Artist, philosopher and sometime interviewer Elizabeth Dee meets Peter Levine, author of The Mechanics of Happiness: Engineering a Positive Approach to Your Life.

I’ve met some of the great polemicists, I’ve met some angry people and I’ve met social revolutionaries. Peter Levine is different and I’m trying to find out how. We are in a central London hotel, a quiet one not flooded with tourists, and we’re sat in big armchairs to get at what he considers to be big issues. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not, but he’s an interesting guy, with some interesting views. He gives me a twinkling smile, and he laughs a lot as he talks, he talks about happiness and he certainly seems happy enough but insists this isn’t his objective, his new book has happiness in its title but it is not a set of prescriptions for happiness. I find his writing style curiously endearing, sometimes archaic, I find him quite curious too but in a pleasing and strangely compelling way.

The waitress smiles as she refills our cups, he is  a charismatic man, someone who I can’t imagine fading into the background. I have to declare an interest, this is not the first time I’ve met Peter Levine, it’s the first time I’ve interviewed him but our paths have crossed, he’s someone I’ve bumped into from time to time at odd events, I’ve seen him in the downstairs café of the National Gallery and we’ve raised an eyebrow across a busy room. It’s a cold day outside and I decide my best approach is to warm him up

Your new book, The Mechanics of Happiness, is it just another work about positive thinking?

No, there are three interchangeable states anyone can have about their life. They can be negative, neutral or positive. I take the position is that you can engineer the approach you take so why not be positive? And by positive I mean proactive, assertive and taking the bull by the horns rather than waiting to see what crumbs fall from life’s table and might just land in your lap. You create your own life, we all do, we are the most potent force in our own lives whether we realise it or not. How you think about yourself will determine your outcomes in life.

The book has something of the self help about it, which I have no problem with, but what do you think about a life spent gazing in the mirror?

Ha ha, great question! Well, I think that a life spent gazing in the mirror is an homage to narcissism, and interestingly if you gaze in the mirror what you see is everything back to front. This book is about seeing things through a prism that has as little distortion as possible. But your point is well made, there is a weighting towards selfishness in our world and anyone reading The Mechanics of Happiness will understand that I am an advocate of a reasoned and balanced assessment of themselves within the context of a world populated by others and that world existing upon a planet who has its own life too.

Others?

Yes, but not only other people, other life forms, other points of sentience within a seemingly unconscious universe.

And how do you relate to these others?

They exist as integral and unique life forms in their own right, if they are alive then they are my brother or sister.

That’s a pretty off the wall statement to make, what do you mean by that?

Life is a quality that appears in diverse forms but the fact of life is consistent and as such I am connected to all living things, as indeed are we all.

How would you describe your new book?

Imagine taking a power shower, but instead of water it was ideas and perceptions refreshing and uplifting your mind. That’s what The Mechanics of Happiness is – a guidebook for living the best possible life. A resource that you can tap into again and again. It is a cascade of cognizance, perceptions and awareness that provides a roadmap for where you are, where you’ve come from and, most significantly, where you want to be.

I’ve read the book and certainly it has those things in it. You seem to focus on self reliance, rather than organizational reliance, and clearly you see life as being a journey, where do you see this book taking its readers?

Wow, great question again. I see that as individuals we have a personal responsibility to become the best possible people we can, that’s for our own benefit and for the benefit of those around us. I always try to think of the kind of neighbor that people would want to live next to, and this is someone you live next to for life, and then I try to be that person myself. Now I think that is where the path starts for all of us, being someone that other people and things want to mix with. You see I took the idea that if you do not know your history or where you’ve come from, then how can you know where you’re going? I think that’s as true for an individual as it is for a people. So I see the book as a primer to living the best possible life, what the Greeks called Eudemonia.

So the book is about knowing your history?

No it’s not but it starts with understanding your heritage, that’s you personally and you as a human being. Without that foundation in place it is difficult to graft other things on to it. A person adds up their life but I think that they can add it up all wrong, they measure themselves against unattainable archetypes or models that only exist in the pages of an airbrushed magazine. But we are seduced by the imagery, the narrative of that kind of glamour and success which is really of no account to human history most people alive and just about everyone who has ever lived and got the human race to where it is. The position I take is that you measure where you are by where you’ve come from and if you do not know where that is then you can get false and inaccurate readings of your situation.

I see, so that explains your first book?

Yes, broadly speaking it does. There are seven small books that make up the whole, so they are like, I don’t know, the seven bands of colour in the spectrum, the one whole thing is divided into seven component parts.

You seem to love patterns…

Oh, absolutely, humans do. Our brains love to make patterns, spot trends see the shape of things emerging. The human brain is the greatest pattern maker there is, we love sequences, mathematics, the whole thing of arranging stuff and… look, humans make patterns, create systems and are compelled to search for meaning within the world we find ourselves to be a part of and those things we engage with. That’s what we do, it’s not a choice, we can’t help it. If you throw a cork into water it floats, it can’t help itself and our brains are like that.

Does that mean you think people are predictable?

