“Once upon a time there was a married couple who lived in a beautiful house, and had lots of the material things that many of us think are important to contentment. They were not contented, however. What with one little misunderstanding and another, the situation grew worse.” (ODAT, 13 September)
So much for materialism. Unhappiness is a position I adopt,
then project onto the situation. Happiness is the realisation that everything
comes from God and is good, either obvious or concealed.
The crowning folly of the world is the premise that ideal
circumstances produce happiness, and so their imperilment, compromise, or ruin
are robust and reasonable grounds to be unhappy. In almost all cases of
unhappiness (overwhelming physical pain being one exception, but it’s amazing
how some souls can sail that strait without foundering), it is not actual
hardship that is causing the unhappiness but the concept of what is going on.
Hurt feelings due to others’ behaviour are a jolly good example of this. A
client stops asking me for work or Gavin stops talking to me and, without any
hardship actually being imposed, I’m like a dog with a bone: ‘Why, why, why, oh
why?!’ I should say it in Greek. That would lend it the proper tone of tragedy.
The world appears to be a venue for the theatrical
production of self to play out, and, as in the story of the princess and the
pea, the game is stacked because no array of circumstances is ever good enough
for self. Self’s existential position is this: ‘I’m unhappy and it’s their
fault, your fault’. The ‘your’ could be anything: a person, an institution, an
idea, the way of the world, a snippet of news, God, even one’s own ‘genetics’
or star sign, even one’s own ‘brain chemistry’ (if that’s the case, perhaps it’s
my brain chemistry that is forcing me to blame my own brain chemistry):
anything, really anything I’ve used to avoid taking responsibility for my state
of mind, for my values, and for how I use those values to assess good and bad,
right and wrong, safe and dangerous. Nothing and no one—even brain chemistry—forces
me to be atheist or God-trusting, a materialist, a transcendentalist, a religionist,
or simply someone who identifies as spirit, and this setting alone will change
all of the others, flip all of the counters, reverse the current running through
every device.
Rather than fighting to have my own way and being
disconsolate, distraught, or simply cellularly uneasy because the scimitar-brandishing
hordes are about to gallop over the presently tranquil horizon and savage the
sheep, I would be better off with this approach:
The unhappiness I experience is really the price I’m
apparently willing to pay for having a concept of self that needs to be looked
after and given sufficient playthings of money, power, image, comfort, and
pleasure. To forego the unhappiness, I need to forego the self, to be
completely stripped of it, to have it set aside entirely, to cease to see
myself as existing except as an operative consciousness, to view the roles I
play and their various circumstances merely as detached garb, not substance.
Then what? Get on with being present, guided by God. It is only at that point that things start to become really interesting. Then I realise that God really is behind everything, and the play that is playing out in the world is simply the somnolescent pageant of a folk who believe in the cavalcade of ‘events’ as the only solid reality. God created the children, the children are playing a game, and God is waiting to see if they’ll realise it’s a game. Firstly, I can watch rather than join the parade to the three-ring circus; secondly, there’s a remarkable amount to enjoy that has nothing to do with this foppery. Kempff’s Bach transcriptions. German Christmas biscuits. Woods.