the cause of depression is happiness

Everyone is looking for happiness. All over facebook people are playing the game of "look at this - I'm happy", and this is somehow good... presumably better than sad. We take this completely for granted, like wi-fi, but actually it's a very strange thing which is totally unique to the tiny slice of time we inhabit.

Let me be more clear. The idea that being happy is good, to be pursued, and being sad is bad, is not a universal human thing - at all. It is probably as recent as 9-5 jobs, or at least big agriculture.

If you look at older times in history, or indigenous cultures, you don't find such emphasis on people questing for happiness, or trying to repair sadness. If you look at their myths and cultural stories - no-one is pursuing happiness. They pursue physical safety, power, honour, restoring balance to natural forces, people to breed with. Happiness is just a boring side-effect of your world being roughly in natural order. 

The quest for happiness is really is a uniquely modern thing. It got caused as we started to get lifestyle choices. Pre-industrial people didn't really have lifestyle choices. But now, people could offer us choices. (Incidentally for those interested in anthropology, the Buddha was born right at the time where a middle-class of free merchants started to exist).

When you try to convince someone to want something, you need to tell them that their state of being will be improved by it. So there you go, the appropriation of temporary happiness as some kind murky indicator that your life is better.

And I'm not talking just about consumerism here, it's more the birth of the idea that we have any right to be happy, or any choice to be happy.

Now, as soon as you do this - as soon as you start to have some belief systems which tell you that happy is better than sad - then you have given birth to depression. Depression is the unwillingness to be sad, which can take various twisted and cyclic forms, depending how bad it is.

From as soon as our kids exist, we feed them images and stories which portray loss and sadness as a bad thing (e.g. Disney). Same with mainstream entertainment, adults consume a diet of emotional-junk food with happy endings. Then we wonder why so many people are depressed. That's the thing with cultures, it's hard for us to see the hidden assumptions we are making which are actually causing our problems.

And therefore even our spirituality is utterly infected with this idea that it is meant to improve your emotional life in any way. When you look at old spiritual teachings, there is simply no emphasis on improving one's emotional well-being life. People in the old days had all the same "psychological" problems - guilt, low-self-worth, jealousy, chips-on-shoulders... and no-one tried to make them feel any better. This is why it worked...!

Hippies, yogis, singing in circles or spiritual songs to feel good - this is not practice! The purpose of devotional practice is to break the heart, to learn to love in a way which is painful, futile, insane - and free.

I wish I had something useful to say, but I don't. I don't even have a practice for you. All I can say is everytime you notice yourself wanting to feel better, stop, and watch some David Attenborough, the hard shit, where some baby animals die in a very beautiful yet sad struggle for existence (in HD). And know that this is the Perfection of Life.

post on DharmaOverground, 2 years after claiming MCTB 4th path and musings

I am sitting in the car waiting to collect my mother so thought I would write a little for my own amusement and out of a desire to connect with DhO a bit, as I feel not a small amount of fondness and gratitude to Daniel Ingram and DhO.
Finding MCTB 2 years ago marked the start of my spiritual journey proper, that is, the journey of awakening, aka, miserable dismantlement of oneself 
At that time I didn't know if any sort of enlightenment was real at all, hadn't met anyone who was "awake" or anyone who was pursuing enlightenment at all, I had never been to a satsang or met a spiritual teacher, didn't know any "spiritual seekers".
Since then I have had some fun on the spiritual scene rollercoaster, spent quite a lot of time on retreat, met some great people and some very enlightened teachers and learned and unlearned a lot. Met countless very misguided people too which is heartbreaking and also fine and amusing.
Life-wise, the content and direction of my life has totally fallen apart, in a good way. My circumstance were favourable (no kids, no ties, had let go ideas about career already, I am a pleasant, intelligent and hardworking type, so no worries with finding work etc) and so I have been lucky to be able to surrender nicely into the big whatever of Life.
On 4th path
I think one of the good things about this forum/MCTB is the motivation and transmission that the concept of 4th path allows. So yes, I identify with what Daniel calls 4th path. When I claimed it 2 years ago, I see now that was actually late 3rd, and 4th settled in a few months later. It is worth doing, and it is do-able quickly with good practice, good motivation, good conditions, and good surrender!
But aside from that I am now not so keen on the emphasis placed on it in this forum, and certainly I think that the way Dan presents it in MCTB is maybe not that good an idea, in the grander scheme of things. If we are doing models, I align much more with the traditional 4 path fetter model, or the 4 yogas of mahamudra.
after mctb 4th path
practice now is clearly effortless and all I can say is that the system (this bodymind) just reacts with disgust to any out-of-truth behaviour (karmic tendencies). This is any learned behaviour which was formed as a way of avoiding certain feelings, which I now 'automatically' do. The system has a taste for uprooting these things, and just won't let me have them. (I have a technical explanation of the nature of awareness and why this must be so, but it's too boring for now.)
So I can't even say that I have a goal, but I guess from my teacher who has been here, the goal is continual stripping away of all this kind of behaviour, until all action is fluid and original, and not "canned" responses.
the body and energetic system
for me, mctb 4th path meant finally being able to effortlessly rest the mind, all of it, by itself, in What Is, without it constantly splitting in two to watch itself, or doing some other deluded activity. With this, the attention started to settle by itself downwards, into the body, much more and more often. the subtle energy system of the body is having to purify and wake up. So a lot of weird effects in the body and the feeling of being in a body is changing a lot. I have a fascinating model relating to trigger points and kundalini etc about what is happening, but another time.
I believe that the body and subtle energetic system is where all the karmic tendencies (subconscious patterns) hide out. All the enlightened people who I feel have cleared out a lot of their habitual tendencies have emphasised the physical transformation of the body as the actual bulk of the journey, much more than the realisation of non-duality in the mind. One teacher I really rate for this is Igor Kufayev.
This is also another reason why this forum/pragmatic Dharma doesn't interest me much these days, it only really deals with the percecptual side, not the emotional (heart) or energy(sexual energy) system (gut/body).
Surrender and dedication (the heart of post MCTB 4th path practice)
As I see it, MCTB 4th path is the birth of true surrender, as Daniel says, it's obvious that there is no agency. You are officially totally adrift on a sea of karma with no sail, rudder or tiller. Some people, after this insight seem to quickly (a few years) wipe out all their conditioned behaviour, and others basically remain as rigid and opinionated as before.... why?
Resistance plays tricks like, say I know I have some murky karma relating to sex (who doesn't?), and everytime life offers me a chance to straighten it, the body resists it, and thoughts of the nature of "it will happen when it happens, I can't do anything" come up... it can be easy to start to very subtly believe these thoughts, and a block is created.
The offer from Life is to wipe clean your entire belief system, at the deepest subconscious level. And what is takes is just simply agreement, surrender, at each level, and Life will auto-wipe you clean. But there are various subconscious blocks & knots, which don't even manifest as thoughts or worded beliefs, just subtle behaviours which go unchecked. This is why I think it's a good idea important to connect with powerful, very enlightened people who can see these things for you. All it takes is the clear seeing, then your do-nothing will take care of the rest.
As you can't really 'do' much consciously, it seems the best tools to work with are devotion (praying to whatever to be fully erased), a teacher, pushing yourself in Life (situations, relationships, culturally) so that your stability is challenged, and somatic practice (energy work, bodywork, sexual work).

