Category: Happiness

Will this make me happy?

I asked some people recently if they want to be happy all the time. I thought they’d all say yes, duh!, but some of them weren’t in fact quite sure. When I asked why, they come things that make me happyup with two classic observations (1) because they felt that without unhappiness they wouldn’t appreciate what happiness was, and also (2) how can you be happy when you get cancer or people die?! 

These seem like reasonable points. Made me remember that we have to understand what Buddhas might mean by happiness as opposed to what the rest of us usually mean by it. There are two types of happiness, which Geshe Kelsang has called artificial and real. Both are pleasant feelings, both feel good (even great), so what’s the difference?

Real happiness is not the pleasant feelings such as excitement that come from worldly enjoyments such as a new relationship or a new hairdo. That is worldly pleasure, and the reason it is not real happiness is because it doesn’t last and is simply the changeover point between unpleasant feelings and more unpleasant feelings (as is explained more here.)

mosquitos in Dallas Texas

Buddha called this type of happiness “changing suffering” —  not because it feels bad or because there’s anything wrong with it per se, but because it is not the pure or unconditional happiness of inner peace that arises from wisdom. It’s like the relative pleasure we get from scratching an itch (and I know about that, as I’ve just spent the weekend in Texas with about 1,234 mosquito friends). As it says in The Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra:

The mental peace that develops from worldly enjoyment is not real happiness but changing suffering.

So in response to the first observation, it is true that without unhappiness we wouldn’t know what this kind of happiness is, because it is just the temporary alleviation of unhappiness.

In response to their second observation, I would say that actual happiness is not the same as excitement or glee. It is not generally appropriate to jump around with joy when someone drops dead.

To get closer to what Buddha means by the real happiness that comes from wisdom, I decided to ask the same people a different question – did they want to be at peace all the time? This time, everyone said yes.

For one thing, it is easier to see how being at peace is not just in contrast to being depressed — it is not part of that seesaw, but an underlying way of being. It is also easier to understand how we can learn to be at peace even when things go wrong. We are learning to maintain an internal locus of control, taking ownership of our lives.

The practice of meditation

And when we’re at peace, we’re happy, are we not? That’s the happiness we’re talking about, the happiness that we can grow more and more deeply by meditating, aka familiarizing our mind with wise positive thoughts both on our cushion and in our daily activities.

The Oral Instructions says:

This book principally presents the practice of meditation, through which we can develop and maintain a peaceful mind all the time. If our mind is peaceful all the time, we will be happy all the time.

As Gen-la Dekyong pointed out during this year’s Kadampa Summer Festival, there is a difference between these two questions:

Will this make me happy?

and

Will this make me happy all the time?

I’ve been finding this very helpful. For sure, as I’m about to take my first sip of this Costa cappuccino and have my first bite of muffin, if I ask myself the question “Will this make me happy?,” the answer is “Of course!” But will it make me happy all the time? No.

muffinOnly inner peace can do that. Therefore, I can get a lot more out of this cappuccino and cake by learning to enjoy it with inner peace. And I can recognize too that the happiness of those first few bites (before the worldly pleasure wears off) is in fact coming from the inner peace rather than from the muffin – if I remain in a miserable mood, for example, no muffin on earth has the power to make me happy from its own side.

What this means is that if I can keep the inner peace going, my enjoyment can go on! It’s like having my cake and eating it! But otherwise it can’t – the eating will just turn back into a sickly feeling and/or the need to lose 5 lbs.

Searching for happiness

Since beginningless time, in life after life, we have all been roving around in search of happiness. If we subscribe for just a moment to the narrative of evolutionary biology … in just this one world, Planet Earth, we can see how living beings — whether dinosaurs, marsupials, mammals, fish, or primates — have been trying nonstop to find happiness and get rid of suffering. Home sapiens (that’s us I’m afraid) have been uniquely cruel, koala bearsselfish, and destructive in our pursuit of happiness and profit, managing in the past few millennia as we roamed further and further afield to “domesticate” (ie, own and entrap) untold living beings while driving the majority of other species to extinction. And we’re obviously still at it (including Koala Bears!), justifying ourselves every step of the way.

Nothing exceptional about me

Self-grasping, thinking everything really is out there for the grabbing, is why we are in samsara experiencing one hallucination after another. That constant craving of uncontrolled desire — seeking happiness out there — then perpetuates samsara, keeps it rolling on and on, traveling everywhere but nowhere.

I’ve been reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s very thought-provoking – not least because it reminds me that the difference between me and a monkey is … yikes, monkey handsnot much! I am a primate!! So are you!!! There is only 1.2 percent genetic difference between me and a chimpanzee! Look at your hands … they’re designed for climbing trees!

