 This is Community Matters, and I'm Jay Feidell. And I'm going to talk about what we need is a little happiness, but exactly what is that and how do we get it? And Roger Epstein, formerly a tax attorney, and now involved in a number of nonprofits, is going to help us do that. Welcome to the show, Roger. Hey, Jay, Aloha from our nation's capitol. Well, all the best people and the worst people are in Washington. I think I fit you in the former category, OK? Oh, good, good, good. Well, I can be best and worst sometimes. Let's talk about the eclipse, because you were there. You watched it and it did not injure you in any way, but did it make you happy? You know, it did make me happy. I think part of happiness for anybody is learning and growing and also feeling like a human being, you know? One of the great things about the eclipse was that everybody participating all over the world got this sense of being a human being in this huge celestial universe. I went downtown at noon yesterday in D.C., and they had a whole right out where the National Mall is, is surrounded by the Smithsonian Institute. And they had a number of exhibits. What does the solar eclipse mean? How you can look at it? They had a lot of displays for kids. They had some telescope with filters on them, looking at them at the sun. And then you could see different things and you could see how it looks through the filter now and then how it filters when the eclipse started. And the eclipse started at three minutes after two o'clock and went for about two and a half hours. And at one point in D.C., it was 89% eclipse. Never got to 100% here, but 89% was very cool. And I ended up watching it with my daughter, one of my youngest daughter who lives here along with my oldest daughter, but just two of us in her backyard, where I am now. We watched the eclipse of the sun and it was very spectacular and made us both very happy. Well, the eclipse, the path of the eclipse, the direct path rather than the oblique path, was exclusively over red stage, you know that. And it points up to the divisiveness we have in our country. And I wonder if there were any protests in Washington or elsewhere or against the eclipse. None that I know of. Everybody seemed to be in favor of the eclipse. And there was no one who felt they could do anything about it anyway. That was my experience with TV and the newspapers here. And even Donald Trump did not believe he could have an impact. At least he didn't say it. He might have. At least he didn't say so. OK, you're now into happiness. And I want to know how you got into that world in a world which is not happy. The world is not happy, so you're going uphill on this, Roger. Right, right. Well, let me start by saying I've spent the last 40-some years working on interfaith matters and seeing the similarities between all our different groups, along with Joseph Campbell's work, the great mythologist. And realizing or demonstrating to myself that we're all connected to each other. We're all trying to say the same thing. We want to know how to lead a good life, how to have a happy life. Two people that say we should have a happy life are the Dalai Lama and Aristotle. I take that coming from very different places. Well, including you, that makes three. That's three. So let me let me let me start with Jerry Jampalski, a wonderful mentor of mine who created a program called Attitudinal Healing. And what he said, Jay, it doesn't matter what happens to you. Everybody has ups and downs, including civilizations and countries. And what's really important is your attitude. And you can change your attitude and you can be happy if you want to make yourself happy. There's nothing keeping you from having that voice in your head saying joyful and light things as opposed to dark and negative things. And the world has been through a lot of bad times. I was born the day Germany surrendered in World War Two. And very glad that I wasn't born 20 years earlier because I can't even imagine how horrible things were at that time in most of the world. So a quick to Jampalski wrote a book, a number of books. And one of them is called Forgiveness. And so about 20 years ago in Hawaii, there was something started called the Hawaii Forgiveness Project. And what we did, I ended up being the host of that starting in 2005. So almost 20 years now that we did monthly meetings. We had an annual Hawaii International Forgiveness Day. And we realized that forgiveness is so important in everybody's culture. Then we had a wonderful kupuna come, Auntie Mahayalani Henry, who said, basically, if you want to have a pono life, a good life, a happy life, you just need to do two things, forgive and be grateful. And there's lots to work on gratitude. So I've done that for many years. We've had literally over a thousand people at our monthly meetings over the 15, 20 years. And in 2018, I was invited to go to Bhutan. Now, Bhutan is the tiny little. It's really funny that you should you should mention Bhutan because that's on my list of questions. Bhutan claims to have a very high quotient of happiness. Well, let me tell you what that what that is. And I went there for three weeks with a client and good friend of mine who had four projects going on with the government based on happiness. And and I went there as her lawyer, as well as an interested party. We went to a happy school. We went to a program to help women save the weaving culture there through happiness programs. We went to a university that's all about nature and some restaurants that were being run in in that mode. So here's the background on Bhutan. OK, it's a landlocked country, all mountain valley, mountain valley, mountain valley, the valleys are so narrow. And one in the main city, you can only build four or five streets that go up the mountain and then it gets too steep. That's how in the capital city. So a homogeneous