I think that everyone is familiar with the feeling of their happiness being just out of reach. We are constantly looking forward to our next big purchase, our next vacation, our next promotion; it is rare that we feel content with where we are at any specific moment in time. Recently, I read Waking Up by Sam Harris, and in this book he discusses this way of living and how we can learn to maybe rise above it to find that we are content with where we are in our lives.

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Chasing Fulfillment 

It’s no surprise to anyone that there are many sayings about happiness and possessions. A quick google search will yield pages and pages of these proverbs:

“The best things in life aren’t things.”

“Money can’t buy you happiness.”

We all hear these from a young age to the point where they become ubiquitous, yet we continue to seek fulfillment in experiences that are elusive by nature.

Sam illustrates this well in Waking Up:

“We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps, a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.”

Sam is pointing out how we often look for happiness in external phenomena. We think about the things we want rather than appreciating what is around us. This inevitably can lead to an unending lack of fulfillment as we feel that our pleasure rests in what we don’t yet have.

Is there another way?

Harris continues to explain that it is possible to find a way of being that focuses on the present rather than what could be. 

He shows that the feelings of happiness or lack thereof that we experience exist only in our minds. Every feeling of pleasure or anxiety, every hope or worry about the future, every thought that we have; these are all merely sensations appearing in consciousness. 

It is because of this that a monk is able to live a life in isolation from everything we tend to associate with happiness. With enough practice, one can train themselves to merely observe unpleasant feelings as what they truly are, just feelings. 

After realizing this, it is possible to train the mind to be content with what is around us, but how do we achieve this state of mind?

Cultivating Mindfulness

In Waking Up, Sam teaches us that the best way to encourage this way of being is to practice mindfulness. 

Put simply, mindfulness is having clear, undivided attention to the sensations of consciousness. This includes everything we perceive through our senses as well as our feelings and thoughts. By paying close attention to what exists at this very moment in consciousness, we can become less distracted by the thoughts and emotions that cloud our minds regularly and focus on merely experiencing the present, not anxious or worried.

The most useful tool for cultivating mindfulness is meditation. Meditation is simply the practice of sitting and observing what appears to us in consciousness. Most often, a guided meditation will have the listener sit and quiet the mind. They will pay attention to the sensations of breathing, the sounds that appear, and sometimes even the visual field in front of them. Inevitably, thoughts will creep in and begin to cloud the mind, but the meditator will observe their thoughts as objects in consciousness and watch them disappear. 

This is simply scratching the surface of the practice of meditation but I will delve deeper into the subject in a future post.

By practicing mindfulness, we not only reduce our anxiety, pain, and depression. We become more intimately aware of the state of being itself. As Sam writes:

“Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly”

Purchase Waking Up by Sam Harris on Amazon.