I mean I went to school, so I knew that — but this book has brought it home to me and made me appreciate even more that I have to use this life to break free. It’s obvious. I cannot afford not to because there is nothing at all exceptional about me, especially my body. Feelings of human superiority are very deceptive. I am simply a part of this ancient scary endless horror movie, nature red in tooth and claw; and if I remain as such, how can I hope for anything other than disaster and pain to befall me sooner or later? It’s all very well fearing taking rebirth in the lower realms, such as the animal realm, in our next life – but it turns out we’re already in the animal realm according to this paradigm. We even have tail bones!

monkey babiesRight now, due to the power of a more creative imagination, I am finally able in this life — after countless lifetimes as monkeys, albatrosses, cockroaches, and dinosaurs etc in this and many other world systems — to use my mind to break free. This is due to some out of the blue good fortune whereby I have met enlightened beings who know that life does not equal samsaric suffering, that there is an alternative. They are explaining clearly how I can manifest and purify my very subtle continuously residing mind, the formless awareness that goes from life to life, in order to realize my potential for enlightenment. They are revealing that none of any of this is as it seems, that there is nothing beyond mere appearance, that everything depends 100% upon thought; which is what makes it possible, at long last, to break it all down.

I saw this video of a toddler last week – he wanders up to a mirror, looks curiously at his reflection, and then walks around the back of the mirror to find out where it’s coming from. We are, according to Buddha, childish ones – but we can learn through our own examination and experience that the things we normally see do not exist, that there is nothing behind mere appearance. And that truth will make us blissfully happy, forever.

This opportunity is what makes my current life a precious human life as opposed to an animal life with no freedom or endowments. I may have a primate’s body, complete with opposable thumbs; but there is nothing to stop me at the moment from developing a Bodhisattva’s and then a Buddha’s mind. Notwithstanding I have only a few hundred months left (at most) to get this done before I find myself in a new body, perhaps with an actual tail.

Luxuries become necessities

However, I do digress ever so slightly, because what I was planning on quoting from that Sapiens book is this (when the author is talking about when the human species started to domesticate their world):

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

It’s like me with camping, or rather not camping. I camped at UK Kadampa Festivals for years, maybe even a decade or more! The tents did become larger as the years went by, I admit, and the thermoses, pillows, and so on became more and more fancy. But the point is that I didn’t much mind camping, and I might even have quite enjoyed it from time to time. Slowly but surely, however, I was invited to stay a night here or a night there on a Amelia tentsitting room floor by someone who took pity on me when it rained. These invitations grew over the years to being offered more nights inside, space in a caravan, a bed in a shared room, even my own room from time to time … Then some very generous  American friends said I could share a modest house with them in my own small room for the whole Festival! What luxury!!! However, sure enough, the moment I put down my suitcase and lay down on my soft bed, I had started to take this for granted. Fast forward several years, Summer Festival 2019, and I am writing this in a beautiful house that is a darn sight posher than my own apartment … and there is no place to go from here but down. I am already plotting neurotically how to maintain this level of luxury next summer.

So, what about this lasting happiness then?

In Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s teachings on developing love in 2009, he said:

Probably we think: If I have money I will be happy all the time. If I have a good friend, a boyfriend or girlfriend, I will be happy all the time. If I have a good reputation or a higher position, I will be happy all the time. This is wrong.

More on why “This is wrong” (ie, worldly enjoyments don’t make us happy all the time) is explained all over this blog, including here.

We need stuff, but we probably don’t need it quite as much as we think, and we definitely don’t need to grasp at it for happiness. As soon as we do that, it is like trying to drink water from a mirage, we will always come up thirsty. As Geshe Kelsang says in How to Transform Your Life:

It is as if we are continually chasing mirages, only to be disappointed when they do not give us the satisfaction for which we had hoped.

It doesn’t matter how hard we try, or how speedy, inventive, or efficient we become in the pursuit of pleasure. Talking about the transition from snail mail to emails etc., for hamster treadmillexample, Harari says:

We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

To be happy all the time, we need to learn to enjoy mere appearance without the grasping – enjoy the mirage without grasping for the water, or enjoy the muffin or the hairdo or the relationship without grasping at something actually being there causing happiness. As it says in Oral Instructions:

When I search with my wisdom eye,
All the things that I normally see disappear
And only their mere name remains.

The point is that we can come to enjoy everything if our mind remains at peace thanks to wisdom, whether that be mirage-like muffins, relationships, or whatever. But not if it’s not. That’s the difference between liberation and samsara.

