Where exactly is happiness within?
A manifesto on happiness.
I’ve been quiet for a minute, while working my way back from India via Ibiza and now to Mexico—so you’re getting a double dose today. Strap in.
What is baseline happiness?
You know those people who are just annoyingly happy all the time?
Yeah, I’m not talking about them.
That’s usually a specific brand of disingenuous, put-on, pretend happiness. We call that mood-making.
But what about those people who just always seem to exude a certain quiet inner contentedness?
No matter which way the wind blows, they’re good—never too high, never too low, just good.
It’s not that these people are apathetic to the world around them, or complacent, or disengaged.
In fact, these people have preferences just like the rest of us—but they don’t seem to get bent out of shape when the world doesn’t match those preferences.
One of my favorite thinkers, Naval Ravikant, says:
"A happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time. It's someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don't lose their innate peace.”
—NAVAL RAVIKANT
It’s all about those last two words: innate peace.
See here’s the thing about real happiness—it’s our default state.
But most of us only know how to be happy when we get what we want—we call this object-referral happiness.
Object-referral happiness means just that—our happiness is in reference to some object. We got a new car, or we got a lot of likes on our Instagram post, or we met someone new.
It’s easy to be happy in those situations—and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But how often does reality match our preferences?
Extremely rarely.
And when it does, how long does that object-referral happiness last once we get it?
Extremely briefly.
As Deepak Chopra says:
“When we identify with objects, whether those are situations, circumstances, people, or things, then we relinquish our energy to the object of reference.”
—DEEPAK CHOPRA
It’s almost like we’re a flag, flapping flaccidly in the breeze, completely at the mercy of whichever way the wind blows. When it blows our way, we feel good, and when it doesn’t, we don’t.
To make things worse, the more things do go our way, the more we need them to go our way again, but in an even better way next time, in order to match that previous “peak” experience we’ve now normalized.
It’s the core of the reason why the people with the most money are often the least happy—they’ve long become desensitized to all material things, and now almost no amount of wealth, cars, clothes, dinners, vacations, etc. can do it for them anymore.
By allowing ourselves to rely on external objects or conditions to be happy, we are designing a life for ourselves that is, at best, monotonous mundanity occasionally interspersed with brief and fleeting moments of satisfaction, and at worst, a constant quest of seeking more, more, more, ceaselessly attempting to manipulate and influence reality to match our preferences, and never quite getting there.
Alan Watts, drawing on the Tao Te Ching, summarizes this predicament perfectly:
“The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”
—ALAN WATTS
What if we could break this cycle and this very precarious relationship to this very superficial form of happiness?
Remember when they told us happiness was within?
Well…where is it?
There’s a second type of happiness, and it’s called self-referral happiness, or baseline happiness.
You can probably work out what it means….a state of happiness that is in reference only to one’s self.
The truth is, we’re not just flags flapping in the breeze—we are the entire flagpole—but so often, we over-identify with those surface-level ephemera, and we lose sight of our pole-hood. Or pole-dom. Or poli-ness.
Indeed, your poli-ness—you are not just the floppy flag flapping in the breeze; you are the entire pole, firmly rooted in the soil of Being that we call inner bliss or supreme inner contentedness.
OK, that’s nice to think about, but is it that easy?
Next time someone or some thing gets our goat, can we just close our eyes and pretend we’re flagpoles?
No, that’s trite and silly.
And unfortunately, that’s where most self-help “gurus” stop short—they build up this idea using all kinds of flowery language, and leave it to you to figure out how to do it. Or maybe the answer will be in their next book, or workshop, or exotic retreat.
Give them my apologies, because I’m going to spoil the secret and spell the whole thing out for you.
Lasting happiness isn’t about “getting happy”—it’s about removing all the stuff standing in the way of our connection to our own innate peace or supreme inner contentedness or self-referral happiness that’s always there, but usually obscured by our worries about what happened yesterday or fears about what might happen tomorrow.
What are these blockages?
In the West, therapists might talk about them through the lens of childhood trauma or conditioning.
In the East, Qi Gong or Taioist practitioners might describe them as blocked qi (chi) or energy flow.
I’ve heard others, like Joe Dispenza, describe them as stuck emotions.
What they’re all talking about is accumulated stress.
You see, every time something doesn’t go our way, we have a choice about how we interpret that.
We can respond consciously, adapting to reality and maybe find the lesson in it, or we can react in a way that’s maladaptive, resisting reality or clinging rigidly to our attachment about how thing must go.
“It better be sunny today, I want to go to the beach!”
“She better not be late, I want to make the movie on time!”
There’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and I’ve written before about the relevance of sometimes being able to exert our influence to change the stars and actually shift the course of things to go our way.
I’m a big proponent of changing what we can.
But what about the things we can’t?
So the clouds roll in, or the date is late—what do you do?
We can ruin the day by lamenting that it didn’t go our way, or we can adapt and roll with it, ultimately accepting that being angry or frustrated about what already is is not going to change anything except how we feel.
Sounds easy, but in practice this can be quite tricky to master.
As soon as something starts going awry, we may feel our heart rate increasing, our brow maybe perspiring, and our body temperature rising.
The way we react—or don’t—to a given stimulus is directly proportional to the amount of stress we’re carrying around, and the amount of adaptation energy we’ve got in reserve.
When you’re walking around carrying a teacup that’s nearly full to the brim, you’ll spill your tea at the slightest bump in the road.
It’s not your fault—but it is your responsibility.
So how do we keep from spilling our tea?
The answer is not to remove preferences—that would be like trying to change what flavor of ice cream we like, and it would be equally fruitless. It’s impossible, and nobody would benefit from it.
The answer is to remove our attachment to those preferences.
