Let it not appear that I seize every opportunity I can to talk about myself. Think of this post rather as a continuation of our discussion on happiness. I dare say I'm a pretty happy guy myself. And I'll tell you why. I'll share with you why it is that I look forward to waking up in the morning everyday, why it is I'm glad to be alive. I hope this post inspires somebody. I hope that someone reading this will appreciate life better because of my example. I hope that the message of hope it contains makes someone realize that they can be happy in spite of the hassles and challenges of life. If my story encourages one soul to embrace epistemology and ethics, then this post would have done its job well. So let us begin. How is it that I'm so happy?
Everybody has a background story. Some are better than others. Mine is probably somewhere in the middle, perhaps a bit more to the bad side than the good. I didn't have the ideal childhood, and my teenage years weren't so swell either. I lost my dad too early. He died when I was five. My mom died when I was eleven. I lived with a few relatives here and there, and I tasted a bit of poverty, a bit of destitution, and a bit of frustration. I endured significant emotional hardships and had to work on myself. My early life was not easy by any standard. Any. All this, however, is background material. Spiritual writers have called background stories the "so-what." As in, "So what if you suffered a lot?" "So what if you had a crappy childhood?" "So what if you endured rare emotional hardships?" It's all a bunch of so-whats. The real deal is the "now-what."
What are you going to do now? What are you going to do in spite or because of what you've been through? What are you going to learn and do owing to or regardless of your background story? Now-what is the bee's knees. It's where it's at, as they say. When I was younger, I used to focus on the so-what. I used to obsess over what had happened to me. I used to play the victim's role, telling stories of deprivation and sorrow: "Poor me" became a mantra. "Oh, look what happened to me" became a song. "This person did this to me, and that person did that to me; and please don't forget that the other fellow did some other thing to me as well." "Oh, sad, sad me." Who cares! Really, who cares! The people I was blaming for doing this and that to me were moving on with their lives, and I was drowning in self-pity. I once had an aunt that said to me: "Look, the people you keep complaining about - are you sure they haven't already made their peace with God?" I took some time to reflect on that. The people whom I blamed for all the bad stuff that had happened to me could very well have knelt down in prayer to God and asked for mercy, and God might already have forgiven them. They could then go to heaven, while I stewed in the hell of my resentment. I have never forgotten this bit of counseling my aunt gave me all those years ago. It clearly opened my eyes.
Today, I can happily say that there is no individual I hate. I have yet to meet a person whom I can truly say I hate. What could they do to me to make me refuse to forgive them? How can I keep grudges against individuals God may already have forgiven? Pointless. And I discover that, in forgiving everyone readily, I easily transition from my so-what days to my now-what ones. Refusing to stew in regret, I take only the lessons and not the pains deriving from my background story and apply them to my now-what living process. I mature, and I change for the better. And life definitely becomes easier. Yet all of this is not what makes me happy; it's only the preamble. So far, I've simply shared the path I've taken to reach where I'm at today, a situation of considerable happiness; a situation where I can look at my life and, in spite of all I've been through and what pain there's still out there in the world, truthfully say, "I am happy." And mean it. It is a path of forgiveness, of transitioning from dwelling on the pains of the past to embracing the lessons and hopes of the present and the future. Remember what Oprah reports is the meaning of forgiveness: "letting go of the hope that the past could be any different."
So what makes me happy? How is it I dare say I'm a pretty happy guy? It is because I embrace epistemology and ethics in my everyday life. Practically. I relentlessly seek truth by always keeping a philosophical posture, a contemplative bent. I hunger to know, to discover, to learn, to examine my life and the lives of those around me. I search for lessons, for certain truths, for knowledge. I never tire of the hunger and thirst for understanding God's will. But I don't just seek to know and understand, I also try to practice in my own life what lessons I learn, what truths I discover. What I shared with you yesterday, I actually do it. I didn't just think up a fancy title and then dream up a bunch of paragraphs and put them down in prose for you to read and clap hands for me. I shared with you what I was doing in my own life. It is true that many years of schooling have shaped my intellect, but whenever I post on my blog, I always write from the heart for the heart; for the generality of people who seek not an intellectual formula or a fantastic fix-it recipe, but only an easy-to-read explanation of life as lived by a fellow earthling, a fellow sojourner on this planet.
To begin with, what have I learned? What is the epistemological foundation for my current happiness? Throughout my life, I have learned many things, as you must have yourself. You see, the things we learn as we go through life are arranged in a pile. Our purpose acts as pile stacker. The things that will help us live out our destiny as planned by God are stacked in a to-keep pile by our purpose. When conversely our life-path observes a needless lesson, it discards such lesson. All of this is largely unconscious. It becomes partly conscious for us when we try to know what our purpose is, what it is God wants us to do with the gifts the divine has entrusted us with. Because I have an idea of what my purpose is, I'm conscious of some of the purposeful truths I've picked up along the way. These truths are correlated and neatly ordered - you know, like the pile we've described. Some of them are more important than others and so are placed toward the bottom of the truth pile, to prop the others up and serve as foundation for relatively less important truths. Truth begets truth, and the more I learn, the more my truth pile increases, geometrically. I can consciously take stock of a number of the elements in that pile.
