To Love Is To Be Happy With

To Love Is To Be Happy With is the fifth of seven principles of the ancient philosophy of Huna Kupua.

You can bungle all the other ones, reinterpret them to mean completely different things because then they fit your habits better, because that's more comfortable, while pretending to have made progress, because that feels good. You can sputter your energy all over the place and make your very existence a hapless exercise of half baked perplexity. You can be dogmatic and rigid and self-serving and deliver morsels of self-righteous hubris to anyone willing to listen. You can cower under a table most of your time and just stay there because it's a great way to stay out of trouble. If you get love right, none of that matters- your life will be a good one. You can royally screw up all the other principles, if you get this one right, you're good. Intrigued yet?

Love. The alpha and the omega. The be all and the end all. The core of every spiritual teaching- even the ones that don't make it very obvious. The only universal principle. The reason to exist, build civilizations, and get out of the bed in the morning, to meditate, have relationships with each other, own pets, not own pets, go skydiving, surfing and whale watching, for music, for philosophy, for math- and eating pizza. Poems have been written, duels and wars fought, wars prevented and duels rigged so nobody gets hurt, nuclear missiles sabotaged, condiments spread on sandwiches, wheat ground and shaped into noodles (did I give away my Italian heritage with that one?), cows farmed, cows kept in sanctuaries, houses built, houses burned down, wolves shot, wolves protected, chemicals developed, forests guarded, books written, amulets crafted, clothes designed, yarn spun, floors swept, computers invented. In a burning, chaotic urge to feel better about ourselves and the world around us. For love.

Whew. I know, it's confusing. If love is the most important thing in the universe, why is it that the best the brightest minds of the ages came up with to describe it, is that it is ineffable, unknowable except by direct experience, or requires further study? Is understanding love, and consciously applying it, on purpose, really that hard?

Turns out it's not. Huna kupua makes no such evasions. The definition of love, as it applies to X, is that if you love X, you are being happy with X, and if you are not happy with X, or are not being with X, then you are not loving X.

It's probably the greatest advantage of adapting the Huna Kupua philosophy that the word "love" actually means something. In the West, it really doesn't- it's such a nice word, and it represents pretty much anything that is good, people started loving the word for its own sake and using it for all kinds of experiences, some contradictory. That's perfectly understandable but ultimately, in our society, the world just really doesn't mean anything anymore. In Huna Kupua, that is different. There love means a very specific thing- to be happy with. To love something- be happy with it. Don't criticize it, praise it. And- and this is the important part- if you can't, change the way you think about it, find different aspects, look at it from a different way, or, even just change the entire experience in such a way that makes you happy. Then you loved. If you didn't do that, then you didn't love. And that is all there is to it.

Exchange X with anything. Divide the universe into any part and give it a name- a process called "symbolism", or for humans, "realizing you are not your mother and being startled out of your diapers by the realization"- and the definition applies.

Let's start with the obvious one because it's getting popular- loving yourself. Are you loving yourself? And, does asking that question make yourself love yourself more, or less? And, under which circumstances does taking a bath in the same room as a lavender scented candle constitute loving yourself, and when is it evading doing your taxes?

We will just turn to the principle to get the answer. Are you loving yourself? Well- are you being with yourself, are you experiencing yourself in the present moment, or are you endlessly distracting yourself from yourself? And, when you are experiencing yourself in the present moment- gently resting your experiential consciousness on the moment where your body is serving as a point of focus in this particular dream framework you made your own by incarnating in this particular instance- are you happy?

