Lobotomy Alternative

No, lobotomies for everyone is not a good idea. Those of us who have functional frontal lobes would rather not lose those capacities. We like the job that the frontal lobe does. It's just that sometimes it works overtime, collects time-and-a-half, and busts our payroll. We need the frontal lobe to do its job, and we also need it to take breaks and vacations so that we can have some time to get out of living in the future and spend some time living right here, right now.

How do we do that? Some suggestions:

1. Take a break from serving an imaginary person, your future self, and do something nice for a concrete real other person in the present.
2. As mentioned: notice when you like something.
3. Laugh, especially with family and close friends. It builds the bonds of connectedness that are so crucial to happiness.
4. Take up a meditation practice. With a posture that is erect – alert yet relaxed – simply bring attention to the sensations of breathing in and breathing out. Reclaim 15 minutes a day from the tyranny of the frontal lobes' incessant planning.

For some people the only time they aren't in the grip of the frontal lobe is when they're dwelling in memories. Take a few minutes to cultivate being right here, right now. Dwell in the present: neither the past memories nor the future plans.

We don't want stop the frontal lobe from doing its job, but we do want to be able to put that job in context. We need not be wholly consumed by our imagined future. It’s possible to have our plans without being so wrapped up in them that we have no identity apart from them. That is: we can have our plans without our plans having us. Plans, after all, even the best-laid plans of mice and men, do go oft astray.

Find the stillness within which the busy-ness of our mind takes place -- the context of silence surrounding the mind's chatter. The only way to find that stillness is take some time to be still: attention on nothing but the breath: for the breath is right now. It's not re-living old memories; it's not all wrapped up in planning. It's now. For a second thing, the breath is the place where you and not-you are constantly changing places. It's the place where interconnection is direct, immediate, and vivid – if we're paying attention to it.

By taking a break each day from being dominated by, consumed by, and identified with the frontal lobe's fabrications, when you come back, and the planning function resumes, you are better able to hold your own planning activity within a mindful awareness.

“Happiness isn't just the limited positive states we strive for, but rather there is a larger openness that includes sorrow and joy. That's true happiness.” (Gaylon Ferguson, Buddhadharma 2008 Spring, 36)

Through the development of present-moment-mindfulness, suffering doesn't disappear from our life. Rather, it disappears into our life.

“When we live our life as a whole, there is no longer an aspect that gets singled out as 'suffering.'” (Barry Magid, Buddhadharma, 2008 Spring, 37)

Life does have loveliness to sell. Are you buying?

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This is part 6 of 6 of "Happy."
Previous: Part 5: "Curse of the Frontal Lobe"
Beginning: Part 1: "Having Everything You Want"

Curse of the Frontal Lobe

People who have received injuries to their frontal lobes can appear and act indistinguishably normal. They can engage in pleasant conversation with you about the weather, or the drapes. They can reminisce with you about the great play at the end of the game last night. They express likes and dislikes, seem to have a coherent personality, they're socially amiable, and can solve logic problems. But ask them what they'll be doing tomorrow, and they simply cannot process the question. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert tells the story of Patient NN:

“NN suffered a closed head injury in an automobile accident in 1981, when he was thirty years old. Tests revealed that he had sustained extensive damage to his frontal lobe. A psychologist interviewed NN a few years after the accident and recorded this conversation:
Psychologist: What will you be doing tomorrow?
NN: I don't know.
Psychologist: Do you remember the question?
NN: About what I'll be doing tomorrow?
Psychologist: Yes, would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about it?
NN: Blank, I guess. It's like being asleep; like being in a room with nothing there; like swimming in the middle of a lake. There's nothing to hold you up or do anything with.
  For NN, tomorrow will always be an empty room, and when he attempts to envision later, he will always feel as the rest of us do when we try to imagine nonexistence or infinity.” (Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 14-15.)

With our frontal lobes we play out various future hypothetical scenarios, and through connections to the limbic system, where emotion happens, those scenarios compel attention. The frontal lobes, in other words, not only create imagined futures but also generate anxiety about our futures. This explains why the frontal lobotomy – that is, the destruction of some part of the frontal lobe -- “became a standard treatment for cases of anxiety and depression that resisted other forms of therapy.” Lobotomized patients were indeed calmer and less depressed. They also “performed well on standard intelligence tests, memory tests, and the like.” Yet, as doctors began to notice, these patients “showed severe impairments on any test – even the very simplest test – that involved planning. . . . They found it practically impossible to say what they would do later that afternoon” (Gilbert 13).

