, but I actually think the happy goal is a bad heuristic. I think it is better to find out how you want to live and what is in the way in yourself. (with the phychologist. Practicle obstacles and strategies can be learned about in other ways.)
Equanimity is a sensible goal considering the brain's chemical arsenal is not well enough equipped to produce a very sustained experience of happiness; or to put it another way, our capacity for feeling good is biologically limited and only becomes more limited with direct pursuit thereof. Besides which, the idea that we're supposed to be happy (as if it's a natural or default state) is a dangerous misconception that a cursory study of evolutionary theory should disabuse us of, making being unhappy about not being happy, or seeing such as some kind of a deficiency, doubly dangerous (particularly in terms of that stance's manipulability by the usual suspects). So, there's an ideological basis for the confusion surrounding happiness that serves a certain system and certain interests and if Confucianism or whatever religious or philosophical basis can be used to self-immunize in that respect, I'd say go for it.
Right.
Quoting Baden
What's your personal pick here? And what did you mean by the "usual suspects"? Happy pills? Drugs? In a more abstract sense, "goods" (cars, a bigger house, even food?)
I don't have a personal pick. Maybe it's just that I've come to see 'happiness' as not a particularly interesting or even coherently definable goal and have more or less dropped the concept in favour of getting on with doing the things I want to do and being grateful for having the energy and opportunity to do so (which a basic state of equanimity or stability allows for*). And when you're not self-reflecting, whether you're 'happy' or not is not an issue anyhow. You just need to make the space to not have to and that may require some initial sacrifices. Generally not of anything really valuable though.
Quoting Wallows
The usual suspects = the media, politicians, marketers etc. Purveyors of the idea that consumption of whatever commodity, material or ideological, can be an end in itself rather than a route to more of the same.
*And what allows for that is security, sustenance, and sociality. Which should be not a huge ask for most of us in the privileged West.
"To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy." ([I]Minima Moralia[/i]).
:cheer:
Some food for thought here if you haven't watched it, particularly from 2:05:00?>>
I think of a three legged dog - from my perception, I’ve never come across a three legged dog that seemed to care, acknowledge or consider that their three legs left something to be desired. Surely they are at some level aware that they have only three legs as they have adapted to life with three legs, but it seems (or I’d like very much to believe) that they do not have three legs or four or eight, or that their number of limbs differ from other dogs, they just have legs that propel them along the path they choose.
To the contrary, whenever I have a broken or damaged body part that invokes a limit, I desire a reality that does not exist where in that moment I do not have said injury because I feel that is the cause of my suffering, when in truth the desire itself is the cause. This is my attempt at explaining my conceptualisation of that which equanimity and happiness to me seem insufficient.
The goal to ‘disidentify’ with ones emotional or physical experiences as @Coben touched on seems to be a flawed goal on both a human and conscious level. The flaw on the human level has been addressed so I’ll focus on why I believe it to be so on a conscious level. On a conscious level, I believe most schools of thought agree that experience is imperative in the role of consciousness. To attempt to minimize or dampen the experience therefore, seems contrary the the concept or purpose of consciousness. I feel the more realistic path to attaining the concept which seems to be the topic of this thread is to fully accept our experiences without desire for what is not, and to fully replace judgment of our experiences with understanding.
Cool debate, never watched it despite it becoming as of late as something of a revelation.
I do like how Peterson outlined the happiness of mankind according to conservative thought to be found in duty and doing what is right at the right time and place, where happiness simply becomes a byproduct of moral and ethically guided behavior. What I do disagree on with this analysis is guiding one's behavior within this framework should or ought to be done from a perspective of what God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit may "want", which raises the typical questions you encounter within theology, about stuff like the problem of evil, etc. (responsibility) etc. (God) etc. (Faith?)
Whereas Zizek is more (Cynical?) in his professing that moral behavior (what can be described as the futile effort of the 'attainment' of happiness) is ideologically driven. But, so what?