--Happiness--A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skills--
A Foretaste of Happiness
Ask any number of people to describe a moment of “perfect” happiness. Some will talk about moments of deep peace experienced in a harmonious natural setting, of a forest dappled in sunshine, of a mountain summit looking out across a vast horizon, of the shores of a tranquil lake, of a night walk through snow under a starry sky, and so on. Others will refer to a long awaited event: an exam they’ve aced, a sporting victory, meeting someone they’ve longed to meet, the birth of a child. Still others will speak of a moment of peaceful intimacy with family of a loved one, or having made someone else happy.
The common factor to all of these experiences would seem to be the momentary disappearance of inner conflicts. The person feels in harmony with the world and themselves. Someone enjoying such an experience, such as walking through a serene wilderness, has no particular expectations beyond the simple act of walking. The person simply is, here and now, free and open.
For just a few moments, thoughts of the past are suppressed, the mind is not burdened with plans for the future, and the present moment is liberated from all mental constructs. This moment of respite, from which all sense of emotional urgency has vanished, is experienced as one of profound peace.
For someone who has achieved a goal, completed a task, or one a victory, the tension they have long carried with them relaxes. The ensuing sense of release is felt as a deep calm, free of all expectation and fear.
But this experience is just a passing glimpse brought on by a particular set of circumstances. We call it a magic moment, a state of grace. And yet the difference between these flashes of happiness seized on the fly and the immutable peace of the sage, for instance, is as great as that between the tiny section of sky seen through the eye of a needle and the limitless expanses of outer space. The two conditions differ in dimension, duration, and depth.
Even so, we can learn something from these fleeting moments, these lulls in our ceaseless struggles; they can give us a sense of what true plentitude might be and help us recognize the contradictions that favor it.
A Way of Being
I remember one afternoon, I was sitting on the steps of our monastery in Nepal. The monsoon storms had turned the courtyard into an expanse of muddy water and we had set out a path of bricks to serve as stepping-stones. A friend of mine came to the edge of the water, surveyed the scene with a look of disgust, and complained about every single brick as she made her way across. When she got to me, she rolled her eyes and said “Yuck! What if I had fallen into that filthy muck? Everything is so dirty in this country!” Since I knew her well, I prudently nodded, hoping to offer her some comfort through my mute sympathy.
A few minutes later, Raphaele, another friend of mine, came to the path through the swamp. “Hup, hup, hup!” she sang as she hoped, reaching fry land with they cry “What fun!” Her eyes sparkled with joy, she added: “The great thing about the monsoon is that there’s no dust.” Two people, two ways of looking at things; six billion human beings, six billion worlds.
Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them. There will be no “hard fall” when things turn bad and he is confronted with adversity. He does not sink into depression, since his happiness rests on a solid foundation.
One year before her death at Auschwitz, the remarkable Etty Hillesum, a young Dutchwoman, affirmed; “When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn’t matter what side of the prison fence you are on…I’ve already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way of another, I already know everything. And yet, I find that this life is beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.”
Once at an open meeting in Hong Kong, a young man rose in the audience to ask me: “Can you give me one reason why I should go on living?” This book is a humble response to that question, for happiness is above all a love of life. To have lost all reason for living is to open up an abyss of suffering. As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an inner state. What mental conditions will sap of joi de vivre (joy to live), and which will nourish it?
Changing the way se wee the world does not imply naïve optimism or some artificial euphoria designed to counter-balance adversity. So long as we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise from the confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell ourselves “I’m happy! I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to repaint a wall in ruins. The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of reality.
Reality and Insight
What do we mean by reality? In Buddhism the word connotes the true meaning of all things, unmodified by the mental constructs we superimpose upon them. Such concepts open up a gap between our perception and our reality, and create a never-ending conflict with the world. “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. We take for permanent that which is ephemeral and for happiness that which is but a source of suffering: the desire for wealth, for power, for fame, and for nagging pleasures.
By knowledge we mean not the mastery of masses of information and learning but an understanding of the true nature of things. Out of habit, we perceive the exterior world as a series of distinct, autonomous entities to which we attribute characteristics that we believe belong inherently to them. Our day to day experience tells us that things are “good” or “bad”. The “I” that perceives them seems to us to be equally concrete and real. This error, which Buddhism calls, ignorance, gives rise to powerful reflexes attachment and aversion that generally lead to suffering. As Etty Hillesum says so tersely: “That great obstacle is always the representation and never the reality.” The world of ignorance and suffering --called samsara in Sanskrit--
Is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.
The world of appearances is created by the coming together of an infinite number of ever-changing causes and conditions. Like a rainbow that forms when the sun shines across a curtain of rain and then vanishes when any factor contributing to its formation disappears, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no autonomous and enduring existence. Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect. Once this essential concept is understood and internalized, the erroneous perception of the world gives way to a correct understanding of the nature of things and beings; this is insight. Insight is not a mere philosophical construct; it emerges from a basic approach that allows us to gradually shed our mental blindness and the disturbing emotions it produces and hence the principal causes of our suffering.
Every being has the potential for perfection, just as every sesame seed is permeated with oil. Ignorance, in this context, means being unaware of that potential, like the beggar who is unaware of the treasure buried beneath his shack. Actualizing our true nature, coming into possession of that hidden wealth, allows us to live a life full of meaning. It is the surest way to find serenity and let genuine altruism flourish.
There exists a way of being that underlies and suffuses all emotional states, that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come to us. A happiness so deep that, as George Bernanos wrote, “nothing can change it, like the vast reserve of calm waters beneath the storm.” The Sanskrit word for this state is sukha.
Sukha is the state of lasting well-being that manifests itself when we have freed ourselves to the mental blindness and afflictive emotions. It is also the wisdom that allows us to see the world as it is, without veils or distortions. It is, finally, the joy of moving toward inner freedom and the loving-kindness that radiates toward others.
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Comment by MiraCulous on December 15, 2008 at 11:45am
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Feel free to add your insights and favorite quotes on Happiness!
"One must practive the things which produce happiness, since it that is present we have everything and if it is absent we do everything in order to have it." --Epicurus
"By Happiness, I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always posiible to change the way we look at it." --Matthieu Ricard
"What constitues happiness is a matter of dispute"--Aristotle
"Happiness is the radiation of joy over one's entire existence or over the most vibrant part of one's active past, one's actual present, and one's conceiveable future." --Robert Misrahi
"Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs to understand first to understand what happiness is."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Comment by David Burnett on December 15, 2008 at 7:07pm
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Happiness is a decision. That's something I've always believed.
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"Why should there be hunger and deprivation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?"
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
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