group of 750,000 people, all Tibetan Buddhists and it's a kingdom. So as they saw China and India, so one side's China, one side's India, almost completely surround as they saw their economics moving, they knew that it was coming to them. They were getting a lot more tourists. And so the king decided, well, what do we want? You know, let's go look at the world and see what's going on. So he traveled to many Western countries, Eastern countries all over the world. And what he discovered was that there was a lot of product. There was so much materialism, much greater than his country that was still mostly into farming and rural living. Yet people were very unhappy. And he came back thinking, well, if we're going to grow into that, I certainly don't want us to be unhappy. And then he came to an interesting conclusion. He said, what you pay attention to is what you get. And what you pay attention to is what you measure. So if you look at Western society, we measure gross domestic product, GDP, and we got a lot of product. But what we don't have is happiness. And what he wanted was people to be happy. Now, remember, we fought the Revolutionary War, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So it's not a joke. It's a fundamental condition that almost anybody asked, what would you like in life? I'd like to be happy. So, so... Let me ask you two questions that come to mind. Number one is, have you seen The Ox in the Classroom? Yes. It's a wonderful movie. A wonderful movie. Very... Yeah. And it actually helps us define the term I'm going to ask you to define, which is what exactly is happiness? How do I know I'm happy? Do I get a buzz? Is it like having a couple of glasses of beer? What is it like? Is it like drugs or some kind? How do I know? Well, let me let me tell you something else I did when I came back from Bhutan. I took a class in happiness from Yale University online. It was the most... It is the most well-attended course in the 250 year history of Yale University. And now Harvard and Stanford have programs on happiness. Really? Wow. And every time I turn around, of course, you know, I'm interested. I just see so much talk about happiness. Now, basically, happiness, of course, is different for every person, Jay. But basically, what I got out simplistically as a generalization out of the Yale University happiness class was happiness is not about what you have. If you want to get a new car, you think it's going to make you happy. It only lasts a day or a week or two weeks or three months. And that's the same for everything else. Being happy really depends on good relationships. And good relationships depend on you being present in the moment with people. This is where we fall back on forgiveness, which gets you out of the past. So you're not running your mind about what I should have, what I didn't do. And gratitude gets you out of the future because you're satisfied with what you have now. So you create relationships and it starts with the family and then it moves out to the next level in business and then everybody. So basically, to have a happy life, you need to have good relationships and you need to treat people with respect and love. One of Jay and Paul's first book was called Love is letting go of fear. And I know I'm throwing a lot of different concepts in Jay, but to think about, we're all created through a loving relationship and what we really want in life is love. And one of the things that also falls into this category is to be centered, to not be ruminating all the time about the past and the future. And so mindfulness has come into our world. The idea of sitting still and seeing what's really going on with you, all this kind of fits into this jar of how do we make ourselves happy, finding meaningful work, having good relationships. One of the things that really we find out is really important for happiness for people is being of service. Think about anybody you know, they always want to tell you how to solve your problem. They always want to tell you where they went to eat that was good because they want to help you. And when they help you, they feel of service. We get a huge charge. We get a huge feeling of satisfaction and goodwill when we help each other. Yes, absolutely. But, you know, a couple of things. One is it sounds a little bit like Buddhism or maybe Hinduism. Is there a religious overlay on this? No, it's always it's very secular. And even the mindfulness that I'm talking about, you can look at the work of John Kabat-Zinn started over 40 years ago at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He created something called mindfulness based stress reduction. And there's classes available through private teachers in Honolulu and all over the country. And this has been used at the hospital for all kinds of mental health, even for physical problems. It's a very circular, secular, totally has nothing to do with religion. But it helps you settle yourself and get yourself comfortable so you can act as positively as possible. I'll give you another example. I'm a member of the Washington bar as well as the Hawaii bar. The Washington bar magazine 20 years ago had a picture of a meditator on its front cover, the monthly magazine or quarterly. And they were talking about how important meditation is to mental health because, you know, the lawyers have a have a whole group to help lawyers who are having mental problems. It used to be alcohol. Now it's alcohol, drugs and depression. So mindfulness, and this is what Kabat-Zinn has done at the Massachusetts General Hospital, is a secular way to help us get past this huge wave of depression and negativity in our lives. I read all the time a third of the young girls in our country have considered suicide. That's how bad these problems are. So what I'm talking about in happiness, I'm talking about getting back to just appreciating your