What deep sleep can teach us about happiness

Deep sleep is perhaps the best analogy to understand what happiness really is. Happiness – or more aptly, contentment – is something nearly all of us want, and none of us have. It is perhaps one of the most elusive experiences in our lives.

Deep sleep- that is dreamless sleep – is something we all love and return to each night. Despite it being the loss of one’s identity, we simply love going there. Deep sleep, is indeed a loss of one’s sense of self. No experience seems to exist in the deep sleep. The sense of ‘I’ has completely faded away. The dissolution of this subject (i.e. ‘I’) and the object (“experiences”) duality is the foundation of contentment. Paradoxically though, the minute subject-object experience has dissolved, all experiences also disappear. This points us to the undeniable fact that contentment cannot be an objective experience. That is to say, there cannot be a separate subject (the ‘I’) that experiences contentment, for contentment entails the disappearance of the ‘I’. This makes it one of those things that the ‘I’ desperately wants, but can never acquire. To attain contentment, the ‘I’ must stand out of the way. Just like when one stops attempting to attain sleep, one can actually drift off to sleep. Sleep is a letting go, not a putting in effort to attain. Contentment or happiness is something similar.

“This points us to the undeniable fact that contentment cannot be an objective experience”

What, then, must one do?

The only thing we can do is to prepare the grounds for happiness, just like we prepare our beds and rooms for sleep. Just as we turn off the lights and make our beds, we can train to loosen the grip of the ‘I’ on experiences. This includes, giving up the search for happiness – especially in objective experiences in the world. It also means giving up the search for fulfilment in spirituality and philosophies. Most of us, having become weary of the world, begin to look at spiritual experiences to finally fulfill us. But this is more of the same dynamic playing out, with the only difference being a change in the object that we are after.

Giving up the search for something that will finally fulfill us is perhaps the most challenging thing to do. Because it essentially means a loss of identity – the sense of self. To be able to obtain the courage to do this, we must be able to recognise ourselves outside subject-object experiences.

How?

There are two pathways to do this. One, meditation. Meditation is the act of watching thoughts, emotions and sensory perceptions without getting involved in it in any way. We witness experiences from the standpoint of a distant observer. Slowly as we gain the ability to separate ourselves from experiences, we begin to see that experiences cannot affect the act of observation. Or in other words, the observer is always untouched by experience. This is the basis of courage. We know we can always exist even if something terrible happens to us.

“The basis of courage is recognising that we are untouched by experience”

However this is still in the realm of duality. That is to say, I am the unaffected witnesser over here, and over there are the experiences on the screen of my mind. Over time as we begin to stand as the observer, experiences and observation collapses into one harmonious whole. We become the experience. This state – also known in modern psychology as flow is most pleasurable and most intimate.

Which brings us to the second pathway and that is doing activities that intrinsically bring us joy. This may be gardening, sport, art or even having a great time with our friends. When we so totally lose ourselves in experience, we forget ourselves and forget time. These moments represent the highest moments of our lives. In both – meditation and doing joyous activities – we experience the dissolution of the subject-object divide and experience happiness.

Happiness then isn’t something we chase, but that which happens to us, when we stop chasing anything at all. We simply meditate or do things that are intrinsically joyous in themself. This is where true contentment lies.