The Meaning of Happiness. Alan Watts
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for centuries has been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East.
Because of this admission many of his contemporaries have charged Jung with mysticism and departure from strict scientific method. Such charges, however, are based on a very understandable ignorance of the true character of Oriental psychology and of those aspects of it with which Jung has been concerned. These aspects have little or no connection with metaphysical speculation and religious doctrine as such; nor have they a connection with certain sensational forms of occultism so attractive to those who lack discrimination.
Our problem is therefore this: What do Eastern and Western psychology taken together have to say about the elusive and pressing subject of human happiness? For this subject is especially the province of psychology as distinct from what we usually understand as religion, or even philosophy. Often the purpose of religion is supernatural experience and philosophy is primarily interested in Truth, and their concern with happiness, in its profoundest sense, is indirect. This indeed is yet another reason why Oriental wisdom and the psychology of the unconscious have to be taken together. It is the only profitable way of considering the collective possibilities of psychology from the East and from the West. As we have seen, Oriental wisdom is psychology rather than philosophy and theology, and the schools of Freud and Jung are the only practical forms of Western psychology which have any relation to it. Unlike the older schools of psychology their object is not simply to observe, tabulate, and comment on the mental behavior of man. On the contrary, their method is empirical and its aim is to heal and give happiness of the deepest and most abiding kind. This too may be said of Oriental psychology, for the experience or state of mind at which it aims is a conscious harmony with life and nature both in external circumstances and in oneself.
The discovery of this kind of happiness is perhaps the chief desire of man, though it is not always expressed quite in that way, for to many the word “happiness” has unfortunate associations. But I use it here because it is the only ordinary, everyday word we have to denote an oddly elusive and mysterious type of experience, the kind of experience that runs away from you the moment you begin to look for it. That highly intensified form of happiness which is spiritual experience behaves in just the same way; it is like trying to catch soap with wet fingers. Oriental psychology is particularly well experienced in this elusive art—need one call to mind the popular Chinese proverb, “Softly, softly, catchee monkey”?—and it seems necessary that in considering a problem which occupies so many of our thoughts we should call upon the psychology of East and West alike.
The elusiveness of all kinds of happiness is common knowledge, for have we not the saying, “Those who search for happiness never find it”? This is especially true of that complete kind of happiness which does not depend on external events, which belongs to the very nature of the individual and remains unaffected by suffering. It persists through both joy and sorrow, being a spiritual undertone which results from the positive and wholehearted acceptance of life in all its aspects. This acceptance, known under many names in the psychology of religion, comes to pass when the individual, the ego, surrenders the conceit of personal freedom and power, realizing that it depends absolutely on that inner, unknown universe which is nature in the human soul. It only exists as an ego to fulfill the purpose of that universe—a purpose which, in one sense, it cannot help serving, but which, in another sense, it does not appreciate when laboring under the conceit of personal freedom and self-sufficiency. When, however, that conceit is abandoned an altogether new and more powerful freedom is known—the freedom of union or harmony between man and life.2 But “freedom,” “union,” “harmony,” “life”—these are vague terms, and the things they signify seem to be as elusive as the terms are vague. To them also applies the old truism that those who search for them do not find them. Such ideas are the commonplaces of popular philosophy and psychology, but in this instance the commonplace is but the familiar entrance to a largely unknown and labyrinthine territory of the spirit. Less than a hair’s breadth divides the self-evident from the subtle, and the danger is that in ignoring something that lies right at our feet we may trip over it through overmuch concentration upon remote parts of the horizon or the heavens.
The very saying, “Those who search for happiness never find it,” raises a host of complications for it will be asked, “If happiness is not found by searching, how is it found?” to which might be added, “If happiness is found by not-searching, or by searching for something else, is not this merely an indirect way of searching for happiness, as it were by a trick or deceit? Surely the important thing is not the means employed, direct or indirect, but the motive for employing them.” There is still another preliminary question that might be asked on this point: “Would it not be true to say that one who does not search for happiness, either directly or indirectly, already has it? Therefore does not the saying that those who search for it do not find it amount to this: those who have it do not search for it; those who do not have it search for it, and thus cannot find it?” In other words, happiness is something which you either have or haven’t, and if you haven’t there is nothing you can do about it except wait for the Grace of God which is something quite outside your control.
Whatever the precise answers to these questions it is generally agreed that happiness cannot be had by any form of direct striving. Like your shadow, the more you chase it, the more it runs away. It is not surprising therefore that in both ancient religions and modern psychology man is advised to relax his self-assertive efforts and acquire a certain passivity of soul, encouraging thereby a state of receptivity or acceptance, which Christianity would describe as easing up the tumult of self-will in order that it may give place to the will of God. It is as if man were to empty his soul in order that the gifts of the spirit might pour in, on the principle that nature abhors a vacuum. But whether it is called the giving up of self, submitting to the will of God, accepting life, releasing the tension of striving for happiness or letting oneself go with the stream of life, the essential principle is one of relaxation.
“Relaxation” is a word often heard nowadays—advertisers; teachers of dancing, music, swimming, physical culture, riding, drama, and business efficiency; doctors; psychologists; and preachers all use it in their varying subjects, its popularity being increased by the nervous tension of modern life. It may be used to mean anything from reading a mystery story or the secret of a ballerina’s art to the way of life of a sage whose soul is in perfect harmony with the universe. For, like “happiness,” it is a word of many meanings and is used quite as casually, and this is not the only similarity between the two. Relaxation is something just as elusive as happiness; it is something which no amount of self-assertive striving can obtain, for as it is in a certain sense the absence of effort, any effort to achieve it is self-defeating.
These two words have many other equivalents, some of them much more high-sounding, and in writing and conversation men have exalted them to the skies and dragged them in the mud. There need, however, be no apology for using them, for they belong to common, everyday speech and even if countless associations make their meaning confused, confusion is worse confounded by introducing a new, exotic jargon when familiar and accepted words already exist. Even if they call too strongly to mind trite little mottoes on greeting cards or advertisements for someone’s cigarettes or patent medicine, such associations can be overshadowed by the knowledge that these same things, under perhaps different names, have been the chief preoccupation of the greatest minds on earth. Other words have had a like fortune, notably the word “love,” which men have made to mean everything from brute lust to God Himself. Such words may drop loosely from our tongues as if the things which they signify were as common as hats and houses; in a few senses they are, but in others they are things which, however common in our dreams, are little known and seldom found in reality. Often they seem quite close to us, as if we should come upon them round the next bend of the road, but this is their special peculiarity. In this they are like a carrot dangled before a donkey’s nose from a stick attached to his collar: if he chases it, it runs ahead of him; if he stands still, it remains where it is, so near and yet so far.
The fact that happiness is associated with relaxation does not mean that it is impossible to be happy in the midst of strenuous effort, for to be truly effective great effort must, as it were, revolve upon a steady, unmoving center. The problem before us is how to find such a center of relaxed balance and poise in man’s individual life—a center whose happiness is unshaken by the whirl that