Tried and tested method for finding lasting happiness

As it says in Oral Instructions:

Meditation is a scientific method to transform human nature from bad to good. Everybody needs to be good-natured with a good heart.

Why do we need to be good? Why shouldn’t we all just stay like we are, each man out for himself, with occasional heroic flashes of selflessness (recorded on social media?)

I don’t know about you, but whatever I see in the news, in history, around me, or in my own life confirms that cutting ourselves off from others, being selfish and mean, doesn’t seem to be a remotely successful self-defeatingstrategy for finding lasting happiness or freedom, either individually or collectively.

Instead, the way to develop deeper and deeper happiness is by getting rid of our inner problems – our delusions – and cultivating our boundless potential for good qualities such as love, compassion, patience, and wisdom.

This is the real method to solve our own inner problems – problems of ignorance, depression, anger and so forth – and is also the real method to benefit others practically.

You’d think we’d know this by now! But we seem to have surprisingly short memories about what makes us really happy and what doesn’t.

Rather than just lumber around like great apes, we need to unleash our spiritual side. It is there, have no doubt – it has always been there inside you. As Buddha says in a Sutra:

If you realize your own mind you will become a Buddha; you should not seek Buddhahood elsewhere.

When we manifest our very subtle clear light mind we can mix it directly with the true nature of all things, emptiness, the mere absence of all the things we normally see; and the mental peace that arises from this wisdom is real deep happiness, pure and lasting. As Ven Geshe Kelsang says:

So, if we really wish for ourself and others to be happy all the time, we must learn to practice meditation. Eventually, through practicing Mahamudra meditation we will be able to benefit each and every living being every day.

i myself must make myself happyThere is life with suffering and there is life without suffering. There is life without any real or lasting happiness, and there is life with real and lasting happiness. At some point we have to choose because it looks like we can’t have both.

Which brings me back to Gen-la Dekyong’s practical question that we can ask ourselves throughout the day:

Will this make me happy?
Will this make me happy all the time?!

Over to you. Comments are warmly invited.

Related articles

Meditation in the pursuit of happiness

Samsara’s pleasures are deceptive

Buddhism and the hedonic treadmill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buddhism & the hedonic treadmill

9 mins & 2 videos

Happy New Year! Here’s a bit of New Year’s encouragement to either learn meditation or keep meditating in 2019 … The world might just become a better place.

hamster eating cheeseFirst a question: What do you reckon happens when we try to make ourselves happy all the time through external means, via the places, enjoyments, or bodies of samsara?

We’ve been trying it long enough, we should know. Basically, Buddha observed (and we can too) that there is no permanent gain in happiness. We have spikes of excitement followed by spikes of despondency, but we don’t get overall happier.

For example, we get a flat white at Starbucks – yum, little spike for however many slurps there are in a cup of coffee. Then we need a bathroom but there isn’t one to be found – hmm, little jag in the opposite direction. Or we get a promotion at work – exciting! Until it sinks in that we have to work harder – darn! Or we get a bigger house – cool! But now we have to clean more shelves – boring.

We can dream about a job or a partner for months, fantasizing about how happy we’ll be, only to be disappointed when the happiness boost lasts approximately five weeks or five minutes (and too often followed by searing heartache).

Essentially, no amount of money, technology, sex, romance, friendship, muscle, prestige, music, or travel will ever make us permanently happy. We will always need more or different. We cannot fulfill all our desires, and a lot of them simply cancel each other out, as mentioned in this article.

hedonistic treadmillThis is a helpful chart, especially if you can visualize that happiness flatline going on long enough to see how it also goes around in circles, bit like a hamster wheel — not ending up somewhere different, our life not really having gone anywhere by the end of it all, just turning into death. And then rebirth — starting up all over, accumulating stuff and losing it all again, ad infinitum.

Plus, as is the nature of treadmills, IMHO, it’s all exhausting and really quite boring.

If our energy and effort have all gone into things outside our mind, we will end up the poorer because nothing physical lasts — we can’t take a smidgeon of that stuff with us. All that goes with us past death is our subtle mental continuum, which is like a storehouse for all the karma we have created in this and previous lives. Some of it good of course, but much of it stemming from selfish desires and leading us who knows where, but probably nowhere we want to be.

Forever chasing froth?

At my first time at the seaside, I remember being mesmerized by the glistening froth on the ocean  — so much so that I fetched my bucket to take some of it home. I don’t know how old I was, 15?! No, seriously, I wasn’t that old, but I was idiotic. My parents watched me doing this and, though they may have gently pointed out that the froth may not look quite so good later, I ignored them as usual and carried on scooping up the sparkling rainbow bubbles.

