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Happiness and Suffering

Introduction

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to IMC. Welcome to those of you here and those of you who might be with us online.

A few announcements before we start. The first is that yesterday I put out on the table by the exit a whole stack of the end-of-the-year fundraising letters. I don't know how delighted you are about receiving fundraising letters, but if you're delighted enough about receiving one from IMC, there's one there you can pick up. I realized this morning that we've been doing fundraising letters for twenty-five years at the end of the year. The first time we did it was so we could be in a circumstance to buy a place like this building here. Many years later, it was so that we could have a retreat center and take care of it. A lot of the building and growing of IMC is attributed to those end-of-the-year fundraising letters. Anyway, if you want to read what I wrote, you're welcome to take one, whether you donate or not.

I won't be here next week; Max Erdstein will be here. The next time I'm teaching here at IMC, and also online, will be Saturday, December 10th. However, on December 10th, I am doing a day-long retreat that is offered through the Insight Retreat Center. Information for it is online and on Zoom; you can find it in the "What's New" section of the IMC homepage if you're interested in doing a day-long from home or some other place.

Happiness and Suffering

Imagine that you are finally able to bring a friend along to hear a Dharma talk somewhere. They've been resisting, not wanting to come, but you feel like they should really learn about Buddhism. They finally agree to come, and the Dharma teacher sits down and starts talking, announcing, "Today, I'm going to give a talk about suffering and how important it is to address suffering." In your mind, you're going, "Oh no, I finally got my friend here, and they're going to be turned off by this."

Or imagine another time you bring another friend who is finally willing to come, but they're somewhat cynical and skeptical about things. The Dharma teacher starts off by saying, "Today I'm going to talk about happiness." You think, "Oh no, my friend is skeptical about all things spiritual. They think Buddhism is saccharine. They're probably going to talk about loving-kindness, and my poor friend is never going to come back."

I don't know if any of you brought friends today, but today I'm going to talk about suffering and happiness. And some of you go, "Oh no, my friend!" [Laughter]

I want to emphasize how important happiness is for the path of Buddhist practice. I think it is underappreciated that it's a path of happiness, and that orienting oneself on this path of Buddhism involves seeing what you can do to become a happier person. Are there reasonable ways that you could orient yourself and navigate this world so that you're a little bit happier and delighted with life and with yourself? There are also ways that you can do the opposite.

I know some people might feel that it's very important to become wealthy by the time they are twenty-nine. So you say, "Well, I'll be happy later. This is not the time to be happy." If that's the case, you're not really cultivating the factors for this path of liberation that Buddhism champions, which has a lot to do with developing a very significant, useful, supportive, strategic sense of well-being, and then, with that, addressing suffering.

This has been well known since the time of the Buddha. In fact, there is an account of the Buddha giving Dharma talks where the first thing he did was elate and inspire the audience, and then he taught them about suffering. He did both, not one or the other. I wanted to read the description of how the Buddha prepared people so he could talk about suffering when the audience was ready.

"When the audience was ready, receptive, free from the hindrances, elated, and confident, he expounded to them the teaching special to the Buddhas: suffering."

I don't know if I can manage to do that today all in one Dharma talk—to make you ready, receptive, free of hindrances, elated, and confident—but the idea is that this is what the Buddha did.

When I was younger in life, especially when I came out of Zen practice, where it was mostly just about a direct penetration to the truth, to emptiness, I would have thought this was manipulative. It felt like playing with people's emotions, getting them elated. I thought, "We just want the truth. Let's just deal with suffering directly." But I think that it can be helpful, useful, and ethical to promote being happy without it necessarily being manipulative or saccharine. It's an important part of the path, so why not talk about it and emphasize its importance?

There is also a teaching about meditation practice where, to address suffering—which is the specialty of Buddhism—there's a description of letting the meditation practice develop and prepare you for encountering your suffering by going through stages of happiness and well-being. There is a series of these stages.

It begins by having something that evokes your gladness, your delight, your joy. What is it that can be evocative of that? One of the primary things the Buddha talks about is called saddhā^[1] in Pali, or śraddhā in Sanskrit, usually translated as "faith" or "confidence."

