What is happiness? You may think it’s how you feel when you get what you want. Someone says something you like to hear, and you feel happy. Someone does something you approve of, and you feel happy. The sun shines and you feel happy. Someone makes nice food and serves it to you, and you’re happy. But how long can you stay happy? Do we always have to depend on the sun shining? In England, the weather is very changeable: the happiness about the sun shining in England is obviously very impermanent and unsatisfactory.
Unhappiness is not getting what we want: wanting it to be sunny when it’s cold, wet and rainy; people doing things that we don’t approve of; having food that isn’t delicious and so on. Life gets boring and tedious when we’re unhappy with it. So happiness and unhappiness are very dependent on getting what we want, and having to get what we don’t want.
But happiness is the goal of most people’s lives; in the American constitution, I think, they speak of ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’. Get-ting what we want, what we think we deserve, be-comes our goal in life. But happiness always leads to unhappiness, because it’s impermanent. How long can you really be happy? Trying to arrange, control and manipulate conditions so as to always get what we want, always hear what we want to hear, always see what we want to see, so that we never have to experience unhappiness or despair, is a hopeless task. It’s impossible, isn’t it? Happiness is unsatisfactory, it’s dukkha. It’s not something to depend on or make the goal of life. Happiness will always be disappointing because it lasts so briefly and then is succeeded by unhappiness. It is always dependent on so many other things. We feel happy when we’re healthy but our human bodies are subject to rapid changes and we can lose that health very quickly. Then we feel terribly unhappy at being sick, at losing the pleasure of feeling energetic and vigorous.
Thus the goal for the Buddhist is not happiness, because we realize that happiness is unsatisfactory. The goal lies away from the sensual world. It is not rejection of the sensual world, but understanding it so well that we no longer seek it as an end in itself. We no longer expect the sensory world to satisfy us. We no longer demand that sensory consciousness be anything other than an existing condition that we can skilfully use according to time and place. We no longer attach to it, or demand that the sense impingement be always pleasant, or feel despair and sorrow when it’s unpleasant. Nibbana isn’t a state of blankness, a trance where you’re totally wiped out. It’s not nothingness or an annihilation: it’s like a space. It’s going into the space of your mind where you no longer attach, where you’re no longer deluded by the appearance of things. You are no longer demanding anything from the sensory world. You are just recognizing it as it arises and passes away.
We’re not being pessimistic about the way things are, but we’re observing, so we don’t expect life to be other than it is. Then we can cope with life and endure it when it’s difficult, and delight when it’s delightful. If we understand it, we can enjoy life without being its helpless victims. How much mis-ery there is in human existence because we expect life to be other than what it is! We have these romantic ideas that we’ll meet the right person, fall in love and live happily ever after, that we’ll never fight, have a wonderful relationship. But what about death! ? So you think, ‘Well, maybe we’ll die at the same time.’ That’s hope, isn’t it? There’s hope, and then despair when your loved one dies before you do, or runs away with the dustman or the travelling salesman.
So the path of the Buddhist is a letting go, rath-er than trying to find anything. The problem is the blind attachment, the blind identification with the appearance of the sensory world. You needn’t get rid of the sensory world but learn from it, watch it, no longer allow yourselves to be deluded by it. Keep penetrating it with Buddha-wisdom, keep using this Buddha-wisdom so that you become more at ease with being wise, rather that making yourself become wise. Just by listening, observing, being awake, being aware, the wisdom will become clear. You’ll be using wisdom in regard to your body, in regard to your thoughts, feelings, memories, emotion, all of these things. You’ll see and witness, allowing them to pass by and let them go.
