Anatomy of Cheerful

  It's interesting that "cheerful" has never been described as a virtue in any of the books I have read about spirituality and religion. We tend to think of cheerful or upbeat emotions as forms of superficiality, artifice, politeness, or just plain denial. Knowing the many ways that the world is in crisis (something I realized during our Buddhist volunteer session today), we might begin to wonder: what's there to be cheerful about? And, more importantly, how can we possibly be cheerful during such difficult times?

  I think it's important to try to find what makes us cheerful. Cheerfulness is a required quality that provides an uplifting energy when we are engaged in difficult or challenging work. But where does cheerfulness come from? I would like to take a crack at it, based on my personal experience of this quality.

   I think, firstly, that cheerfulness is a decision to be happy, no matter what the circumstances we are in or thoughts we have. How we decide to be cheerful is not by "thinking cheerful thoughts", because that is only going to make us feel tense and stressed. Rather, cheerfulness comes from developing a practice of holding thoughts lightly in mind. That is to say, never take your thoughts to be real. When we feel pressure, stressed about anything or "heavy" in our mind, we should know that we are clinging to some thought, and it's the act of clinging that gives the thought a certain tenacity in our mind. Rather than trying to come up with "happier thoughts", we should try to reflect, instead, that the pressure we feel is not so real. It's only a result of a clinging relationship to our thoughts. Master Sheng Yen used to say something like, "If you get what you want, it's OK; if not, that is also OK". Can we try having this attitude?

   A second attitude is to take thoughts to be impermanent. Thoughts are always conditioned in nature. How I see myself, the world, the people around me, is always the result of very impermanent impressions that come to the mind. If we recognize the mirror-like reflections that compose our thoughts (like shadows on a dark-lit road), then will we be so gloomy about them? If we know the scene in front of us is bound to change soon, are we going to feel heavy and miserable? Again, misery and depression arise when we are too heavily invested in thoughts that they start to develop a sticky quality to them. They become laden with judgments, comparisons, evaluations etc. , which then renders them even more sticky. If we reflect on their changing and ephemeral quality, then we will naturally feel lighter in our hearts and more cheerful overall.

   A third attitude is to take thoughts to be empty. Now what does this mean? If someone swears at you in a language that you are familiar with, you might start to think the words are insults, and then we attach them to ourselves. We think we are in the sentence a person utters when they swear at us. But is that "you" in the sentence the real "you"? In fact, all signifiers are empty in the sense that they are relative to to thinker and a wider context in which words are only meaningful relative to other words. We put sentences together based on our understanding of a language, which is mediated in turn by our education and cultured experiences. When we recognize the nature of thoughts themselves as empty in nature, then they lose all referentiality. Nothing is absolutely anything: good or bad, happy or sad. Everything only exists relatively and in a state of constant comparison.

   A fourth attitude is to take thoughts to have no thinker. That is, there is no unified self thinking or having the thoughts. We can have "miserable" thoughts but does this mean there is a miserable thinker behind those thoughts? It's only when we start to form a concrete impression of the "person" inhabiting "this body" that we conceptualize a suffering self that needs salvation, or alleviation etc. But if we free ourselves of this, we can be "happy in misery", knowing that painful thoughts have no thinker, and no particular solid body called a "self" that is suffering.

   Finally, when all is said and done, we should be like children in the world. If there is something we can do to make our lives better, we should do it, but playfully so. Don't take this dreamlike world to be so solid, so real, so unchanging, so stubborn etc. because these ideas are simply the result of a clinging mindset that wants things to be a certain way, or experiences inevitable frustrations when they don't go a certain way. Children cry when they don't get what they want, but they don't hold onto something for very long. Adults, on the other hand, tend to weave complicated dramas around things, attributing complex meanings to things that may not have an enduring single meaning after all.

   We can summarize the idea of cheerfulness using the following acronym "LIENC":

L: Let go- we can choose to have a cheerful attitude toward anything, by letting go of clinging attitudes toward thoughts

I:  Impermanence- observe how ephemeral and short lived thoughts are (and meditate on their coming and going).

E: Empty- realize that all thoughts are empty of signifiers, and only exist relative to language, culture, social mores, and the workings of the mind in putting meaning units together. Otherwise, the words themselves have no single permanent and fixed meaning.

N: No-self, or no "thinker" behind the thoughts. No matter how crummy our thoughts are, there is no enduring or fixed thinker behind them. So we can rest easy and let the thoughts come and go.

C: Child- be like a child and take a playful approach to things.