Of Happiness, Longing, and Sex

"How can I be happy?" This question, while simple to ask, turns out to be perhaps the most important, difficult, and ancient of all unanswered questions. It's produced a myriad of answers over the years, ranging from the greedily obvious to the hopelessly abstract. It's a question that torments us, motivates our every ambition, a splinter deep beneath the existential skin. Despite the best efforts of philosophers, priests, and gurus, the answers we produce continue to diverge or are so abstract as to be impractical or irreconcilable.

Aristotle believed happiness was "the good life," a life of virtue characterized by moderation and the balance between extremes, "the Golden Mean." Epicurus believed happiness resides in tranquility. Christianity would have you believe that happiness comes in accepting Jesus Christ into your heart. Buddhism teaches that happiness comes with the elimination of dukkha, "suffering," or "mental dysfunction." Alongside these definitions are countless others, each supplying its own practice and map with the X in a different spot.

The funny thing is that we all know happiness intuitively. We don't need to dance around it with linguistic flourishes, we've all felt it first hand. For some, it's an ephemeral sensation of bliss, gone almost as soon as it appeared. For others perhaps, a more longevous state of being. If you, reader, aren't happy at this very instant, then surely you can remember a time at which you were. Thus we all know what happiness is. For the purpose of illustration, however, I will presume a few characteristics of happiness.

1. A distinct absence of desire or longing.

2. A firm grounding in the "here and now."

3. An silence of the "internal monologue." (What were you thinking about the last time you were truly happy? What did you say to yourself? Presumably nothing in that moment, the incessant rambling in your head was probably out for lunch.)

In physics, there exists the notion of a "ground state," also known as the "zero-point energy" state or in the case of quantum fields, the "vacuum state." These synonymous names refer to the state of a system at it's lowest point of energy, or its "resting state." Consider the system of a ball on a hill. If you place the ball on the slope of the hill, it will roll down. The ball atop the hill is an "excited state." Once the ball reaches the bottom of the hill however, it comes to a rest - it's reached its ground state. In other words, the ground state of a system is the most stable state, the state from which the system it not inclined to move, or "the state the system wants to be in."

I would like to propose that for all its elusiveness, happiness is simply the ground state of consciousness. It is the state which, once there, we've no desire to move away from. It is the state we want to be in.

But hold on a moment there, if happiness is our ground state, why do we suffer? What energy moves us out of this resting state? If we naturally descend into happiness, what force counteracts this natural descent? The answer: surviving the real world.

Should a person be born into their most imperturbable state of pure happiness, what motivation would there be to seek out food? To reproduce? To shelter oneself from the elements? A person in a state of pure bliss wants for nothing, desires nothing, has no use for thoughts or plans, and in the barbarous face of earthly reality, is quickly consumed by starvation, a storm, or a tiger. Almost ironically, our senses which bestow upon us the aptitude to survive, also bequeath us our suffering. The sense of pain, which assists us to avoid open flame. The sense of hunger, which reminds us to eat. The sense of pleasure, which informs our behavioral decision making.

And thus, armed with our senses and mental prowess, we humans find ourselves masters of survival, the whole wide world, in our hands. We command the lesser beasts, defeat the ravages of disease, and erect shelters from the storm. And yet still we suffer. For it is our very genius, our ability to gaze back into the past and scheme forward into the future, the integration of sensory information into cognition, our proprioception, nociception, and apperception that escort us "up the hill," away from the ground of happiness. But we long for lasting happiness, just as the ball atop the hill longs for the base. Only when the temporally bound perceptions, sensations, and cognitions that define our waking life dissolve, do we find ourselves firmly resting on the "ground."

"Hey, you promised sex. Where's the sex?!" I admit this has not been a particularly libidinous post. It was inspired largely by reflections on a post titled, "The Contrast," by MsHannahTweets (linked in the comments). In it, she writes, "having sex is something you do out of lust, or a feeling of obligation, or, honestly, sometimes pure boredom." She then recounts a memory of her roommate, distraught by her first encounter with coitus. But soon her tale takes an unexpected turn, as her grayscale portrait of sex matures into something far more profound and indeed, beautiful. It moves from being an act motivated by longing to an act characterized by love - no longer a vacuous attempt to temporarily abate this omnipresent sense of longing, but an act of affection enjoyed on a shared ground of happiness. Towards the end she writes, "people are right when they say you can’t be truly happy without being sad." This is true, in the same sense that the term "ground state" is meaningless in the absence of "energized states."

Hannah's story was telling to me, as it illustrated a story of self-discovery, one in which a profound distinction was made between "ecstasy" and "happiness." Ecstasy is bound in time, a peak doomed to normalize. Happiness on the other hand is itself the permanent normal. To return to our physics analogy, if happiness is the ground state, then ecstasy is a sort of "metastable" state. Imagine again the ball on the hill, but this time, rather than a smooth downward slope, imagine the hill is a tortuous continuum of peaks and valleys. Should the ball be rolled down this hill, it may find itself stuck in one of those valleys, comfortable for the time being, but not resting tranquilly at the base of the hill. Such is the common notion of happiness. Many of us, like, I think, Hannah, just need a ball named Jordon to come crashing into us, displacing us from our metastable roosts to send us plummeting together towards the welcoming ground.

And so here we find ourselves climbing the hill, shepherded by our ambitions, desires, and survival instincts, longing for the next metastable bastion of happiness in which we can rest our weary legs, tragically and comedically unaware that by simply letting go, rolling down the hill, we'd find ourselves grounded in the zero-point meadow of enduring happiness.

Our challenge then, as participants in modern civilization, is to learn how to live in the ground state whilst continuing to contribute to society in a meaningful way. Buddha would recommend the Eightfold Path. I leave the choice to you.