Some people come to Buddhism, and they hear about suffering and the importance of it. But what they hear more importantly is that there's a practice and a path that leads to the end of suffering. They go, "Wow, finally I meet someone who's really talking about suffering as it is, without painting it over, and they have a practice for it. This is inspiring. I'm so glad to have finally found it." A kind of gladness wells up.

Other people have an inspiration that I think of as closely related to gladness. I remember meeting people when I was a newer practitioner and seeing these people who had been practicing for a long time, and being so inspired by them. "Wow, I've never met someone like this. They seem ordinary enough, they don't seem like they're putting on airs or being spiritually high in the clouds, but there's something about them that really inspires a kind of peacefulness and joy in myself." There are all kinds of ways to be inspired.

One of the things that creates this gladness and joy, which perplexed me when I first came across it in Buddhism, was the idea that your own ethics could be a source of joy. I wasn't particularly unethical, but I was just a hippie, and we were kind of antinomian back then—not into the hypocrisy of commandments and rules. When I heard about people who were joyful about their ethics, I was mistrustful. I heard that in Thailand, Theravadan Buddhists were delighted in following the precepts, taking deep satisfaction in it.

Then I went to Thailand and did a long, ten-week retreat there. To my surprise, about seven weeks into it, I felt a strange feeling inside. What is this strange feeling? The best words I could come up with to describe it was that I felt a kind of ethical purity. Wow, what is this? And it felt delightful to have it. There was a joy to it. I thought, "Oh, maybe that's what the joy is to feel." It's not like an evaluation or going through a checklist, saying, "Well, I don't do that, I don't do that, therefore I should be happy." It was an inner source for ethics that was just inspiring to me.

The Buddha talks about this idea of something that inspires gladness. Gladness is evaluative in nature. It's conceptual: "Oh yeah, I have this experience, I have this knowledge, I've touched into something. This is really good, and I'm so glad and inspired by this thing that I've come into contact with."

As we are inspired through gladness, it is said to create a momentum to practice. As we practice, the excitement and the slight agitation of gladness begin to dissipate. The engagement sets in: "Finally, I'm doing it myself. It's not just an idea."

As we do it, there's something about the engagement in meditation that, at some point, brings something called pīti^[2]. I like to translate it as "joy." Some people say, "Gil, that's too sedated, you're dampening it down; it's rapture." Sometimes I just like to call it "well-being." There's an inner thrill. It's a bit energetic because it comes very much from starting to get concentrated as we practice. As we get concentrated, maybe it releases serotonin or something in our system, but the point being that things become harmonized in the mind. There is a harmony between the mind and the body. Things are working together without any stress, so the heart begins evoking or bringing forth something very different than what it evokes when it's caught up in stressful thoughts, preoccupations, and lost in thought. It's a kind of joy. It's a miracle that happens this way.

As we practice further, being content and happy with the joy, and being able to put aside our preoccupations because we're feeling this joy, something in the body has a chance to relax. A lot of the relaxation of the body has to do with finally being present for your experience. The body just wants to relax. If you give the body half a chance, it will relax, but some of us don't do that. Sometimes the tension in the body is unconscious; we don't even know we're carrying it.

I was so surprised when I started to meditate to discover that I would feel more rested and more relaxed after I meditated first thing in the morning than when I woke up from sleep. I thought sleep was supposed to be the premier rest, but in fact, meditation allows something to rest deeper. A lot of that had to do with just being present. The body wants to relax, to be calm.

As the body relaxes, that joy that we have gets quieter. The energy or the excitement around it goes away and it gets replaced with happiness, or well-being. This is usually not translated in energetic terms like rapture; it's more sublime. Some people translate the Pali word sukha^[3] as "pleasure," because it's a very deep, embodied sense of well-being that just feels like a sublime pleasure everywhere.

Then the Buddha goes on and says that with that sense of happiness, that is the condition that allows for very deep concentration. If you're content already, if you're happy, if your body is happy, it's just nice to be here. Some people say, "I feel like I'm home finally. This is safe. This is satisfying. This is better than watching Netflix." There is a deep satisfaction that allows something to settle more, to unify, to come together, which is a lot of what samādhi^[4] is: concentration, a deep willingness to settle here.