So here we are -- we nonlobotomized humans -- with this amazing capacity to envision our futures with a level of scope and detail far beyond what any other animal can do – and at the same time so seized by our own imagined future scenarios that we spend the better part of our waking hours slavishly in the service of future selves who can never repay us and will scarcely acknowledge that we gave them the best years of our lives.

Because of this capacity to think about the future, humans could invent agriculture, plan cities, build civilization so that we can inhabit this glorious world of fax machines, traffic jams, ipods, strip malls, garage-door openers, cable TV, and spam (both the canned meat and e-mail versions). Because of these hugely enlarged frontal lobes, our lives are, as John Lennon said, what happen to us while we're busy making other plans.

Living in the future, working on some scenario of a bigger house or a trip to Paris, we miss the joy of our present moments. Sometimes we miss chances to have fun with our kids. What's the answer? Lobotomies for everyone? There must be a better way.

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This is part 5 of 6 of "Happy."
Next: Part 6: "Lobotomy Alternative"
Previous: Part 4: "Macaroons or a Frontal Lobe?"
Beginning: Part 1: "Having Everything You Want"

Reality vs. "Should Be"

The Mindfulness habit begins by being conscious of when you’re having fun – when you’re enjoying something. As like as not, it’ll be some little thing. The painter, Vincent Van Gogh describes getting up from bed at night after a snowstorm, and looking out at the landscape:

“Never, never has nature made such a moving and touching impression on me.”

Moments of grace like that happen when we’re open to receive them. The beauty of nature is usually a good bet. Every season has its aesthetic; springtime is, for most of us, particularly reliable for offering its grace.

“Every happy living thing revels in the cheerful spring.” (Henry Purcell)

If the first step is telling ourselves that we like what we’re experiencing, the next step is to stop telling ourselves so much about what we don’t like. It’s the all-too-common trap: ignoring our blessings, while weaving a richly detailed story of all the wrongs we unfairly endure.

“Before I woke up to reality, I had a symbol for all my frustration: my children’s socks. Every morning they’d be on the floor, and every morning I’d think, ‘My children should pick up their socks.’ It was my religion. You could say my world was accelerating out of control – because in my mind, there were socks everywhere. And I’d be filled with rage and depression because I believed these socks didn’t belong on the floor, even though, morning after morning, that’s where they were. I believed it was my children’s job to pick them up, even though, morning after morning, they didn’t.” (Byron Katie)

Live in reality, says Katie, instead of in our “should be’s.”

“After 10 years of deep depression and despair, I came to see that my suffering wasn’t a result of not having control; it was a result of arguing with reality. . . . Until you can love what is – everything, including the apparent violence and craziness – you’re separate from the world, and you’ll see it as dangerous and frightening.” (Byron Katie: click here)

Loving what is – total acceptance of reality exactly as it is – does not mean that we do not work for social justice. It does mean that we simply let go of our frustrations as we go about that work.

What is yours to do? First, what are your gifts – your talents, your passions, your hunger? Second, what are the world’s greatest needs? Third, where is the balance point between those two – where do your gifts meet the world’s needs? Those are the questions for identifying what is yours to do, and if you don’t know, then discernment work on those questions is called for, and even if you do know, discernment work is ongoing.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches: You have the right to your work; you do not have the right to fruits of that work. In other words, what is yours to do, you offer up to the world. The world will then make of it what it will: that’s out of your hands. You have come to your calling, the works of your life, in part, through an estimation of likelihood of success. Yes, calculate your best chance of success. Then roll that die and accept what comes.

Maybe your work becomes the last straw producing a cascading collapse, one after the other, of every system of oppression and injustice by which humans hurt each other, other animals, and the earth. Maybe you save the world.

Or: maybe your work makes no difference at all.

Or: maybe your work triggers a backlash that makes things worse.

Who knows? You do what is yours to do, and beyond reviewing what really is yours to be doing next, let go of attachment to results.

“The point of washing the dishes,is not to get them clean. The point of washing the dishes is to wash the dishes.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Just do. No frustrations about outcomes; no “arguing with reality.”

Our hearts cannot but turn over to grace all that they are and have. Grace has its own way of shaping what our hearts bequeath it.

* * *
This is part 3 of 6 of "Happy."
Next: Part 4: "Macaroons or a Frontal Lobe?"
Previous: Part 2: "Notice What You Like"
Beginning: Part 1: "Having Everything You Want"

Notice What You Like

If Thomas Jefferson was right that “pursuit of happiness” is an unalienable right, then what are we to do with that right? Pursuing happiness for its own sake is generally counterproductive. Happiness eludes us when we aim at it, and it often sneaks up on us with big, warm hug when we’re paying attention to something else.