Even by the time I got to the car, it was grey, flat, and lifeless. I was disappointed, I think I may even have cried. But worldly enjoyments are all moreorless like that. The excitement disappears, and we’re left with the greying aftermath. Plus whatever karma we created. And, like my wiser parents, the Buddhas have been trying to tell us this but we won’t listen, or only half-heartedly anyway, because this fleeting insubstantial froth is still so enticing to our childish minds. Bucket and spade

In The New Eight Steps to Happiness, Geshe Kelsang says:

Of all worldly possessions the most precious is said to be the legendary wish granting jewel… that has the power to grant wishes.

Only caveat is that this jewel can fulfill wishes for superficial, fleeting happiness, aka “contaminated happiness”; not the pure happiness that comes from a pure mind. But even if we ever come to possess everything we ever wanted externally, which of course is impossible while we still have the itch of attachment, pure and lasting happiness still eludes us. We still feel moreorless itchy and dissatisfied. Furthermore this jewel only has “the power to grant wishes in one life – it cannot protect its owner in his or her future lives.”

So, as it says in The New Eight Steps to Happiness:

hamster on happiness lineThe only thing never deceive us is the attainment of full enlightenment.  It is only by attaining enlightenment that we can fulfill our deepest wish for pure and lasting happiness, for nothing in this impure world has the power to fulfill this wish. Only when we become a fully enlightened Buddha will we experience the profound and lasting peace that comes from a permanent cessation of all delusions and their imprints. We will be free from all faults and mental obscurations, and will possess all the qualities needed to help all living beings directly. We will then be an object of refuge for all living beings.

Maybe we’re thinking this sounds a bit far-fetched – I don’t even like my neighbor, and here it’s being suggested that I can become an all-loving Buddha?!

But try closing your eyes and imagining all this for a moment, being profoundly peaceful, an object of refuge, and so on….

Can you?

Yes?

If so, that is significant. If you really couldn’t become a Buddha, you wouldn’t be able to imagine becoming one. And vice versa.  Everything starts with our thoughts, our correct imagination.

It’s only the hallucinations of our self-grasping ignorance that make us buy into being fixed, small, and limited. As I started to explain a bit here, we can change our programming fast by dropping into the clear light mind at our heart, dissolving away the self we ordinarily see, and then identifying with our boundless potential.hamster on swing

The first step: getting over ourselves

We now have the big picture. And according to the presentation in Eight Steps, once we’ve decided that enlightenment sounds interesting to us, and is something we might want and are capable of experiencing, we then go back to the beginning, to the first step, which is cherishing others.

Slowly but surely we overcome our bias and partiality to broaden and deepen our love — and what happens is that instead of experiencing that same old flatline happiness, with those pointless peaks and troughs, our happiness increases as the weeks, months, and years go by, and our delusions, sadness, and depression begin to melt away.

happy hamsterThis mind of cherishing others will take us in an ever upward trajectory — the happiness line ascending up and up infinitely until it disappears into space. With enlightenment, we have off the charts happiness and mental freedom.

“Quite remarkable”

I don’t know if this kind of thing impresses you or not, but this video talks about an experiment showing that the brainwaves of the “highest level meditators” are really different.

The main thing apparently is the gamma waves – we have these for a very short period when, for example, we solve a problem, or bite into an apple, or imagine biting into an apple (or drink a flat white). But “what was stunning” in people who have meditated a lot is that their “gamma waves are very strong all the time, a lasting trait, just their everyday state even when they are not meditating.” And apparently “science has never seen it before.”

Another remarkable discovery is that “when they meditate on compassion, their gamma jumps 700 or 800 percent, and this also never been seen by science.” The psychologist concludes that these meditators have “a state of being that is not like our ordinary state — sometimes it’s called liberation or enlightenment or awake or whatever the word may be. They feel spacious wide open.” And while he says we don’t know what this is exactly, we do know “it is quite remarkable”.

I would just like to add that we start to experience these kinds of joyful effects as soon as we start meditating regularly, especially if we do so skillfully in the context of identifying with our potential – these effects don’t just suddenly pop up overnight. Hence the ever-ascending line of the graph.

We have a taste

The deep joy or bliss we already experience inside us from time to time, when the clouds of delusions clear, gives us a taste of what it is like to be enlightened and experience deep profound bliss day and night, feeling connected to all living beings, blessing their minds. That seems compelling to me.  No longer to have to be all wrapped up in a small fixed boring me.

As Geshe Kelsang says, it’s up to us:

We are faced with a choice: either we can continue to squander our life in pursuing worldly enjoyments that give no real satisfaction and disappear when we die, or we can dedicate our life to realizing our full spiritual potential.

This is our choice: no one else can make this choice for us.

