I once asked this very question, what is happiness, to a couple of quite renowned psychologists, Dan Krippner and Joan Bereschenko. It’s interesting what they said.
Krippner said simply that, well, he just looks at happiness as pointers. Like, for example, somebody’s smiling, then obviously he’s happy. If somebody has satisfied a contract or earned some money and shaking hands, obviously, he’s satisfied and happy.
My feeling was that he was just avoiding the question. He doesn’t want to go deep. He’s just pointing out pointers that may indicate that a person is happy.
Of course, we don’t really know if the person is happy. It cannot be done that way. Joan took a different track altogether.
She said that we are, again, implication. We are naturally happy because she didn’t want to go into that. She instead said we block happiness all the time.
Like clouds cover the sun, we have too many clouds that cover up the sun of happiness. It’s interesting because, you know, today, materialists, on the other hand, will give you a positive answer. They will say, oh, yes, happiness is pleasure.
Why look for anything else? I once heard Johnny Carson say on his famous Tonight Show, exactly the same thing. Happiness is a dry martini. Of course, we know that alcohol gives us the same brain molecules that dopamine, that being happy with pleasure, gives you.
But is pleasure a molecular phenomenon? Is that all there is to happiness? So, you know, when we are developing quantum science, we were mainly interested, very majorly interested in this question. Can we do better? Can we really define happiness? And indeed, what is happiness? If you look at the moments that we are really happy, it’s easy to conclude that when we love, we are happy. But what is the situation with love? If you notice your heart, you will see that you feel expanded.
Expansion of consciousness has taken place. Very interesting, no? And then, of course, you have a theory of why the heart expands so we love, and this is what quantum science enables us. Then you explain, well, okay, what happens is when we love, we are taking a quantum leap.
Quantum leap to what? To an expanded consciousness. So it started there, and then Valentin Ornisher and I were researching again on happiness when we are writing a book called The Quantum Brain, and we found out something else. You know, our previous theory was, it’s all explained in Self-aware Universe, if you are interested, that when consciousness embodies itself in the brain, it does in two stages.
One stage is the present central experience, which only a few people have a few times in their life, called the quantum self-experience. Unconditioned. It’s cosmic, non-locality prevails, signals as communication.
Of course, that is the definition of expanded consciousness, when you can communicate with another without any signals, obviously your consciousness is expanded to include the other person as you. So this is the theory of expanded consciousness. But then we have a second stage, which is called the ego.
And that’s a contracted state, because we lose that non-local quality except on very special occasions like psychic phenomena. We are not able to do non-locality anymore. And then in while researching this book, we found that an amazing thing, that the brain can also go into the pre-conscious state.
Experimenters actually found there is a pre-conscious state. And the timing of it is actually half a second. It takes half a second for the brain to do an reflection of what’s happening in the quantum self when the reflection via reflection in the mirror of past memories that are etched in the brain.
And this revisioning is what takes place from the wide open quantum self to the limits that we put on our ego. But we can penetrate this half a second. We don’t have to accept it.
How do we penetrate? We penetrate it by meditation. Indeed, it has been found if we meditate a long, long, long time, then you can reduce that half a second to about 180 milliseconds and probably even less than that. So, pre-conscious.
This is the key to happiness for ordinary people like you and me. If we meditate, if we listen to good music, if we approach, explore, embody meaning and purpose in our life, if we love, if we are good to people, all these things will take us to the pre-conscious. And if we do these things again and again and again, the good news is that we’ll develop brain circuits, which will enable us to be in this pre-conscious most of our waking hours.
And then we can really say that we are mostly happy. In fact, you know Sunita Pathani and I already have developed a scale of happiness that you can actually climb. Happiness zero is psychotics because they can climb at all.
One is for neurotics. They can climb if they can get rid of their neurosis with some help from others. Two is normal.
This is where most people live. And two plus is very important to mention because this Abraham Maslow already discovered that some people have positive mental health. And this is also the subject of positive psychology developed by Professor Gullitman in Harvard.
So that has to be acknowledged. But it really the level of happiness changes when we make a quantum leap. And this quantum leaping is where we can do something very seriously and it’s not that difficult.
We have negative emotional brain circuits and we can balance them by developing positive emotional brain circuits. And this balancing requires a quantum leap before we can make it part of our character. Where automatically whenever we are upset by some stressors acting on our brain, we can automatically invoke these positive emotional circuits to balance the negative emotion that has arisen.
That means that our ability to control emotions through just simply meditating on it will increase enormously. So that most of the time we’ll have equanimity. Now, you know spiritual traditions like if you read Bhagavad Gita, it will emphasize emotional equanimity as one of the signs of the enlightened people.
And we are saying ah, so you reach the first stages of enlightenment by actually reaching equanimity. At least the beginning of equanimity. And then this equanimity becomes the test.
The higher you go in the climb the ladder the more emotionally equanimous you will be. You will have your own individual ways of developing that capacity and eventually, of course, quantum science is very clear on that. You’ll be whole.
You’ll have embodied the archetype of wholeness. Wholeness is that state where there is no conflict. So what is going to produce any deviation from that state of equanimity? The state of no conflict, state of wholeness, state of complete equanimity.
We call supramental intelligence using Aurobindo’s language or if you want to use our quantum science language it is what we call quantum enlightenment. Isn’t that interesting? What it’s all about from the material description of happiness being molecular pleasure to happiness something that we can investigate, explore and embed the capacity, embody the capacity to be more and more happy in our life. Thank you.
