Café Philos: an internet café

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I had a pleasant surprise. A friend I hadn't seen in over two years showed up on my doorstep, healthy and happy.

The healthy and happy bit was very much part of the surprise. Suzanne has suffered over many of her 28 years from a nearly debilitating emotional disorder. But yesterday she was quite happy and seemed healthier than I remember as being usual for her.

So far as I know, Suzanne is the world's only former Victoria Secrets model to join a traveling circus.

She lasted a year in the circus job, which is a long time for her to last in any job. She's energetic, exceptionally intelligent, and hard working. But then there's that emotional disorder thing. It impairs her judgment, and she tends to screw things up with the result that she's had very little stability in her life.

She was 16, I was 39, when we first met at a coffee shop. It's been a dozen years now, and that circus stint is still the longest she's held onto a job. She says she's known me longer than nearly anyone else in her life outside of family, and I believe her. I've lost count of the number of apartments and rental homes she's had. It's as if Suzanne repels stability.

Like so many people with an emotional disorder, Suzanne has been in a protracted abusive relationship. He was twenty years her senior and the sort of man who habitually preyed on much younger women. Quite charming at first.

She had two sons by him. She finally left him when he began to abuse her sons, too.

I've always admired Suzanne's buoyancy. No matter what else that emotional disorder has done to her, it hasn't taken her resilience. She always bounces back. And maybe her buoyancy has something to do with the fact she and I can laugh together at even the worse of her misadventures. Yesterday, during her visit, we laughed so hard recalling her miscalculations and misjudgments that I had to wipe my eyes -- several times.

I don't recall who started it, but there's a running joke between us. It's a bit crude, and she's a bit more likely to express herself crudely than I am, so maybe she started it. At any rate, each time I bail her out of some distress she's gotten herself into, she swears she owes me a blow job for it. In return, I tell her that I'm not feeling like one at the moment, and so I'll put it on her tab. Yesterday, she reminded me that she now "owes" me 53 blow jobs for the number of times I've bailed her out of some mess since we started that joke years ago.

In truth, Suzanne has taught me a great deal about giving. Even before I met her, I had learned to give without most strings attached, without most expectation, or most hope, of gaining anything in return. But there was something I hadn't yet learned. There was something I still expected to come from my generosity.

I expected improvement.

Without being consciously aware of my expectations, I hoped when giving to someone that they would learn from their mistake -- from whatever mistake put them in a position to need a hand out -- and that they would improve themselves. I even unconsciously considered a gift wasted if the person did not learn from their mistakes.

Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That's a pretty good insight into what a severe emotional disorder can do to a person's judgment. Suzanne is like that.

Suzanne will repeat a mistake again and again, without being aware that she is doing the same thing over and over with only insignificant variations. Her disorder is a cruel one.

At first that frustrated me. When I examined my frustration, I saw it was because I expected her to improve. When I thought about my hope she would improve, I discovered my hope for her was a string I was attaching to my gifts to her. And then I was struck by how unrealistic and unfair to her it was of me to do that.

It was through giving to her I learned to give without even that expectation of any reward for my generosity.

If you yourself make a practice of giving without strings, then you know how liberating it is to do so. And because I myself know that feeling of liberation, and value it, I am grateful to Suzanne for helping me realize it. Perhaps that's her greatest gift to me. If so, it's a good one.

She has many fine qualities, and there's nothing genuinely evil or humanly indecent about her. If life were a child's fantasies of life, then life would be fair; and if life were fair, the Suzannes of this world would never be afflicted with cruel emotional disorders. For someone with her talents and abilities could accomplish a lot of good, both for herself and others -- if only she were healthy and not such an habitual screw up.

D.H. Lawrence somewhere says that youth should not be misled into believing that it must rebel against authority and tradition in order to achieve freedom. Lawrence asserts that those battles have already been fought and won. Youth is largely free to do as it pleases today, and so it is misleading youth to tell them that they should be battling against authority and tradition.

On the other hand, Lawrence points out that the real revolution youth must accomplish is "to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door." That is, to find and exploit the aspects of life that youth does not even as yet suspect are part of life. Doing so will bring about a greater revolution in youth than will battling against authority and tradition.

What do you think of this? Is the real job of youth to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door, or is it to battle against tradition and authority? Which brings greater freedom? Which is more revolutionary?

When Bob Dylan sings the words, "He's not busy being born is busy dying", he offers us an important insight into human psychology. Namely, if we ever are so foolish as to refuse rebirth and renewal, then we are "busy dying". For the only way a human can stay alive spiritually, or psychologically, is to be reborn -- again and again and again.

I am often reminded of that truth these days because of a friend of mine. He has reached old age and, unfortunately, ceased being reborn.

Even on a relatively superficial level -- the level of one's opinions -- my friend has turned to stone. The opinions he has today are substantially no different than the opinions he held a decade ago. His intellectual curiosity has evaporated. He merely repeats himself.