Unplugging the hedonic treadmill in 2019

hamster treadmillJust to conclude, I’m going to point out to those of you who are relatively new to Buddhism that unplugging the hedonic treadmill and dedicating our lives to realizing our full spiritual potential does not mean that we stop drinking flat whites, enjoying time with family and friends, watching movies, or getting promotions at work. It means that we understand where real happiness comes from and bring that understanding into whatever we’re doing each day.

We don’t abandon anything outside our mind, only our selfish attachment and other delusions for therein lie our actual problems. There’s a great saying in the Kadampa tradition:

Remain natural while changing your aspiration.

Using this life, or even just this year, to seek enlightenment doesn’t mean we have to go all strange. We can carry on doing pretty much the same things on the outside (unless we are a butcher or something). We transform our daily life into the spiritual path, and in this way experience greater and greater happiness as time goes on. As Geshe Kelsang puts it:

If we make the effort to practice Buddha’s teachings we will definitely attain enlightenment.

Definitely.

We don’t need to abandon our family, friends, or enjoyments, and retire to a mountain cave.

(Tempting as that may be from time to time … )

All we need to do is change the object of cherishing.

We could try this out in 2019 and see what happens. I don’t see what we’ve got to lose? And if it doesn’t work, we can get back on the treadmill in 2020.

Over to you. Comments are welcome.

 

How much can a person really change?

9 mins read + a video

I was talking about perspective in this article, and I think it’s fair to declare that neither self-grasping nor self-cherishing have any reasonable perspective at all. They are totally self-referential blinkered minds, which also happen to serve no useful purpose whatsoever. bridge the gap

What also arises in dependence upon these ego minds is attachment, where we exaggerate the power of things outside ourselves to make us happy. In a way, we have no choice but to view the world like this. Why? Because we are really over here really wanting to be happy, and everything and everyone else that might possibly make us happy is over there. How can we ever bridge such a gap?

The endless pursuit of pleasure

We have this natural wish to please this real me, “What can I do now to make myself happy?” There is nothing wrong with the wish to be happy, but we have this pressing concern that my happiness is so important, it is so incredibly important, it is more important than everybody else’s happiness, so what can I do about it? I can have a coffee, I can meet a friend, I can inject Botox, I can earn lots of money, etc; and we start projecting sources of happiness out there, thinking, “I need this promotion. I want that car. I need this partner. I want that donut.” And conversely, if I don’t get these things, it is some kind of disaster.

This pursuit is non-stop from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed. And then it even continues in our dreams. Exhausting, really.

money doesn't buy happinessAnd what is happening is that some exaggeration is going on because these things don’t ultimately make us happy, they cannot, they are by nature fleeting. They don’t even temporarily make us happy half the time — because the things that we think make us happy are also the source of our problems, vis a vis donuts, jobs, relationships, cars, etc. But with the mind of attachment we exaggerate the power of things to make us happy.

All these things can make us superficially happy for a short while, but they can also cause us much worry and suffering. They can never give us the pure and everlasting happiness that all of us, in our heart of hearts, long for. ~ Eight Steps to Happiness

We externalize the sources of happiness, believing that they are out there, when in fact happiness is in here (point to your heart).

Selfish desires

Attachment can also be understood as “selfish desires”. With any delusion, our thoughts are more selfish, revolving around a stronger sense of a real self than when our mind is peaceful and positive. When we are angry, for example, it is, “You did this to me, ME!” Check out this video by an amusing friend in New York to see some of the dynamics of annoyance at play:

And if we have really strong attachment for someone, we think, “How can I get you to make ME happy? I need you to do this, that, and the other for ME.” See what I’m saying? Depending on their strength, all our delusions have at their core a more or less exaggerated sense of Meeee.

Cultivating the happiness that comes from wisdom

Happiness is a state of mind that comes from mental peace. We get some inner peace automatically the moment our mind is free from upset, when we are temporarily free from stress, worry, selfish desire, etc. Our mind is rather like a clear, still glass of water (which would feel very peaceful if it had feelings); but then our delusions shake that glass about and the water goes crazy. This is why even the simplest breathing meditation, letting go of the turbulence to quieten the mind, induces feelings of peace and well-being. i want happiness

And then we can deepen that inner peace by developing thoughts of love, or compassion, or patience, or wisdom. A rich blissful mind of wishing others to be happy, for example, or a mind that happily accepts everything that arises … there are many peaceful states of mind and they all make us genuinely happy, but donuts don’t. Donuts and cars and sex and money can sometimes induce momentary sense pleasure, of course they can — but real, lasting happiness is far deeper than that, and it arises from within. Geshe Kelsang says that everyone needs the true happiness that comes from wisdom.

