How To Find True Happiness

Yogis have always known there's a significant difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure comes from getting what you want: for example food, good sex, clothes, etc. But pleasure is short-lived and fickle. It lasts for as long as it lasts--a few hours at best. And then it's gone. Pleasure is fleeting. However true happiness is inexhaustible and permanent.

According to the yogis, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. One never goes anywhere without the other, and they alternate. You may eat, but you'll be hungry again. You're lonely, then you're in love, then you're lonely, then you're in love. Then you're lonely and in love at the same time (and hopefully writing country western songs). Love and hate, war and peace, hot and cold, success and failure, rich and poor, and on and on. But true happiness transcends the pleasure/pain principle.

Everyone has isolated moments of feeling on top of the world: when you buy something you really want, achieve a long held goal, overcome a monumental challenge, or even fall in love. Yes, it feels phenomenal. In those moments, the mind is quiet, there's a sense of intense satisfaction, and a tiny sliver of happiness reveals itself. This sliver is pleasure. You might think it comes from the buying of a new house, getting a big promotion at work, finding true love, or winning a prestigious award. But the truth is that these things just assuage your desire long enough for you to experience your natural state. The happiness is the same happiness every time. The happiness is not only coming from you (as opposed to those achievements or acquisitions), it IS you. The fulfillment of desire gives you a brief glimpse of what you really are. But the yogis have realized that you don't have to merely glimpse this happiness within you through the satisfaction of desire. The material world gives you a peek at pleasure, but lasting happiness is found right where you are.

Happiness is in you, it is you, and it's not coming from an external source (including the shopping mall--and did I already mention that happiness is not at the shopping mall?). Here is the essential point: Brief happiness (pleasure) doesn't come from the object of satisfactions, it comes from you. This is where many people are erroneous in their perception, and also why people stress out, worry, and suffer: They believe happiness is out there...somewhere.

A wise man I met in India put it to me this way: You're living on a mountain of gold and you don't realize it. Every time it rains, the dirt and muck are washed away and the gold is revealed. And you run out into the rain, scooping up fistfuls of gold and dancing around. But you mistakingly think that the rain is bringing the gold, so you worship the rain, and you make sacrifices with your schedule to please the rain. When there's a drought, you become poor, starve, and bemoan the absence of the rain. But the gold is always there, just beneath the surface, and the rain has simply been revealing it. If you'd just dust off the mountain the slightest bit, you'd see it for what it is. Scratch the surface! Look deeper! There's no need to rely on the rain to reveal your happiness.

Now I'm not saying move out of your house, relinquish your possessions, live in the streets, and that will make you happy. That's not it at all. Living like a monk isn't necessarily going to remove your desires, either. Having is not the problem. It's wonderful to be grateful for what you do have, and it's great to have fun in the material world. You can have and enjoy all that you can manage. Suffering does not come from having, it comes from endless wanting.

Having is a necessity for survival. Having a roof over your head and food in your belly will not cause you pain. When you truly have something, you accept it as it is. There's no lofty expectation projected onto it. Will winning a trillion dollars make you happy? Well, you will have a trillion dollars. But true happiness? Nope, a trillion dollars is just a trillion dollars. Does having a roof over your head and food in your belly guarantee happiness? No, it's just food and shelter. You can have food, shelter, and even a trillion dollars, but your experience of these things has very little to do with the things themselves and everything to do with the one who is experiencing them. You can be miserable or happy. That's really up to you. Ownership and having don't rule out attaining uninterrupted happiness, but they can't promise to deliver it, either.

Remember, true happiness is independent of circumstances. Pleasure is utterly dependent on circumstance. True happiness is prior and senior to the flickering phenomena of the world. True happiness transcends the boundaries of the mind and the limitations of conditioned propriety. True happiness is uninterrupted.

Comments

[mainmonkey]

This strikes me as true. Buddhism talks about the need to eliminate desire to eliminate suffering. However, I feel this is not the whole story. I think there is something about serving others - feeling like you are having a positive impact - that is also critical. The idea that one can sit at home, never interact with anyone, and still be happy - may be misleading. I think loving your fellow humans, and expressing that love through service of humanity - is vital.

This quote by Bengali writer/artist/Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore says what I'm trying to say:

"I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service happiness is found."

[Jonahson]

In Buddhism, the highest service a person can offer is one's life to save others. The highest gift is the gift of knowledge that ends suffering. Buddhism is not about sitting alone and experiencing happiness. This you can achieve by taking drugs. The happiness you pursue this way is not permanent either. Tell me if you are carrying a bag of 100lb cement on your back for years and suddenly you see the foly of doing that and you throw the bag away, how would you feel at the moment the bag is unloaded from your shoulder? Buddhist meditation is about that. Of course the process need to achieve that, need proper guidance.

[NedFlanders19]

Instead of talking about happiness at any level, which can bring about ideas of it being balanced out by sadness of some type, why not simply focus on continuously experiencing the source of happiness or sadness.

If we look at happiness and sadness as two sides of a coin, like was described earlier, the coin is the source of both. Yet we're taught to focus on one side as being "better." Perhaps by focusing on the coin itself we can see that both have their place. And by then going deeper and allowing ourselves to continuously experience what allows this "coin" to be in the first place we can live from the source itself. To get all Matrix on ya, there is no coin - and yet at the same time there is.

Words cannot convey what I truly wish to express, so I ask that you connect with the energy behind them, for that is all what truly matters. The following sums it all up for me...

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[CarbondaleKid]

Not to criticize, but I feel this article misses the point. People of my acquaintance who seem and say they are happy, also appear very wise. This quote says it well: No mistakes, no experience; no experience, no wisdom. (Stanley Goldstein). I was taught as a child that mistakes were to be avoided. My corporate career was organized such that all my problems were to be someone else's problems. Promotion and progress were paramount. Many of our executives were alcoholic and unhappy. I believe true happiness results when a person is true to them self. Modern life is so corrupt and so divisive it is no wonder people are addicted to drugs and alcohol and have "buy-itis". I agree that when we give OF ourselves we give happiness TO ourselves.

[Jonahson]

There are three type of happiness. First type is happiness derived from material gains including fame. This type of happiness is impermanent and you have to let it go sooner or later otherwise more unhappiness will follow.
Another type of happiness is when you liberate yourself from sufferings.
The last type of happiness is the happiness you experience when you unselfishly help others to be free from suffering. This is the perfect happiness.

[cktirumalai]

Being in the grip of desire and being driven by it, and harnessing chastened or refined desire to an end are two different things.
The Greeks and Romans spoke of the gymnosophists of India: wise men who, like Greek athletes at the Olympic Games, went about naked. Of course, in India as in other countries, there are fake wise men.