That deep settledness here in the present moment, with the mind at rest and the body at rest, provides a new vantage point, a new perspective. Just like when the Buddha gave his Dharma talks, people became ready, receptive, free of the hindrances, elated, and confident. That state of being that he evoked in people prepared them to be ready and receptive to see and understand something in a new way. In fact, when he starts teaching about suffering to that audience, it isn't that they then believe something new. What happens when they listen to his teachings about suffering is described as their Dharma eye^[5] opening. Some ability to perceive is available; a new perspective arises.

In the meditation path, going through gladness, joy, relaxation, happiness, and samādhi also gives the meditator a new perspective to see. What is that?

Imagine yourself as contented, happy, and satisfied as you've ever been, without being sleepy. Here on Earth, in the present, maybe you woke up from a wonderful nap, and nothing has to happen. You don't have to do anything. You do have thoughts that come through, but the thoughts are like wispy clouds that pass by. You're lying in bed after a nap, the sunlight comes in, and you're just watching the dance of the dust in the sunlight, or the speckles on the ceiling. Thoughts come and go, and nothing is sticky. Nothing is grabby. It's just really nice to be there.

Then a thought arises about some really big challenge at work that's distressing and anxiety-producing. You see that work challenge coming up, but you're so settled, quiet, and peaceful that you say, "Oh, look, there's thinking about that work challenge." You feel a little compulsion arise somewhere, maybe in the chest, like, "I ought to get involved with this anxiety." But you say, "Wait a minute. I don't have to be involved. I don't have to pick this thought up. I can just let it pass through." There's such a subtle place where you actually have some choice: "Oh, I don't have to get involved in this thought." And then it passes, and you're back to the dust dancing in the light, which feels so good. There's nothing to do, just being peaceful and content.

Then, suddenly, thoughts about your high school sweetheart come up—someone who spurned you fifty years ago. Suddenly, anger starts coming up. Fifty years ago! But you're in this very nice state, and you see, "Oh, look at that. It's fascinating that after fifty years I should feel this compulsion towards anger. Let's not get involved with that. I have better things to do today." You have enough choice there to not get involved, and it passes. You watch all this stuff come and go. Wow, this is something.

Then you wonder, "How can I live with this kind of peace? How can I go through my life this way so I don't get caught in these things? Now that I think about it, I spend most of my days caught in something. I never realized that until I was in this deep peace and watched things come and go—watched the tendency to get involved begin and end. I had no idea that I spent most of my day caught in things. No wonder I wake up in the morning still tense!"

You ask, "How can I live in such a way that I stay close to this peace?" What would it take?

The first thing that occurs to you is: "I think keeping this perspective active for me—seeing how things arise, seeing them when they first appear so that I can view them as an appearing phenomenon with no more reality or substantiality than just an idea or compulsion arising—gives me a chance to see it pass and to let it go. Seeing that all things come and go—that's a good perspective."

What else should I do? "Well, I've noticed that when I do get really entangled in rich, juicy, painful suffering, it's because I'm being mean, or I'm being greedy—wanting more sensual pleasures. I'm a little bit cruel even. Those are cognitively complex activities of the mind, to have those motivations. Let's not do those." Okay, that's the second thing: avoid certain kinds of behavior and motivations.

What else? "I've also seen that it's cognitively complex, involves entanglement, and takes me away from this peace if I lie a lot. How about if I not lie? And I bet that if I spend a lot of time killing people, stealing from people, and running around doing sexual misconduct, that also puts me into a complicated cognitive world where I have to plan, hide, escape, and justify. That's complicated. Let's not do that."

What else? "I've been involved in work that harmed people, that didn't do any good for this world, and that was so stressful for my mind. And I've done things that felt wrong to do in the world, and not doing them felt so much better. Let's avoid work that causes harm."

Is there anything else I should do? "I should really take a good look at myself. From this new perspective, I see that when these compulsions arise in the mind—like greed, hatred, or spinning around in confusion, delusion, and perplexity—that actually doesn't feel good. Then I'm caught again. I've left that relaxed place of watching things come and go. Let's not do those things."

