I’ve been having an excellent discussion with Attila Orosz over at his blog ‘Mediation for Beginners‘. His three year old article 13+1 DEFINITIVE SIGNS THAT SHOW YOU ARE NOT ENLIGHTENED is a great way to bring people who think they have ‘got it’ when it comes to enlightenment back down to earth.
But one part of it that bugged me was Attila’s assertion that an enlightened person cannot be happy all of the time.
He points out the brutality of the world makes this impossible and anyone who is always happy must either be in denial (and so have replaced one belief system with another) or suffering some sort of mental illness.
On the other hand I am coming from the point of view that an enlightened person is happy at all times. We are all happy by default, we simply block this state – mostly because of the way we were bought up.
Attila said:
Say for example your loved one dies of cancer. Are you still *really* happy? If you are not sad in that event, you are either in denial, or have psychopathic tendencies. Neither is healthy.
This is well worth taking apart because it shows the struggle so many people face in being happy – even if they are, like Attila, very intelligent and have been working towards enlightenment for years.
So can you really be happy if a loved one dies of cancer? The answer in short is ‘Why not?’
On the surface that sounds shocking but if you think for a moment about where the root of this shock comes from it is simply the conditioning of society.
For most of us we are bought up in such societies where death is seen as a bad thing and our reaction to it should be sadness. Not all of us – the Mah Meri tribe in Malaysia have a day of dancing after someone dies but in Western culture to dance in such circumstances would invoke outrage.
Interestingly Attila says that being happy all the time could indicate psychopathic tendencies which are defined in the dictionary as “a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behaviour”.
Note the words ‘social behaviour’ but social behaviour is defined by that particular society so in one society dancing when someone dies is psychopathic while in another it is the norm.
We are happy but for so many unblocking it is incredibly hard because of the way society has programmed us. Everybody is sad when someone dies so if we are not we will be alienated – and society also programmed us to crave the acceptance of others.
But if we thought about it a little and questioned our programming we would chip away at this rule that death equals sadness. For whom are we sad? Ourselves.
The person who has died has no idea what our reaction is. We are sad because we have lost someone and feel our lives will be worse now. This might be true but is purely a selfish reaction. After a while (what we call the grieving process) we realise it isn’t all that bad and get on with things. The initial perception that things were worse is just that … perception.
We are also sad to please other people. Society expects us to be sad and people would be angry with us if we weren’t. I’ve known people go to funerals just to comment about “exactly how upset the bereaved were”. Acceptably upset, too upset or not upset enough.
If a person follows a religion or other belief system which says there is an after life there is even less reason to be sad. If ‘heaven’ really is so great what on earth do they grieve for? It has to either be jealousy that someone else got there first or the same self loss I mentioned earlier.
The trouble is, as you will see in our discussion on the blog post, two-fold.
Firstly, shaking these norms that society has placed on us is incredibly hard. Attila says that to do so is being Psychopathic or Sociopathic but both are labels created by society to describe people who live outside the norms of that society – they are not by definition ‘bad’ although we have been taught to see them that way.
One definition I have seen is “a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture”. Did you miss it? The local culture. One can be the same person but ‘psychopathic’ in one place and completely ‘normal’ in another.
If I lived in Germany during the Second World War and used violence to oppose the holocaust I would have been a psychopath to the Nazis and a hero to the Jews … but both are just labels.
Sometimes they are so ingrained that they can be called, as Attila does, ‘natural’. So far, however, I have found no evidence to suggest grieving is an instinctive response.
Attila also confuses observation with denial. You can observe an emotion or a thought and so be less affected by it, but the entire process of observation means that you are not denying it.
Secondly there is probably a language issue here. When we think of someone who is happy we imagine a person who is smiling but the mental state and the physical expression are two different things.
A sad person can appear happy.
There are even weird situations. Some religions suggest that pain, suffering and persecution all need to be endured to reach the after life. Believers are therefore happy in their pain, suffering and persecution.
But back to the point – we can be happy even when we are comforting someone who is sad. We don’t sit their beaming from ear to ear but we do not need to be sad to empathize.
In other words we do not need to take on the emotional state of another person in order to empathize with them. We can show understanding and by not becoming their emotional state we can be more effective.
Interestingly both these types of empathy are well recognized in Wikipedia but Attila’s belief system only includes one and so when confronted by the other he claims it is a mental illness which seems like a disservice to his intelligence.
An enlightened person knows that the sad person is only sad because their belief system is clashing with reality or because society has conditioned them to be that way in that situation. The enlightened person is also enlightened enough to know that this is not the moment to explain this to the sad person!
But the last thing an enlightened person can do to help is to become sad as well.