A happy planet independent of material resources

The map above shows a ratio of the happiness of countries to their ecological footprint, with greener countries ranking better. It was developed by Nic Marks, a statitician who makes a relevant notion in his recent TED lecture: that maybe it is not so meaningful to optimize the happiness of a country, but we rather need to optimize the amount of resources we use per 'unit' of happiness. In other words, we need to find ways to develop a happiness that is independent of material things that bring happiness.



His research introduces the 'Happy Planet Index', a number that shows the ratio of happiness to the ecological footprint of a country. From this research we learn facts such as that Western countries reach a relatively high rate of happiness, though it is at the cause of a high ecological footprint. Sub-Saharan Africa is not doing that well, but then again, they're not using a lot of resources. South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia are doing a little bit better, but the striking notion is that Latin America is doing the best in being happy with the least amount of planet used. At the sole summit is the magnificent Republic of Costa Rica.

Now you'll want some facts about Costa Rica:

- It's small, about the size of West Virginia, and has about 4.6 million inhabitants
- The national motto is: "Long live work and peace"
- The Costa Rican government announced plans for Costa Rica to become the first carbon neutral country by 2021
- They have no army, since 1949
- There's lots of water, islands, banana plantations, jungle, and gorgeous beaches with a tropical climate
- It contains 5% of the world's biodiversity
- It's a constitutional democracy with a pretty successful universal healthcare system
- They like to play the marimba and dance the merengue
- "Often, people walking down the streets, or buying food at shops say hello by saying "Pura Vida" which means pure life, or good life. It can be phrased as a question or as an acknowledgement of one's presence. A recommended response to "How are you?" would be "Pura Vida"."

The United Arab Emirates has the highest ecological footprint, 9.5 global hectares per capita (gha), of the world. This is about twice the consumption of most Western European countries. And it means that more than four planet earths would be required to sustain this way of living. The USA is a close second with 9.4 gha. Other major world-misusers are Kuwait (8.9 gha), Denmark (8 gha), Australia (7.8 gha), New Zealand (7.7 gha), Iceland (7.4 gha), Canada (7.1 gha) and Norway (6.9 gha). So the life satisfaction of the English-speaking nations and the Nordic countries comes at a cost. Costa Rica has the highest life satisfaction of the world (8.5 out of 10) with a footprint of only 2.3 gha and a good life expectancy too: 78.5 years. It is the prime example of how to develop happiness independent of material resources.

Based on this, mr. Marks suggests five strategies to follow in your life:

1. Connect, develop social networks
2. Be physically active
3. Take notice of what is around you
4. Keep learning
5. Give

I would humbly suggest to add one. It's the first word of this blog. Create. Simply making stuff, and using your mind to imagine future creations, is a phenomenally empowering capacity once you start developing it. It takes you out of the social mode and gives you purpose, as long as you have the courage to awaken it. You will see that you get a greater appreciation for things, too, once you see how they all had to be created. Creativity roots you into the world with both your mind and your body, and I think that once humanity collectively awakens its innate creative powers, perfect happiness can be reached.

And in case you have a spare quarter hour, you could watch Nic Marks' TED lecture here:

you can be a robot, but you'll still be you

If you've seen the recent movie 'Surrogates', where Bruce Willis lives his life through an idealized version of his own body called a surrogate, and you think this to be purely speculative science fiction, maybe your view changes after viewing the latest prototype of Anybots. This company produces telepresence robots through which you can be present anywhere and "enjoy complete freedom to move fluidly and interact with others in a remote location from the ease of your home or office."

Omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, from the comfort of our lazy chair, is that really what we want? While such technology can help us reach temporarily more satisfactory states of being, I think it should be used with great care and awareness of what one is essentially doing: ignoring the own body, abstracting one's embodied existence and fragmenting one's consciousness. While we seem to need temporary comforts, I am convinced that we should remain aware that there is a happiness beyond comfort, and that life is a progressive learning to connect to this form of happiness. A happiness that you could call sublime or even divine.