The answer will- always- be maybe. Shades of grey (the exact number is not particularly important for love). But you can say, and it will absolutely explain your situation to yourself- to the extent that you experience yourself without holding back, and to the extent that doing that has a way of making you feel happy, then you are, to that extent, loving yourself. It's never going to be zero. Congratulations! Good job! However, to the extent that you are "running away", to borrow the language of friends who just got back from their first spiritual retreat, to the extent you are placing your attention on random things in a kind of jerking motion while your subconscious mind is raising an issue for you, or your higher self is dropping an inspiration, then you are not with yourself- and then, to that extent, you are not loving yourself. Love requires a presence of the mind, a kind, non-analyzing, non-dividing, relaxed, fresh, friendly, authentic, flexible, accommodating, flowing-as-opposed-to-jerky, persistent, yet sometimes really intense and swelling, gushing and even exploding, yet always nimble and detailed and sensitive even in its great movements, attention. It's the kind of attention you get when you decide you are going to place your attention on something, and then keep putting it there without chastising yourself, or immediately forgive yourself if you do chastise yourself by accident, and just keep putting your attention back on where you decided you wanted it to go, and stay.

This process is also called meditation- or, in Huna, a Nalu. Since it's one of the ingredients required for love, it makes a lot of sense that all the spiritual traditions have a method for cultivating it.

So if you have that kind of receptive, energetic attention on yourself- and, while you are doing so, you are feeling elated happiness of some flavor- then to that extent again, you are loving yourself! Congratulations! If, however, you are not feeling elated happiness of some kind, you get cranky, you tense up, you feel angry, afraid, disapproving, stern, sadistic, schadenfreudig, insecure, worrisome, incomplete, torn, pressured, inadequate, or like the worst aspect of the universe bar none (to borrow the content, but not the language, of the clinically depressed)- then, to that extent, you are not loving yourself.

Luckily, there is a method, and again, it has been discovered and taught in all noteworthy spiritual traditions- I didn't study them all in depth, this is a hunch, but I did study some to some extent and it always applied- there is a method to be happy with whatever you are experiencing, and to close the deal in your love endeavor, to lock it in by fulfilling the second requirement- that in addition to be present with something, you are also to be happy during that presence.

Seems like a tall order. I read Gandhi's autobiography because it seemed like a good thing to do while traveling through India, and in it, he talks about his intense desire and successful tactics to get people to feel joyful while performing mind-numbingly tedious tasks that would advance his causes. At the time, it seemed like a tall order. Turns out it's not if you know how.

The method is to think different. Now, that slogan is as ambiguous as the company that made it famous in our culture, and that's because thinking different works a lot better when the different way you are thinking in is better than the way that you were thinking before. And better means happier. The way to be happy with something is: Change the way you think about whatever you are experiencing and are not feeling happy with.

Here's an example. I used to really hate corporate culture, but I really admired Apple computer. Spot the contradiction? I was so torn I almost gave up on computers entirely, and I wasn't even using a Mac. Think about how limiting that would have been! So I finally decided, courtesy of my infinitely patient higher self, that whatever way Apple was doing business, that's just the universe experiencing itself and learning, along that avenue where people like things to be a little more structured. I also decided that they were also learning about the value of spending time with family and friends the hard way, and it was okay for them to do that (apparently the married engineers who developed the first iPhone had an 80 percent divorce rate- only a fifth kept their wives and husbands). I decided the company that made beautiful things I admire didn't need to have it all figured out in all ways. That also really helped me feel good about myself when I really liked a Chinese phone, and a Japanese car- both cultures who have a strong tendency to really highly value time spent in a company building, but not so much in a private building. And yet, to live my daily life, I needed a car and a phone, and I liked and admired their craft so much, I didn't want anything else. It was powerful. Suddenly, it was okay to experience myself at home a lot, even if the people who make the stuff I really love and admire, don't! Then I further realized that a lot of those people who make my stuff don't even want to spend as much time at home as I do, and that it was very silly to feel unhappy about the stuff they make because they make choices that lead to the way they live their lives. And then I realized that those who really wanted to live more like me, they absolutely could! They had higher selves and ways to reach them. Maybe a few of them might even be helped by this blog, which I am typing on another machine built by people who probably weren't at home a lot the way I am- or even were interested in the concept the way I am. Suddenly, I was okay with computers again- and I really do love them. So good not to have any more hangups about them.

