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Our relationship to pleasure, happiness and fulfilment - both individual and collective - may be the most important consideration for humankind. After all, all over the globe, it is our greatest incentive behind all that we do - behind all the actions that shape the world and our human history. Yet, it is tragically overlooked. Without relevant curricula in schools, we spend most of our lives taking the forms of hungry ghosts, ever looking for the next pleasurable thing at our own detriment. If we as individuals deeply understood how it all works - what drives us, the effects of pleasure, what truly makes us happy and fulfilled on the long term, and what we actually need in life - then, I believe, we would all collectively shape a world so beautiful it may well be completely unimaginable to us today.
The Quantum and the Lotus
As empirical evidence pours in in the language of fMRIs, quantum computing and algorithmic data processing, the twin revolutions of biotech and infotech are beginning to weave a stunningly harmonious new melody. This is a new yet ancient song - one that is beginning to synchronise with the immemorial hymns of Eastern philosophy, in a kind of beatific unison that combine into a profoundly lucid and rivetingly illuminating metaphysical Theory of Everything.
Ancient Eastern ideas that confront the nature of consciousness, suffering, joy, and other aspects of subjective experience have long stood the test of millennia-worth of rigorous inquiry and practice across equally impressive geological scales. Today, however, they are fast gaining credence and traction in the modern Western psyche under the banner of the scientific method and its microscope of rigorous empirical observation. As the physiological, cognitive and emotional benefits of meditation are being thus empirically validated, a treasure trove of other ancient philosophies and practices are similarly being corroborated via a diverse wealth of models in various research fields, from ontological physics and neurobiology to biomedicine and psychotherapy. Indeed, an opening of the scientific heart to Eastern wisdom is fast emerging into a nascent consensus of curiosity, acceptance and integration in the Western psyche at large.
In tandem with the emerging Psychedelic Renaissance, a foundation is thus being silently built upon which the epistemic warrant of ancient Eastern wisdom and other spiritual teachings can powerfully take root and understood as the credible, potent, and timeless sources of power and wisdom that they are. These developments are allowing ever deepening, cutting-edge explorations into the mysteries of Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu teachings, among others, to launch and constellate in parallel with the discoveries of particle accelerators and and spacefaring telescopes, as they all begin to beautifully coalesce to illumine the final frontiers of the human mind and soul that hitherto lay dormant in the black oceans of subjective consciousness.
One rather exciting and pertinent development that has caught the attention of the popular imagination this year has been the exploration into the neural correlates and biological mechanisms behind our subjective pain and pleasure balance - and the fascinating, obvious, paradigm-shifting way they explain why the most materialistically wealthy countries in the world are the most miserable, why the richest among us are still so dissatisfied and ensnared in their own unique psychopathologies, why we as individuals can never seem to achieve lasting joy - and why equanimity may be a goal more worthy even than the universally deified emotion of happiness. This is the science of the powerful neurotransmitter called Dopamine - one with which we are all most pleasurably and most painfully acquainted.
If these themes seem familiar, it’s because ancient philosophers, from Siddhartha Gautama to Aristotle, have figured it out long before the 1%, obesity, drug and screen addictions, and other maladies of excess have so conspicuously manifested in human life. Ancient Eastern consciousness has dealt with the quandaries of pain and pleasure through myriad poetic metaphors and timeless parables, heralding equanimity and temperance as the foremost virtues of human existence. Now, findings in neurochemistry are tangibly and convincingly telling us the very same story, and teaching us the same lesson - this time in the language of neurotransmitters, synapses and phylogenetics.
But let’s start by speaking in a language that we all can understand.
The Gnostic Imperative
“Know Thyself,” the maxim inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, bears in it - as with many stock maxims - a cavernous depth of wisdom that only expands the further down you explore. Knowledge is power, power is responsibility, and we collectively are increasingly responsible for state of the entire planet. So it is our veritable moral imperative to begin anywhere, with anything, by understanding ourselves. Thus can this understanding structure our innate responsibility for ourselves, and by extension, to our surroundings, to others, and to the planet. This is the definition of the act of maturation, a value that our ancestors have held sacred through ritualistic ceremonies and rites of passages for more or less all of human history. Relative to our past, it is evident to anyone cognisant of these practices that we are living in dangerously chaotic and psychologically infantile societies lacking in vision, responsibility, and the self-understanding at the core of it at all. Yet it is not an archaic repeat of the past that is necessary for forward movement, but a similar self-understanding on the level of our human species and its patterns, needs, and place in the world, one that emerges when we study the echoes of our ancestors so as to apply their sacred knowledge as a major missing puzzle piece to our understanding of the world we live in today.