In my experience, happiness can only be reached by transcending the boundaries of the self and its preferences, and constantly connecting to one's personal challenges, seeing how every moment connects to that project of the self, making it more and more in tune with the environment. Where comfort is one option, the other option is to immerse oneself in activities that make one grow as the craftsman of one's own perceptions. Whereas distractions like social interactions are easy to live by, there is always more to do: mastering the art of life. If we truly see ourselves as cosmic artists, already allknowing, allperceiving, allexperiencing and allbeing, we ultimately see that happiness lies in immersion in fully embodied action. I feel that only when we live as fully embodied beings, technology being an intrinsic part of us that we are always mastering in full connection, that we can truly calm down our consciousness and live a blissful life.

I see telepresence robots as a great development, especially when the focus will more and more be on a richer bodily connection, so the entire mind and body become involved. But more than that, people using another body should be kept aware of their own biologically given body and live in tune with that. Technology can play the role of an abstractor and enhancer, but it should also always have the larger role of a personal guide through life. Now is the time that we need to face away from capitalism, and start developing technology from a true shared vision of human happiness, so people will not get tricked into adopting technologies that they think will make them happy, while being blinded to what it actually does to their lives from a holistic point of view.

happiness in a hat

Of course this 'happiness hat' is at first sight a fake happiness inducing technology to cover up today's widely prevailing existential insecurity. What looks like a good lunchtime laugh, is still interesting to me. It is highly paternalistic in approach of course, although if people stay open and choose to produce a genuine smile as opposed to an enforced one with underlying frustration staying behind as a residue, I think people can also come to grow the neural connections to enlighten them on a cognitive level. But it takes a lot for people to get this harsh on themselves and let go of all they are clinging on to that keeps them from true free, enlightened happiness.

how to get rid of the hidden killer in ourselves

"Man is an enigma to himself" - Carl Gustav Jung (1958), The Undiscovered Self.

In the astounding movie on top of this post, mentalist Darren Brown has an unsuspecting bar visitor participate in a first person zombie shooter arcade game. Brown then plays Wizard of Oz with the gamer in that he sends flashes of light out of the device that bring the gamer into a catatonic trance for a few minutes, just enough to bring him into another room that looks just like the virtual one he had just been in. The participant wakes up with an airgun in his hand in a room full of people dressed like zombies. What happens is shocking. In a pandemonial panic the protagonist starts screaming and running around shooting the zombies, and the realization that he is actually killing people seems to bring him into an even more extreme state of terror. He has just discovered the hidden murderer in himself, and before figuring out how to solve the situation, he blindly accepts this short-sighted role. To me, this is the story of humanity up to now.

People can be highly manipulated by their environments and lack a consistent internalized fundament to guide them in every situation. Because people's inner selves are largely undefined and people are insecure of them, they can easily forget about them and be absorbed by behavioral patterns that are biologically or socially ingrained into them. It often seems more like these patterns evolve through us as mostly blind individuals, instead of us completely mastering ourselves.

This also seems to be happening with the digital mediaspace we have created; it is running out of control but dramatically changing our lives mostly outside of our own awareness. Our digital technologies are mostly alien to us, but because they provide us shortcuts to pleasurable states of being, we accept them into our lives in the conviction that it is good. This is an illusion though, just another trick of the selfish brain, which becomes apparent in cases like the one mentioned above, where the boundary between projected and real fear blurs. Our technologies create temporary lifeworlds for us that often seem innocent and neutral, for they are often only the means to fulfill a purpose in the 'real' world. But they never were neutral; the way we act in digital realms influence the way we act in what we perceive as reality. A projected action can easily become a real one, since we have already adopted it mentally, activating the same neural patterns that would have been activated had we really performed the action.