How I came up with these ideas, this different thinking, is this- years after realizing I felt really unhappy about big companies and the way they do things, I realized I just didn't want to feel that way any more. So I wondered how else I might think about them. That was all. I did keep it up for a pretty long time, and I experimented with different ways of doing it- I thought about all the jobs they created, for people who wanted them, but that didn't work because I was getting rid of my job at the time to replace it with something else. I thought about the stability they brought, the feelings of safety for the people who worked there, but that all felt, like, "meh." Then I thought of them as spiritual expressions of great ideas, that were naturally imperfect because they had to be experienced and refined. That clicked for me. So now, as far as I'm concerned, that's what they are. I might come up with even better ways of thinking of them, should I need to, but, for now, that will do.

So to think differently, in a happier way, about something- you ask yourself the question: How would I have to think about that something to feel happy? And then you blank out your mind and take whatever comes up as your answer. It might take a little practice. The catch of the procedure is that then you apply whatever came up and kind of play with and try on whatever preposterous thing your higher self thinks would make you happy to think (and it all will appear preposterous, because you are only used to critical, non-loving thinking about your something at hand).

As a really great side effect this train of thought, my Musings on business- I realized that, if I can think different about big companies and feel happier, I can certainly think about myself and feel happier, by experimenting with different ways of thinking about myself, my position in life, my relationships, my body, different parts of my body, my subconscious mind, my higher self, my habits, my memories, the way the crunch sounds when I eat my corn flakes, the bills I procrastinated paying and got fined for even though the service was excellent (turns out they had a service that covered it while I was figuring out how to improve the way I tackle my to-do list, so I could let go of the guilt right there). It turns out in the vast majority of situations I'm not particularly proud of, no real harm was done, or, at the very least, life went on- and every time I asked myself about ways to improve my thinking about situations that would make me happy every time, I would get a stream of suggestions that would pop into my mind, and each time, some of them would eventually stick. This took some practice at first. I've been really good at getting ideas about technical problems and other people's issues for a long time, but my own, not so much. But this simple question- How would I have to think about this to feel happy? Asked again and again unleashed a torrent of philosophical ideas and downright additional information I wasn't aware of before that really cleared the air, and by golly I'd accept the alternate interpretation to the usual "that happened because you're a doofus" explanation that seems so seductive when you're used to it just fine as soon as I saw it. I could tell because aches and pains would go away, tenseness and sore spots disappeared, and I appear more radiant. Self-love really does work! And since the areas we have most influence on are our minds, according to Huna Kupua teaching, changing your mind to love more is a really great place to start.

The art of working with simple principles is you don't get to have a laundry list of exceptions that correspond to your current habits- you recognize what your habits are, and examine them to see if if they apply to your principle, and change them if they don't. That can be very unpleasant, and even feel overwhelming- and the best way I found to start loving more really is to start loving yourself more. So you take those same ideas about loving more that helped me come to terms with distant happenings that were bothering me, the companies, and apply them to yourself. To start to think about yourself in a way that makes you happy, and to really accept it- I mean really accept it.

The best way I found for looking at my habits that might involve not-particularly-loving thoughts and feelings, was to realize that it's fine to just be working on it. All those non-loving ideas? I didn't make all of those, I picked them all up from my ancestors, bless them, and the people around us, bless them too. And now, when I change them, every one of them counts, and is a huge part of the transformation the world is going through. All the bad stuff- that was the default, that was normal. What's new and great and exciting, that's taking whatever part I can at any one time, and making it better. So this is a process, and it doesn't have to be complete for it to be good, and I get to celebrate all my progress, because it is very, very significant, far beyond myself- it will be good for my ancestors, because they won't have to deal with a negative inherited idea, for the people around me, their ancestors, and so on. So what I'm doing, it's really great! Even if I'm very uninspiring at times, it still counts that I can be really inspiringly loving at times where I wasn't before! Wow. Thinking about myself like that makes me happy. So I guess I loved myself now. So I made another bit of progress. Cool! I know I did it, because I know what it means to love myself now! It becomes easy as pie.

