Happiness: The Mind’s Bottom Line

In the final analysis, the hope of every person is simply peace of mind.

— The Dalai Lama

Most of us have become so focused on what it is we think we want, we have forgotten what it is we are really seeking. We seldom ask ourselves “What is it we really want?” When we go deeply into this question we find a common theme behind all our desires. We want to feel better. We may give this inner feeling various different names — joy, happiness, inner peace, satisfaction, fulfillment, bliss, contentment, ease, well-being — but however we describe the quality of mind we seek, the underlying motivation is the same. We are looking to avoid pain and suffering, and find a more enjoyable state of consciousness.

This is completely natural, and is as true for every other sentient being on this planet as it is for us. It is the organism’s way of monitoring how it is doing in life. If there is something amiss — if we need food, for instance — we feel hungry, which is usually an uncomfortable experience. We don’t feel good and so, quite naturally, we look for something will relieve our suffering — in this case food. Having eaten we feel better; our lives are in balance again.

This is one thing that unites us all; we all want to reduce our suffering and find a more comfortable, satisfying state of mind.

I may decide to change jobs because I believe I will be happier. I may choose to play tennis with a friend because I expect to get some pleasure from the game, some good feelings from the exercise, and some satisfaction from winning — or perhaps from seeing my friend win. I may take up hang-gliding because I find the challenge enjoyable — or because I get a kick from the release of adrenaline. I may spend time writing a book, foregoing other pleasures, because I gain satisfaction from following my inner drive. If my mind wanders into daydreams, it is probably because they are more entertaining than the task at hand. And I may meditate to feel more at peace within myself.

However, although we may all be looking for a more fulfilling state of mind, our search is not always successful. Sometimes, through short-sightedness or factors beyond our control, we do not achieve our objectives. At other times we may well get the things we desire only to find they have not made us any happier; they may even have led us to suffer more. How many of us have started a new job, a new course of study, or a new relationship, believing it will make them happy, only to discover later they were happier the way things were?

Nor is it always immediate gratification that we are after. We may not enjoy visiting the dentist, but we go in the hope that life will be more enjoyable later. At other times we may worry about the future, creating much discomfort for ourselves, because we unconsciously assume that our worrying will help us avoid future sources of discomfort.

The same principle lies behind our more altruistic actions. We may give up all sense of personal gain and devote time to helping others feel better, perhaps putting ourselves to considerable inconvenience or hardship. But we do it because at some deeper level we feel better for it.

Even the masochist who sets out to cause himself pain does so because he gets pleasure from it — or imagines he will.

A more pleasant state of consciousness is the mind’s bottom line. It is the fundamental criterion by which, consciously or unconsciously, we make our decisions.

Trying to discourage this drive is to miss the point of life. Our error lies not in seeking inner peace, fulfillment, happiness or joy, but in the ways we set about finding it. Our cultural conditioning has trapped us in a materialist mindset — a meme that says if we are not happy then something in the world around us needs to change.

This is the “virus” that has infected our minds. This is the bug in our thinking that lies at the root of our malignant attitudes and behaviors.

I am God

To many, the statement “I am God” sounds ridiculous. God is not a human being, but the supreme deity, the almighty, eternal creator. How can any lowly human being claim that he or she is God? To those of a more religious disposition, the statement may sound heretical, if not blasphemous. When the fourteenth-century Christian priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that “God and I are One,” he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to “recant everything that he had falsely taught.” Not all were so lucky. The tenth-century Islamic mystic al-Hallãj was crucified for using language that claimed an identity with God.

To those who do not believe in God at all, such statements are meaningless, the symptoms of some delusion or pathology. They might have been tolerable a couple of hundred years ago, but not in the modern scientific era, where God seems a totally unnecessary concept. Science has looked out into deep space, across the breadth of creation to the edges of the universe. It has looked back in “deep time” to the beginning of creation. And it has looked down into the “deep structure” of the cosmos, to the fundamental constituents of matter. In each case science finds no evidence for God; nor any need for God-the Universe seems to work perfectly well without any divine assistance. Thus anyone talking of a personal identity with God is clearly talking nonsense.

That is where I stood thirty years ago. Now I recognize that I was rejecting a rather naïve and old-fashioned interpretation of God. When we look to mystical writings, we do not find many claims for God being in the realm of space, time, and matter. When mystics refer to God, they are, more often than not, pointing toward the realm of personal experience, not something in the physical realm. If we want to find God, we have to look within, into the realm of deep mind-a realm that science has yet to explore.

A Sentient Universe

A nature found within all creatures but not restricted to them; outside all creatures, but not excluded from them.

— The Cloud of Unknowing

What is consciousness? The word is not easy to define, partly because we use it to cover a variety of meanings. We might say an awake person has consciousness, whereas someone who is asleep does not. Or, someone could be awake, but so absorbed in their thoughts that they have little consciousness of the world around them. We speak of having a political, social, or ecological consciousness. And we may say that human beings have consciousness while other creatures do not, meaning that humans think and are self-aware.