Where virtual, computational environments seem distinct to us, we must realize that this is not so. The dichotomy between 'real' and 'virtual' is merely constructed by us, to make our lives manageable without having to expand our sense of self. We must realize that there is no such thing as virtual; all is just data we simultaneously perceive and act upon, and that we can derive happiness out of by creatively organizing that data so that we transform our lifeworlds into ones that we feel more at home in, and that we can more easily incorporate in our sense of self. There is no such thing as a simulated world, for it relates as much as the 'real' world does to the optimization of our experiential patterns towards ones in which we are happy.

Along the same line, it is not very useful to wonder if we are living in a real or a simulated universe. If we discover that we are in a simulation, and find a way to live outside of it, nothing really changes. Still, we will be conscious, creative patterns that act upon experiential data, but only this data will transgress its borders and we will need to learn to incorporate it into our sense of self in order to become one with it. Trying to figure out whether or not we already live in a simulated world then, is an act stemming from an inacceptance of the current experiential lifeworld, an act of seeking happiness in something outside of what we already have, in the silent hope that there is more. More than that, if there appears to be more, this is a mere creation of ourselves, not a discovery. It will be the result of the search, that we already created with the creation of the search itself. The universe is not outside of us; we have created our own universe by means of our own loops of action and reflection in which we continuously shape it.

Then if we realize that nothing is outside of us, we come to realize that we are already everything. We are not distinct from anything we perceive as outside of us unless we choose to perceive it as outside of us. The illusion our social brain imbues us with is that we are people inside a physical body, who identify with a certain group of people and objects but not with others. This alienness to others creates an unconscious aversion to them that, in critical moments where resources like time are scarce, will result in actions like that man in the experiment aforementioned, who attempts to murder what he perceives as zombies.

As long as we identify with our own bodies, we will maintain a fear of death, which in the end is the cause of all suffering and misery. When we see that also the body is a mere concept constructed by us, we can mentally let go of it, and it is only then that we can live fully, and have the energy that is already within us guide our actions instead of illusory concepts we at some point have pasted onto our existence, as a patch to make a seemingly inherently hard life more liveable and pleasurable. When we lose our fear of dying we transcend a life in between pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, good and bad, but we see that everything is the way it should be already, and we can be invulnerably happy at every moment, only acting from a love and compassion towards everything, without first making the comparison as to whether some perceived entity or concept is similar enough to us.

We then can even come to see that there is no difference between life and death, but that this also is a constructed dichotomy stemming from a narrow self-identification with the body concept. When somebody dies, be it you or somebody else, what really dies is the concept you have of that person. The body just remains part of life in that it will get transformed into other organisms. As long as we try to condense ourselves into a concept, yes, we will inexorably remain an enigma to ourselves. But if we throw away all concepts as necessities for a good life, and act based on the creativity that stems from pure being, we know everything that there is to know already and we will act out of compassion instead of confusion and anxiety.

Coca Cola and the new humanity

I never thought I would be posting something from Coca Cola, but this commercial is pretty well done and very actual. If there's anything like illusory happiness, it's the Coca Cola type of happiness. If there's anything like an illusory self, it's embodied in the digital avatar. We seem to be heading towards a surreal world of tempting transitory illusions indeed, but let's not forget that happiness as chosen by yourself is the only transcendent and invulnerable form of happiness. Another thing, this commercial makes the classical McLuhanesque mistake of projecting the contents of an older medium, the virtual screen-based world, onto a new medium, namely what we call the 'real' or 'physical' world.

As to conclude as usual with a more abstract statement: we will need to learn to holistically re-ecologize ourselves in a functional niche of our technobiological future, in which we empathically co-evolve with anything we perceive as an other to in the end become one with it.

A fundamental principle for "Second Nature"

"Second Nature" is an exhibition currently held in ‘21_21 design sight’ in roppongi, tokyo until january 18, 2009. It is curated by Tokujin Yoshioka, a designer who also contributed to the contents of the exhibition with a chair that was grown from crystals. Also Ross Lovegrove shows some objects that use a minimal amount of materials through processes he has called 'netification' and 'coralization'. 