Now, if that felt challenging, let's move on to something that is the hard part- loving other people. Companies are kind of locked into being the way they by their dynamics, so we can give them a pass- but other people surely are responsible. And doesn't that mean they deserve to be punished for their transgressions, preferably by us?

Turns out that, no, Huna does not recommend to punish transgressions, like, not at all, as in, never, zilch, no, don't do it.

You can do it- and you can even get away with a lot of punishing others and still turn out all right, because the same loving spirit of forgiveness that applies to a transgressor also applies to you, the would-be punisher. But you don't have to.

You can establish certain rules in your relationships, and you can simply not cooperate in certain ways, and you can even threaten to leave or flip the table or do certain things that are ambiguous at best in terms of love. But you can do those things without being particularly unhappy in that moment. Again, it all depends on how you think about the other person. Is that person the worst thing that ever happened to the universe at large, and deserves to suffer endless pain for it? Or is that person a well-meaning, purposefully limited aspect of all creation who happened to run into something you are fickle about? The latter idea works a lot better, but you can probably find ones that suit you more and make you happy even when exploring personal boundaries. Remember, love means to be happy with- love says nothing about being with someone in a particular way. The definition of love according to Huna Kupua does not require you to be physically present, although your own culture will have an influence on how happy you can be with or without that. The definition of love according to Huna Kupua most certainly does not require you to adhere to a certain prewritten rule book, and in a tiny bit of anarchist spirit might even encourage you to explore alternatives for freedom's sake. But your cultural beliefs might still influence you to give a certain rule book a certain relevance, and it's always easier to work with your existing beliefs and develop them rather than oppose them, and you do that by- guess what- loving them. So if you want to get along better with your cultural beliefs you picked up from your parents- or your partner's or special friend's or generic friend's- you think about them in a spirit of friendliness. And the really really negative soul-crushing unfriendly nasty beliefs you might hold have a strong tendency to go up in metaphorical flames once you bring them out from the shadows by looking at them.

But regardless which beliefs you include in your relationships, a safe bet is that you are going to be a lot happier by forgiving someone than staying mad at them. This is a really particular type of changing your thinking, and it can be as easy as just saying that it is now forgiven. That's really all. What this does is you get the minimal amount of changing your thinking to get you happy, quickly. Things are still as they are. You don't suddenly love things you really just don't like and know are not right for you right now. But those little pointy sticks you throw at people subconsciously, they just go away. With forgiveness of this type, you get a nice life panacea- you still get what you've been getting, just a better and easier version of it. Forgiveness is the true life 2.0- just like the old version only improved.

Because like love forgiveness has a lot of cultural myths tied up with it, let me dispel a few of those.

You don't forgive the other person for them, although of course they benefit too if you don't hunt them down in a grand quest for revenge (or practice telepathic black magic by repeatedly criticizing them). You do it for yourself. No matter how much you dread someone, you yourself will always be affected much worse by any critical thinking about them. So you really hate somebody? The best way to get 'em is to forgive them, because it sets you free, and if they are your nemesis for the time being, wouldn't it be nice to just be really really well off? Wouldn't that be much better than being not-so-well-off, even if you just want to give that person the short end of the stick? Now of course that's a temporary idea because if you love more you will make peace with your nemeses or they will drift out of your experience or both, but it does get you started.