When we understand our systems, we see how they directly affect our life. As you watch your moods come and go and understand the mechanics behind them, you receive the explanations for the enormous questions: Why do I feel bad? How do I feel better? Thus the feedback loops become predictable, obvious, and most importantly, within our control to redirect.
Simple philosophical questions such as Who am I, What am I here for? and What drives me? are at the root of the wisdom we need to heal the converging crises of our generation. Even when (dangerously) unexamined, they form the basis of all of our actions in the world.
When we are born, most of us are quickly accustomed to a world and parental figure(s) that, for the most part, do their best to acquiesce to our needs. We are fed, bathed, cuddled and loved without condition. Despite the various forms of trauma, from the subtle to the major, that many of us are still battling, the prevailing message was that we are the recipients of external care. It is a rather blissful world for many children, at a time when our own innate fears and lethargies are pampered and enabled, for they were too insignificant and nascent to cause any significant damage to our surroundings.
Dopamine Makes the World (And You) Go Round
In Dopamine Nation, it is argued that Dopamine addiction is the biggest and most insidious under-reported crisis of the modern age. Beyond creating entire nations that are inevitably headed down a landslide of epidemic depression, anxiety and other profound pathologies of the soul, Dopamine addiction - I will argue - may also be a non-negligible culprit behind all the most major distresses and calamities of our time. These include our deepening and notoriously disastrous levels of wealth distribution, Rich Asshole Syndrome and related maladies, climate change, social media polarisation, drug addiction, violence, and war - as well as all their tributaries of human, ecological and animal subjective suffering. This is plainly because at the root of all these phenomena is dukkha - or dissatisfaction, as an innate characteristic of the human condition. The strings that seem to keep pulling our limbs at every turn like puppets in some grand cosmic joke of sickening poignancy and unbearable absurdity.
Is human nature happy or unhappy? Satisfied or unsatisfied? It is difficult to say at a time when depression has become so normalised in our civilisation, a state that conditions us into thinking this is simply how life is. And yet when we contextualise everything that’s happening, we can also identify the specific structures that prop up a system that continuously feeds dysfunction in a negative feedback loop that has been operating for centuries, if not longer.
In Andrew Huberman’s podcast episode #39, Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction, Huberman cautions us to be aware of what a powerful and influential neurotransmitter Dopamine really is - how much it profoundly shapes our experience of life at every given moment. Dopamine is the famous-infamous neurotransmitter responsible for motivation, energy, and action in the animal kingdom.
Dopamine science dump
The science of dopamine creating more and more pain [craving = pain]
The emptiness you feel afterward / in between dopamine hits
How cheap pleasure speeds up time. 30 mins of gaming vs 30 mins of learning a skill like piano. The latter feels way longer (lengthening your experience of time throughout your life) and you have way more to gain.
The science of cross-addictions / addiction transfer
How we are all addicts
The bliss of childhood before desensitisation (theta waves, gamma waves, brains of meditators) + how we ruin the childhood brain with addictive food + phones and other substances.
Fasting and its effects on rejuvenating our sense of pleasure
Dopamine awareness + management as the antidote and means of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of a system that uses dopamine as the heavy shackles that bind us while also hypnotising us into believing it’s our decision
Recovery, spirituality
Raising your baseline dopamine
1. Meditation
"Buddhists believe that happiness is our natural state – our brains are wired to be happy. To find happiness, we must simply free ourselves of the daily distractions that obscure it from us through meditation."
"Buddhists believe improving the quality of your mind is the principal source of happiness, and meditation is the tool to achieve it."
2. Diet
Sugar makes other foods not taste as sweet. Within a few weeks of eating healthier, our taste sensations change such that foods with lower salt, sugar, and fat content actually taste better. AND sugar also your brain down-regulates dopamine receptors to compensate for the repeated jolts of fat and sugar. (Source)
Regular exercise remodels the reward system, leading to higher circulating levels of dopamine and more available dopamine receptors. (Source)
What if the natural state of man (without unnatural sugar and sedentariness etc) is much more akin a baseline paradise?
The more we rely on highs the lower our baseline becomes.
The more strongly we resist the highs the higher our baseline becomes.
We live in a society predicated on selling highs to each other (through food, shopping, entertainment, coffee, weed, sex, alcohol, etc.)
I’d rather be always happy than than constantly desiring the next high.
I’d rather fruits and vegetables taste like candy, than making healthy food feel like a chore.
Pleasurable baseline existence is possible but we have to give up all of our addictions and it takes at least a few weeks of effortful deconditioning.
im not interested in getting high intermittently, im interested in raising my baseline so that every moment is richer and i dont need dopamine-depleting substances anymore. (positive feedback loop - instead of using willpower to hold back from bad habits, the good habits feel so good you forget about the bad habits.)
Addiction: The Root of All Evil?