Somewhat more profoundly, he has come to isolate himself as much as possible from new experiences. His routine is set. His day contains few challenges. He no longer wishes to be bothered with the new, the novel, the unexplored.

Old age can do that to us; it can be merciless. I do not point to him in order to blame him for what so many of us experience -- or will experience -- if we live long enough. Instead, I merely wish to illustrate how "He's not busy being born is busy dying".

Yet, we need not look to old age alone to illustrate in what ways Dylan's observation might be true. Society in many ways puts a great deal of pressure on all of us to be as unchanging, as constant, as ossified, as possible. Nor does one have to look far to see great and small examples of that pressure. Didn't society teach you the only valuable love is unchanging? Didn't it teach you any love which comes and goes is "mere infatuation"?

Or, look at class distinctions in so many societies -- the social sanctions that are leveled like canon against anyone who dares to break out of the social class they were born into.

Again, take even the most trivial example: How often have you heard someone called a "flip-flopper", a "waffler"? How often have you heard it said changing your opinions shows a lack of firmness and character? Demanding that someone never change their opinions is tantamount to demanding they learn nothing from one day to the next. Yet, society generally values the person who learns nothing during the course of a day over the person who learns something new.

I cannot begin to cover here the myriad ways society tries to pressure people into remaining constant. Yet, remaining constant is not at all the same thing as being true to ourselves.

"He's not busy being born is busy dying". How else can you stay genuinely true to yourself without being reborn -- again and again and again? For the self is always changing.

I think that becomes obvious once you give up trying to be a self and instead just observe yourself day to day. When you have learned to observe yourself like a scientist would observe a fruit fly -- as dispassionately as that -- you see how much you change. But to clearly observe yourself, I think you must neither condemn nor praise what you observe. A dispassionate scientist would neither condemn nor praise a fruit fly -- why should we think we need to condemn or praise ourselves? Condemnation and praise seem to be mere ways of escaping from clear observation.

I do not believe it is necessary -- and I believe it can even be detrimental -- to set for ourselves a goal of change or renewal.

Instead, once we learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves, we will understand ourselves -- and with that understanding comes change. But if we set a goal of renewal, we will only achieve a little change -- far short of a rebirth -- and then backslide. Everyone has seen that happen to those people who pray fervently to become better people, go for two weeks or two months, and then backslide. It's even true some people spend their whole lives doing that without ever catching on to how worthless it is. Yet, merely learn how to dispassionately observe ourselves and the rest will come naturally.

D. H. Lawrence somewhere writes beautifully of another reason we should avoid setting a predetermined goal for how we want to change. Speaking to young people, he reminds them they have often been told that the challenge of youth is to throw off the chains that oppress them. He then explains how they have been misled by that, and how throwing off the chains that oppress them is by no means the primary challenge of youth. Instead, he tells them their job is to "discover the unexpected door" to their lives. Why is that true?

I think it is true because, as Heraclitus long ago said, "No man steps into the same river twice, because either the river has changed, or the man has changed, or both." Now, if that's a simple fact, then how can anyone stay true to themselves without being reborn -- without "discovering the unexpected door"? Perhaps when we set a predetermined goal to how we want to change, we close off that unexpected door, and with it, our chance for genuine rebirth.

"Satan is the one who plants wicked thoughts in our minds." I read those words on a site yesterday and they stopped me for a while as I wondered what kind of fearful struggle their author must experience to believe that each time he has a wicked thought it comes from Satan. Can you imagine?

Suppose he thinks, as it seems so many religious people do, that even his sexual desires are wicked? Well, according to some psychologists, one thinks of sex every few minutes. Does he feel he's wrestling with Satan every few minutes?

How can one cope with such a monstrous notion -- the notion one's mind is wrestling with Satan? How could one ever be at peace with oneself?

I'm certain I have thoughts he would consider wicked, and therefore from Satan. But I don't see my thoughts the way he does. I'm not in a struggle against any of my thoughts -- to struggle against an unpleasant thought just prolongs it in consciousness. To be frightened of a thought reinforces it, makes it stronger. To condemn a thought just fixes it in memory.

As best I can, I watch my thoughts. I'm attentive to them. But I don't struggle with them. I don't condemn them. I just idly watch them come and go.

I think that poor man must go around in circles, like a puppy chasing his own tail. Perhaps he's struggled so hard against his wicked thoughts that he's committed all of them to memory, where they ever lie in wait to pop up again and again. Perhaps he's reinforced the neural pathways of those wicked thoughts so much they are extremely robust and crowd out most other thoughts.

It would be ironic if I had more wicked thoughts than he did with the difference being I forget my many while he never forgets his few.