So if you're not sure how to change your thinking- try forgiveness. Forgiveness is just saying that a slight or transgression has been dealt with and isn't important any more and can now drift into the background. It doesn't mean you have to pretend what happens is good, and it doesn't mean you can't learn and take precautions in a very common-sense ordinary sort of way. But if you forgive enough, you might be in situations where it doesn't occur to you anymore to act in a guarded sort of way, because the idea of danger is curiously absent- it's just not an issue so it doesn't occur to you. You don't have to force that, it happens organically- if it occurs to you to take precautions, your belief-level thinking is still aligned with the danger, so it's better to take the precaution as long as that thinking is there. But if it does occur to you to not take the precaution as well, you can try that one out too, it's really up to you how to move forward, and the details don't really matter as long as you perform the forgiveness change in thinking.

One aspect we kind of glanced over so far is the actual process of doing the thinking change or the forgiveness. All of these techniques are a form of ku-talk, the process of assuming the existence of your subconscious, and then talking to it for the purposes of influencing its beliefs- which is how the thinking change is performed. Belief is memorized thought, and your subconscious mind's job in your organism is to hold memory, so that's why we're doing it. So the process of ku-talk is about holding an inner socratic dialog with yourself where you explain to your ku, your subconscious mind, what you would like it to believe or start doing, and then you listen for responses and deal with any objections that come up by arguing with them, telling your ku what to do with it ("that's not important, believe this anyway" or so can be enough), or even shouting them down to get your ku to accept the idea. So it's perfectly fine to just repeat the sentence "whatever this feeling is about, it is forgiven" in your mind until you feel relief, but it's equally valid to reinforce that by imagining yourself yelling at yourself, or arguing away any objections ("no ku, it doesn't matter that it was really bad, we forgive for our benefit, not theirs"). It is, in its essence, a process of selling your new idea to your own subconscious mind, and you do it exactly the same way that advertisers sell to you- and they really sell to your subconscious mind- you use repetition, imaginary loud volume, and here we get ahead of ourselves and also include sensory detail, imagery, sounds, smells- that all reflect and transport an idea that you want your ku to accept- such as that you are completely wonderful. If you add to what I described the elements of building up energy and ritually acting something out, you have the generic complete dream changing technique of Huna, the Haipule- and yes, you absolutely can do a Haipule for self-love, or love in general, or loving a particular person or thing, in fact it's a really good way to use a Haipule.

So, in other words, in order to change your thinking in such a way that you become happy, you use whatever techniques you know and can use to change your thinking, and you do so in such a way as to make yourself happy in the presence of whatever your experience is in that moment. That's the extended version of loving.

So you re-think yourself using the mentioned variants of ku-talk to have a more friendly view of your life partner, your children, your parents, your ancestors, the town you live in, the country you live in, the government, money, plants, trees, people you disagree with, people you generally agree with but disagree with in a subtle way, the mass media, conspiracy practitioners (in and outside of powerful positions), and even mosquitos and other predators who might want to eat you. Whew! Thank God I'm sitting in this Jeep and the lion is outside, really appreciate it, American car industry!!!

And if you do that, you are happy with them, and then you love them, and then everything else becomes easy and fun. It's really worth it. Give it a try.

Another specific relatively easy technique for changing your thinking is to perform blessings. Blessings are the same things as compliments, and they can be just as casual as a regular complement, or they can become big elaborate rituals but it's only a matter of scale- a blessing is a blessing, and it's a loving thought, and a loving thought is never critical, that's a curse.

Yeah here's a tough one to swallow, when you try to "improve" someone else by pointing out their faults, you are really cursing them and making it harder for them to change, and you are also cursing yourself, because the ku takes it personally. So if you take the trouble to love and bless someone else, then you are also blessing yourself, and when you bless yourself, that energy will arrive at the people around you. When you curse yourself- when you self-criticize- then you become mean-spirited and angry because you might as well be poking yourself with a stick. That whole school of improvement-through-constant-chiding is about as insane as selling people on the idea that they will get really good at tennis if they whack themselves with the racket. That's really how a curse- a criticism- feels to the ku. Praise- love- on the other hand feels wonderful. You understand how much more cooperative everyone and everything will be with you if you have a general blessing attitude- you're constantly making them feel good just by having your ku there because it's memorized loving thoughts instead of cursing ones. If you criticize yourself and others a lot, you will be hurting others just by being there because all that critical telepathically transmitted thought downright offends them, even if you didn't say a word.

