Civilization and Its Discontents

"People who are really happy with themselves are f***ing boring. The worst word in the world is content."

— Kevin Spacey, who turned 56 on Sunday

I think maybe I understand what Kevin Spacey meant by that statement. Drive and personal ambition are important American values. Always aiming higher, not settling for less. More, better, stronger, faster. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Spacey plays (so very, very well) one of the most evil, Machiavellian, greedy, power-obsessed characters on television, in the disturbingly good Netflix series “House of Cards,” which provides a devastating and hair-raising glimpse into American national politics.

But I disagree with Spacey’s statement. Because I think it’s actually incredibly, incredibly rare for human beings to experience true contentment. And contentment is one of the secret, neglected keys to spiritual awakening and self-realization.

Most of us live our lives chronically caught up in a pervasive feeling of what ancient yogis and Buddhists referred to as “dukkha,” a Sanskrit word that (unfortunately) is often translated as “suffering” but could be (more accurately) rendered as discontentment, dis-ease, imbalance, a sense of lack and insufficiency that plagues us and leaves us—no matter how much good stuff we get—always wanting more.

The ancient yogis and Buddhists said that on the flip side of this coin that is our human experience is the opposite of dukkha: sukha. Sukha, (again, unfortunately) is most often translated into English as “bliss,” which sounds like some kind of fuzzy, pleasurable state that is assumed to be the opposite of suffering. (By that definition, a junkie strung out on heroin could be experiencing sukha.) But there are much better choices for rendering “sukha” into English: contentment, for one, or a sense of ease and well-being, balance, things working smoothly and harmoniously according to the natural order.

Contentment is one of the magical, golden keys to a life well-lived. Without cultivating a basic sense of contentment and gratitude for what we have, we cannot unlock the doors that keep us trapped in our self-made prisons of resentment, jealousy, greed, and all the other afflictive emotional patterns that diminish and discolor our human experience. We don’t have to rest on our laurels and become doormats, but developing a greater sense of contentment and appreciation for what we already have is a really good place to start.

— Hunter

“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn't try to convince others.
Because one is content with oneself, one doesn't need others' approval.
Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.”
― Lao Tzu

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.”
― Lao Tzu

“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”
― Socrates

The Hammer of Insight

We all have those days sometimes when nothing seems to go the way we want it to, and everything gets under our skin. They seem to happen disproportionately on Mondays, when most people are returning to their jobs from the relaxation of a weekend.

One recent Monday I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. My mind was foggy, and I felt psychologically oppressed by the pressures of work that were looming ahead of me. A complex matter in my personal life was also weighing heavily on my mind. And my foot was hurting. On the subway, someone had vomited. I sat on the bench across from it, at the far end, to distance myself. Everyone who entered the subway car saw the pool of vomit and turned in another direction, except for one oblivious woman who stepped right in it and then realized her mistake. She came across and sat right next to me, tracking the vomit on her shoe. I felt a wave of irritation and revulsion, but breathed through it. Then the person on the other side of me sneezed without covering his mouth. My irritation surged again, and I started holding my breath.

Once off the subway, the streets were barricaded and filled with jeeps, police cars, and uniformed infantry. I suddenly remembered it was Veterans Day, and the epicenter of the Veterans Day parade is directly beneath my office window. I zig-zagged my way through the barricades, negotiating with police officers to reach my office building and weaving through squadrons of soldiers, firemen and former PoWs on Harley Davidsons. All morning long, the noise of drums and bagpipes filled my ears, distracting me from my work. Despite my English and Scottish ancestry, the sound of bagpipes has always been to me like nails on a chalkboard.

A Toolbox for Coping with What Life Throws at You
So what do you do when you're having a seriously bad hair day? A day filled with stressful pressures, vomit on the subway, people sneezing at you, and bagpipes grating on your nerves? What tools do you draw upon to keep yourself from completely losing it?

One good place to start is to remember to breathe. When stress gets the upper hand on us, our heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and breathing becomes shallow. The sympathetic nervous system becomes over-stimulated. Just pausing for a moment and breathing slowly and deeply into the belly can help us insert space into a cramped situation. It also activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which counters the physiological effects of stress and promotes relaxation.

