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#3995 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Here's another article by
David from http://raptitude.com
David wrote the article
in which six songs were featured, in my previous Highlights
(#3992)
from http://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/good-news-happiness-doesnt-exist/
Good News: Happiness Doesn’t Exist
by David
Happiness is slippery. It doesn’t like to stick around. We
know we’ve had it before, but it’s gone away, and we
know there are certain things we have to do to find it again.
Certain ducks have to be in a row. After all, if you didn’t
have to do anything to be happy, you wouldn’t do anything at
all. It can’t be too hard to find. Other people seem to be
finding it all right.
Yet for all our efforts,
we never seem to get this happiness problem nailed down, and
there’s a very good reason for that.
When we start talking
about solving the problem of unhappiness, it’s hard to avoid
the topic of Buddhism. I know not everyone is a fan, but they
have lain some important groundwork, even for those of us who
like the idea of improving our quality of life but aren’t
prepared to buy the whole package, with all its baldness and
orange robes. Despite its promises of peace and enlightenment, I
haven’t leapt in with abandon, so don’t worry, this
article doesn’t delve into pratitya-samutpadas and
tathagatagarbhas. It’s about a plain-jane concept you know
very well: happiness.
Buddhism developed as a
response to mankind’s search for happiness. In the simplest
terms, it’s not a belief system but a methodology for being
happy. Yet Buddhist literature is known for focusing much more on
suffering than happiness. Its curious preference for morbid
subject matter has led some to describe Buddhism as preoccupied
with negativity.
The reason suffering has
become Buddhism’s primary focus, rather than happiness, is
that happiness, as we conceive of it, doesn’t really exist
— at least not in the same way suffering does. What we refer
to as happiness is really just what the absence of suffering
feels like.
I avoid the casual use of
Sanskrit or Pali words in my articles because I think they make a
lot of readers tune out, as they sense they’re being led
into an esoteric religious discussion. Books and articles about
Buddhism can get pretty dry and cryptic, scaring away readers who
would otherwise be fascinated by the very same concepts if they
weren’t presented in such stuffy, user-unfriendly language.
But for the rest of this article I’ll use dukkha, if it
hasn’t scared you off yet.
“Unease” might
be the best of the English translations of dukkha. The original
word was meant to evoke the feeling of a potter’s wheel that
would screech as it turned.
I often substitute dukkha
with “suffering” but I realize that may be misleading
for those not acquainted with the Buddhist meaning of that word.
Before I encountered “suffering” in the Buddhist
context, it meant something different to me. It meant great pain.
Sobbing, aching, despair.
Suffering, from a
Buddhist perspective, refers not so much to outright catastrophe
as to the persistent, low-intensity feelings of dissatisfaction
or yearning that human beings feel most of the time. Indeed, most
of our “suffering” is extremely minor:
* The
faint hint of financial angst you get when you notice gas has
gone up again
* The
tiny feeling of urgency you get when you discover you only have
19 more minutes to get ready to go, and you thought you had 30
* The
slight unease you feel when you’re opening a gift in front
of the person who gave it to you, and you want to make sure you
look pleased no matter what you really think of it
* The
sinking, “here we go again” feeling you get when
so-and-so begins to get impatient with the waitress
Often they happen when
you experience something so powerful that it wrests all of your
attention away from your thinking mind, such as a picturesque
sunset or an incredible piece of music.
Other times, this peace
blindsides you at a perfectly ordinary moment, maybe when
you’re filling up a glass of water and you’re taken by
a perfect, glowing triangle of sunlight on the countertop.
Suddenly the mind shuts off, you can hear the delicate background
noise of the kitchen and the surrounding neighborhood, and
everything looks and sounds exactly as it should.
The potential for it
seems to be always there.