that's all for now, my mother has arrived thanks for taking the time to read this.gratitude to the community, and especially those who guided me and are still in my life now.
any questions /quibbles welcome

why we need a view

Why do we need to be told what to do?

What about following our inner intuition?

In 1998 I was in a church hall in Cowley, Oxford in the middle of the most baffling and amazing jam, a weird mix of martial arts, dance and play, led by a big black dude who spoke literally no English. We would spend the first half of the class doing cartwheels, kicks and movement sequences, then make a circle and people would go into the middle and have no idea what to. So they would stand awkwardly opposite each other, move with no rhythm (we were English too, remember), do karate by themselves, breakdance, samba, stand on their heads, do the hokey-kokey, feel confused. It was ridiculous. And the teacher, having no English, could only really do so much to guide the flow. Everyone was brand new. I didn't even know what the class was called, or where this guy was from (I guessed Africa), or what the point was. But I knew it was awesome.

This was pre-YouTube-era Capoeira in England. Everyone knows what capoeira is now, but back then, none of us had ever seen a roda (the circle, the actual game). No concept of what it was supposed to be, look like, how we were supposed to interact. We could not have imagined it from the exercises of doing a few cartwheels and crawling on the floor. We could not have imagined how much grace, power, connection and beauty that could exist in such fluidity between 2 people. We could not have come up that unique cultural blend of playfulness, spirit, sexuality, aggression and love that comes from a good roda. That is the transmission of Capoeira. Yes, those qualities come from inside, from universal human spirit. But, no matter what exercises we did, it would not have been possible to bring them out without having a clear transmission of Capoeira, from someone who lives it.

So now we have a similar situation with Spirituality. We have a bunch of methods which are clear and easy to follow - yoga asanas, vipassana meditation, pranayama, qi-gong. But we don't have a clear idea of where they are supposed to lead. Sure we have words like Enlightenment, but all we have is our own best stab ideas at what it is - which are all based on our own limited ideas about happiness, or peace, or transcendence, or something. In the worst case (sadly most cases), we have misleading ideas from well-meaning but ill-qualified people. Without a clear view to follow, it is unlikely that our practices will transmit the intended wayless-way of being.

As the example I most familiar with, meditation. Pretty much 99% of people doing meditation in the UK, Buddhists, whatever, are working with the framework that you are a person, made of matter, living on the earth, and meditation is something you do with your mind, to overcome suffering, or somehow help others. If you have this View, it is impossible for you to reach the original intended purpose of meditation. Not hard - impossible. It is like if someone had told you to play the piano with only your right elbow, not your hands or fingers, then it is impossible that you will ever play the Rachmaninov Concerto like that. Your journey in one-elbow piano may be a beautiful, developmental creative epic, but it will not be anything close to the classical piano that we all know. People in the modern West do not appreciate this enough.

It is probably true that any practice done a bit is a bit beneficial, whether you know what you're doing or not. And it is true that most people have no interest in the bigger picture, they want less anxiety, better health and to make new friends that aren't as irritating as their old ones. But for those that do want more, who want to actually achieve the aim of the old spiritual practices, we need to know the right view, otherwise we are gonna get stuck at some point.