A person at last night’s talk brought up Matthieu Ricard, a recent TED speaker, in relation to how meditation is related to decision-making and emotions.

I listened to the TED speech and wasn’t very impressed.  Certain Buddhist philosophies simply rub me the wrong way, even though I agree that they’re effective methods for learning to train the mind to be less reactive.

Before I go into what I disagree with (as that will take more preparation), here’s something I agree with from a recent article on Sustainable Happiness:

Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear grow together. So, while helping others may not always be “pleasant,” it leads the mind to a sense of inner peace, courage, and harmony with the interdependence of all things and beings.

Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness, with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well.

This passage basically says to me that happiness is a quality of community rather than individuality.  That the non-zero sum game is the key strategy for happiness.  And I generally agree with that.  Those who take the selfish strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma may make short term gains, but will not outlast other more cooperative players.

Consider this as a starting point for my longer goal of exploring the differences between enjoyment, pleasure, happiness, hedonism, lack of suffering, Buddhism, cooperation, and shared experience.  They’re all tied together, and I want to meditate on their differences and subtleties in a loosey goosey manner that goes to the very inspiration for me to start this blog in the first place.

This entry was posted by Buster on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:24 pm. It is filed under Defining enjoyment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.