Buddhism’s genius is
that it reduces all human problems to a single one: the problem
of dukkha. This is a very powerful perspective. The implication
is that our ordinary state is one of peace, perfection,
problemlessness, and clarity — the very things we are always
ultimately seeking. Dukkha is the only thing standing between a
problematic moment and a problemless one. The problem is not gas
prices, or your bank balance, or your love handles. Without
dukkha, none of them would be problems. The price of fuel would
strike you as perfectly appropriate, as would your net worth and
your physique.
The Buddha developed a
method for transcending dukkha, but many other approaches have
been discovered since by sages, psychologists, seekers and
average joes. They all amount to overcoming your attachments in
the moment.
Happiness is…
…what’s left
when you take away unhappiness.
Since the only problem we
ever have is the presence of unease in our moments — and not
the absence of anything — happiness itself doesn’t
really exist. It’s just what we call moments in which we
don’t experience dukkha. And that means what we refer to as
“happiness” is always there behind the current
moment’s unease; ultimately, it is always accessible.
I find it’s more
empowering to think of happiness this way — as the absence
of unease, and nothing else — and here’s why:
We tend to think of
happiness as something “out there,” waiting just beyond
some future achievement or change in circumstances. This makes
our happiness contingent on factors we cannot directly control.
If we think of unhappiness (or unease) as a function of how we
are relating to the present moment — whatever it contains
— then we always have an opportunity to improve the quality
of our moment. This way power over our quality of life resides
with ourselves, and not with luck, status or other externals.
Happiness is too easily
confused with gratification. Gratification is simply getting what
you currently want. It provides a fleeting cessation of unease,
which makes it feel awesome, like an end in itself. It is such an
intense release that it feels as if the problem has been
conquered, when really it’s only been chased away for a
short while. As a strategy for happiness, gratification is a poor
one for three reasons:
1) You can’t always
get what you want
2) Depending on getting
what you want in order to be happy increases your attachment to
getting what you want, which intensifies the suffering
you’ll experience next time
3) Getting what you want
often makes it harder to get other things you’ll soon want
— for example, when you spend all your money on what you
want right now
The typical approach to
seeking happiness is to add something to our lives, because we
perceive ourselves as needing something we are missing: more
security, more money, another possession, the approval of others,
a personal achievement. But on closer inspection even these
actions are actually driven by a desire to remove something:
insecurity, hunger, angst, tension of some kind. We are driven to
acquire and achieve in order to remove dukkha from our
experience.
There is no happiness
“Don’t seek happiness. If you seek it, you won’t
find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.”
~Eckhart Tolle
Happiness (or whatever
you want to call that state we are all seeking — joy,
well-being, peace) occurs when something is removed, not when
something is added. Happiness is an opposite, a negative mold
— an imaginary abstraction created to define precisely what
it is not. It’s no different than darkness, which itself is
nothing at all — only a way of describing an absence of
light. Light is real, darkness is just a concept.
So why did we get it
backwards? As with most of our inefficiencies, we evolved that
way. For millions of years our behavior has been driven by
dissatisfaction, which manifests itself in a sentient creature as
desire. Our very clever biology has us desiring, non-stop, for
anything that appears to put us into a better position to
survive. It’s the ultimate carrot-and-stick setup, and we
still fall for it because we don’t know what else to do. We
can always use more security, more esteem, more power, so the
desires never cease. It works very well to the survival end, by
constantly creating a mental itch that must be scratched. This
itch is unhappiness, unease, or to Buddhism fans, dukkha.
This is how the human
mind works now. It creates unhappiness to keep us moving, with no
regard for our quality of life. You can scratch the itch your
whole life and it won’t go away. It will only put you in the
habit of scratching the itch. The human mind has developed to a
point where we are finally understanding this awful cycle, and
developing ways of dealing with it. About 2500 years ago — a
New York minute, in evolutionary time — a curious young
prince nailed the problem down. He found we weren’t actually
missing anything after all.
Happiness, it seems, is
just a shadow. By continuing to gaze at it, we’ve overlooked
what’s standing in the light.
http://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/good-news-happiness-doesnt-exist/