"I never noticed the opposite: there are certain ways that the mind operates where it's generous, it's kind, it's wise, and that comes so naturally. It seems to actually be part and parcel of this peaceful, satisfying, relaxed place that I discovered at the end of this path of gladness, joy, tranquility, happiness, and concentration. Let's stay close to those good things."

What else should I do? "I think I better stay attentive enough to track all this. I think I need to stay mindful."

What else? "It seems that a lot of this new perspective is supported by being really settled, concentrated, and still. Let me live a life in such a way that I have access to a quiet, concentrated, still mind."

Great. What I just went through is the Eightfold Path^[6]. This is apparently what the Buddha did when he was enlightened. He did exactly the same analysis: "What keeps me close to this freedom I discovered?"

When the Buddha gave his talk, making people's minds ready, receptive, free of the hindrances, elated, and confident, he was putting their minds in a state that was ready for a new perspective. What was that new perspective? It was suffering: the arising of suffering, the appearance of suffering, and the cessation of suffering.

Remember what happened after the nap: you saw states of mind, thoughts, and ideas arise and pass, and you saw compulsions to be involved in them come up, and you chose not to be involved. You let it all come. Trust the simple mind. Relax. Don't get caught in anything. See the arising and passing. If you get caught in it and involved, you won't see things come and go. There's freedom there. Between the ending of one thing and the beginning of the next, there's peace. There's space. There's something wonderful. And then he taught them the path leading to the end of suffering, the Eightfold Path.

I like to think of it the way the Buddha thought about it as well: it wasn't just leading to the end of suffering—it is that—but it also is how to live from that place of freedom and ease.

So happiness has a role in Buddhist practice. Happiness prepares us to be able to see the world and ourselves in a new way that's actually hard to do when we're suffering a lot. Buddhist practice can help people who suffer a lot; it can give us practices, perspectives, and compassion that support the lessening of suffering, coming to have a better relationship to our suffering, and finding our way with suffering. But at some point, this practice of Buddhism is also about awakening, staying close to, and developing our capacity for a significant kind of well-being and happiness.

How often in your day do you allow yourself to be happy? How often in the day are you so involved in serious things that you don't take the time to be delighted at what your circumstances are—the weather, the sky, the trees, the people around you? Maybe you have such important things to do that you can't really take the time to appreciate anything that's around you or with you. If your life is that important, I don't want to interfere! But maybe for some of you, it's not.

Some of the things you get involved in are not that important. If an anthropologist from Mars came to study you and looked at what you actually did through the day, what conclusion would they make about what human beings are all about? Would it be, "This is the best news in the universe"? Or would it be, "Well, maybe you should have chosen someone else, because the way my mind works, I'm always caught up in this and that, being resentful." The anthropologist might report back to Mars: "This person mostly spends their time thinking about the past." Or they could write back: "This person is mostly planning because they're always anxious. Maybe that's what human life on planet Earth is all about: being anxious. They must have a religion of anxiety. They must worship it. They have this special altar, this sacrament they go to regularly to increase their level of anxiety—they're really good at it, it's a computer monitor." [Laughter]

I think that for some people, what we do in daily life regularly and repeatedly would not be the best representation of what human beings are capable of. I would propose that some of us don't have such important things to do all the time that we can't take more time to feel happy, to feel joyful, to feel appreciation, to find things that are inspiring.

Is that Pollyannaish? Is that saccharine? Is that a life that doesn't realize that this is a serious world we're in? There are a lot of people suffering, and it is heartbreaking what goes on in this world. But maybe, just maybe, we are better off addressing it with a new perspective rather than the old perspective. To have the Dharma eye open—that's what Buddhism is about. To be able to see in a new way, to see from the perspective of how things are coming and going moment by moment. To see from a place of well-being, settledness, and happiness. And then, from there, let us address the suffering of this world. Let's not ignore it. Let's not just be happy and then forget everyone else.

So, I want to emphasize the importance of happiness, and that the Eightfold Path is a recipe for staying close to the happiness of this new perspective. It's a cycle: if you feel the happiness of this new perspective, that strengthens the gladness, the joy, the tranquility, the happiness, and the ability to see things as they are better, which can produce more happiness, more of a feeling of being inspired. It grows and grows.

