Happiness is not the answer

It seems  a common thing, that people say happiness is what we are really after in life. In a way, they may be right, but the  happiness most people think of is not the type of happiness that we should be striving for. So in this sense, there are two different types of happiness. One comes from gratification, or in other words, pleasure. Pleasure, or the experience of pleasantness, comes and goes from our lives and is not the type of happiness that will bring us real happiness. Real happiness, on the other hand, doesn't come and go with the changing conditions we experience. That is to say, it doesn't depend on the gratification of our sense pleasures in order to be fulfilled. This type of happiness is possible even when things aren't going our way, and as you might imagine, is much harder to cultivate than the feeling of being pleased.

It this is type of happiness that is our birthright, our natural state, but it doesn't happen naturally. If this sounds like somewhat of conundrum, it is. What I mean by that is that we have to work to cultivate it, just like the cultivation of a garden. If we don't cultivate the garden, it becomes overgrown with weeds, and is no longer beautiful. The beautiful elements of the garden haven't changed, all the plants and flowers that make it beautiful are still there, it's just that their beauty is covered up by other things that we don't find as attractive. In the same way, if we don't work to cultivate real happiness, we won't be able to see it, it will be covered by the weeds of our minds.

The gratification of sense pleasures has a shelf-life. It only exists for as long as we have access to whatever it is that brings us pleasure. Whether it is love, food, entertainment, comfort, security, well-being, or any other thing, or state, we will lose it as soon as we lose it. This happiness is nothing more than an emotion, and emotions are constantly changing. We feel happy one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month, or for some other amount of time, and then we lose it. When we lose it, we either experience neutrality or unhappiness, or somewhere in between. Think about it, mentally or emotionally, you either feel good, you feel so-so, or you don't feel good. Of course, there are the degrees of feeling good or not good, but there are no other options here. Every other emotion carries with it some amount of these two extremes, or is neutral in its essence. In Buddhism, these are called the feeling tones. They are associated with the ways in which we receive and process any sensory input, including emotions and feelings.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't accept the feeling of being temporarily happy, that we should feel that it's wrong or unworthy, but just that it is dangerous to see it as the point of life, or to give it more value than states of unhappiness. If we assign it a special value, and we think "Oh yes, this is it, this is what it's all about," then when we lose it, we are lost, confused, and sometimes even angry. When we see happiness and unhappiness as being equal in value, that is to say that we see them both as sharing the same characteristics of being temporary, not who or what we really are, and things that we can't necessarily control and therefore able to able to cause us suffering, we understand their true nature and we aren't so caught up in the inevitable ride that is the swing of emotions. When we become attached to changing emotional states, we suffer when they are gone. It is the same as becoming attached to anything else, money, power, health, possessions, or lifestyles.

All this means is that when we are happy, we should know we are happy, and the best way to do that is to remind ourselves, with the power of awareness, that we are in fact experiencing a temporary feeling of happiness. That way, we don't get confused about what it is we are experiencing. We don't suddenly think that the real "us" has returned, and that things are back to normal. This is not normal. This type of happiness is not what should be considered normal. On the contrary, normality is the ever-changing nature of emotions. What matters is how we view these changing states. If we cling to them, we fail to understand their transitory nature.

The same goes for unhappiness. It might be hard to believe, but we often cling to unhappy states as well. In other words, we take them to heart. We give them value, like there is some reason we are unhappy. We tell ourselves that we shouldn't be feeling this way, that we should be happy. But this is nonsense, and will just lead to more suffering. There is nothing wrong with feeling unhappy, it is totally natural.

Understanding this can help us avoid states of feeling unworthy. If we personalize unhappiness, it is like twisting the knife. While most don't prefer to feel unhappy, it's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it is necessary. If we didn't feel unhappy, neither could we feel happy, in the temporary sense of the word. Without the darkness, there would be no light. In the conventional sense of reality, we live in a world of opposing forces. That is why we need to assign the same value to these opposing forces. Yin and Yang. Sunrise and sunset. Can you imagine a world where the sun never set? Having daytime and nighttime are necessary for us to feel balanced and whole. If there was only daytime, we'd go crazy.

I think it's important for you to know that I am not writing this out of some feeling that this is a practice that I have mastered. Quite the contrary, I am writing this as a reminder that this is something that I need to practice, because although I am vacationing in paradise, I have lost my temporary happiness. Instead of taking it personally, and twisting the knife, I have decided it best to regroup my stance, and connect with the wisdom that says this type of happiness is not what it's all about. I feel this truth in my heart, but all too often, I forget.

So what it comes down to is whether or not we know this to be true. It is at this point in our inquiry that we stumble upon the question, how do we know if this is true or not? For me, now, the answer is right in front of my face. It's the reality that we can have all those things that we want, we can have great weather, perfect white sandy beaches, cheap food and accommodation, good company, and financial security (thanks to my credit card), but yet we can still feel unhappy. In this situation, we can no longer say "If only I had this or that, I'd be happy," because everything we want is right in front of us, yet the happiness isn't there. This means we can stop believing the lie that these things can bring us happiness, or that when they do, the happiness will last.

Is this the type of happiness we are looking for? 

If so, we are bound to suffer. When we realize that in reality, things can never be the cause for real happiness, we begin to ask what can. Now, the real search for happiness begins. Or, going back to garden analogy, we can start to identify the weeds of the mind and then it is our choice as to whether or not we do the work to start cleaning things up a bit.

At this point, I won't try to pretend that I have found this ultimate sense of happiness, so neither will I define it. But what I can say is that I have tasted it, and that before I started doing the work, it was not something I knew to be real.

