I’ll see if I might help unpack this important subject, though it’s very tough and I’m unsure I’ll do job. However then once more, the Buddha himself was not sure he may do job.
After attaining enlightenment below the Bodhi Tree in India, a state of nirvana the place he’d not ever expertise unhappiness, he remained silent for seven weeks. He felt there was no means he may talk this state of final satisfaction to others. They simply wouldn’t get it.
Lastly, after being satisfied by each celestial beings and human beings that he ought to educate what he’d found, he relented. And isn’t it attention-grabbing that his very first instructing was on the character of struggling: that every one beings are oppressed and never free. They aren’t liberated, reasonably they’re imprisoned by numerous afflictions and psychological problems, and so they don’t even realize it!
In my early days of being immersed within the Buddhist custom, I puzzled why he didn’t begin with the third noble fact, the discharge from struggling—which is the state of final peace and satisfaction, nirvana—reasonably than beginning with struggling itself. This actually would make for a neater, prepackaged promote within the trendy Western world!
Through the years, as I’ve thought of this, I’ve come to grasp that the Buddha made nice effort to coach us about struggling first as a result of if we don’t know what struggling actually is, then, we will assume, our thought of happiness could be equally skewed.
Is unpleasantness our default state?
It’s unusual to assume that we don’t know what happiness is when, basically, all we’re doing is in search of some type of expertise to really feel higher. This in itself offers us a clue into what is supposed by struggling, and particularly into its all-pervasiveness. For if we’re all the time in search of to really feel higher or in search of to keep up the nice feeling we’ve got or making an attempt to keep away from an disagreeable expertise, then, logically talking, we aren’t safe in our happiness.
In truth, we’re in a relentless state of dis-ease. Our “happiness” is all the time in peril of evaporating within the very subsequent second. And additional, what we’re calling happiness, when additional analyzed, tends to be equated with a feeling of delight or pleasantness.
This type of tentativeness round our emotions and constructive experiences clearly implies that we’re always on shaky floor—merely making an attempt to stave off the following disagreeable expertise or extend a nice one. It is a large half of what’s meant by the Buddhist notion of struggling: We aren’t relaxed in our personal pores and skin or in our personal thoughts, as a baseline.
When our contentment, good emotions, happiness and satisfaction are by nature fleeting, then is that actual happiness?
When our contentment, good emotions, happiness and satisfaction are by nature fleeting, then is that actual happiness?
Bouncing round from one good feeling to the following isn’t the Buddhist thought of happiness or contentment. That could be a fixed sense of tension that calls for we keep vigilant about preserving the feel-good expertise taking place and avoiding the lack of it. The lack of that feel-good expertise is a state that isn’t nice, but that actually is our baseline.
If that is so—that we’ve got to always hold shifting in the direction of pleasure to keep away from the disagreeable—then we will say our basic state of being is unpleasantness. This unpleasantness could also be slightly below the floor, however the level stays. We will’t declare to be joyful after we’re always making an attempt to hunt or preserve a sense of contentment and well-being.
However—isn’t ignorance bliss?
One may argue, if our unhappiness lies beneath the floor even because it’s directing our moment-to-moment ideas, emotions and actions, “However isn’t ignorance bliss?” This “ignorance is bliss” argument is a bit like considering that since canine love pet food, then we must always all simply stay ignorant and accept pet food, too.
From the Buddhist practitioner’s perspective, having seen the potential for nice pleasure and happiness, mundane pleasures seem like pet food. Most of us have eaten nice meals; we’d by no means surrender these lucky eating experiences to accept pet food.
By the identical token, neither would the non secular individual accept mundane, ephemeral, fleeting pleasures in change for the state of liberation from all psychological anguish, afflictions and problems. For those who can have filet mignon, why eat a can of Alpo?
The place does the seek for happiness finish?
But we resist coming to the conclusion that issues in life are literally tough, painful and dissatisfying and that our pursuit to numb this by pleasures appears, properly, fairly unreal. For instance, you might have observed that you would be able to’t keep in a single place for very lengthy. You get hungry, so that you sit down for a meal after which that you must rise up if you’re completed. You might go to the sofa to look at TV, however after some time get drained and go to mattress.
For those who discovered happiness in mattress, then why do you rise up within the morning? In case your job made you content, then why not keep at work on a regular basis? If taking a trip had been true happiness, what wouldn’t it be like should you stayed on vacation on a regular basis?
I knew individuals who thought that being on vacation was the important thing to happiness. They made sufficient cash in order that they might go on a cruise yearly. First they went for a month. Then three months. Then six months. But they had been no happier than anybody else. After they had been on the ship, they’d complain that the standard of the meals had deteriorated, the leisure consisted of the identical previous reveals and so they’d been to a lot of the ports of name so that they wouldn’t go ashore.
They contemplated switching alliances to a different cruise line as they heard the opposite line had extra attention-grabbing ports and extra eating places. However then they discovered the ship was too giant with too many passengers—much less intimate. The place does the seek for happiness finish?
That is what the Buddha was making an attempt to inform us when he stated we’re in the character of struggling. Struggling isn’t the cruise line. Struggling is within the thoughts.
Woke up buddhahood vs. struggling
That is in fact a miserable thought when there may be nothing to switch this tough state of affairs. If we attempt to discover a appropriate antidote for struggling, we discover that the other of that idea isn’t precisely happiness, though happiness is a byproduct.
The absence of struggling means there may be knowledge—the knowledge of understanding how issues exist and the way we exist as properly. In that state of knowledge, all the pieces seems as gentle, light, non-threatening, peaceable and clear.
The byproduct of that is we’re possessed by a thoughts that’s so balanced and unagitated that the pure impact is happiness, however a happiness that’s uncommon within the sense that we don’t ever expertise it, as a result of it’s non-diminishing—it doesn’t fade or morph into some new agitated, unfulfilled frame of mind.
Thus, the precise reverse of struggling is awakening. This distinction in Buddhist thought is extremely related. Awakening, or woke up buddhahood, is the last word state of happiness, which by no means diminishes.
Karuna Cayton is the creator of 6 Myths We Reside By: And Overcome Them and The Deceptive Thoughts: How We Create Our Personal Issues and How Buddhist Psychology Can Assist Us Resolve Them. For greater than 50 years, he has studied and practiced Buddhism, dedicating his life to translating its profound psychological insights into sensible instruments for contemporary life. Go to him on-line at www.karunacayton.com.
Excerpted from 6 Myths We Reside By: And Overcome Them by Karuna Cayton. © 2025 Knowledge Publications. Reprinted with permission of Knowledge Publications, Inc.
photos: Depositphotos