Unless you are trying to pass a class in metaphysics, whether god ontologically exists or not is trivial at best and more likely irrelevant. It's true that discussing the issue can, if done well, exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking, but so can many other issues exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking. Overall, wondering whether god exists or not is nearly pointless -- except perhaps as a way of distracting ourselves from dealing with more authentic challenges of living.

Underlying the mistaken notion that god's existence or non-existence is vitally important are the assumptions that god, merely by god's ontological existence, saves us from meaninglessness, makes sense of our suffering, preserves us from eternal death, is with us in times of need, and so on and so forth. Yet, not one of those things can be demonstrated -- not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

The mere ontological existence of god implies almost nothing about the nature of god or god's relationship to us. For instance, suppose that tomorrow someone finally proves the universe must necessarily have a creator, and therefore god must ontologically exist. Fine. But would it necessarily mean anything to us? Would it mean there was salvation from eternal death? Would it mean god in any way cares for us? Would it tell us a thing about whether god has a purpose for us or not? On what grounds could anyone answer "yes" to those questions?

Yet, it is crucial to point out here that some people experience god. To be precise, they have an experience of something they choose to name "god". Other people, having similar experiences, choose to say they experienced the Tao, the Buddha-Nature, the Great Spirit, the Void, the Ultimate Weirdness, or some other placeholder. It doesn't much matter what people call their experiences experiences of. That seems to be more determined by what society, religious tradition, or culture they come from than by anything else. What matters is those experiences are so often transformative.

They are transformative in ways the mere ontological existence of god is not. For instance, someone who has had such experiences might find they no longer fear dying. Not because they now believe in a life after death, nor because they now have a reassuring theology, but simply because they have changed, been transformed, into someone who doesn't fear death. Likewise, someone who has had such experiences might find they are now capable of much greater love. Again, not because they believe god ontologically exists and has commanded them to love, but simply because they have been transformed into someone who is more loving. While the ontological existence of god (or the Tao, or whatever) is at best trivial, the experience of god is often profoundly transformative.

The question of whether god exists or not is insignificant compared to the transformation that can occur when one experiences god. Moreover, that transformative experience does not come about from believing in god. You can believe in god to your heart's content, but all your hours of belief will do nothing to bring about a transformative experience of god. Why is that?

"God" is just a symbol -- no more, no less. To say you believe in god is quite the same -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in the star that represents Paris on a map of France. It is just as insignificant -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in your wife's name. Nor does it matter in the least how elaborate, sophisticated and complex your notion of god is. For does it matter whether you say you believe in the star that represents Paris on one map, or you say that you believe in the more detailed street map that represents Paris on a different map? In both cases, your mere belief will not be the same thing as an actual experience of Paris -- regardless of how passionately or fervently you believe.

For those reasons, belief in god is quite often mere escapism. It is like reading a map of Paris rather than visiting Paris. It can be no more than a longed for daydream.

At Andersonville during the American civil war, the Union soldiers who were held prisoner there by the Confederates lacked salt. When you go without salt, you begin to crave it, and the craving of some of those soldiers became so intense that they would cut the world "salt" from their Bibles and chew the word. It did nothing to preserve their lives -- they starved for salt anyway. But it had a psychological effect on some of those who ate the word. It comforted them.

For many people belief in god is just such a comfort. It does nothing to really nourish them spiritually, it is by no means as transformative as experiencing god, but it does give them a morale boost -- just as eating the word "salt" comforted some of the soldiers who did it at Andersonville. Perhaps ironically, I think most of us would prefer the comfort of believing in god to the experience of god. That might be why we place so much emphasis on whether we believe or not.

"Competition can be a very intense experience and a very rewarding one, or it can be enormously destructive. External pressure, whether it’s exerted by a coach, a school, a ski club, or a country, is what can make it a negative thing. When they use you to satisfy their need to succeed, when they impose their value system on you, then competition isn’t personally rewarding anymore.... You’re either a winner or a loser.... There’s no way in my mind that you can divide humanity into those two categories."

- Andrea Mead Lawrence (Olympic Gold Medalist)



"In tennis, at the end of the day you’re a winner or a loser. You know exactly where you stand.... I don’t need that anymore. I don’t need my happiness, my well-being, to be based on winning and losing."

- Chris Evert (Champion Tennis Player)

Ed Diener is America's foremost psychologist researching human happiness. In a 2003 study, he and Shigehiro Oishi discovered that European and Asian Americans behaved differently when choosing tasks to perform.

The European Americans typically picked tasks they were good at, while the Asian Americans were significantly more likely to ignore whether they were good at something when choosing whether to do it. Diener and Oishi further discovered that over time the European Americans expressed greater happiness with their tasks than the Asian Americans. That is, both groups were given a choice what tasks to perform, but only the European Americans picked tasks that made them happy.

Given a choice, why would anyone not choose to do what makes them happy?

