Reaching A Better Place

‘To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.’

- Life of Pi, Yann Martel (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yann_Martell)

‘According to the scriptures, in his lifetime, the Buddha refused to answer several metaphysical questions. On issues such as whether the world is eternal or non-eternal, finite or infinite, unity or separation of the body and the self, complete inexistence of a person after nirvana and then death etc, the Buddha had remained silent. One explanation for this is that such questions distract from practical activity for realizing enlightenment. Another is that such questions assume the reality of world/self/person.’

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism

The type of happiness I’m writing about here is contentment: being happy because you’re okay with everything. When it comes to finding contentment the big questions can throw a lot of people off.
A lot of people aren’t comfortable thinking about the fact that they’re going to die. A lot of people lose their sense of contentment if you ask them about God. A lot of people become uneasy around the topic of the meaning of life.

The big questions are, well…big. You can try pretending the elephant isn’t in the room, but that’s not going to make you happy – and that elephant isn’t about to go away before you do.
Will some answers make us happier than others? Does the accuracy of the answer matter? God, the meaning of life, the start of the universe, what happens after death…how do we deal with those questions in a way that will make us happy, or at least prevent us from feeling sad?
In my studies of happiness itself (which of course tie in with personal development) not a whole lot is mentioned about what a person knows or believes to be true. There’s plenty on optimism and positivity, of course, but little on the answers we have to the difficult questions.

The happy religious answers

I was once told by a Buddhist chaplain (I’m pretty sure he was a chaplain) that the Buddha famously didn’t answer questions about God or the universe because he believed the answers won’t make anyone happy.

It’s a fascinating contradiction to the Western religions’ use of Heaven, a loving Father, eternal life and purpose in life of doing what God wants. Here answers are provided and it is these answers which largely constitute the religions: the values promoted and practices encouraged are secondary to what makes Christianity, Judaism and Islam what they are. It’s largely the differences in the answers they provide that actually separate them.
In the West if you care about your fellow man you can just be a humanist and have nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian religions even though you hold many of the same values.

Western psychiatrists, studying western people, have found that the religious ones tend to be happier than the secular ones. So couldn’t we logically go against the Buddha’s view and find a religion with all the answers that we like and, thus, become happier?
From what I’ve read the findings of these psychiatrists do not provide evidence that a religion will make someone happier: they provide evidence that happier people tend to have religions. Happier, if not fully independently thinking people, are more likely to be religious. They’re more likely to have close ties with their family (as most people end up in their parents’ religion), they’re likely to care about others, to contentedly submit to authority and to be more at ease in ignorance (for them, the phrases: ‘God works in mysterious ways’ and ‘it’s in the Bible/Koran/Torah, which makes it God’s word’ are usually enough to ease the doubts).
People with such lives and mindsets are likely to be happier ones anyway, with or without a religion.

But aren’t the answers that some religions provide still sources of contentment, you may ask.
To an extent, but if you’re striving to be a better person you will become less and less comfortable with those answers as your thinking improves.

Noah’s Ark

This is what happened to me, and it happens to most people to some extent. When we’re all very young children we believe in the Old Testament stories just like we believe in Father Christmas and the monsters under the bed. With our undeveloped cognitive faculties we depend on authority to tell us what is true. As we get older though we tend to stop believing in the Old Testament stories as fact and our reaction to them from then on can say a lot about what our personalities are to become. Some zealously oppose them and become very confrontational atheists and others see them as useful allegories and still have a stake in religion while maintaining healthy scepticism about at least some of their religions’ scriptures.