As he also says in his stunning new book, Mirror of Dharma:

Some people may say, “I will be happy all the time if I become wealthy, enjoy a good reputation and have the opportunity of a relationship with the person I desire.” I am very sorry, but this is not true! We can see that people who have all these things also experience great unhappiness and many problems. Many wealthy people and those in high positions experience great suffering and many dangers. We see and hear news about such things all the time.

Quick detour

Geshe-la and Gen-lasGotta make a quick detour here to mention something very cool: The transmission of Mirror of Dharma will be given at the International Kadampa Retreat Center in Arizona at the Kadampa Fall Festival 2019, to accompany the opening of a massively huge World Peace Temple on Route 66 that will be visible to many of the 5 million annual visitors to the Grand Canyon. If that doesn’t put Kadampa Buddhism on the map, I don’t know what will.

Do you have a set personality or not?

And as a result of increasing our inner peace, our wisdom and compassion, our personality changes. We change.

As we keep saying in Buddhism, because Buddha said it, the potential of our mind is infinite. He once said that the amount of our mind we use compared with the amount of mind available to be used is like a pea compared with a planet.

So, we can change. Can’t we?

The other day I was reading a 56-year-old study on a bunch of women who were interviewed every year between the ages of 14 and 70 to see how much they changed as people. And, as it turned out, it was a lot. (I cannot now find the article but I did find this.

happiness (1)Normally I think we have this idea that we have a pretty set personality, “This is just the way I am. Maybe I can get a little bit happier with a whole lot of effort, maybe I can get a little bit more chilled out, maybe I can even get a little bit nicer. But basically this is me.”

However, we sell ourselves enormously short given how much happier we can become, how much kinder, and how much wiser. How we can, in fact, become completely different people — people who live for others, for example a Bodhisattva who wants to free all living being from their suffering and is getting rid of all her faults and limitations to do just that.

Everyone reading this can become a Bodhisattva if you want to. You can become an enlightened being if you learn the methods and put them into practice. Literally, the sky’s not even the limit when it comes to how much we can change.

Nonetheless, due to our stuck ideas of a limited self, and before we get a sense of how extraordinary our minds are through meditation and introspection, there’s a prevalent sense in individuals and society that we all have pretty fixed personalities. That’s where this study is interesting because it discovered that these women were changing all the time and that by the time they reached 70 every single area of their personality had changed beyond recognition — socializing, confidence, wishes, habits, values, everything. Not necessarily for the better, sometimes for the worse, but everything had been replaced. The study concluded you wouldn’t recognize the person of 14 at 70, not just physically but mentally (and that is even long before we slip into senectitude).

Route 66This study is an indicator of how much we change anyway in the natural course of our lives without even particularly trying. What we call our personality is really a bunch of tendencies, wouldn’t you say? We have a certain tendency to react or behave or talk in certain ways around certain people or in certain situations. We have the sense that there is this true essence, true me, or whatever, but is there? Who is this real self who has a real fixed personality? Where is this self? It’s quite an interesting question, isn’t it?

We can use our wisdom to see if we can find it anywhere and — if we can’t – surely we are free to let it go?!

I think who we are depends upon our thoughts. Who we are is very largely, perhaps completely, who we think we are. And who we become is who we want to become, which also depends on who we think we can become.

Who we think we are determines what we do

There is a relationship between who we think we are and what we think we want. And as we always tend to put our energy and time into what we want, who we think we are determines what we do each day.

meditator in the Grand CanyonFor example, even in the course of an ordinary week we can change dramatically. We can wake up on Tuesday feeling like a complete loser – “Today is going to be horrible. I know it. I’m useless at this job, it really worries me, I’ve messed everything up in my life, and no wonder no one likes me.” We can think of ourselves like that all day long, thereby depriving ourselves of all agency and rendering ourselves pretty much powerless, not to mention miserable. And what are we going to be doing all day long? Anything fun or inspiring?!

Wednesday we can wake up feeling on top of the world – “I can’t wait for work today, I can’t wait to shine at this job, I am just great, really sorted, strong enough to face any challenge, and I have lovely friends, everything is good.” And do we not act completely differently as a result?

What has actually changed about us from Tuesday to Wednesday? Did someone switch out the grumpy me for the happy me overnight?! No, only our thoughts about who we are have changed, and therefore we have changed. We’re always having these different ideas of ourselves, it’s going on all the time. There is nothing fixed about us. Who we are, what we are, and therefore what we do depends entirely on our thoughts. And our personalities are our persistent thoughts, if you like, our tendencies, our habits of behaving and reacting in certain ways. As it defines personality in dictionary.com:

  1. the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.
  2. the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual.
  3. a person as an embodiment of a collection of qualities.