The way in which I shall be using the word consciousness is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or a particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness–the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

For every psychological term in English there are four in Greek and forty in Sanskrit.

— A. K. Coomaraswamy

The faculty of consciousness can be likened to the light from a video projector. The projector shines light on to a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience–what I call the “contents of consciousness.” The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different perceptions, thoughts and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself.

Consciousness in All

The faculty of consciousness is not limited to human beings. A dog may not be aware of all the things of which we are aware. It does not think or reason as humans do, and it probably does not have the same degree of self-awareness, but this does not mean that a dog does not have its own inner world of experience.

When I am with a dog, I assume that it has its own mental picture of the world, full of sounds, colors, smells and sensations. It appears to recognize people and places, much as we might. A dog may at times show fear, and at other times excitement. Asleep, it can appear to dream, feet and toes twitching as if on the scent of some fantasy rabbit. And when a dog yelps or whines we assume it is feeling pain–indeed, if we didn’t believe that dogs felt pain, we wouldn’t bother giving them anesthetics before an operation.

If dogs possess consciousness then so do cats, horses, deer, dolphins, whales, and other mammals. They may not be self-conscious as we are, but they are not devoid of inner experience. The same is true of birds; some parrots, for example, seem as aware as dogs. And if birds are sentient beings, then so, I assume, are other vertebrates–alligators, snakes, frogs, salmon, and sharks. However different their experiences may be, they all share the faculty of consciousness.

The same argument applies to creatures further down the evolutionary tree. The nervous systems of insects are not nearly as complex as ours, and insects probably do not have as rich an experience of the world as we do, but I see no reason to doubt that they have some kind of inner experience.

Where do we draw the line? We usually assume that some kind of brain or nervous system is necessary before consciousness can come into being. From the perspective of the materialist metaparadigm, this is a reasonable assumption. If consciousness arises from processes in the material world, then those processes need to occur somewhere, and the obvious candidate is the nervous system.

But then we come up against the inherent problem of the materialist metaparadigm. Whether we are considering a human brain with its tens of billions of cells, or a nematode worm with a hundred or so neurons, the problem is the same: How can any purely material process ever give rise to consciousness?

Panpsychism

The underlying assumption of the current metaparadigm is that matter is insentient. The alternative is that the faculty of consciousness is a fundamental quality of nature. Consciousness does not arise from some particular arrangement of nerve cells or processes going on between them, or from any other physical features; it is always present.

If the faculty of consciousness is always present, then the relationship between consciousness and nervous systems needs to be rethought. Rather than creating consciousness, nervous systems may be amplifiers of consciousness, increasing the richness and quality of experience. In the analogy with a video projector, having a nervous system is like having a lens in the projector. Without the lens there is still light on the screen, but the images are much less sharp.

In philosophical circles the idea that consciousness is in everything is called panpsychism, from the Greek pan, meaning all, and psyche, meaning soul or mind. Unfortunately, the words soul and mind suggest that simple life forms may possess qualities of consciousness found in human beings. To avoid this misunderstanding some contemporary philosophers use the term panexperientialism–everything has experience. Personally, I prefer the term pansentience–everything is sentient.

Whatever name this position is given, its basic tenet is that the capacity for inner experience could not evolve or emerge out of entirely insentient, non-experiencing matter. Experience can only come from that which already has experience. Therefore the faculty of consciousness must be present all the way down the evolutionary tree.

We know that plants are sensitive to many aspects of their environment–length of daylight, temperature, humidity, atmospheric chemistry. Even some single-celled organisms are sensitive to physical vibration, light, and heat. Who is to say they do not have a corresponding glimmer of awareness? I am not implying they perceive as we do, or that they have thoughts or feelings, only that they possess the faculty of consciousness; there is a faint trace of sentience. It may be a billionth of the richness and intensity of our own experience, but it is still there.

According to this view, there is nowhere we can draw a line between conscious and non-conscious entities; there is a trace of sentience, however slight, in viruses, molecules, atoms, and even elementary particles.

Some argue this implies that rocks perceive the world around them, perhaps have thoughts and feelings, and enjoy an inner mental life similar to human beings. This is clearly an absurd suggestion, and not one that was ever intended. If a bacterium’s experience is a billionth of the richness and intensity of human being’s, the degree of experience in the minerals of a rock might be a billion times dimmer still. They would possess none of the qualities of human consciousness–just the faintest possible glimmer of sentience.

The Evolution of Consciousness

If the faculty of consciousness is universal, then consciousness is not something that emerged with human beings, or with vertebrates, or at any particular stage of biological evolution. What emerged over the course of evolution was not the faculty of consciousness, but the various qualities and dimensions of conscious experience–the contents of consciousness.

The earliest living organisms, bacteria and algae, had no sensory organs and detected only the most general characteristics and changes in their environment. Their experience might be likened to an extremely dim, almost imperceptible hint of light on an otherwise dark screen–virtually nothing compared to the richness and detail of human experience.