I was in the latter camp: I have never been what you would call religious, but until my early teens I believed in the Christian God. From my early teens onwards I went through the third and final stage of mental development, and as I grew older still I gradually dismissed all the Christian beliefs – except one: the belief in a supreme being. I became a deist, without knowing the word for it. I believed a God had created the universe, and I believed he was still around (unlike some deists) but I didn’t think he listened to our prayers, cared in the slightest about our welfare or had anything more to do with the universe beyond its creation.
Later still the belief in a supreme being, which until then I had cheerfully defended against my atheist friends’ arguments, went shaky too. I saw The God Delusion on a supermarket shelf one morning and bought it on impulse: I already owned books of pro-religious argument so I thought it only right to read the opposite side. And, wow. That was it. I had teetered between theism and agnosticism for a long time, believing that I would never go so far as to actually not believe in any God at all. But perhaps the best atheist argument ever written was enough to kill Western religion for me.

Living without a safety net

Gradually over the years the religious answers had broken down and finally I was left without the contentment safety net that a religion provides. But I wasn’t any less happy, or – as this article more specifically puts it – less content. I was actually more content. I had certainty again. Science and reason had not provided me with answers that were ecstatically happy ones, like those of religions’, but that didn’t matter because at least I didn’t have to doubt these ones.

The specifics of the answer will not make you happy

It was only then that I fully appreciated how atheists got by, believing that no God would help them in times of need and (with most of them) believing that their deaths really would be the end of them and that they would never be reunited with their dead loved ones.
I probably would have embraced atheism a lot earlier if science didn’t offer such emotionless answers to the big questions. But given atheism left me with no doubts I knew I could no longer go back to any degree of theism I had before. I had to make my peace with the new answers. And I did – surprisingly quickly.
I can now think about my own death, and the deaths of others, without feeling gloomy or anxious. Human suffering is another matter, of course, but death itself doesn’t trouble me. It actually troubled me more when I believed in Heaven than it does now that I don’t. I can’t say that, gun to my head, I wouldn’t panic if I were seconds away from dying. Death is still an unknown – it’s just that objective reason provides the most likely answer to what happens.

What I’m getting at is: it’s not less-than-happy answers that make a life difficult to live, but doubt in the ones you have. Genuinely unhappy answers, such as Hell, are obviously bad and fortunately science and reason have yet to provide such answers. Only certain religions say anything bad happens to you after you die.

Buddha probably meant that we should make peace with our ignorance and thus avoid getting attached to any answers (because, especially with religion, the answers can so easily be proved wrong or at least grossly unlikely).

I say find the answers that sit well with you and then make your peace with them. When it comes to contentment, nothing eats away at it like doubt.
You must find an answer so you can stop asking the question. If you don’t have an answer you’ll probably just keep coming back to the question, going through an unfulfilling thought cycle. You possibly can stop the cycle without finding a satisfactory answer (as the Buddha was suggesting) but it would be a lot easier to just find the answer.
Seriously, what would be more difficult: finding answers to the big questions that work for you, or never again for the rest of your life wondering what happens after you die or if there’s a God?

To summarise:

1. Find the answer that sits well with you: that doesn’t mean picking one that makes you feel good, but one that really satisfies you intellectually.

2. Make your peace with that answer. This won’t be as difficult as you think, if it leaves you with no doubts you’ll have to stick with it and then the emotional acceptance will come easily enough.

3. Don’t become too attached to it. Remember that what will make you feel content is an answer you can feel certain about. That’s all it’s worth to you. If you come across some other answer to one of the big questions that shakes your confidence in the one you currently hold, then you’ll have to do some thinking again. Always go for the answer that makes the most sense: that answer will never involve a fiery lake and brimstone anyway.

A note for the skeptics, agnostics etc

If you’ve read all this and feel resolute in your decision to not commit to any particular answers then that’s fine, too – as long as you still don’t have any doubts. How does that make sense? Well, if you can live your life really contentedly without answers to the big questions then you’ve already solved the problem of not becoming attached to any answers and so you don’t have to doubt any of them.
If your certainty is on a lack of certainty, then this too can mean contentment – it’s just, you know, harder to get your head round :P.
It’s just a matter of certainty and living your life free of discomfort about the major unknowns. That’s how happiness, by which I mean contentment, sits with the answers to the big questions.

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