Unfortunately, not everyone in this strange world has the option of fully playing to their strengths. It seems in many cases the reasons for that are economic. I would guess the need to earn a living, combined with a lack of opportunities for doing so, has probably forced more people into jobs and lives that play to their weaknesses than perhaps any other single factor. Just imagine how many immensely talented people in the long course of human history have been street beggars because the society and economy they lived in provided them with little or no opportunity to do anything else! Yet, even in wealthy nations today many people find themselves going into jobs where they cannot make full use of their talents and skills, but must to one great extent or another play to their weaknesses.

Besides economics, many social and cultural factors can pressure people into opting for a job or life that does not play to their strengths and leaves them less happy than they would otherwise be. The classic example of that is the social and cultural oppression of women. Until recently, most societies allowed women very few choices in life. And minorities within a society often face similar restrictions.

A third set of factors are probably psychological. A few years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States released a startling report that concluded one in five Americans was mentally or emotionally ill. A symptom of many disorders is anhedonism -- that is, an aversion to pleasure. People who suffer anhedonism are more likely to seek things that make them unhappy than things that make them happy. Although I don't know what percentage of the population suffers from anhedonism, it seems likely enough that it could be a few million of us.

While playing to our strengths is a significant source of happiness, not all of us do so for many and various reasons -- some of which I've touched on.

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

- George Santayana

Brian was an unhappy worker. He hated his job and was one of my least productive salespeople. By the time he got 12 sales, the group average was 36. He kept showing up at the office because he needed the money, but his heart just wasn't in it.

I first tried to retrain him. That didn't work because the problem was not his lack of understanding how to sell, but his absolute distaste for it. I was afraid I would have to fire him. I didn't much like Brian, but as his manager I considered it my duty to do my best by him. So I wracked my brain for some work -- for any work -- that I could reassign him to rather than fire him.

About that time, the monthly accounts receivable report crossed my desk and I noticed that the receivables were getting out of hand. The percentage of people who were agreeing to buy our product, but who were then ignoring the bills we sent them, had taken an upswing -- most likely because the economy was in recession. Something had to be done about it.

I don't know how long it took me to put 2 and 2 together to get 4, but I eventually did. That is, I decided to create a new position -- bill collector -- and assign Brian to it.

At first, Brian was just as pessimistic about his new job as he had been about his old one. But that suddenly changed sometime in his very first week. When I dropped by on Tuesday to ask how things were going, Brian grinned so broadly that I thought he was going to bite me. And by Friday, Brian was collecting as much money from the past due receivables as some of our salespeople were bringing in from new sales.

Brian began to change. He no longer bitched about everything from the office carpet to his fellow workers. He started coming in early, and was no longer the first to leave. I was convinced he had more energy than I'd ever seen in him before. And, perhaps most astonishing to me, he told me he loved his job.

By hit or miss, I had somehow managed to take Brian out of sales position that played to his weaknesses, and instead place him in a collections position that played to his strengths. In doing so, I had not only avoided firing him, but I had actually helped to make him a happy and productive worker. I will never forget how dramatically Brian changed when he was finally asked to do something he could do well.

According to the scientists who study what makes people happy, there are many factors involved in human happiness, but one significant factor is for people to play to their strengths, rather than to their weaknesses.

Playing to your strengths means that you position yourself to make the best use of your talents and skills. When you do that, the task you set yourself to perform becomes comparatively easy -- like bicycling downhill. But if you are unfortunate enough to play to your weaknesses, then just the opposite is true -- you might as well set yourself the task of always bicycling uphill through life.

So, there you have it. Whatever the obstacles, anyone who is at all concerned with their happiness would do well to pay close attention to themselves in order to figure out both their strengths and their weaknesses -- and then as much as possible always play to their strengths. That is often easier said than done. In a future post, I plan to offer some suggestions about how to play to our strengths and avoid playing to our weaknesses.

A new poll of young people (ages 13 to 24) jointly conducted by MTV and the Associated Press finds that "being sexually active leads to less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds" but more happiness in the moment for 18 - 24 year olds.

Of course, by "leads to", the folks at MTV and the Associated Press meant "it correlates with". So, the press release should have read, "being sexually active correlates with less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds, but correlates with more happiness in the moment among 18 - 24 year olds." The difference is important.

"Leads to" implies that sexual activity causes less happiness among 13 - 17 year olds.

However, there could be all sorts of other reasons why sexually active 13 - 17 year olds are less happy than their non-sexually active peers. For instance, it could be that unhappy kids start having sex earlier than happy kids (Perhaps unhappy kids are using sex to escape their unhappiness). If knowing why sexually active 13 - 17 year olds are less happy is important, then it is important to be straight about the difference between "leads to" and "correlates with".