Of course I do. There are seemingly random attributes to us all but ultimately they fit within a model or a pattern that emerges as our lives progress. Just because you are confused by something today does not mean that you will still be confused by it in twenty one years.

You talk a lot in your book about choice, what you’ve just said implies that there is no choice, it’s all worked out in advance.

Oh no, not at all. Certain things are worked out in advance, they are things like our genetics and our DNA and so on, they are untouchable and form an unassailable bastion of what we are. There are other things where choice is implicit and it is the consequence of those choices that may have a certain inevitability about them but the freedom to exercise those choices remains an inviolate human attribute. My message is that the best choices are the result of the best information, the better informed you are the better your choices and decisions will be.

I hear what you say, but a lot of people think there is too much information out there at the moment.

Yes, and I’m one of them. Information itself is then graded according to quality and relevance. This is one of the malaise of our age, a junk food diet in information terms, too much available of too low a grade. It is possible to suffer from mental and emotional indigestion brought about by gulping down stuff that has little or no discernable benefit. My position in the book is that a few core pieces of information, and we could call these lessons, wisdoms, truths or whatever, are far more useful than a lifetime of unreferenced stream of consciousness stuff.

Why mechanics of happiness and not paths to or how to get?

Because at one level our lives are very mechanical. You drink a gallon of water, you will need to spend a lot of time in the toilet, that’s mechanical. But mechanical also refers to something that is reproducible, if you do something once then you should be able to do it again, I read a great quote from Albert Einstein, ‘we cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’, and what that says is that everything is replicable, the useful and the not so useful. So the idea of mechanics is about using replicable methods, perceptions and ways of appreciating your life as the bedrock of creating something great and something extraordinary. You see, a person who understands mechanical things is a mechanic and crucially if something is not working as it should they can repair or improve on its performance. What I am advocating here is that we all take a basic mechanics course in our own lives.

Which would lead to what exactly?

Well I identify a grid of three outcomes here, happiness is one, fulfillment and satisfaction are the other two. I see these as being a threefold system that ensure a person’s wellness and puts them in control of their own life. They interweave with one another and their interactions can only be positive. There is a deficit of these in the world right now. Our lives have become incredibly pressured and stressful and subsequently these three dip below the horizon as we try to work harder just to keep an unnatural model together, once they’re over that horizon they become easily forgotten.

What do you mean by an unnatural model?

Well if you study various forms of psychology you will know that we model ourselves on things that we see, people we encounter, admire and so on. Humans are great mimics, we copy what we see and those things we find attractive trigger a subliminal response in us to be like that. The un-natural model is the thing I referred to earlier, the airbrushed and sanitized version of life which bears little resemblance to real life as we mostly experience it. But because our brains don’t care about reality, they just want the model, and they want it now,  they pursue it and ultimately there is little or no satisfaction in that process because the model they are pursuing is a chimera, an elusive and illegitimate composite.

So what makes your model of happiness different, how is it not a chimera?

What another great question!

My position is this: the only valid template against which we can measure our own lives is the natural worlds. And when I say the natural worlds I mean specifically the way that universal law or principle manifests in physical form in the observable universe. The most tangible point of reference we have for that is Mother Nature. I see nature as the point of reference that has no hidden agenda, no spin and no angle. Its processes are the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected, there is an ancient wisdom from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus which states simply, as above, so below. The ancient Chinese explained that if you want to understand man, study the universe and if you want to understand the universe, study man. These are different ways of saying that life is a matrix of repeating patterns that express themselves in multiple guises with different scales but whose principles remain constant and unchanging. So it is this model of happiness that I advocate, the model that says happiness is a byproduct, but not the end, of a life well lived and trying its best to fulfill its design and purpose; that purpose and design being a representation of those laws that have jurisdiction throughout the universe, including, obviously, here in our small part of it.

You speak in a very expansive way about these things, the universe and everything in it is a huge concept to take on board, is there a practical basis in what you are saying?

Well there has to be. There has to be something that makes it accessible and palatable without being condescending and throughout the book I am trying to present a cohesive and simple approach to living the most useful life that it is possible to live at every level, the life that derives the most satisfaction and fulfillment. If I can’t keep it practical then it becomes overwhelming, if a person is overwhelmed then they think that it is unattainable but my central theme here is that the best life is available to everybody who wants it, that’s part of the deal here, part of the baggage of turning up on this planet as a human being is that you have access to everything that you need, absolutely everything.

Sitting with him it all seems so simple. Back in the crush of central London the people seem a little more frantic, the day is heading toward the evening rush hour and the pace is quickening. I think about what he said concerning un-natural models and I see in this ancient bustling metropolis how few people get what they really want and how little happiness is on the faces of the people rushing by chasing what they imagine they should want. We talked about his relentless optimism, the work he does with damaged children and young people and the journey his own life has taken. I get the sense he is someone who has looked into the face of something immense and is compelled to report back on what he’s seen, his vision is a bright one on a cold winter day. His optimism is contagious and I find myself humming absent mindedly while flicking through his book. I open it at random and read ‘it begins with you’, he has a point.