Today's talk was about happiness and suffering, and the point I wanted to make was the importance of happiness. I won't say it's easy to be happy, but it might be more available to you than you allow yourself to take advantage of or touch into. If you allow yourself to have more happiness, perhaps it will allow your meditation to become more settled, contented, and concentrated. It isn't just dust dancing in the sunlight that you see coming and going; there is a profound way of seeing this world as coming and going, with you free in the midst of it.

Those are my thoughts for today. We have a few minutes here; we can take a couple of questions or comments.

Q&A

Speaker 1: Gil, early in the talk you mentioned serotonin, and that leads to a body chemistry kind of question. I have this idea that I'm not sure about: that any kind of "getting what we want" activity stimulates some body chemistry—serotonin, or adrenaline, or hormones—that feels a lot like happiness, but maybe those have the seeds of some stress underlying them. And that the greatest happiness, a Dharmic happiness, would be the kind of happiness that tamps down our body chemistry so that there are not strong emotions happening. Instead, there's just pure awareness and a letting go. Does bringing body chemistry into the Dharma like I'm doing now make sense to you?

Gil Fronsdal: I'm not qualified to answer. I shouldn't have brought up serotonin; I hardly know what it is! [Laughter] To answer questions about body chemistry is something I'm not really capable of doing. But from a classic Buddhist point of view, there's a difference between mental, emotional, and physical activity that leaves traces, and activity that doesn't leave traces.

The negative karma^[7], in a sense, is the traces left behind. So maybe it's chemicals that get stuck in our system, but there are good chemicals too. There are good states of mind that can get quite strong and persist, and create very different conditions that persist.

Does this practice make us emotionally neutral or dampen down our emotions? I think it depends on the person. There are people whose emotions swing dramatically between states of well-being and dramatic states of suffering—despair and all kinds of things that are directly connected to their clinging and attachment to self-identity. For those people, as their clinging reduces, the swings won't be as extreme.

There are other people who cling, and the way they cling narrows their emotional range. They're frozen; maybe they'll just manage a small smile. They're already dampening things down. For them, as they relax their clinging, they begin having a much wider emotional range. What the right range is for people is very individual, and there shouldn't be any comparison to others. The only thing is to get out of the way and not add clinging to make it worse.

Speaker 2: Thank you for the talk. So nice to be here; this is my first time back since the shutdown. I just got through watching a Global Joy Summit. It was a multiple-day event with speakers from contemplative sciences, neuroscience, and different spiritual leaders. It started with a documentary that is available to everybody featuring Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. It's really timely with what you're talking about. The biggest thing—because both of them have gone through such tremendous suffering, and their countries have—to see the two of them together was really remarkable. They couldn't keep their hands off of each other. What I took away from it, and from today, is that it's not about denying suffering at all. Absolutely not. These leaders absolutely faced it. But it's almost a choice to purposely make space for joy—to see the opportunities for it and to claim it when it's available. In no way is it meant to deny the suffering; it's more of a purposeful claiming of joy. Is that in line with what you're saying?

Gil Fronsdal: I think it's close enough. I feel a little hesitant about the word "claiming"—it seems a bit strong—but I think there are all kinds of ways in which people out in the world are trying to make you miserable. Terrorists, for example, and politicians, and all kinds of people. It's a revolutionary act to not buy into it. It's a revolutionary and powerful act not to give in to fear or anger when there's a lot of people giving you an ordinary motivation to be that way.

Appreciate how radical it is to stay happy. But doing it so it's genuine is the art. There are so many people who do it in a fake way, as a veneer, and that doesn't help either. I think meditation is one of the means by which to keep it sincere and authentic for ourselves. If you're really practicing mindfulness and being present, you'll feel that the veneer doesn't work. The pretending doesn't work.

But I believe the examples you gave are fantastic examples of people who have stood up against the suffering and the evil of this world and demonstrated an alternative in such a way that inspired people to live a different way. So, if you want to change this world in a very good way: be happy. Please.

It's not easy for those of you who struggle with this topic. I don't want to pretend that it's easy, but it's really worthwhile to be on this path. There is a path that you can take, and sometimes the path is slow, but it's really worthwhile. Knowing you're on a path is one of the recipes for at least gladness, if not for joy.

Thank you very much.