With the evolution of multicellular organisms came the emergence of specific senses. Some cells specialized in sensing light, others in sensing vibration, pressure, or changes in chemistry. Working together, such cells formed sensory organs, increasing the detail and quality of the information available to the organism–and enhancing the quality of consciousness.

In order to process this additional information and distribute it to other parts of the organism, nervous systems evolved. And, as the flow of information became more complex, central processing systems developed, integrating the different sensory modalities into a single picture of the world.

As brains grew in complexity, new features were added to the image appearing in consciousness. With mammals the limbic system appeared, an area of the brain associated with basic feelings such as fear, arousal, and emotional bonding. With time, the mammalian brain grew yet more complex, developing a new structure around it, the cerebral cortex. With this came better memory, focused attention, greater intention, and imagination.

The picture appearing in consciousness had by now reached the richness of detail and diversity of qualities that we associate with our own experience. But this is not the end of the story. With human beings another new capacity emerged–speech. And with this, the evolution of consciousness took a huge leap forward.

For a start, we could use words to communicate experiences with each other. Our awareness of the world was no longer limited to what our senses told us; we could know of events occurring in other places and at other times. We could learn from each other’s experiences, and so begin to accumulate a collective body of knowledge about the world.

Most significantly, we began to use language internally. Hearing words in our minds without actually saying them, allowed us to talk to ourselves. An entirely new dimension had been added to our consciousness–verbal thought. We could form concepts, entertain ideas, appreciate patterns in events, apply reason, and begin to understand the universe in which we found ourselves.

The problem with the world is not the Illuminati, it’s us.

It’s you, it’s me, it’s every person you’ve ever known and every person you’ve ever came into contact with.

Do you honestly believe they could stop us or harm us if we unconditionally loved every living being on this planet? If every person genuinely cared about the next, if you could point out a stranger in a crowd and say, “I’m watching your back”, what could they possibly do? How are they going to stop 7 billion people who treat each other as family?

Have you ever considered why it is that evil gets to run this place we call Earth? It’s never ran through your mind that maybe it’s supposed to and there’s a logical reason why it doesn’t fail?

You know the Illuminati are not the names and bloodlines you know and perpetuate. When is the last time you put your ass in the firing line when you didn’t have to? Where did you see anyone step out of the shadows and claim and responsibility for the atrocities committed against humanity who wasn’t directly tied to a government?

The Illuminati provide choices, nothing more. It’s your responsibility to figure out why that is and why they have such great power. There’s no one forcing you to waddle your way into McDonald’s and order imitation food products. No one’s forcing your hand while you pour that aspartame down your throat. No one forces you to police and terrorize each other like you have some kind of God-appointed authority over other human beings, although “someone” seems to. You do these things.

Do you look beyond your theories of mass population reduction? If they’re going to kill a majority of us, what are they waiting for? More people to start to wake up, to sense what’s going on? The money shot? “They’re paying attention! Do it now!” It’s just not realistic.

What do you think your purpose for existing on this planet really is? Are you here to complain about the things you do to yourselves and blame it on someone else or is there another explanation? Did you not have a conscience as a child? Did you not feel guilty when you hurt someone else? Who’s really to blame for you losing it over the years when you have free will?

If you hadn’t lost your consciences, where might life have taken you? If you continued to care about others, would you have not tried to be the best person you could possibly be and continue to evolve as a human being? Perhaps you would have continuously grown and recognized that as a valid reason for living? Maybe then you wouldn’t be the actors you are today, hiding your true selves behind metaphorical masks?

What would you even be without the Illuminati and the options they provide anyway? If there were peace and anarchy, true freedom from government, would you ever grow or more importantly, would the world as a whole continue to grow? Could you let go of your senseless religions and hateful Gods that demand your complete slavery? Would you ever come to see every other person on this planet as your equal or would you continue to look down on them for not being as “wise” as you?

You need the Illuminati just as much as they need you, as much as it’s their duty to be here for you. What would you come together over if not your common hatred for them which I wouldn’t advocate to begin with, but it’s a start to something. When will you stop fighting fire with more fire? Do you just enjoy feeling negative? When you see the news and something comes up that negatively affects you, how do you honestly react to that? With love, compassion?

Catch yourself when you see your negative reactions and reprogram your subconscious mind that lives so much of your life. Feel positive for a change instead of always torn down or depressed about what’s going on around you. Your free will is in how you react. Hell may be encompassing every aspect of the world that exists outside yourself, but you control your own mind and sense of self. You’re not here to suffer, you’re here because you suffer.

A person who is awake sees the illusion and connections to everything while having all the information that exists inside of them easily accessible because they know entire universe is within them (“as above, so below”). They do not dive deeper into the illusion unknowingly and complain about others who don’t see the world like they do. It’s time to remember who you are, where you are, how you got here, and how to leave this place.

Go inside yourself and find your own answers, because they’ve always been there. Experience the ego death / mind body separation whether it be through thousands of hours of meditation or the short cuts that nature has provided for you. Most importantly, relax, it’s only a ride.