There is no person to be found in that sum total or that organized pattern (not sure who is organizing it?!). A person or self is merely imputed upon it. By changing the parts — our behavioral, physical, mental, emotional, social, (and spiritual) characteristics — of course we change completely the pattern, the whole, and the imputed person, our self.

eagle in grand canyonSo, to answer this article’s title, our personalities can and do change completely, even in this life, let alone from life to life. In which case, let’s finally take advantage of this fact to deliberately transform our personality into the best possible personality — why not a Bodhisattva? — with the use of wisdom and compassion, the two wings that will fly us fast to enlightenment. Then everything we want and everything we do will be about making others happy, and as a side-effect we too will achieve the happiness we’ve always longed for.

Over to you. How much do you think you can really change?

Time to read a bit more?

Feel free to change your mind 

What about me? 

What we do depends on who we think we are

No real self

Happiness depends on the mind

So, happiness depends on the mind, not on external conditions. That’s what we say in Buddhism. All the time!

(Carrying on from this article on developing self-confidence.)

In January, while in NYC, I decided in the spirit of market research for this article to see if I could find happiness in and around Central Park; and then jotted down my findings.

coffee

I started in Starbucks, of course. Only second in the queue, I was quickly weighing up the important decision of whether to ask for a flat white with 170 calories or a cappuccino with 140, and whether I was really going to spend over $5 on a coffee in the first place (I was), when I noticed that the woman in the line ahead was ordering 13 drinks. So I gave up. No coffee for me today in Starbucks itself, so I had to search for happiness elsewhere, like in Baldacci’s across the street.

And if I thought Baldacci’s was pricey, it was nothing compared with $3 per minute for a ride in a grimy Pedi cab in the Park, a ride I didn’t take. How demoralizing a job to be a Pedi cab driver, all lined up going nowhere on this wintery day, wealthy women in Lulu yoga pants declining the drivers firmly, almost crossly, “No, we came here to get some exercise!” How many people are stuck in grinding or demoralizing jobs all day long all over the world, if they are in jobs at all? However, although most of the drivers looked dejected, one or two looked like they were having some fun – different minds, different experiences.pedicab in new york

I walked past the young pregnant homeless woman, still nursing a cold. I gave her a smoothie. I’ve taken to connecting with her between the apartment and the subway. Some days she looks very sad, today she smiled warmly. She moves me – why is she there? How can I really help her?

How many New Yorks are there? As many as there are New Yorkers? Do the ducks on the lake know they are in Manhattan? Probably not. So do they live in Manhattan, or do they live in Duckhattan?! The quality of the New York life — happy, unhappy, or neutral – depends not on an objective New York but on what is going on in the minds and experiences of the various living beings, which includes the results of their previous actions, or karma.

I, for one, had a lovely time because I was determined to do so, and because there are umpteen opportunities in this city — and indeed wherever there are lots of people — to increase our peaceful minds of love, patience, compassion, and the wisdom realizing New Yorkimpermanence and that everything depends upon the mind. I was also blissed out by a great acrobatic show, though I noticed some onlookers still looked a little distracted and forlorn, and one child was crying.

Taking refuge in peaceful minds

This is of course just one hour in one day in one month in one insignificant person’s lifetime, but I relay it here as an example of how every minute of everyone’s experience, including my own, depends upon the mind. This is why we need to get started in taking refuge in the peace of our own good hearts and kind actions, learning familiarity with positive minds as antidotes to negative ones while we still have the relative freedom to do this, while we are not yet suffocated by suffering.

To embrace this fact — that happiness depends on the mind far more than on external conditions — and to live by it, as opposed to just saying it with our mouth, we need the self-confidence that believes that it is true and that happiness is possible. If we change, if we conquer our delusions.

As explained in this article, we both want to change and yet distrust change, so we self-sabotage. Have you ever binge-watched Netflix or otherwise put off your meditation practice for days, weeks, months, or even years?! I think we hold ourselves back because we have not thought enough about how it is possible for us to change, we don’t really believe it, maybe we don’t even want to believe it as it has too many repercussions on our way of life; and so we give into lazy habits instead.

vancouverIf we really want to be happy, peaceful minds work. Overcoming delusions works. We need the confidence that knows this — as well as the fact that we can conquer our delusions — so that we can break any vicious cycle of discouragement leading to inaction leading to no results leading to more discouragement. We need consistency in applying peaceful minds every day; and by taking this self-confidence to heart, we can become more steadfastly motivated. Then we get results, which in turn encourages us to keep going, in a virtuous cycle.