This was downright baffling for me at first, but it held up just fine. No, I'm not Dr. super special holier-than-thou chosen-few extra super morally superior because I'm behaving mean to everyone. There is much to be said for investigative journalism, but even this professional way of uncovering faults has a lot of collateral damage when innocent people get into the radar. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I am saying it doesn't work well to try and translate fault-finding into your general life- ask an investigative journalist about that one. So it was completely non-understandable because I had been brought up in the American left-wing counterculture school of thought that there are these establishments, and that we must constantly nitpick them and kind of protest them out of existence and all will be well. Now I gave all that up and I focus on bringing about alternatives to things that don't sit quite right when I feel like it. It feels so much better you wouldn't believe it- and it also works a lot better. Bitterness has never convinced anyone of anything, it just doesn't work that way. Do be appalled about things occasionally when it occurs, but then switch to finding loving thoughts and trust that those will help take care of the problem- or do something about it with the newfound energy the new loving thought gives you if it's important enough to you. Save the whale, don't sit at home, curse the whaler and feel like you've made an improvement. If you're really advanced and happen to be interested in business, go to a whaling part of the world and start hiring people- and then get whaling banned. (I'm not judging whaling or whalers either way, although it would appear to be something used to have its place but is on the way out because the times are changing, like fox hunting or duels.)

Now before we bring all this information to a close I'd like to go into the being with aspect of loving when you're talking to people. Being with in each moment means to take in the sensory input, to be present. We learned about this in the last principle, now is the moment of power. So if you really pay attention to people while they are there with you, and you also don't think about anything critical and notice nice things about them, they will feel loved by you- the energy will be there, and the positive ideas will be there and so you will be connected to them. They will also be super inclined to help you out if you need it- you are loving to them are you not? Now of course some people won't notice this no matter how much you do it, but to the extent you do it, the people who respond positively to you will respond drastically, and your current friends will enjoy your presence much more. Just make sure not to let your mind wander- the switch from loving attention to no-loving attention has to be done carefully with a nice goodbye to prepare them for that, or else it feels like a hurtful jolt.

That brings us to friendship, which is really just love- your friends, those are people you love and that's that. You can have as many of them as you like. Now, of course sometimes you reserve a special form of friendship for certain people, your "besties," and in some languages such as my other native language German "Freund" means "best friend", and the English "friend" would be something like "Geselle" or "Kollege" or even a "Cooler Typ den ich Kenne", or "cool dude I know". Germans are particular with true friendships, and others are too, to different degrees. But it's all the same thing, the difference is just the form you give it and possible expectations you might add on- but those added expectations have nothing to do with the love, they just act as a vehicle to feel happy with someone if they work well to do that (such as Tuesday night poker as an excuse to meet and adore each other), and should be dropped if they don't (Tuesday nights get too much so you do it every two weeks but enjoy it more).

And then romantic love, which is a really intense form that also can have a sexual aspect that is expressed, which is really just another opportunity to be with someone and be happy about it, just physically. All the added aspects are culturally specific, and like Tuesday night poker, lifetime cohabitation is as good as it serves the love, and when it's not good then it should be changed in some way- presumably by making it more loving.

So if it's spouses, the government, friends, family, police, neighbors, strangers, animals, computers, books, telephones, ideas, work, obligations, bosses, workers, plumbers, musicians, or your toothbrush- if you want things to be good, you change your thinking if you don't feel good about it and you give it your full attention and you will never stop spreading that sweet love, and things will be good.

In Hawaii there is a beautiful word for love, and it means the same thing as this principle. Thank you for reading, and Aloha!!!