There seems to be a common understanding that material things don't bring us happiness, especially in the west. The saying of "more money, more problems," is something that we seem to know firsthand, or maybe second-hand. If it isn't us that has an excess of money, we all know someone that does. All we have to do is look to the rich and famous, whose problems are plastered all over the media, to see that having everything that the world has to offer doesn't make one truly happy.

In Thailand, and many other Asian countries, material success is something that is sought after with the sort of innocent belief that it will bring true happiness. They haven't seen the possible dangers of it, so they still believe the lie. But we know better, and yet we still fall victim to it. We compensate by substituting other temporary things with material things, but these are still temporary. We say that having a loving family and relationships is what will bring us true happiness, and although these things might be a step in the right direction, they are still based on attachments. We cling to these things and we dread the idea that someone or some thing might take them away. But the truth of the matter is, that someday, we will lose everything, including our loved ones. It might not be until the time of death, but it might be before. Either way, we will lose them. Then what will we have?

The secret here is to take the crutch away. The crutch isn't the thing itself, it is simply the attachment to it. Many people are averse to this idea, that we shouldn't be attached to our loved ones, because in a practical way, it doesn't make any sense. In order to understand this, we need to take a step back from conventional reality and see the bigger picture. Not being attached to our loved ones doesn't mean that we love them any less, it just means that we understand that will lose them. If we cling to them like they are permanent, we will suffer, just like we will suffer when the good times run out.

So even though I know this secret, it doesn't mean that I have embodied it. Just like in AA, the first step is to admit there is a problem, then the healing can begin. But even after accepting that this is the problem, we can still avoid the real healing process because we don't want to submit ourselves to doing the actual work. Instead of diet and exercise, we look online for some sort of diet pills to fix our problem. In the context of this problem, the diet pill is the idea that we can overcome this problem on the intellectual level.

We have it figured out, we understand the lie that says that clinging to that which is temporary will bring us true happiness, so why do anything else?

The problem with this line of thinking is that when we have an insight on the intellectual level, that is to say when we understanding something intellectually, we don't necessarily realize it. What I've found with my meditation practice is that, even when I understand something through my repeated experience, I still don't necessarily realize it. In other words, I still fall into the same traps of conditioned reactivity. When I find that even practicing diligently, I can fall into the traps of the mind, I know that a mere intellectual understanding definitely won't suffice.

The point here is that to understand and embrace true happiness, we must constantly work to cultivate it. It isn't a stopping point, and especially not at the intellectual level. So if you are reading this and it resonates with you, and you think, "Yeah, I agree," then what might follow is the idea that your work is done, but I can assure you, it is not a stopping point. That is why it's called the path to liberation, the path to freedom. It's a journey, not a destination. If we have stopped at the intellectual level, thinking that no other work needs to be done, it is considered to be like an exit on the freeway. You see a big flashy billboard that looks like an attractive viewpoint and you pull off to check it out. Why continue when where you are seems to be such a good place?

What I am here to remind myself of is that I must push on. There is so much work left to  be done, and that although I have both tasted this freedom and understand it intellectually, I still find myself suffering when I lose the temporary  feeling of being happy.

Now the question remains, what is this work that needs to be done? And for this, I will let my other writings on this blog speak for themselves. More important, for this entry, is the idea that the belief in temporary happiness as the purpose of our existence is invalid. There is more to our existence, and even though I know that it is my true nature, I am determined to continue to pick the weeds in my garden in order to see the beautiful flowers and plants that are the intended purpose. But just for the sake of offering a complete entry, I can mention a few words in regards to what this practice entails.

The mind is the only thing that separates us from true, lasting happiness, which probably looks a lot more like peace and contentment than always smiling. Does it make sense to always wear a huge smile on our face, even in the presence of extreme suffering? No. Sometimes, we need to respond to the changing conditions of our lives with wisdom. We need to respond with compassion, with tolerance, with lending our time and efforts to those who need our help. If someone has just lost a loved one and we are grinning from ear to ear, we might find that we aren't serving them. Instead, we might need to offer a sincere presence. They might just need someone to listen, someone to understand. They might just need a shoulder to cry on.

To find this lasting happiness, we need to purify the mind from the defilements of greed, hatred, and delusion. That's it, really. And in the trends of a modern, new-age spirituality, sometimes it's nice to look back to an ancient tradition such as the Buddha's teachings to clarify the problem so succinctly. That doesn't mean that we need to be Buddhists, but that we can honor the teachings that these three defilements, in all of their manifestations, are really the sum of our problems. And as quickly as the Buddha offered a problem, he also followed up with a solution.

If we use the power of our own minds, we can eradicate these defilements. These powers are nothing supernatural, it's just concentration, investigation, and acceptance, mixed in with a little honesty and humility. All we have to do is observe, be willing to admit and accept what he have observed, and then practice kindness for ourselves and all those involved. This is stepping out of the realm of intellectual activity and into moment-to-moment awareness of what is.

When we can take a deep look at our lives, and accept what we see, we have begun to invite awareness into our lives and we are that much closer to finding true, lasting happiness. As for the rest of it, that remains to be unseen for me, but there isn't a day that goes by that I am not grateful that I have at least started this life-long journey, and that has proved to be enough to keep me motivated, to keep me going even when times are tough and I just want to give up. And even when I lose sight of the path, the progress I've made serves as a reminder to what I already know with my heart, and although I can be quick to forget, that which the heart knows and understands is nothing that no one or no thing can ever take away from me, and for now, I'm going to let that be enough.

Thanks for listening.