The Conservation of Happiness

     So I don't know if this is a thing all throughout the Navy or just concentrated in the nuke community (or perhaps it is known far and wide, and I am only just now hearing about it), but a phrase that keeps popping up in conversations with instructors and students is "Conservation of Happiness."  It is a reference to the conservation of energy (energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely altered in form -- also known as the first law of thermodynamics) except this version states that happiness can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transferred from one person to another.  Basically, if I want to be more happy I have to make YOU less happy, thus taking some of your happiness.  Now of course I know this is not true.  From my experiences, I can say with certainty that a person can become happy or unhappy without affecting others either way.  What's more, I feel sure that few (if any) people I have encountered who would invoke this pseudo-principle sincerely believe that it is true.
     This idea gets brought up a lot, though.  And even if nobody who brings it up believes that it is true, it has a strange sort of reality which has real effects.  For starters, it does astutely describe a phenomenon which seems to be deeply embedded in the culture I am now a part of.  I witness a troubling amount of spite and bullying.  I want to take a moment and clarify that I am not talking about bullying in the sense of malicious, ongoing torture.  This is more like aggressive ribbing, comprised of short encounters where one person will put down another person in order to feel better.  I also hear about such instances anecdotally, like "when I made that guy cry I got sooo happy."  I was bemoaning the unkind nature of my classmates to someone who has been to sea, and he told me that I should grow a thicker skin because it is even worse on the ships.  One story I heard which perfectly illustrates this warning involved one sad crew member who was talking about wanting to cut himself.  His crewmates' response was to find all the knives they could and stash them in the sad crew member's rack.
     Even if the wording which describes this phenomenon is unique to the Navy, I realize that putting others down to feel better is nothing new.  But most people grow out of it by the end of high school.  So far in the Navy, though, it seems like this systematic schadenfreude is not only tolerated but encouraged.  Why might this be?  I cannot know for sure, but I have a few thoughts I'd like to share.  For starters, the whole military resembles one giant frat.  Back in college, this was a culture that I had a strange love-hate relationship with.  On the one hand, pack mentality, group-think, cult of personality bullshit repulses me on so many levels.  To suppress creativity and novelty in favor of primitive ideals which appeal to the lowest common denominator stymies progress, and all the frat activities I witnessed around the U of A campus seemed to be demonstrative of this kind of retardation.  On the other hand, though, I did not like feeling like an outsider.  I longed to bond with fellow males on that intensely basic level of understanding which seemed to come naturally to that crowd.  After all, fraternité means brotherhood in French.  So now, in the Navy, I am learning a thing or two about male bonding on a basic level.  Case in point, another comment from a sea-returnee was something to the effect of "It's when people stop messing with you that you should worry." 
     I am still puzzled by this.  All my buddhist training on kind speech seems to be non-applicable.  I mean sure, there are exchanges of good-natured barbs, but that's not what I'm talking about.  To really improve one's mood in keeping with this "principle," one must genuinely hurt someone else.  And people do derive some form of pleasure from upsetting others, particularly subordinates.  Maybe that's one reason for this behavior: by using one's position of authority to hurt those beneath them, even in ways with no lasting ramifications, one reenforces their place in the pecking order.  But upon even further analysis -- and this is what makes this issue really fucking crazy to me -- it is apparent that the person who is trying to take the happiness from the other person doesn't actually want or need the other person to be unhappy for very long.  What they want is a temporary transference of happiness and then subsequently a recovery and resurgence of their victim.  Because we all are, in fact, on the same team.  We need to know the people we are working with are strong, emotionally, because in a crisis situation our own lives depend on the strength of our crewmembers.
     So apparently this behavior kills two birds with one stone -- improving the mood of one person by practicing mild sadism and/or underscoring their authority (if a power dynamic is at work) while simultaneously testing the emotional fortitude of their teammates, perhaps building it up in the process.  I submit that it is possible to improve one's mood and increase people's emotional stability without resorting to behavior rife with potential for negativity.  But such alternatives must necessarily encourage empathy, and in a culture devoted to the vanquishing of one's enemies, empathy can be a dangerous luxury.  Now I posit, based on my experience and understanding, that even empathy towards one's enemies can be possible without undoing the goals of a military.  But perhaps my understanding is flawed.  Perhaps I am coasting on an ignorance masquerading as understanding, and I am really all fucked up.  But anyways, I will keep inquiring into this and other issues that arise and try not to settle too comfortably into an answer or explanation.
     I kind of lost any sense of thesis in this entry.  This sort of thing defies understanding.  There is a continuum of messing with people.  It runs the gamut from ribbing for the sake of camaraderie to malicious, sadistic sociopathic bullying.  I think mostly, the discussion I attempted can only serve to scrutinize my own motives.  Any more than that is beyond the scope of buddhist examination.