life, being present, being of service to other people, getting fulfillment out of your life, which I would call happiness. Satisfaction. Well, in some circumstances, that's going to be pretty extravagant. For example, here I am in a cattle car in the German railroad and my family has been decimated back in Berlin or wherever and we're on the way to Auschwitz where I know what's going to happen to me. And I'm in great pain. I have to stand up the whole trip. There's no food, there's no water. People are dying around me. How do you apply this particular approach to that? Well, obviously, you've you've you've created an incredibly different cult scenario. However, some people did survive the concentration camps. Ellie Weisdell and others who have gone on to really be leaders of humankind to try to end this kind of stuff. I'm really not reaching I could go into that, but I'd rather talk about what we can do in the ordinary situation, which is how we could be happier in Hawaii. We have everything there. We have beauty. We have a lot of lots of healthy things. We we have nice people. Oh, I mean, there's just so many things. We are the premier multicultural society in the world today, living comfortably as a multicultural. So so what can we do to make ourselves happier? We can focus on the things that make you happy. In fact, education is one of the principal things that we can focus on. And I have a couple of books I brought back, one I brought back from Bhutan, which if Michael would put it up on the screen, I'll show you the title of it. And and this this book is is also followed. This is a textbook for how to create happy societies. And then there's another paperback book that the same author who was the head of Gross National Happiness, that's the measure they created in Bhutan to kind of compete with gross domestic product. And so it's not that there's so much happier. It's that they're working on it. That's where their energy is. That's where their focus is. And if we could get our energy and focus on that in treating each other nicely. And of course, Aloha says a lot to that. So that's why I created this program called the Aloha Happiness Project. We took the Hawaii Forgiveness Project of 15, 20 years and we morphed it. We said, hey, look, if if forgiveness and gratitude helps to get the happiness, let's focus on the goal instead of the mean. And so we're trying to blend those concepts of gross national happiness from these books I had from Bhutan with Aloha. What does that look like? We're the best place in the world to do this. Well, we're unique, aren't we? I mean, there's not everybody, not every place is like this. There are some places that we're much more difficult to, you know, be happy about your circumstance. I mean, in America. Yeah, and all over the world. Yes, all over the world. I mean, think of the people in the 60 minutes segment last Sunday, which get little little five inch green minds and the Russian planes dropped them and the guy is tending his roses. He's as happy as punch and he loses a leg in the process. But he didn't notice the little five inch green mind. It's just really interesting. So the question is, how do you connect? You talk about happiness as a social experience as a relationships. It's all about relationships. You know, they used to say the law of real estate is not about real estate. It's about people. It's about relationships. And you can apply that to all the law. You can apply that to all human activity, actually. But my question is that we have to live in a civil society. We have to live in a society which is controlled by some kind of political strength. OK? How do we advocate? How do we sell this notion to politicians who are different than the rest of them? That's what they're working on in Bhutan. So we take some of their ideas. We blend them with the beautiful Hawaiian culture that was living on an island. That's where that's how Aloha recognizing that we're all sharing the breath of life together. That's how it came to be because many islands killed everybody. They just, you know, went in the other direction. So we're in the best situation to not only help ourselves with this, but to become a model for the world. And that's really the goal of what we're trying to do. And as this book that that Dr. Toe has now published in a much more conventional way, he talks about how to scale up happiness from people to organization. So there's sections in here on happiness in education, happiness in business, happiness with family. And and again, it's it's different for everybody. But there are some fundamental principles, the principles of doing doing good, being of service to people, the principles of cooperating and collaborating instead of this death competition for more materialism. Would you agree with me? Would you agree with me that, you know, a lot of people are not in this this zone? A lot of people don't do this. They don't know about it. So the question the question I put to you is to have the project show wrote the book, the classes at Yale, all very valuable. But those things, those influences only reach a limited you'll have to agree a limited number of people. So what you're doing is you're you're advocating and you're trying to get other people to, you know, buy into this notion if you're happy, then you can make other people happy. And so then you have a happy civil society. But you're but you're actually contending and competing with untruth in the community. Yeah, I mean, let me let me how do you how do you sell it? Where are you on the continuum of selling? So listen, what I see in our society is we've created some wonderful things over the years. The United States has done great things. We're at a point now where we've kind of gone on an extreme and we've kind of reached the pinnacle of what we can do. And now's the time to make changes. If you