Having said all that, I might add that if any kid were to ask me when they should start having sex, I would most likely tell them, "sometime between 18 and 24". That is, unless I knew the kid well enough to sense that he or she would be happier starting sex earlier or later than that age range. Yet, for most people, it seems a pretty good bet that sometime between 18 and 24 they will be emotionally and mentally mature enough for sex.

I do not know at what age someone will be emotionally and mentally mature enough for sex, but I do know that it's very difficult to be happy having sex if you are not emotionally and mentally mature enough for it.

I was cruising the internet the other evening, recklessly swerving my way from one blog to another, happily dashing down the electron road, when I crashed into a notion. The notion I crashed into -- on blog after blog that evening -- was that unless God exists, life is meaningless. Several people were saying they had lost their faith in God and now felt "empty", "hollow", "full of angst", or "devoid of meaning". I checked, and none of them were teenagers. Teenagers typically mistake horniness for existential despair. But these folks were adults and it can be presumed they were not simply mistaking the emotional effects of testosterone for a crisis of meaning.

What all the bloggers shared was having been raised as Christians in churches where it is common to teach people the meaning of their life comes from God.

That is, the idea seems to be that without God, our lives are meaningless because after a few decades at most they end in oblivion, rather than continuing on in some fashion. Thus, it is argued the meaning of life depends on whether we -- that is, our soul, metaphysical spirit, or true self -- endures for all of eternity.

Yet, is it actually true that life has no meaning unless we continue on in some fashion after death?

I sometimes feel fortunate that I mostly escaped ever harboring the notion my life was meaningless without eternity. As a child, I attended church because my then agnostic mother believed it was important to expose me to the dominant religion of my culture -- Christianity (She also believed it was vitally important to get me out of the house Sunday mornings so she could stay home and indulge herself in the wonder of a few hours without having me under her feet). My exposure to Christianity led me to think quite a bit about it, but my exposure failed to make me a Christian -- except for a single month while I was in middle school. Other than that one month, I grew up agnostic like my mother. So, it was quite some long time ago that I examined the question of whether eternal life made temporal life meaningful and somehow I never bought into the notion that it did. Thus, I did not feel "empty", "hollow", and so forth upon leaving Christianity after my one month gig with it. But the bloggers I swerved into the other evening at one time certainly bought into that notion because giving up God and eternity for them has resulted in their feeling life is meaningless.

Our assumptions and expectations have much more to do with whether we feel life is meaningless than we might at first suppose. If we are successfully taught at a young enough age that life is meaningful if and only if we last forever, then we will feel life is meaningless as soon as we give up our belief we last forever. Yet, if we do not assume the meaning of life depends on how long we endure it in some form or another, then we look elsewhere for the meaning of our lives -- and many of us will succeed in finding a meaning (or meanings) for our lives that satisfy us.

Being true to oneself is a skill. It might even be the single most important skill we can acquire. A Zen poem beautifully expresses the emotional import of being true to oneself while expressing the art of it in the simplest terms possible:

I eat when I'm hungry.
I drink when I'm thirsty.
I sleep when I'm tired.
How wonderful!

For many people, the very closest they will come to being true to themselves happens during the earliest days of their lives when they cried when they felt like crying, puked when they had to puke, slept when they were tired. Yet, those days soon ended. As they grew, they were increasingly taught to ignore themselves and their own wants and needs. To sit still when they wanted to move about. To be quiet when they wanted to yell. To learn subjects they did not want to study. To pass exams they did not want to take. To hold jobs they did not want to hold. Much of what they learned about denying themselves was necessary, of course, for them to live and function in this strange world.

Yet, it's surprising at times to reflect on how much we unnecessarily deny ourselves. And if that is surprising, then it is absolutely astonishing to ponder all the ways we unnecessarily deny ourselves.

Sometimes those ways are obvious. I'm reminded of a friend whose father was a senior executive of an auto company. Early on, the father decided his son would become the Chief Executive Officer of a large corporation -- hopefully, General Motors. From that moment forward he pressured his son to conform to the ways of an executive in training. Nothing his son wanted or did was innocent: Everything must have a purpose and that purpose must be to produce an executive. Consequently, my friend grew up deeply confused about who he was and what he wanted for himself. How could he not have grown up confused? He was never taught how to find out who he was.

Yet, many times the ways in which we learn to deny ourselves are not quite as obvious. Today, consumerism is the prime example of that. Corporations, their advertising agencies and public relations firms are constantly teaching people in consumer societies that being true to yourself means little more than buying a brand. While that is a shallow, artificial and ultimately misleading way of expressing yourself, it is the primary way in which millions -- and soon billions -- of humans will simultaneously "express themselves" and deny their true selves. Consumerism merely promotes narcissism, and substitutes it for self-realization and accomplishment. In that respect, it is just another way of denying your true self. And how can you be true to yourself if you deny your true self?

So, broadly speaking, we have so far discussed only one way in which being true to yourself is skillful. That is, there is skill involved in avoiding the many and various ways of unnecessarily denying ourselves.