Focusing on what I want is a path of unhappiness. Do I want a bigger house, fancier gadgets? Do I want solar panels for my roof, and an all-electric car? Do I want the nation’s elected leaders populated with people who think like I do? Whatever I want, that’s where the source of my suffering will be. That’s even true if the focus of my desire is “happiness.”

Fortunately, intentionally cultivating an openness to life’s joy is not the same thing as a grasping desire for something called happiness. We can undertake to orient ourselves toward happiness without thinking of it as a thing that we want. The reigning metaphor in the one case is opening to what’s there – and in the other case, it’s acquiring something we don’t have.

Attention to opening to what’s there makes a difference. For example, one week my internet service provider was down. I couldn’t get my e-mail at home. This was very irritating. (I mentioned to a member of my congregation I was annoyed at my provider. He raised an eyebrow and said, “A minister annoyed at his provider.”)

Then the next week the e-mail went down again, but I was a lot less irritated. Why? It turns out that in the meantime I was reading a book by the Dalai Lama about being happy. Several hours of reading about it has oriented my neural pathways toward happiness – which is to say, away from “I want, I want, I want.”

And it is, just as Voltaire found it to be, good for my health. ("I've decided to be happy because it is good for my health." -Voltaire)

A day later, though, unless I specifically take a moment, and a deep breath and intentionally tell myself to remember what the Dalai Lama was saying, I’m again prone to being annoyed with my provider. The demands of the universe can be so unreasonable!

Apparently, we aren’t really designed to be happy. The mildly unhappy among our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a better chance of surviving and reproducing. They needed to be focused on dangers and problems. We have inherited that tendency. The trick is to find ways to override the circuitry of anxiety and stress when that circuitry doesn’t happen to be functional for us.

The growing legions of spiritual advisors who books fill bookstore shelves these days speak often of “mindfulness.” They mean paying attention to everything that’s going on in you and around you while it’s happening. Start by noticing what you like. Be more present to what you’re enjoying while you’re enjoying it.

“You can spend an evening with friends and only realize once you get home that you had a good time.” (Cristophe Andre, click here)

You can eat a pizza, not noticing what a great pizza it is. Things you enjoy are the places to look first if you’re having a hard time finding your happiness. Try pausing to say to yourself, “This is a nice moment. I’m having a good time. Right now, I’m happy.”

Happiness really is a warm puppy – when you bring awareness to the enjoyment. Those of you who are parents of children: next time you hug your kid, you can bring yourself to a fuller level of presence to that moment by noting to yourself, “I really like this.” Of course you do. Are you noticing? The Mindfulness habit begins by being conscious of when you’re having fun – when you’re enjoying something.

* * *
This is part 2 of 6 of "Happy."
Next: Part 3: "Reality vs. 'Should Be'"
Previous: Part 1: "Having Everything You Want"

Having Everything You Want

Once upon a time, back in the days when I was a philosophy professor, one day one of my students came to see me. I had discerned from our prior contacts that he was a young man who wanted the finer things in life: he wanted a big house, fast car, tailored clothes -- the trappings of status and comfort. He came to me because he was concerned about how he would get these things. He wasn’t quite seeing how being a philosophy major, as he was, squared with his material ambitions.

I said to him, “I know a way that you can have everything you want.”

“How?” he wanted to know. He was looking straight at me, fully focused on my every nuance. I don't think he ever gave me that level of attention in class – but right at that moment he was ready to believe philosophers really had discovered the arcane secret guaranteed to bring success and wealth – and that he was about to receive this secret. The dues he had put in – all the hours reading Plato and Descartes – well, the minutes, anyway -- were about to yield their ultimate reward.

“The way to have everything you want,” I said, “Is to want only what you have.”

He didn’t buy it. The expression on face indicated that he was, in fact, abjectly disappointed with my answer. He looked as though he thought he'd fallen for some stupid trick, and couldn't decide if he was more disgusted at me for pulling this dumb hoax on him, or at himself for falling into it.

It's no trick, no hoax. It's a simple truth. To have all you want, want what you have.

Two Strategies

There are two ways to arrive at a state of affairs in which what you have and what you want match. One way is to make a list of all the things that you want, and then set about doing whatever it takes to acquire everything on that list. Work on bringing the “have” bar up until it meets the “want” bar. The other way for “want” and “have” to match is lower the “want” bar until it meets the “have” bar.

