What is contentment?
The dictionary informs us that it is the experience of being satisfied, of not desiring more than you have. This is a starting point, but it leaves out important elements of contentment, including the most essential aspects from a psychological perspective. What does it feel like to be contented? What are the conditions that produce contentment?
Recall again a satisfying time when everything seemed right: there was no need to alter what you were doing, who you were with, or where you were. During such moments life is rich and full. The mingled buzz of worries, fears, and anxieties that so often circle your head like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes is quieted. Instead of judging or second-guessing yourself, you are satisfied just to be. Even that old familiar voice of desire, the disturbance in your mind that cries like a needy and demanding child, I want, I want, I want, is somehow stilled. Contentment feels peaceful as the moonlight at the bottom of a stream, tranquil amid constant change.
Now. Here. This is it. Contentment gives you a different experience of time; your mind stops wandering into the past or the future. As modern people, we waste so much time wishing we were in a different circumstance, which of course is quite impossible. You could call contentment being in love with the moment, not just dutifully accepting it like an arranged marriage but passionately, rapturously embracing the eternal now as your soul mate.
Contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is. Honoring “what is” is just the opposite of living out of a “just as soon as” mentality. Reality doesn’t always go the way you would like. When this happens, you can either become frustrated and redouble your efforts to push reality around, or you can learn to accept, affirm, and even dance with what is given. This book is about the dance between what we want and what reality presents to us. It’s all in the dance.
Arusakumar, the Coconut Seller
Mark Twain once said that nothing so broadens a person’s perspective as traveling to a foreign land. It is difficult to see the assumptions and habits by which you live until you step out of them.
There is a coconut seller named Arusakumar who lives in a bamboo shack near the town of Pondicherry in southern India. He is a master at the art of slicing off the top of a green coconut with a machete, inserting a straw, and offering it to customers. You sit on a burlap sack of coconuts to enjoy your drink, as this is the only furniture at his curbside stand. Arusakumar must be one of the most contented men in the world, and this near-divine quality is highly contagious. He sings and laughs and pulls you into a Garden of Eden atmosphere in which he spends each day.
Contentment is beyond the vagaries of fortune or possession. Arusakumar’s options are limited, his expectations low, and his contentment high. He still blunders about and gets into difficulties, but when he does, he doesn’t feel guilty or obsess about what he could have or should have done.
Arusakumar possesses a profound awareness of an invisible, eternal reality. When things don’t go the way he might wish, he assumes that a larger plan is at work. This unseen pattern—call it fate or the will of God—may not be immediately clear, but he trusts that it will eventually be revealed, and he accepts it. How different this is from the modern approach of grabbing life by the collar and throttling it into submission!
Cut Off from Our Roots
It was part of the genius of the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung to recognize that in modern life, the personal self is assigned too great a task. We are taught in Western culture that each of us is a separate, isolated self. We forget that there is a deeper layer of experience that we share with our whole culture and with all creation. This Jung called the collective unconscious—a source of wisdom, purpose, and meaning.
The collective unconscious is a great sea from which we have all been born. In this sea live the feelings, ideas, abilities, behaviors, faults, and virtues that we identify as ourselves; and out of this sea each individual, each ego, each “I,” develops.
Many intelligent people today refuse to admit that they have an unconscious. They insist they know why they want what they want, and why they do what they do.
Unconscious is a curious term, like uncola. It says what it is not rather than what it is. But the unconscious is not so vague and esoteric. It consists of all those processes taking place in and around you that occur in the background. You know that your blood pressure and rate of breathing adjust when you run up a hill or as the weather changes, and you don’t have to consciously think about it. Just as your body does many things without requiring conscious thought, so does your mind. To say that we have an unconscious is another way of saying that we are mentally and physically part of nature. The depths of the unconscious are the depths of nature. Even when we feel most isolated from others, it is important to remember that our common psychological home remains the same.
Dr. Jung raised important questions for modern people concerning the nature of our real self, reminding us of something that earlier civilizations took for granted—that the self lies much deeper than reason and intellect, deeper than our individuality. The exploits of the gods and demons of the ancients may seem fantastic and irrational by today’s standards, but at least premodern people were aware of the important fact that there are powerful forces at work in our lives that have an existence of their own independent of our conscious will and desires. To find contentment, we can’t just ignore the powers of the unconscious. We must relate to them.
Reconnecting to a Larger Whole
We live in an age of “I” consciousness. Humans dominate the physical world in a way no one thought possible. Our buildings and our cities are monuments to ourselves. Just look at the skyline of a major metropolis; the grandest buildings are symbols of human power, status, and control. Earlier in Western history, the tallest building was always dedicated to the divine. But as we’ve become skilled at controlling external reality, we also become filled with “God-almightiness.”
Not too many years ago the Shell Oil building in London was assembled floor by floor until its height exceeded that of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. There was an outcry in the newspapers and tremendous discussion that an old age had passed and a new secular age of commerce and business was replacing traditional values.
Ecological crises of various kinds are teaching us the folly of thinking we can manipulate nature at our whim without serious consequences. All of life is interconnected and interdependent. This applies equally to our inner world.
We get into all kinds of trouble by thinking that life can be measured, understood, and controlled solely through our conscious will. The isolated individual tries to find contentment in novelty, excitement, power, prestige—by manipulating the external world. Cut off from the collective unconscious, we become filled with anxiety and insecurity.
The “I” inside us can become arrogant and alienated from its roots in nature. It is hard for us to admit that there is a great deal in life that is outside our control. But a little humility can be a wonderful gift. Britain’s great leader, Winston Churchill, once said, “I have had to eat many of my own words, and I found the diet very nourishing.”
Coming Back Down to Earth
We are familiar with the word humus, which means rich soil that you add to your garden to make it grow. This is related to the words humble, humiliate, and humility—all of which involve bringing ourselves back to the earth. Contentment does not require more reasoning and willpower; if that were all that was needed, humanity would surely be content by now. No, instead we must learn to humble our pride and admit that the “I” inside does not know everything and sometimes has a hard time figuring out what is best for us.
Contentment requires that we “soil” the arrogance of modern consciousness by bringing it back down to earth and reestablishing an ongoing relationship with the collective unconscious.
Most psychology today—90 percent or more—ministers to a person’s relationship to the outer world. Perhaps you can’t get a date or your marriage isn’t working or you are socially clumsy or some such thing. These are important issues, and they often require repair work. However, to find contentment, we must attend to the equally wonderful and challenging world within.
There is a story of a spiritual seeker who one day came to his master and asked, “In the olden days it is said that there were people who walked and talked with God. Why doesn’t this happen anymore?” The master replied, “Because nowadays no one will stoop so low.”