Besides the many and various ways in which we deny ourselves, there are other challenges to being true to oneself. For instance: To be true to yourself, you must, of course, know yourself. That is an ongoing process without end. We never complete the task of knowing ourselves: We merely get better at it. Because we never complete the task, there is always some uncertainty about who we are.

Yet, many of us avoid knowing ourselves precisely because knowing ourselves involves uncertainty, and uncertainty is uncomfortable. Instead of maintaining the open mindedness to genuinely learn about ourselves as we go along in life, many of us try to fashion personal myths about ourselves that we can cling to in order to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty. "I am such and such a person", we tell ourselves -- even though we do not act that way, or at least haven't acted that way in years. Paradoxically, to know yourself, you must be willing to live with the uncertainty of not knowing yourself.

There are many ways to learn about oneself, but perhaps the best way is to watch what one does as dispassionately as one would watch someone else's child at play, or a stranger on the street. That requires considerable skill because it is not at all easy to dispassionately watch ourselves. Yet, that might well be the best way to learn about oneself.

Being true to oneself is not effortless. It is instead a skill that requires development. To be skillful at it, one must combine the insight to give up the many and various ways of unnecessarily denying ourselves with the will to learn about ourselves. I believe, however, that it is impossible to be genuinely happy in this life without being true to oneself. Thus, being true to oneself might indeed be the most personally valuable skill we can acquire, for it leads to genuine happiness.

Wondering what the human prospect is these days? You might get some factual insights on that by visiting Trinifar this week.

Trinifar has put together some beautiful graphs showing major ecological, demographic and economic trends in a post on "visualizing sustainability". He then briefly explains each graph in clear, non-technical terms.

Especially worth noting I think are the estimates that the world population of humans will reach 9 billion by 2050, while the maximum sustainable population is estimated between one and three billion. If anything even remotely like that occurs (and something remotely like that seems very likely) some environmental resources will be exhausted by the excess population, perhaps leading to a reduction in the number of people who can live on the earth in a sustainable fashion. That's just about the mildest effect such a disaster will have on the human prospect.

The effect of too many people and too few resources that concerns me most is political and spiritual. Huge numbers of people competing for diminishing resources is quite likely to lead to repressive societies. Then what happens? Will humanities' potential for authentic happiness ever be realized? Will most of us be able to appreciably develop our talents and skills, or stay true to ourselves? Or will only the tiny elite that controls the world's resources have decent lives?

I am reasonably confident that in the long run, the human spirit will rebound. But the long run could take centuries to be realized.

Growing up, I was frequently disappointed with humans. I expected them to be rational. Now I expect them to be irrational, and am instead sometimes pleasantly surprised.

My values have not changed. Merely my expectations. And my expectations did not change as a negative, hurt reaction against irrationality -- that might only have left me cynical and bitter about human irrationality. Instead, my expectations changed in a positive quest to be more realistic about our human nature. That quest has not left me cynical and bitter, but merely aware that things of beauty to me (such as rational thought) do not grow everywhere anymore than flowers grow everywhere.

An old adage goes, "There are two ways of being rich. The first is to have more money than you want. The latter is to have fewer wants than the money you have." In my expectations, I have largely embraced the latter. I emotionally expect -- i.e. I demand -- a little less than the world is willing to cheerfully give. That "trick" has made for a great deal of personal happiness.

Can everyone use the very same trick to achieve a bit of happiness? I don't expect so. The trick I've talked about here is not compatible with everyone's spiritual path, for some people take the path of the idealist. It seems to me a genuine idealist is someone who demands more from the world than the world is willing to cheerfully give. It has it's place, idealism, but it's mostly not my own path. I largely reserve my idealism for those few things I believe I can personally change.

A friend recently lost her job and is short on money this month, so I'm sending her a few dollars to ease the situation.

I seem to recall that when I was much younger, giving was more problematic to me. That's to say, I thought when I was young that I had to somehow justify it. It is, after all, considered a moral act to give, and morality is something that ought to have a reasoned basis, right? So, when I was young, I seldom gave anything without trying to reason out why I was giving something.

At some point, it became tiresome to always wonder what grounds there were for giving, and I dropped any effort to do so. And that's when it became fun to give.

I think for most of us, it's just as natural to us to give when we see a need as it is for us to eat when we are hungry. We usually don't need to rationalize eating, so why do we sometimes feel we need to rationalize our giving? The effort takes the fun out of giving, just as it would take the fun out of eating.

Last weekend, I managed to get up into the mountains. Spring was just coming to them. The peaks were still snow capped, but the days were warm and bright, and some tiny wildflowers were in bloom. I would have liked to stay for a week or two, because it can take me that long to get into the rhythms of the wilderness.

You don't notice it too much when you're in the city, but your senses go to sleep in the city.

