Tranquillity
Why Live in Hope when you can Live in the Moment?
Mo Gawdat, a former Chief Business Officer of Google’s innovation arm, has developed an intriguing and simple mathematical formula for human happiness. This states that,
‘Happiness is equal to or greater than the events of your life minus your expectation of how life should be.’
Gawdat is well aware that this is no more than a modern formulation of a very ancient branch of knowledge and philosophy, one traceable in ancient Greek thought (particularly in the stoics) and before that in Taoism and Buddhism. Even so, there is no harm (and potentially much good) in restating these ideas. They seem to be fundamental to human experience throughout the ages and to the project of enhancing human fulfilment.
One of the modern ‘spins’ on these ancient philosophies, an interpretation that has only really become available in the last 150 years or so, comes from theories which explore our evolutionary development as a species.
The main psychological thrust of these modern interpretations is that evolution has designed the human body and brain to create expectations which exceed what those bodies and brains can in practice achieve.
The first human beings survived and reproduced because they expected more than they had- more food, better shelter, more desirable mates, larger and healthier families. Of course, in most modern societies the list of expectations is much more diverse, stretching into wealth, health, well-being, possessions, careers, friendships, status, etc. But fundamentally we have not changed. We remain animals who want more than we have; such is our biological legacy, one derived from the evolutionary history of our natural selection.
Yet at the same time we are a species that values thoughts and ideas. Originally, the value of such thoughts and concepts must have depended on the selective advantage that they generated. If, for example, our ancestors could think where prey might be hiding they would be better placed to find it, kill it and eat it. But over time, as humans developed complex cultures, thinking also came to be valued in enabling more abstract thought and knowledge to arise. The human mind became more complex, intricate and, yes, ambitious.
Perhaps our thoughts could enable us to unearth truths about the human condition, truths which when understood fully might lead us to contentment and happiness? Surely, this is an expectation worth having?
In one sense Buddhist teaching applies a brake to these lofty conjectures. The Diamond Sutra, for example, contains an instruction that is often translated as ‘Do not become attached to any thoughts that arise in the mind.’ In his commentary on the sutra, specifically verse 23, the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh explains the proposition in more detail. He says,
‘All objects of mind are equal and share the same nature of interbeing.’
He uses the Sanskrit word ‘samata’ (or samatha) to describe this idea of equality.
When I first read this commentary I was quite shocked! I glanced at the bookcase on my wall where there are many books- books on religion, on philosophy, on science, novels, plays and poetry. All contain ‘objects of mind’, thoughts which writers have had and wished to communicate to others. Surely, they cannot all be the same, or of the same significance! On the contrary are they not saying many different things? Isn’t that the whole point of them?
In time though I’ve come to see that what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying in his commentary is that all these varying thoughts are equal or ‘the same’ in one crucial respect. They all comprise ‘objects of mind’, concepts, mental formations, words and ideas, and none of them can stand on their own. They all survive and all have meaning by possessing ‘interbeing’, by the connections they form to other concepts, to our own mind, and to the minds of others.
A long lineage of writers and readers, some living and some now dead, made those words, those concepts, possible. Those thoughts depend for their existence on a vast network of other thoughts. They are ‘compounded’, and none of them can ever stand alone or apart. In the same way, everything I think, everything I value, care for, and desire- including life itself- is a compound.
Nothing stands alone and nothing in itself has substance or essence. In this sense thoughts are no different from the material objects that make up our physical environment. Both are compounds that lack essence. No words or thoughts can ever stand alone as ‘the Truth’.
Thinking along these lines sent me back to those same books to try and understand better this notion of ‘samata’. The word is often translated into English as ‘equality’, ‘sameness’, or ‘evenness’. But sometimes it is used to describe what might be thought of as the original state of human consciousness, a state before that consciousness is stamped with all those thoughts and experiences which in practice impinge on it and on our day-to-day lives. And in this context a concept closely associated with samata is ‘tranquillity’.
So, what has this got to do with Gawdat’s formula for human happiness? Well, I think it lies in the way in which expectations disturb the tranquillity of our awareness. We can think of the inherent nature of the human mind- before expectations have been impressed upon it- as already complete. But then come those expectations which our natural evolution creates and renews in each generation of our species. It is as if each of those expectations is a cloud that temporarily obscures the clear light of the sun, a cloud which disturbs the inherent tranquillity of our view, and makes that view ‘uneven’ or distorted.
Tranquillity is sometimes described as one of the two critical features of Buddhism, the other being insight into one’s own nature. Everyone who practises mindfulness and meditation will know something about tranquillity. It appears in our daily practice and, with repeated practice, it appears more frequently and prominently in our daily activities. And one of the key features of tranquillity is a reduction in expectation, a settling down of desire and the need for things to be different. A greater and deeper degree of acceptance of what we already have and are.
Expectations disturb the evenness of our view of the world, the inherent and potential simplicity and purity of that view. An unclouded view.
Perhaps we know instinctively that morally and emotionally our attitude towards the world would best be one of acceptance, tempered by compassion toward others. But unfortunately we are rarely inclined to adopt such an attitude; rather we want, and have been designed by nature to want, the world to change to our requirements. These are the ‘expectations’ that we have to subtract from our actual experiences in order to arrive at the amount of happiness or contentment that we can actually have. In effect, this makes tranquillity the key to fulfilment.
In the light of this we can see why expectation and tranquillity are intimately connected. As one comes down, the other goes up. Samata then might be seen as a levelling down of expectation, one which is made possible through an increased sense of tranquillity, an acceptance that what arises in each present, passing moment is sufficient. In time, as tranquility grows, perhaps expectations can reduce to zero. Then nothing needs to be deducted from, or added to, our actual experience.
Of course, everything in life continues to change because change is at the heart of human experience. But now one no longer automatically expects some changes whilst fearing or resenting others. Those expectations, which in Gawdat’s formula must be deducted from the store of human happiness, are minimised and rendered powerless.