Which strategy will work best?

The first strategy is doomed to failure. You'll never have enough. Long before you ever acquire every item on your list, you have added more things to your list. The “want” bar will always keep rising, staying ahead of the “have” bar. The second strategy, at first, may not look so hot either. How does one decide not to want stuff? Even if one has come to believe that wanting only what one has, letting go of desires for more, does conduce to happiness, can one simply decide to stop wanting?

Voltaire once wrote,

“I’ve decided to be happy because it is good for my health.”

What sort of “decision” is this? And if it’s just a matter of deciding, why hasn’t everyone decided to be happy?

The instant that it takes to say, “I now hereby decide to be happy” probably isn’t enough. It takes a little bit longer to psyche oneself into a good mood -- and even then, the effects tend to fade away in a few hours, even under good conditions. What's a body to do? If Thomas Jefferson was right that "pursuit of happiness" is an unalienable right, then what exercise of that right is worthwhile?

* * *
This is part 1 of 6 of "Happy."
Next: Part 2: "Notice What You Like"

Macaroons or a Frontal Lobe?

The Person You Work For: Your Future Self

Unlike Mr. Possum, here, I'm betting you've got some self-restraint. You may think you don't have much, but as the animal kingdom goes, humans have a lot. Is that a good thing? Part of you, I imagine, would like to dispense with all that self-restraint and eat so much you couldn't move. This part of you imagines that, in defiance of your self-restraining part, you would "regret nothing."

And yet . . .

The fact is, you spend a large part of your life and energy on behalf of someone else: the future self that you will become. Psychology professor Daniel Gilbert notes:

“We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, – jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, -- enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fat-cheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps.” (Stumbling on Happiness, 2006, xiii-xiv)

And even if you’ve reached that retirement, even if the fat-cheeked grandchildren are all grown, you’re still spending large portions of your day trying to take care of your future self – fretting and working for the sake of somebody else.

I haven't read a study on this, or seen any government statistics, so I'm just speculating here, but my guess is that over 90% of all dead Americans spent their entire lives and went to their graves without ever once eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub while wearing a paper hat. What's up with that? That possum isn't wearing a paper hat because, well, he's a possum. Marsupials don't have such a refined aesthetic sensibility as you and I have. (And he's not in the bathtub because that's not where the food was. Duh.) But he sure was into every pistachio macaroon -- and every other baked good -- he could find.

That Growth on the Front of Your Brain

Why would you work so hard for someone else -- even if this taskmaster will have the same name as you (and maybe even the same mortgage)? You’d have to have some kind of large growth on the front of your brain. Actually, you do. It's that frontal lobe.

Here's how it happened:

“The first brains appeared on earth about 500 million years ago, spent a leisurely 430 million years or so evolving into the brains of the earliest primates, and another 70 million years or so evolving into the brains of the first protohumans. Then something happened – no one knows quite what, but speculation runs from the weather turning chilly to the invention of cooking – and the soon-to be-human brain experienced an unprecedented growth spurt that more than doubled its mass in a little over two million years.... A disproportionate share of the growth centered on a particular part of the brain known as the frontal lobe, which, as the name implies, sits at the front of the head, squarely above the eyes.” (Gilbert 10)

Our brains are a lot like other primate brains -- and even like marsupial brains -- in most regards. The biggest difference is that massive frontal lobe we got. This lobe pushed the low, sloping brows of our ancestors forward to become our sharp vertical brows.

What does this frontal lobe do – besides keep our hats (paper and otherwise) on? The frontal lobe is where we create our future in our imaginations, allowing us to act today on behalf of someone else: the future self we will become.

All animals make predictions about the immediate, local, personal, future. For instance, they smell a predator and predict that they should run and hide. Only humans think about what they'll be doing tomorrow. With this capacity to project the future, we go on to wonder about other future things:

“the annual rate of inflation, the intellectual impact of postmodernism, the heat death of the universe, or Madonna's next hair color” (Gilbert 6).

And the consequences of too many pistachio macaroons -- a thought which evidently never darkened the neurons of Mr. Possum.

As a candidate running to unseat the incumbent of the last 2,000 millennia might ask: "Are you better off than you were two million years ago?" Would we be happier if we weren't so enslaved to our future selves and carpe diemed ourselves a few more paper hats?

* * *
This is part 4 of 6 of "Happy."
Next: Part 5: "Curse of the Frontal Lobe"
Previous: Part 3: "Reality vs. 'Should Be'"
Beginning: Part 1: "Having Everything You Want"