Another useful tool is to laugh at yourself. Take a step back and look at how seriously you take everything, and see the humor in it. Laugh at yourself. Are you saving babies or performing brain surgery? If not, ask yourself: do I really need to be taking all of this so seriously?

Big Teachings Come in Small Packages
I remember meeting with my spiritual teacher once when I was having a day like this. He was only in town for a weekend program, and I went to see him with a small group of people on a Friday night, coming straight from work. My mind was buzzing like a beehive of stresses and irritations. He looked at me and asked me how I was doing. I beat around the bush, not really wanting to bother him with what I knew were mostly petty, mundane concerns. I said I was okay.

"Why just okay?" he asked.

Again, I beat around the bush, not really forming a clear answer. I mumbled something about life in New York City being like a roller coaster.

Suddenly, in the middle of my mumbling, he grabbed me by the shoulder, looked directly into my eyes, and said quietly, so only I could hear him: "You died two months ago."

I was stunned into silence, not sure at first what to make of this bizarre and ominous-sounding statement. "Just imagine," he repeated: "You died two months ago."

In that moment, the hammer of insight struck me upside the head. I saw that it wasn't the external circumstances that were putting me in that stressed-out state of mind: it was me. I saw how silly and unnecessary it was to do that to myself. What a waste of time and energy. I was putting myself at the center of a huge emotional drama, and making such a fuss over it all — and for what purpose? Soon enough, death will come for me, as it comes for everyone. What if I had died two months ago, and I hadn't even been there to experience all this drama? Would it still carry the same importance to me?

Even more importantly, what if death comes for me two months from now? Is *this* how I will want to have spent those months? Life is short for us humans even in the luckiest of circumstances. Do I want to fritter away whatever precious time I have left wallowing in emotional dramas and stressing out over external circumstances that I cannot control? If I were on my deathbed right now, how much would I really and truly care about the pressures at work, the vomit on the subway, the bagpipes in the street? All the plans and ambitions, the hopes and fears, the unfinished projects, the worries and concerns, the grudges and attachments — do they really amount to a hill of beans in the end?

Sometimes the most profound teachings come in the smallest packages.

Whenever I have one of those days now — and I do still have them, more often than I care to admit — I try to remember that teaching. I look at whatever it is that I'm getting so worked up over, and I ask myself: would this really matter to me in the end? How would the situation be different if I had died two months ago? How would it look different to me if I knew I was going to die two months from now?

That's what a good spiritual teacher does. It's not about the books they write, or the talks and workshops they give. It's about the tools they give you for cutting through your own trip and getting a better view of reality. It might be five simple words whispered in your ear, but those five words might contain the one message that pops your bubble and brings you back down to earth, and reminds you of what's really important.

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Get Over Yourself: Resisting the Tyranny of Ego

When I lived in the monastery, one of the most profound and challenging aspects of our training as monastics was the principle of choicelessness.

As humans, we ordinarily spend a vast amount of time — maybe even the majority of our time — fussing over our personal preferences about everything from our food to our clothing and appearance to the creature comforts of our home. A big chunk of this time goes into trying to get our way and impose our personal preferences on other people, and negotiating all the conflict that arises from clashing preferences. Our partner feels like eating sushi tonight and watching a certain TV show, but we feel like eating pasta and watching a different TV show.

Dropping the Habit
Like Goldilocks in the children's fable, we jump constantly from one experience to another, always searching for the one that's "just right" — the one that fulfills our personal preferences. We spend our lives trying to make ourselves comfortable by selecting and acquiring the objects that meet our criteria. But our preferences are fickle and quixotic, and things often don't live up to our expectations. The movie we so looked forward to — and coerced our friends into seeing with us — turns out to be dreadful, and we leave the theater feeling disappointed (and chastened by our friends). The pasta that pleased us yesterday bores us today. The shirt we loved when we bought it last season looks like a fright when we put it on now.

In the monastery we were encouraged to drop this self-defeating habit and to work, instead, with the discipline of choicelessness.