You notice it when you're in the mountains for a few days -- then your senses wake up again, sharpen, become more alert than you had imagined they could be.

I figure your senses go to sleep in the city to protect you from all the noise, odors, confused movement, and subtle chaos that are the nature of cities. If your senses were really awake in the city, you'd be overwhelmed.

When I have spent a long time with nature -- enough time to feel a part of it, rather than just feel myself a visitor -- I often have found in myself a sense that the pace, the rhythm, the sights, the sounds of nature are what we are really born to understand. Deeply understand. It seems so much easier, up there in the mountains, to understand life, to accept it for what it is, to want nothing more than what it offers.

I don't mean to trivialize nature. A life lived in nature is hard, difficult, often short, frequently pained. Yet, for all that, our species did not evolve for cities, but for the wilderness. And part of us shall always be asleep in the city.

As I write this, the sun has just touched the uppermost blossoms on the apple tree in my back yard. The sight is so beautiful that it demands I become lost in it.

Have you noticed there can be a certain emotional pain in seeing the most beautiful things? The most deeply beautiful things sometimes disconcert us. We might even turn away from them. We might even make an effort to dismiss them. For the deeply beautiful things of this world have the power to challenge us to move out beyond ourselves; to loose, if even for a moment, the concerns, the thoughts and feelings that give us such a sense of self, such a sense of who we are and why we are so important to ourselves.

Sometimes, we would prefer to look at something ugly than to look at something beautiful precisely because the ugly thing does not make us yearn to be free of ourself; precisely because it does not challenge us in quite the same way beauty can challenge us to loose ourselves in it.

That's a truth that seems lost on those overtly sentimental works of art designed to provoke in us warm and fuzzy feelings towards the merely cute or the merely pretty.

Yet, the deeply beautiful things of this world have the power -- if we let them -- of refreshing and renewing us in ways that sentimental prettiness cannot. The deeply beautiful things can offer us a perspective on our selves that is far more life affirming than the feelings one might have towards an all too cutely rendered painting of an English cottage at dusk.

That's why it is so important to let go of oneself at times: To allow ourselves to become lost, perhaps in the sight of something deeply beautiful. Letting go can, when one is lucky, be life affirming. But genuine letting go of ourselves is not ego affirming. And hence, it is something that we all too often are not prepared to do. Our egos, necessary as they are at times, can make us cowards even towards experiencing something as simple and life affirming as the beauty of an apple blossom against the dawning sky.

The other day, Newsweek referred to "Is God real?" as "life's biggest question". The occasion was a polite debate between contemporary thinker Sam Harris and megachurch pastor Rick Warren, which I've reviewed here. Perhaps I shouldn't be concerned with what Newsweek deems life's biggest question is, but it struck me that it might be fun to explore the notion a bit.

Why would any of us think the existence of deity was life's biggest or most important question?

I suspect the likely answer is we have been told the question involves whether we will at some point go to heaven or hell. If given that choice, many of us would naturally prefer to be in hell with our friends than be in heaven with the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson, but the catch is that heaven is eternal bliss while hell is eternal torture.

So, perhaps it boils down to this: The existence of deity is thought to be life's biggest or most important question because it involves death's biggest reward or punishment.

Yet, does even that loose-loose choice between eternal bliss with the likes of the Religious Right versus eternal torture in the company of our honest friends genuinely make, "Is God real", "life's biggest question"?

As everyone knows, it's all very speculative whether deity exists, whether deity has created a heaven and hell, whether deity assigns souls to one or the other, or whether there's anything we ourselves can do about where we go upon death. There is no conclusive evidence for any of that, as demonstrated by 2300 years of mostly rigorous philosophical inquiry into the matter. And that should leave us wondering whether there aren't bigger and better questions than "Is God real".

For instance: We could ask whether it matters at all if deity exists or not? What difference would the existence of deity make, and how would it make that difference? For even if deity existed, it seems we would still be ignorant of the fact that deity existed, still ignorant of any demands deity made on us, and still ignorant of any way the existence of deity played a role in our lives.

Sure, someone could say, "if deity exists, then heaven and hell exist, then eternal reward and punishment exist, and so forth", but -- once again -- that would all remain speculation.

The question of whether it matters at all whether deity exists or not seems to me a more primal question than the question, "Is God real". Yet, I wouldn't even call that question "life's biggest". For I think such questions as, "How are we to live?", and "What is the Good Life?", are far more important than even, "Does it matter if deity exists?".

Some people play a cunning game with those they love. The game is called, “I am only saying this because I love you”, and then they damn the person with their criticism of him or her.

“I am only saying this because I love you: You should not read thick books because boys don’t like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don’t you?”

“I am only saying this because I love you: You must accept Jesus as your savior or you will go to hell.”