Tassajara Journal Review 1

     I have wanted to write something in here for a while, but I have been both bothered by too many ideas and bothered by too little motivation for any one of them.  So to appease my longing to contribute to this project and to express something that is going on for me right now, I am posting a journal entry from my time at Tassajara. 

     At times, I feel like the mouse in this next story.  And what I symbolize in the story, the ogre, the oaf... Well that could be a number of things.  No need to name them.  Anyways, here it is:

Monday, June 13 -- Day 65 (10:30 pm)
     Just now, in the bathroom, a large mouse or smallish rat was surprised by my arrival [in the lower barn bathroom] and had no way to escape.  So what he did is find the corner farthest from me and make himself as small as possible.  When I went closer to get a good look at him, he dashed past me to a different corner (inset of sorts, on the step up to the stalls) and hid behind the broom/dustpan.  I was able to sit on the step and see him closer, but as I reached to tap his tail he made a break for it across the room and this time behind the container for hair clippers.  Again, I went closer.  I kept this up for a little bit; partly to see this creature closer, but also partly to observe his method of self-preservation...and...it wasn't much, really.  I mean, without an escape all he could do was put some object between us or just bury his face in a corner and hope that I would leave.  If I got too close for comfort, he would make a break for it.  Watching him at one point, cowering, whiskers aquiver, I realized, "he's more scared of me than I am irritated by him."  Then I brushed my teeth.  While brushing, I went up to him in a new spot behind the plastic bin the toilet plunger is kept in and pinned him against the wall with said bin so I could give him a tiny stroke on the back in a last attempt at comprehension, on my part, of the reality of this creature, and communication of peace as well, no matter how unlikely it was that it would be understood.  Then I thoroughly washed my hands (who knows what diseases it might by carrying in his fur?) and finished brushing my teeth. 

Guilt

     I've heard it said that Catholics and Jews tend to be more guilty than most.  I don't know why, but that's the accepted stereotype.  Well, I was raised Catholic.  And whether or not that has anything to do with anything, I am noticing a lot of guilt lately surrounding my buddhist practice.  Guilt is a useless emotion if it isn't serving to motivate improvement.  For example, when I feel guilty about not practicing the guitar I paid $200 for (or when I feel guilty for paying $200 for something I don't practice), when I feel guilty for not working out or exercising when I have plenty of free time, these are opportunities to act differently, to do the things I have objectively deemed worthy of my time instead of being idle.  I feel like the best scenario would involve doing these things without the guilty feelings serving as motivation.  But the guilt is there, largely because I don't do these things way more than I do, and so I usually just end up feeling guilty.  This brings up the question of whether I actually WANT to do these things, or if there is something else going on -- some neuro-peptide addiction which is gratified by guilty feelings, perhaps.  It's difficult to say.  But if I'm feeling guilty and NOT taking action to fix whatever I am feeling guilty about, then the guilt just ends up being somewhat masturbatory -- I get to continue being shitty but still feel kind of good for being tortured over my shittiness.
     Often, though, I feel guilty about stuff that is much more subtle and nuanced than simply going to the gym vs sitting around in my room.  Sometimes I feel guilt over something no rational person would feel I should have to change, like not returning the feelings of someone, for example.  I have noticed I will feel guilty BOTH for giving a homeless person money and for holding back from giving a homeless person money.  I feel guilty when my practice doesn't resemble that of people I look up to.  That last one is really a bit silly; I mean isn't it the point of "looking up to" someone to emulate the qualities in someone more developed which one hopes to cultivate in themselves?  So while it's good to feel motivated, there's no reason to feel guilty about not being a particular way NOW.  I struggle immensely with this.
     I still get angry, upset, or otherwise worked up -- quite often, actually.  I feel guilty when I get like this.  One reason is that I feel like I am misrepresenting buddhism, zen specifically.  I (perhaps erroneously) feel like meditation practice should help a person be calmer, more collected.  I mean, it probably does... A common fear for me (which I touched on in an earlier blog entry) is that meditation really only helps keep me at mostly-normal levels of irritation -- that without it I would be a raging psychopath or something.  That's most likely not true.  What IS true, maybe, is that I was more angry or prone to getting worked up before I started zen practice, that I am less so now, and that in the future these traits will be even smaller.  I do need to keep reminding myself that the fruits of practice (as Darlene Cohen mentioned) are best measured in degree rather than in order of magnitude (that phrasing was co-opted from an NPR article I can't now recall).  It takes more than four years to turn an intense young man into a sage, cool cucumber.  In the mean time, I will persevere in noticing my failings, feeling guilty about them (if it's a failing I can rectify, like judging people or being unkind, or clinging to a small sense of self) and using that as motivation to work continually TOWARDS the idea of buddhism.  If I notice masturbatory guilt, I will try to let it go.  And if I can't, well at least I will do my best not to feel guilty about it.