Yoshioka sees the beginning of an era of manufacturing where the product does not leave the assembly line as finished, but as open to adaptation and change by the end-user:

"a design is not something that is completed through being given a form, but rather something that is completed by the human heart. I also feel that incorporating the principles and movements of nature into ideas will become something important in future design."

His feeling is aligned with what I aim to set up a framework for: incorporating wild biological evolution and neocortically controlled, rationalized technology design into a new evolutionary process that takes happiness as the measure for survival. I won't elaborate on that much further, but I can give you the definition of happiness I like to attain. A concept of happiness that I believe is universal, everybody strives for, but that one can only attain when one has experienced this form of happiness. This definition is:

Happiness is the state of being when one's self is fully aligned with one's actions, the two mutually shaping each other in perfect resonance.

Here with actions I mean any intentional conscious move, incorporating motor actions but also thoughts, which are merely actions in the 'internal' realm, if you want to make a distinction between the internally and the externally perceived. After all, as confabulation theory explains, the brain is just another, but very complex, muscle.

My definition of 'self' requires more elaborateness of explanation, as I have developed it myself and haven't found it in any piece of literature yet. For you experts in self-psychology out there, please direct me to it in case it does exist; I'd be eternally grateful. I think it cannot be classified among either one of the four 'forces in psychology'; it does definitely not conform to Freudian psychology, not to behaviorism, not to humanism such as Maslow's psychology, and even not completely to transpersonal psychologies.  My main inspirations for this idea of the self did come from Eastern thought, namely from Buddhism, which arose originally from Hinduism, but has remained more pure, and is better explanable to Western minds, in my view.

As Albert Hanken explains in his excellent synthesis "Balanceren tussen Boeddha en Freud" (which translates as "Balancing between Buddha and Freud"), traditional Western psychology always analysed humans as being in a dualistic state, in a continuous tension between desire and satisfaction of that desire. Then Maslow introduced the need for self-actualization, which emerges when the lower, dualistic needs - needs that arise from a felt deficit such as hunger, sex, or social support, and that can only bring humans into a state of neutrality rather than positivity - have been met. Self-actualization is a monistic need, because an opposing force is not felt, which makes it more like a unidirectional, positive force.

Now I am not an expert in this at all, so I can only talk from intuition, but I feel
that the main lack in Maslow's theory is that the self he is talking about can still be a local type of consciousness; people can actualize themselves as in having the characteristics Maslow described of unity, meaningfulness, spontaneity, and so forth, but these arise from a self that is limited to being aligned to a local pattern, such as a culture or organizational structure. Instead of it being aligned to a more universal pattern it is merely aligned to an abstraction thereof. Of course this is very much related to Sartre's existentialism, stating that people create their own essence.

What happened after that, and is still happening, is a merging of Western science and ancient ideas from the Eastern mystics. As Stanislav Grof explains in "A Brief History of Transpersonal Psychology", humanistic psychology did not take 'altered states of consciousness' very seriously while it was more and more evident that an incorporation of these was necessary for a more holistic, comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology. Especially those states of consciousness Grof has termed 'holotropic' have "heuristic, healing, transformative, and even evolutionary potential", mentioning that "In holotropic states, we can transcend the narrow boundaries of the body ego and encounter a rich spectrum of transpersonal experiences that help us to reclaim our full identity".

But what is a 'full identity'? First of all, I want to avoid using the word 'identity' since to me that signifies more of a constructed concept, inherently too abstract and narrow, rather than a holistic representation of what we are. It is a self-concept, while I prefer to use the word 'self' in order to denote that it is not condensable in a concept at all, and doing so is only meant for communication purposes, not for bringing about directly an internalized understanding of what it stands for. That has to come through one's lived experiences and reflections.

