Happiness is here right now

Wrote this on Valentine’s Day but it works every day.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! How’s it going?! Feeling happy?! Feeling loved? Or feeling unloved?! Feeling disappointed?!

Whether we are having a great day or a depressing one is not whether or not we have a hot partner (or any partner!) to go to dinner and a movie with, but whether or not we are feeling loving and/or blissful inside. (Click here for articles on overcoming loneliness.)

Is this true?: We try and make samsara work every day – not just on the macro scale, but even on the micro, organizing our kitchen cabinet, arranging the right date, etc. But it is never quite right. We organize our relationships and life and health and job, but we still have not quite found the right person or the right pair of shoes.

And on Valentine’s Day there seems to be an even bigger disconnect between trying to make things work and things not quite working. One problem with Valentine’s Day is that people set themselves up for disappointment by expecting things to happen – no surprise that calls to the suicide hotlines spike on February 14. (Someone just told me upon reading this today that Al Anon apparently refers to expectations as “pre-meditated resentments”…)

We can’t quite make anything work. We haven’t quite got it. But what we haven’t quite got is that it is samsara — the experience of an ordinary or deluded mind – that does not work. That cannot work. We need to understand the importance of going inside. And today would be a good day to understand the value of training in bliss.

Training in bliss

The initially imagined (but still functional) bliss that arises from dissolving everything into the experience of bliss and emptiness during Tantric generation stage and the natural bliss we get from the melting of the drops in the central channel once we are able to absorb our energy winds during Tantric completion stage leads to a Yogi or Yogini’s profound experience , as described in Tantric Grounds and Paths p. 141:

They feel that they experience a profound bliss mixed with emptiness, as if emptiness and their mind of bliss have become one entity… Once they have this experience they simultaneously perceive any objects such as forms that appear to them as manifestations both of emptiness and their mind of bliss.

We may not be able to do this yet, but nonetheless we can begin to incorporate the training in bliss into our life and it is important. Why? Because deep happiness and bliss ARE possible if we look in the right direction. And it is the experience of bliss mixed with the ultimate nature of reality, emptiness, that will finally set us free from attachment and all other delusions, and allow us to help others in the same way.

At the moment, unfortunately, whenever we experience a bit of happiness, from a sandwich or another person or a ray of sunshine on a cold day, we feel that the happiness is coming from an object outside of ourselves and we immediately develop attachment. “More of that please! I don’t want it to go away.” You’re out on a freezing cold day and the sun comes out from behind the clouds and warms your face, “Oh, that feels good!” Followed immediately by pain: “Nooo, here comes the cloud. Oh, come on!” Talking to a cloud.

Or you’re with a nice person having such a nice time – “Oh, you’ve got to go, so soon?” Pain. And that is what attachment does as it projects the happiness onto an external object or person, not understanding that the happiness is coming from within the mind.  Attachment comes and spoils it. It spoils everything. So we need a basic training in ALLOWING ourself to enjoy deeply while  recognizing that the enjoyment is actually coming from our mind.

So let’s say you are enjoying the presence of a person in your life. Enjoy it, but understand that the person is reminding you of the enjoyment that exists within your own mind. They are giving you a window into the fact that bliss is possible but only if you stay with the source of the happiness, which is not the person but your own experience.

Instead of allowing our mind to go out and grasp, to try and hold onto this person who is walking out the door (even if it’s for the last time), we just move the mind inwards so we stay with the enjoyment and we recognize, “This enjoyment is like a surface manifestation of the bliss that is in my mind, like a wave arising from a blissful ocean, reminding me of the bliss that is the actual nature of my mind.” Thank you very much! You’ve just reminded me that I can generate great bliss, meditate on emptiness, and become a Buddha! In this life. And it is going to be fun doing it because it is so blissful. As Geshe-la says in Tantric Grounds and Paths:

If our mind becomes full of bliss, all phenomena that appear to our mind are mere manifestations of our mind of bliss, because besides this they do not exist at all – like things in a dream.

We begin to enjoy ourselves but in a pure way so that we extract the enjoyment and let it remind us of the potential for bliss and emptiness. Instead of grasping at the external sunshine or person, we let go. We enjoy it when the sun is shining, we enjoy it when the sun goes behind the cloud. We enjoy being with the person, we enjoy it when the person disappears. This is because we are enjoying hanging out with the pure nature of our mind, and allowing ourself constantly to be reminded of what is possible.

Don’t grab, let go!

So, next time you feel the urge to try and grab your object of attachment – physically, verbally, or mentally – pause a moment and do this instead.

We imagine or remember having fun with them. We generate bliss. We let them go, let them dissolve away. We abide in bliss, waves of bliss arising from the root mind at our heart. We remember that nothing exists from its own side, not even them, that everything is mere name, mere hallucination, mere projection. We dissolve everything into bliss and emptiness, with the compassionate wish to become a Buddha and destroy everyone’s samsaric hallucinations right now.

We can do that as often as we want until it becomes second nature. Then we will really have transformed objects of enjoyment into the spiritual path, reducing our attachment and increasing our wisdom.

Here are some more articles explaining how to transform enjoyments/desire , as well as other things we can do with this experience. I hope you enjoy the bliss of your own mind today and every day.