read, well, Elizabeth the tourist, the evolution biologist, talked about things didn't just evolve randomly. They evolved when they reached the point where it wasn't working anymore. What was working before is no longer working. Now we got to change. OK, we're in a place where many things are happening. Women were just freed up in the 60s for the first time in 5,000 years. Huge changes with female energy being out there. We don't know what to do with it. We're trying to change, but we don't really know where to go. We have so much information digitally. Why do we have to teach kids to memorize things? Maybe we could have our schools focused a lot more on how to be a good citizen. Let me keep going. Religion is struggling everywhere in the world and particularly in the United States. But people are not just looking at materialism. The word spirituality now has an whole meaning it didn't have before. People want to know what are the bounds? What are the what are the morals that we have? If we can't learn it from from church, let's learn it for ourselves. There are some values like the Ten Commandments or, you know, that we can agree are really important. So we're going to do it slowly, but surely we take one and we have the time to do that. There are people who, you know, who don't want to do that, who go exactly the other time. You were alive in the 60s. Do you remember all the backlash against civil rights? Do you remember how terrible it was? And George Wallace was saying segregation today, tomorrow, forever. And people were cheering, shooting people. I mean, it was all kinds of horrible stuff. It's I don't care what you say. I know for a fact that we are so much more integrated in the United States, it's just hugely changed. Now, are we perfect? No. If you look at the Chinese, they'll tell you things don't change in five years. They change in 50 or 100 years or 200. But you've got to start some time. And I wake up in the morning tomorrow and I can see what you're saying. I know about the books, I know about the courses. I know, I know about the, you know, the the object of it, the, you know, the goal of it. But what do I do? I need your advice, Roger. What do I do? A, to be happy and B, to spread the word and kind of get other people aboard on this thing. But what do I what what what foot do I put out first here? OK, you have to you have to learn some happiness skills. I think so. So meditation is a is a foundation. There may be you can do prayer, whatever you do to close your mind down. There's prayers. There's meditations now in the Christian church has something called mindful prayer, something like that. And so it doesn't have to be religious. It just needs to quiet us down. We're so busy, we're so busy doing everything. Let's sit down and then we can focus. All right, what do I need to be happy? Well, I would like to get along with other people. I would like to not be angry. I would like to be satisfied. Well, if we get back to Jim Paul's work, we can see that attitude is what you make it. You can tell yourself the place is miserable. But I'm telling you, the world is not miserable. Go out and sit at the beach for a while and see how you feel. Sit with your friend and have a cup of coffee or a beer and talk about how how their kids are growing. I'm just saying there's the cup is half full or half empty. OK, how do you want to do a board? Let's assume you know this. Let's assume you are completely integrated into your your thinking. How do you get other people to say, all right, the one way one way are not inclined to do it one way is really have to convince them. One way is the happiness project we're doing. And I'm telling you, you don't have to convince everybody. If you get 10 percent of the people interested in something, it's on its way to mainstream and 20 percent is mainstream. The other people just kind of follow along. Secondly, education is really important. I'm taking hopefully I'm talking with the commissioner of charter schools to go to Bhutan in June and do a whole week program with them about how we bring happiness into our schools. And we're trying to get a group to do that step by step. Jay, one step at a time. Let's get it going in ways that will spread different. What I'm doing with the happiness for everybody I introduce to it has their own idea. Oh, why don't I talk to this group? Why don't I do that? People are hungry for this. And one last thing, people are living a lot longer. We've got so many Kupuna who are going to live a long life and they're in a place now, many of them who want to do something valuable with their life. We can utilize them in so many ways to work with the youth to volunteer in different ways and to develop their own concepts of happiness. The first thing is to do it ourselves. We've got to really live from this place ourselves. So actually, I feel a little better now than I felt at the beginning of the program. I was looking more at the dark side now. I think that the human condition and being alive is something worth thinking about, something worth appreciating, you know? And if you spread that around, if you convey that, you're doing a favor for not only yourself, but everyone around you. And I wish you well in this, Roger. I appreciate and admire the project you set up over all these years. And I appreciate what you're going to do going forward. Roger Epstein, retired tax attorney, but also a man who understands, you know, so if you can do it, you can do it from any purpose. Exactly. Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Jay. Always a pleasure. We're going to keep working on you to get more of your effort, which is terrific into these programs. Thank you, Roger. A lot. We want to announce that Think Tech Hawaii is moving into a new phase and will not be producing regular talk shows after April 30th. 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