In order to avoid suffering needlessly, we have to address the root cause of attachment—stress accumulation.
An example might help:
At a young age, Johnny finally got up the courage to ask his crush to the dance in front of a group of people at school.
She said no and laughed in his face.
This created a stress response, because he was quite attached to her saying yes, but reality did not meet his expectations.
While he didn’t realize it, the stress chemicals secreted by his body during this maladaptive response were permanently stored in the sub-cellular memory of his physiology.
This wound festered for days and months and years.
The wound occurred at such a deep level, and at such a formative time in his life, that he begin to subconsciously build his worldview around this wound.
He began to relate to women in a way that would protect himself from ever being hurt again, even if it meant never fully opening his heart or allowing himself to be vulnerable to them.
He began to pursue a lifestyle geared toward making himself most attractive to women—perhaps giving up his dream to be an astrologer in favor of a well-paid career in high finance, so he could ensure he was always driving the latest sports car and wining and dining his dates at Michelin restaurants while wearing the finest clothes.
Over time, and without realizing it, Johnny built an entire life around protecting this core wound—exercising feverishly and getting botox to look younger.
Now, Johnny has become quite rigidly attached to his lifestyle—because in his mind, it’s the only thing protecting that wound.
If he were to lose his job, or his looks were to fade, he’d likely have a very difficult time coping with that change in reality—because he’s allowed his entire livelihood to become reliant on these specific set of preferences.
Now I ask you to reflect on something that really gets your goat—people being late, poor communicators, bad tippers, whatever.
Ask yourself why that thing bothers you so much.
Chances are, it’s because at some deep, unconscious level, it threatens some core belief or wound we have about ourselves or how the world needs to be in order to protect us from that belief.
Personally, I used to deal with fundamental feelings of inadequacy.
It used to really grind my gears if someone didn’t respond to a message. Now sure, that’s annoying behavior, but few people got as wound up about it as I would.
Through therapy, I was able to identify this core belief and realize that my very strong attachment to people responding to me in a timely fashion was rooted in this idea that maybe I’m not good enough to warrant a response.
But only with meditation was I able to actually dissolve the stress from that wound being stored in my physiology which was underpinning those beliefs.
Make sense?
Now I’ve heard these same self-proclaimed self-help “gurus” tell people to just “relax” and “let go” or “take a deep breath.”
What a joke!
For someone whose preferences are so firmly entrenched and ultimately rooted in stress—which, by the way, describes almost everyone—these platitudes are as useless as the paper they’re written on, and can often create even more frustration when they don’t work.
Each time we don’t get what we want, or things don’t go our way, we feel the energy shift and our happiness get blocked. What’s happening there is that our inner energy is hitting our stored stress like a river hitting a rock, getting blocked, and causing a rapids situation—which we feel as our heart racing, brow sweating, or temperature rising.
If you store things inside of you that bothered you, you’re going to keep feeling bothered.
Rather than try to remove our preferences, we have to remove the underlying stress which is causing us to be so rigidly attached to a specific preference.
As Vedic Meditators, we have a tool to dissolve those blocks by giving the body the depth of rest it needs to unwind them on its own.
The more we dissolve, the fewer blocks we have, the more easily the energy flows and the more easily we are able to connect to that innate peace, supreme inner contentedness, or self-referral happiness—that baseline happiness.
We still like certain things and prefer certain outcomes, but have a much easier time detaching from them, because we are so happy inside already, and this happiness is not dictated by external phenomena, so our sense of self is no longer reliant on an entire set of charades we’ve constructed in order to avoid things from triggering our inner wounds.
We also become more adaptable to situations, meaning we accumulate less stress moving forward as well.
So we feel happier, and continue getting happier and happier every day.
This my friends, is what we call baseline happiness—and it doesn’t change with the wind.
Speaking of baseline happiness—I just launched a new project this week with two of my colleagues and closest friends, Barron Hanson and Matt Handley, called the Baseline Happiness Project [link].
BHP is founded on the idea that 1% of a given community or population practicing meditation is enough to bring about collective harmony and raise happiness levels in that entire community, first cognized by my teacher’s teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and dubbed the Maharishi Effect.
This hypothesis has been confirmed in dozens of studies of small populations around the world, but we’re aiming to create this effect within the music industry, the world we know, by teaching meditation to 1% of as many groups and organizations as possible, thereby reimagining the idea of “the 1 percent” ;)
Barron, Matt and I have been in sunny Mexico this week, teaching meditation at RÜFÜS DU SOL’s Sundream festival, and we couldn’t be more optimistic about the bright future of the project, with several members of the band as well as dozens of other artists and industry taking the plunge already and joining the dark—er—bright side.
I also owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to Barron for inspiring this project.
Barron is one of those people who’s always in contact with his own innate peace. Never high, never low, and always better than good.
Almost three years ago, Barron decided to export some of that happiness to his hometown of Nowra, Australia, by creating the Be Here Nowra Community Happiness project, setting out to teach 1% of his hometown (about 300 people) how to meditate, and making a documentary about it over the course of four years.
Barron’s experiment will be the largest-ever scale experiment of the Maharishi Effect, and his film, which he plans to bring to some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, has the potential to revolutionize how we think about happiness forever.
It’s tremendously important work.
And Barron needs our help.
Today, Barron launched his Kickstarter for fund the making of the film. He needs $70,000AUD in order to pay the production crew, director, and hard costs of producing the film, or it may never get made.
If today’s letter resonated with you, if meditation has made you even a little bit happier, and if you love good films, consider making a contribution to the Be Here Nowra kickstarter.
I know you thought music today would be Happy by Pharrell or Lovely Day by Bill Withers, but wouldn’t that be a little obvious? Nothing says eternal happiness like the grunge movement, and specifically a band called Garbage ;)