Define the basic nature of the addict (nothing is ever enough, you always want more, etc.)
Dopamine and…
wealth hoarding
obesity
social media addiction
animal agriculture
resource extraction / seeing nature as a resource dump
But before we slippery-slide down the well-worn trenches of 20th century existentialism, Godless nihilism and Übermensch worship, let us take a few cautious steps back - all the way back - into the 4th - 5th century BCE: the cradle of modern written philosophy. While science continues to emerge and materialise into the fantastical winding roads previously laid out by the imaginations of science fiction writers, let us explore the paths laid out before us in the minds of mystics and sages, by the mythos of antique philosophy at the dawn of modern human thought - deep, ancient grooves that are now finally being lit up by the neural imaging of modern science.
Joy is a Butterfly
The parallel between illusion and attachment in Buddhist philosophy and dopamine addiction (the idea that we will be happier after satisfying a craving is upside down; these illusions actually hurt us)
Mindfulness as an antidote to craving and addiction (see: TED talk on cigarettes)
Mindful eating (HeadSpace)
Meditation, non-judgmental witness consciousness, equanimity
Parts work - listen to your shame; wisdom of emotions. Is being judgmental necessary? everything that appears in your consciousness in necessary and valid, even anger and shame. Shadow work, integration.
Heisenberg quote on the intersection of different disciplines
Christian Mysticism
Equanimity but also mindfulness, witness consciousness
Meditation Vs desire and aversion
It has been said that happiness comes about not by searching for it directly, but indirectly as a byproduct of living by your values. It is easy to see that the happiness being described here - and in most places where people talk of happiness with any philosophical weight and sincerity - is the happiness of eudaimonia, of a life well lived.
In Buddhist literature, the driving force of our personhood - our ego - is made up of the twin ghosts of fear and desire. Together they form the same mechanism that propelled the survival and domination of the human species just as much as they lead to our collective and individual downfalls. And these ghosts haunt our neurochemistry as much as they do our souls, and they materialise as the presence of Dopamine.
From a materialist perspective, this may seem bleak to know that the major parts of our psyche are formed by these rather unpleasant emotions. But key in this understanding is also the concomitant realisation that, when fear and desire dissipate, something remains. You remain, and you are innately free. And, armed with the recognition of these pulling forces, you are free to chose whether or not to engage in them, to feed them and make them grow stronger than your will.
[…] When the Buddha said that life is suffering, it was not stated as a stand alone fact. This oft-cited truism was born as part-and-parcel of a 4-part statement, one that leads onto saying that there is a cause to this human unsatisfactoriness, an end to it within our reach as our birthright, and that this end can be found in the Eightfold Path. It’s important to note, as well, that this is but one diagnosis of many - and it is through cross-referencing the multitude of other major surviving philosophical traditions, now scaffolded by the rigours of scientific inquiry, that we may arrive at a through-line that can most comprehensively make sense of human happiness and suffering in a way that can aid us in making the most important decisions of our lives: our day-to-day habits and choices, decisions that collectively ripple out to create the world we live in today.
Alan Watts on pain, pleasure and consciousness
Eudaimonia: The Natural High
The beginning of the spiritual path is the realisation of a most fundamental truth: the truth that inside you lies a greater happiness than all worldly sense perceptions can offer you. It begins when you set foot on seeking this greater happiness in your inner world, your state of mind and the lens through which you see the world. Once you've touched upon this happiness, the insight gained will never be lost again. You will have tasted true inner peace, and realise that this is the most important thing to have in life beyond what anything the outside world can offer.
As Jordan Bates says, heaven is not a place to go to, but a place to come from.
You Have Nothing to Lose But your Chains
The Buddhist view of attachment paralleling the chains of chemical addiction
Dopamine management as an act of Revolution
An Integral Philosophy - an Integral Life Practice
If we recognise and fully internalise the fact that our addiction to pleasure is killing us and our planet, we may certainly think twice before reaching for that phone, pizza, or partner that we believe will fill that gap, if only temporarily. This maxim, once deeply integrated into our day-to-day lives, can become a north star, a guiding light. And this scientific discovery becomes the scared knowledge of our generation, the torch of wisdom that the beauty of our contemporary explorations and endeavours can pass onto future generations, so that they may know themselves as humans never had before. There is indeed a “right way” to human, and I - personally at least - would like to use my one precious life on our beautiful earth to mirror it as best I can. Because the only alternative is finger pointing, and we have enough of that already. In a world where misery is the fastest growing trend, and pleasure is available to dull and control at every corner, the core values of equanimity, health and self-discipline become truly revolutionary acts, and may well be what define the word environmentalist in any way that truly matters.
[Necessary disclaimer - of course everything in moderation and balance etc etc but most of us are too far on one end to worry about over-disciplining ourselves]