• Forget about your appearance. Leave your fancy hair products behind. Shave your head like everyone else. Forget about jewelry and make-up and accessories and your favorite clothing — they're not allowed. Wear the simple robes that are given to you, which (surprise!) look like everyone else's. Stop trying to be "unique" and to "express yourself" with your appearance. That's just your ego.
• Forget about your eating preferences. Eat the food that is prepared for you, and eat it only when it's placed in front of you at the appointed hour. If you don't like the food, you're cordially invited to keep your complaints to yourself. Or don't eat.
• Forget about your creature comforts. Sleep in the bed that's offered to you. If you don't like your roommate's snoring, you're cordially invited to get over it. Try wearing earplugs.
• Forget about sleeping in, or planning your day according to your mood. Wake up with the others and follow the schedule. Do your practices. Do your chores. Do your work. Don't like the schedule? You're cordially invited to get used to it.
• Forget about escaping on Open Day into the movie of your choice. You can choose to watch the one movie that is provided on Friday night — which is selected by majority vote — or you can choose not to watch it. Don't like it? Leave the room. Go to bed early.

Life Does Not Revolve Around You
You learn very quickly in the monastery that life does not revolve around you and your personal preferences. As in the military, there's a structure and a program to be followed for pretty much everything. You either get with the program, and learn to be generally okay with it, or you make yourself miserable by struggling against it. That's your choice. Which one is more appealing?

That may sound harsh, and in some ways it is. But when you actually embrace choicelessness as a practice, a form of spiritual training, it can open you up in unexpected ways. You start to see that the quick thrill of getting what you want pales next to the deeper sense of contentment that comes from accepting that which is, without complaint or struggle.

You've spent your whole life trying to get everything and everyone around you to align with your personal preferences. How's that working for you? Maybe, just maybe, it has caused more trouble than it's worth. So how about dropping all that and just letting things be as they are?

Sometimes a Burrito is Just a Burrito
You may still hate the burritos that are served every two weeks, like clockwork; you may still hate the film that was chosen by the group for movie night. You may hate the schedule, and feel a burning resentment at being coerced out of your warm bed and into the cold meditation hall at 6 a.m. for the first practice session of the day. But after a while you start to glimpse that your personal preferences are just that: they're just your personal preferences. You begin to see that you are enslaved to them, and they make you miserable because you take them so seriously and believe it's your job to satisfy them all the time. The less seriously you take them — that is, the more you stop whining and get with the program — the less miserable you make yourself and those around you. You begin to taste the freedom that comes from not blindly following your own patterns and urges.

Maybe you discover that the burrito is not the dramatic culinary insult that you have made it out to be. It's just food, after all, and you could actually do something completely contrary to habit, like choose to eat the burrito anyway, without throwing a temper tantrum because it's not what you like. In doing so, you may even experience a faint glimmer of gratitude that, unlike so many other people in the world, you have a burrito to eat in the first place. What's that, you say? A burrito isn't what you wanted? So what? Who said life was supposed to give you everything you want all the time?

Choicelessness in Everyday Life
You don't have to go to the extremes of shaving your head and living like a monk or a nun to work with the practice of choicelessness. You can experiment with it in your everyday life. Take one small opportunity each day to notice when your ego is trying to manipulate a situation to get your way — and when you notice that, just see if you can drop it. If there's a discussion between you and your partner or your friends about what to do on a Friday night, make a conscious decision to drop your personal agenda and just do what they want to do instead. Watch your ego kicking and screaming like a brat as you eat the burrito. Eat it anyway. It's food. What's the big deal? Notice, afterwards, how your whole world did not, in fact, come crashing down as your ego predicted it would.

The spiritual path is about learning to recognize and peel away the layers of our individual ego — with all its demands and distortions, its likes and dislikes — in order to uncover the egoless, undifferentiated Being that is our true nature. As long as we are caught up in the lifelong momentum of trying to satisfy our ego's preferences and keep ego happy, it will be hard to make much progress at peeling away those layers. The practice of choicelessness is a tool that helps us, moment by moment, drop down through the onion, one layer at a time.

It's a lifelong practice, and I'm not sure that anybody really gets it perfect. But the more you can drop your mind's struggles to acquire what you like and push away what you dislike, the more possible it becomes to glimpse the truth and to find a more abiding form of contentment.

Seng-ts'an, one of the forefathers of Zen Buddhism, put it like this:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.

You are cordially invited to get over yourself — starting right now.

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