One of the foundational truths I've learned is Descartes' three-step method of dealing with negative emotions. Believe me when I say I use this formula each day. Each. I've got to repeat it. I mean, I have never lived a day in my life since I learned of the three-step method without applying it. As in, I'm walking down the street and a negative emotion creeps up on me - call it say, insecurity. Rather than stew in it and entertain its baggage, I promptly become conscious of the emotion. I call it by name. I say, "Hey you there, insecurity; what's up?" "Where've you come from?" Having become conscious of the emotion, I let it make the trip from where I felt it, my heart, all the way to my head, where I tear it apart. I think about it through and through: I examine its weight, its import, the behaviors it tempts me with, the possible outcomes of such behaviors, and so on. Then I reason with the emotion. I speak positive words to it, mollify it, rationalize it, intellectualize it, and observe it simply fizzle away. Believe me, Descartes' three-step method is a foundational truth for me. I am ever so grateful I learned it.
Another truth I picked up along my life-path is sacrifices. This is also a way by which I deal with negative emotions, especially loss. Equipped with the truth concerning sacrifices, rather than see losses - be they of things or people - as actual losses, I see them as sacrifices, things and people that I have let go from my life because of a greater end-goal. So, instead of mourning - which is what people do when they experience loss - I find myself consoled by the prospect of a greater good, which minimizes the impact of the sacrifice. The concept of sacrifices can save millions of people millions of dollars at therapists' offices around the world. It is a concept I hope to teach to as many people as I can, for their own benefit. It may be that some day I will write a thick book on sacrifices: its philosophy, psychology, theology, and spirituality. I really cannot do the concept justice in a blog post. I cannot even begin to explain how this concept has helped me and saved me from crying many tears. We all need to embrace this powerful idea.
One more truth I've absorbed is attraction, which is synonymous with positive thinking. I got this truth from Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, and I've shared it with you in a previous post, and so I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that the law of attraction, which guides the universe, is able to bring you all the good you think of, especially when you believe in - feel positively about - what you desire, and work toward obtaining it. I apply this principle in my own life as well. There are other spiritual truths I've learned, such as forgiveness, sympathy, charity, humility - especially as manifested in sensitivity, selflessness, simplicity and sanctity - and many more. I'm not sure I can itemize and explain all the truths I've picked up along the journey of my life. Plus, I keep picking more up as I go along. It's like in the nursery song: "picking up the paw-paws, put them in your pocket; way down yonder in a paw-paw patch." My paw-paw patch must be pretty scanty by now, while my pocket is bulging. But by far the biggest truth I've learned, my largest and ripest paw-paw, is the concept of the afterlife, my certainty that this material world is not the end. There is something that lies ahead, and we have to prepare for it - which reminds me: I will have to explain the parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 16:1-15) soon. Oh, when will I come round to doing this!
All the truths I've picked up are indeed too large for my intellectual pocket. I fancy I have rather a mental knapsack. You recall the song, "I love to go a-wandering along the mountain track, and as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back!" It is a happy song indeed. But one cool thing to note is that carrying this knapsack of knowledge is not a chore, because the bag is not heavy. The knapsack of truth is actually so light that it is practically weightless. It is the knapsack of despair, of evil, of want, of pain - of every bad thing - that is heavy. No, the bag of knowledge on my back is light. Jesus says of this load, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matt 11:30). Let me tell you a story to further explain what I mean. You see, a master and his servants once went on a journey and there were several bags to carry. Each of the servants had to carry a bag. The youngest carried the largest bag of all. When the master saw this he said, "You are the youngest and smallest - why do you carry the largest bag?" The young servant said, "Please don't worry. I know what I'm doing." The master said nothing more, and he with his servants began the journey. As they went along, they came to a resting spot and they all put their loads down awhile. In the largest bag, the one the youngest servant carried, was the food for the journey, and they all took of it and ate. The load was consequently lighter, and it got lighter and lighter each time they all stopped to rest and eat, so that by the end of their journey the youngest servant was carrying nothing at all, whereas all the other servants still bore the weight of intact bags.
The knapsack of knowledge is like that. It is so light that is feels empty, and it feels empty because we don't just acquire knowledge to store. We acquire knowledge only so that we can apply it in our daily lives. We take of the truth in our bag and eat. We are like Ezekiel, whom God commanded to eat knowledge (Ezek 3:1). Also, God promised to write the truth of the Law in the hearts of the people, rather than on stone tablets (Jer 31:33). Another image, which Catholics will understand, is that of the Eucharist, which is Truth in the form of food that we eat at mass, food that becomes for us a via-ti-cum, which in Latin means accompaniment for the road. And so, the lessons I acquire on my life's journey, I don't just acquire for knowledge sake, but I always apply them. I act on them. I live them out. And because I live them out, I act ethically. I act justly; I love tenderly, and I walk humbly with my God (Micah 6:8). And I become a model and an inspiration to others.
So, in spite of the so-what of my life, I am observing a now-what formula based on forgiveness and transcendence that is propelling me to embrace a rigorous epistemology. I seek after truth everyday by maintaining a contemplative posture. With this truth, I am inspired to act virtuously, in other words to embrace ethics. Practical epistemology plus practical ethics result in happiness, as visible in my case. Obviously, I don't know everything about everything; I don't even know everything about anything. I don't even claim that what I have in my knowledge sack is sufficient. But I'm learning each and everyday. I'm still walking along that paw-paw patch and picking up the fruits; I'm still going a-wandering along the mountain track, bearing my knapsack on my back. But the knapsack is so light that it feels empty, and it feels empty because I don't just acquire knowledge for knowledge sake, but I actually put into practice every truth I learn.
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