“I am only saying this because I love you: You shouldn’t spend time playing basketball. Basketball is for wimps. Football is for men.”

Almost all of us know someone who plays the game of, “I am only saying this because I love you.” We might even play the game ourselves because we were taught to play it by our parents, our siblings, our spouse, or someone else. It is very difficult to break a habit, isn’t it? Especially when those around you have the same habit.

Whether we play that game or not, most of know – deeply know – that it’s not real love speaking when someone plays that game. The person who is playing that game might kid themselves, but even they usually know on some level that they are not being authentic when they say, “I am only telling you this because I love you.”

What do you do if someone plays that game with you?

You try to put as much distance between them and you as you can, don’t you? But what if that’s not possible? What if they’re your parent? Or, your spouse? What do you do if you cannot physically avoid someone who plays that game? When we cannot physically distance ourselves from someone, most of us will try to psychologically distance ourselves from that person, and we have many ways of doing that.

I am not concerned here with most of those ways. I want to focus on just one of them. Last night I came across an interesting blog on which someone was discussing this very problem of love and criticism. Something they said reminded me of one way many of us psychologically distance ourselves. They defined love as, “I understand you without judgment”.

That’s an interesting statement. If we look closely at it, we see it is a direct and forceful contradiction of the “I am only saying this because I love you” game. By insisting that love is understanding someone without judging them we knock the wind out of that game, don’t we? We expose it for what it is. We show how it lacks real love.

Yet, is it completely true that love is understanding someone without judging them? You’ll notice I asked if it were completely true. For there is a great deal of truth in the statement, and my only quibble with it is that it might not be the complete truth. So, to put the question a bit differently, is it at all possible to criticize someone out of love?

If we are serious about answering that question, then perhaps we should begin by asking ourselves what love is. Specifically, is love just a feeling, an emotion? Or, is it more than an emotion?

I think genuine love is more than an emotion. It is as much a way of looking, a perspective, a way of seeing, as it is a feeling. When we love someone, we see them very differently than when we don’t love that person. Sometimes we say we see their soul, or their spirit; their inner self or their true nature. Whatever we call it, love has a tendency to reveal to us what is authentic in another person. Or, to slightly paraphrase Iris Murdock, love is the difficult recognition that someone besides our self is real.

Yet, love is more than that, isn’t it? It is also the unconditional acceptance of the real in another person. That is of their real, authentic self.

So, is it at all possible to criticize someone while at the same time unconditionally accepting them?

At the least, that would seem paradoxical. But let’s quickly resolve the paradox. When we unconditionally accept and love what is authentic in another person, we can still criticize what is inauthentic without thereby in any way changing the fact that we unconditionally accept and love what is authentic in them.

To put it differently, we might decently criticize them for not being true to themselves. For instance, if a girl put aside her love of reading because she was afraid that boys would not like her if she read thick books, we might point out the folly of that decision to her and encourage her to continue reading. Again, if a friend ignored her normally sound reason in order to believe in God out of fear of hell, we might point out how that was a betrayal of herself and encourage her to return to her senses. Or, again, if a boy gave up the sport he loved and excelled at in order to please his father we might point out to him how lame that was, and encourage him to pursue his excellence. In short, our criticisms would be encouragements to be true to oneself.

If I am right about this, then loving someone certainly does not preclude us from at times criticizing them when they fail to be true to themselves. If I’m wrong about this, then I shall fetch myself another cup of coffee and re-think the whole thing, for it’s early in the morning as I write this, and it seems quite possible to me that I am not yet awake enough to write knowingly about such things.

Life is in the details. We ask big questions about the meaning of life, but can any answer we give to those questions make us happier than a good walk?

I have a close friend who refuses to take phone calls from people -- even her own family -- unless she genuinely feels like hearing from them.

More over, she makes no excuses for her behavior. She will tell you right up front when she does take your call that she saw your number on her caller ID the other evening, but didn't take your call then because she wasn't feeling like talking with you.

If I ever needed reasons to love her (and I don't need reasons), that would be one of the reasons I'd love her.

When I call her I know, if she takes the call, that she actually wants to speak with me. I don't know that with some people.

It's astonishing how many of us are willing to put up with calls we don't feel like taking at the moment. That is, we're willing to take the calls, but then all too often we resent the caller for having called us when we didn't want to speak with them. With my friend, I know that never happens.

I can't remember the source, but somewhere out there in this big wide world is a Zen poem that goes something like this:

I eat when I'm hungry
I sleep when I'm tired
How wonderful!

My friend reminds me of that poem. Not just in the intelligent way she takes phone calls, but in the intelligent way she leads her life. That is, her policy on phone calls is part and parcel of her policy on nearly everything in her life. As much as can be done in this often insane world, she "eats when she's hungry, sleeps when she's tired". She has worked very hard, and made some sacrifices, to make her life one that can be lived as close to spontaneously as possible.