The Happiness of Being

Submitted by Peter on Tue, Jan 12, 2010

The Happiness of Being

by Peter Demers

If science is your religion, I am happy to report that it seems to be heading in the right direction. At the very least, some studies are finding evidence of "spirits in the material world."

Take, for instance, George Vaillant, M.D., who has curated the Grant Study for more than 40 years. He's said that humans are hard-wired for empathy. The Grant Study was established at Harvard University in the late 1930's by Dr. Arlie Bock, who began the study to learn "how to live well" by studying the lives of "normal" young men, 268 students at Harvard University.

While normal was the label given to the students at the start of the study, by middle age, one third of the participants showed signs of mental illness. Arlie Bock said, " 'They were normal when I picked them,' he told Vaillant in the 1960's. 'It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.' " 1 Now, at the end of the study, with the surviving men – combined with another study which includes both men and women – in their 80's or 90's, George Vaillant has discovered a few things that make for happy lives.

Vaillant was interviewed several times in 2009. The Atlantic article was accompanied by the video below. After the video, I'll discuss some of his other observations from this and other interviews, show how it all meshes with the findings of other scientists, and A Course in Miracles. A Course in Miracles has over one hundred references to happiness.

The laws of happiness were created for you, not by you.
- A Course in Miracles

To begin, there are three things Vaillant advises:

1. Stay away from self-help books, but think about helping someone else.
2. Think of faith, not as belief, but as trust.
3. Add gratitude, forgiveness, joy, compassion, and awe,

and you're talking about something people who are deeply religious understand.
- George Vaillant 2

Happiness isn't about me. Try being funny. Try making yourself fall in love.
Try making yourself forgive someone. Studies have shown that, while forgiveness is tremendously helpful to the heart and to peace of mind, if you enocourage someone to try to forgive, their blood pressure goes up and they get more and more tense.

- George Vaillant

Vaillant has said that positive emotions are very important to living well 3 In his GEL talk, he said that man has evolved to include "the four F's"

1. Fighting
2. Fleeing
3. Feeding
4. Lust

He said that alligators are also good at those things, but humans have three capacities that alligators do not:

1. Humans have the capacity to express unselfish love toward their young
2. Humans have "the separation cry"
3. Humans have the ability to experience play, which is joy

The miracle teaches you that you have chosen guiltlessness, freedom and joy. It is not a cause, but an effect. It is the natural result of choosing right, attesting to your happiness that comes from choosing to be free of guilt. Everyone you offer healing to returns it. Everyone you attack keeps it and cherishes it by holding it against you. Whether he does this or does it not will make no difference; you will think he does.
- A Course in Miracles

The whole danger of defenses lies in their propensity to hold misperceptions rigidly in place.
- A Course in Miracles

In the notes given to the scribes there is a vast amount of insight about Freud's work in A Course in Miracles. As a psychiatrist, Vaillant also addresses the "defenses" put forth by Sigmund Freud and his daughter, Anna Freud4. In Vaillant's world they are called "adaptations" and he has divided them into four categories:

Psychotic, the usual suspects here
Immature, in which he includes such things as passive aggression and hypochondria
Neurotic, the so called normal stuff ie. intellectualization, dissociation, and repression among them
Mature, which includes altruism, humor, and anticipation

That's progress. And Vaillant attempts to blend this with "positive psychology" on solid ground.

Every ability of the ego has a better counterpart because its abilities are directed by the mind, which has a better voice.
- A Course in Miracles

As you prepare to make a choice that will result in different outcomes, there is first one thing that must be over-learned. It must become a habit of response so typical of everything you do that it becomes your first response to all temptation and to every situation that occurs. Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize: You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, it but obscures the fact that you believe it to be yours.
- A Course in Miracles

In the Harvard Gazette 5, Vaillant reiterates his mantra this way, "You have to keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends with those who are younger than you, learn new things, and have fun."

Here is a link to books by George Vaillant. Vaillant is also on the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous.

1. Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic, June 2009
2. Growing Bolder interview
3. George Vaillant's talk at the GEL Conference, 2008, NYC
4. What daughter Anna and nephew Edward Bernays did with Freud's work. Edward Bernays is said to have invented public relations. You want a Brand? This is how it started, as explained in the documentary, The Century of the Self: The Happiness Machine:
5. Happy Well, Harvard Gazette