By His Grace and Blessings I Write…..
This is last and final part of the series on Happiness. We will discuss some more approaches to happiness and the issue of relationship between meditation and happiness.
William James in his famous 1890 book “The Principles of Psychology “produced a startling hypothesis on the nature of emotion and feeling. The hypothesis gave a profound insight that not only does the brain communicate with the body, but equally important, the body communicates with the brain. He proposed that conscious, or cognitive, experience of emotions takes place after the body’s physiological response. A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. Unconscious emotion precedes conscious perception. This unconscious perception of emotional stimuli plays an extremely important role in survival; it causes physiological changes in our body in response to changes in the environment and thus influences our behaviour. Later developments in psychology revealed that different social contexts would produce different perceived emotions, even if the body’s physiological reactions were the same. An analysis of more than 20 lakh emotional faces revealed that emotions are actually manufactured in brain and that they are not inherently embedded in brain. The implication of this is that if we can somehow change the context, the emotion that will be manufactured will be different though physical symptoms will be the same. The psychologist Nico Frijda in 2005 gave the finding that our conscious experience of the emotion –what we feel-depends on where we focus our attention at any given moment. Simply stated human beings are not prisoners to their emotions and the responses can be changed by changing the context/focus. The brain can be trained for the kind of emotions one wishes to have.
To illustrate this hypothesis a creative experiment was carried out by Stanley Schachter on young, single male volunteers in his laboratory. He told some of them that an interesting woman would enter the room and told the others that a frightening animal would come into the room. He then injected epinephrine into both the groups of volunteers, knowing that this chemical would increase the activity of the sympathetic component of their automatic nervous system and lead to an increase in heart rate and sweating palms. When these groups were interviewed later ,with an undifferentiated autonomic arousal –the fight or flight response –elicited feelings of approach ,even love ,in the men who had been told that an interesting woman would enter the room, but elicited feelings of avoidance and fear from the men who had been told that a frightening animal would come into the room. The hypothesis thus stands proved that brain created emotions depending upon the context.
So if someone wants to feel happy, all he has to do is to change the contexts/focus and train the mind for a different response. Change of mindset is the ultimate remedy to one’s unhappiness and it works when you are consistent in your efforts.
Meditation is the way to change mindset. Meditation works on neuroplastic quality of brain and changes its structure by creating new neural patterns like psychedelics. This relieves us from unhappiness, anxiety and stress. Meditation leads to a state of calmness, peace and loving awareness. It has been established through thousands of scientific experiments carried out on the brains of Buddhist monks. The brains of these monks have been analyzed through brain scans, electromagnetic devices and other tools of modern medical sciences. The conclusions are that meditation familiarizes us with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things which is more in adequation with the reality, with interdependences, with the stream and continued transformation with our being. The negative emotions like fear, jealously, hatred, anger, greed, anxiety and stress etc when observed through meditative brain tend to vanish very soon. The emotions are neutral most of the time; it is our reaction to these emotions that is at the root of all our unhappiness. Meditation teaches us to observe our reactions to various emotions and thus relieve us of the suffering.
A very different approach to happiness is proposed by Dutch Sociologist, Dr Rutt Veenhoven. Rutt has drawn following conclusions based on 20,000 research findings from 3500 empirical studies on happiness…
- Happiness is universal and conditions for happiness are quite similar for all across the countries, ages and time.
- Greater happiness for greater number is possible by fostering freedom of choices , informing people about the consequences of their choices and investments in mental health research.
3 Happiness in life signals that we are functioning well and therefore is commensurate with good health, long life, better relationships, social responsibility etc.
Dr Rutt is of the opinion that an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy is a major source of unhappiness, that incomes/wealth beyond a certain point don’t add to happiness, marriage and children don’t make much difference to happiness. Rutt further feels that meditation is not much useful in matters of happiness.
Dr Rutt is a pioneer and a world authority on scientific study of happiness. His work has prompted national governments and UN to adopt happiness as a very important tool of public policy. Happiness of a society is the most reliable measure to assess progress in societies. Whether we agree to Dr Rutt’s findings or not is up to us but worldwide they have a very important bearing on the public policy on happiness.
Another new approach to happiness which is currently very much in limelight is the Japanese Ikigai .Ikigai which is about life practice towards fulfillment and not happiness per se , is an idea which encompasses the union of four fundamental components to life; Passion, Vocation, Profession and Mission. It aims to bring a harmony in all these aspects of life leading to fulfillment to life’s purpose and thus creating happiness. The approach seems to be similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory where self actualization is the ultimate goal of human life and creates conditions of bliss .
Every year around 1000’s of studies on happiness get published. Many public talks are given by masters in the field and various studies in neuro sciences open new vistas on happiness .In my this 3 part series on Happiness, I have tried hard to get the facts and theories right, but inevitably there will be errors. Moreover, I am likely to have missed many new ideas and approaches to happiness. I welcome corrections from sharp-eyed readers or from all those who know more than I do about Happiness. Thanks for being with me in this journey, for showing so much patience, for all your lovely feedback and insightful comments.
By His Grace and Blessings I Continue To Write….
Dr. Seema Chaudhary