What I understand transpersonal psychology, but also quantum physics, to mean with the self, is that people are not separate entities, but parts of a universal dynamic energy field. Karl Pribram introduced the hologram as a metaphor for how the brain works, and this metaphor is also used by modern physicists to rationalize mystical ideas and describe how the universe works according to quantum physics. The remarkable aspect of a hologram is that each part of it contains the whole, so there is not really a distinction between the whole and its separate parts. For example, if you cut a holographic sheet in half, you will get two holograms that are halved in size, but still contain exactly the same, whole, image. General systems theorist Ervin Laszlo speaks of an Akashic field that is absolute and contains all the information in the universe, our experiences being only moments where we tap into this field. This is very much related to the Buddhist notion of 'Atman is Brahman', which roughly means that the soul or essence, called Atman - literally, the breath -, of each person is connected to a universal, metaphysical, divine field called the Brahman, but is also equal to it. In stating that there actually exists something beyond our perceptions, it is also related to the Vedic idea that Swami Prabhupada called 'Krsna' and was the basis of the Hare Krishna movement in the 1960's. He preached that people should free themselves from the material world's conditionings and revert themselves to the metaphysical to gain true happiness.

It may already be apparent, but I am not satisfied with this definition of self as being indistinct from the whole, the main reason being that it is biased towards the mental, and treats the body like a material burden instead of a means to derive the deepest meaning we can derive in our lives. It seems to be more of an antagonistic statement to Newtonian-Cartesian materialism than a full incorporation of it, too. Since metaphors are all we have, I would now like to briefly pose my own view, entertaining a metaphor I have already introduced in an earlier post on this blog, called "Who Are You".

There I posed the metaphor of the 'fractalic universe', with my vague definition of a self being a "dynamic, active, ever-evolving self-organizing pattern within an infinitely complex larger pattern". This metaphor is in my view more precise, since it takes into account people as unique beings while at the same time being part of this whole. Before continuing I must first say again that this is merely a metaphor; nothing like this whole exists since we cannot perceive it, it is only a construction of the mind to put people into the stance that is the most fulfilling, thus the most useful. I take the pragmatist stance of truth being what is most useful, that truth being only a crutch to cope with the complexity of being.

What makes a self unique is its embodied transformative creativity, i.e. the way an entity contributes with his whole being in bringing his perceptions in alignment with a vision of the future that transcends the current mode of being. An individual self tries to align his perceptions with his thoughts, and in my definition one is only happy when this alignment is complete.

I will talk to you from my own experience to make this less abstract now. I have gone through a period where I studied Buddhism and meditated until I truly saw that I had to transcend my ego and become selfless in order to do the things I deeply wanted to do. But in a selfless state, it was not satisfactory to just do things completely selflessly, for the divine whole that is larger than me. I did accept the current world and did not desire for a better one, but I did see that the accepting stance was not enough, since I believe that we can transform the world, and moreover that there is no end to this transformation. I do not believe in an immaterial, absolute highest point to attain, and that beyond that the only thing to do is to get others to this highest point. I believe that we as humanity embody this highest point, and that we need to seek ways to uplift it actively, through interacting with our whole being, our thought-like actions and our motor actions - as stated before I do not see a body-mind dualism, and therefore see everything as actions, but can occasionally still distinguish between two different kind of actions that I now called 'thought-like actions' and 'motor actions' only for the sake of communication. So after experiencing states of selflessness, I started looking for ways to be a unique and active part of cosmic evolution, to transform the world, and so I slowly developed my mission. At the same time, the mission always keeps on changing with each action. I see all consciousness as integrative, the only thing we can do being continuously re-integrating our experiences into a comprehensive and cohesive framework and projecting that onto our perceptions through continuous interaction. I see everything I do as circling around the mission I attain at the present moment; it is the measuring tool I use for everything I experience. Then I think complete happiness is the process of selflessly and completely embodying the intention to carry out this mission, and we are shaping our world so that everything in it contributes to this purpose. The purpose can never be fulfilled, since there is no absolute point to attain; it always keeps shifting as we continuously transform our selves.

Happiness is in the process, and that, as roughly sketched as it is now, would be the kind of happiness that a hominized evolution would take as its measure for survival.