Next installment: Overcoming self-doubts.

Over to you. Comments welcome.

Related articles

Happiness from the inside out

Samsara’s pleasures are deceptive

Want peace of mind? Get rid of your delusions.

 

 

Going wide means going deep

Yesterday I ran into a cool guy at the Colorado Mills Outlet Mall – he was smiling so broadly as he served his customers that I couldn’t help saying to him when it was my turn,mountain-1 “You’re in a really great mood!” And he replied, “Yes, I’m always happy. It’s a choice, you know. I have also spent a lot of time in the past not being happy.” And then apropos nothing, except, who knows, maybe apprehension about this Tuesday’s election (or perhaps that’s just me), “Being black in this country is not always easy. But I have made a choice.” I told him I was a meditator, and he was of course all over that; and then he asked me if I had made the mala on my wrist myself (I hadn’t, I never make anything, but I liked that he knew the word.)

Encounters like this are more and more frequent with the passing years – this has just reminded me that an immigration official at Atlanta airport, upon noticing the mala on my wrist, recently reached below the fingerprint machine to pull out his well-thumbed copy of Eight Steps to Happiness. This is all a far cry from the start of my interest in meditation (1981), when people looked at me funny if I even mentioned the word, let alone that I was into Buddhism — “You, ermm, what?!”

i-had-help
Had help writing this article.

I think this growing awareness is a very good thing because the world could do with more people making the conscious effort to be happy, for lord knows there are enough unhappy people about, as my teacher Venerable Geshe-la once put it. And if the cover story of this week’s Time magazine, “Anxiety, depression, and the American adolescent” is anything to go by, unhappiness would appear to be on the rise in our modern society, and society needs help.

(I also hope that article will raise attention that will help stem the tide for young people. For it’s important that possible medical diagnoses of clinical anxiety and depression are considered by all concerned and treated where necessary by qualified authorities.)

I think the choice to be happy is one of the main choices we have to make in order to succeed in life – probably even more important than the choice of President (though please go vote in any case!) Luckily Buddha gave loads of practical advice that anyone can follow on how we can make that choice and stick to it. It’s not just for our own sakes either — if we are happy, we are in a far stronger position to make others happy. That guy in Aeropostale was helping make people’s day.

Getting over ourselves

As Buddha pointed out again and again, the best way to become happier is to get over ourselves and cherish others instead. But this can give rise to some trepidation; namely, if I care more and more about others, and take responsibility for them, won’t I just end up more stressed out than I am already?! It’s already bad enough worrying non-stop about the kids and the aged parents and the people at work and the refugees and the shelter animals — how can I add limitless living beings to the mix and not go mad? And when will I ever get another moment off? There’ll always be something to worry about, something that I have to do.

The other day I told the story of Patti Joshua in South Africa, who brought Buddha’s teachings to over 11,000 children in the rural areas of KwaZulu Natal; and I quoted her friend as saying, “There was always space in her heart for one more.” But she never worried. She had such a huge heart that there was plenty of room in it for everyone, with space left over. By increasing our compassion we can widen our own heart space, and with wisdom we can deepen it.mountain-3

Spread too thin?

With compassion to liberate all living beings, we understand that everybody hurts sometimes, and we want to take the suffering away from all of them, until we feel responsible for everyone — possessing the superior intention of a Bodhisattva. But we need to learn to do this without being overwhelmed or anxious.

Worry and existential tiredness, however, do not come from the concern we have for others but from a tightness born of ignorance about our true nature, and attachment to externals, to appearances. So to go wide, I think, without spreading ourselves thin, we have to go deep.

As Buddha pointed out, our mind is like a vast clear boundless ocean, with limitless potential. All his teachings are relating to that potential, which we all share – the spiritual path is about accessing more and more of that inner peace, love, wisdom, compassion, faith, and utter happiness, where we end up with not a care in the world even as we work for the welfare of all.

Take time out

There are many ways to go about this, to go deeper so we can go wider. Simply taking some time out each day to meditate and experience the restorative nature of our own peaceful mountain-4minds, even through a simple breathing meditation for example, is invaluable. And I bet we can all find ten or fifteen minutes for this if we really want to. For me, absorbing in meditation each day has always been the happiest and sanest part of my life, setting me up for the rest of the day. As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says in How to Transform Your Life:

Unless we make some time every day to meditate, we will find it very difficult to maintain peaceful and positive minds in our daily life, and our spiritual practice as a whole will suffer. Since the real purpose of meditation is to increase our capacity to help others, taking time each day to meditate is not selfish.

You know what happens if you never get off the couch to exercise, the results are not pretty. In a similar way, we need to tune daily into our Buddha nature and faith in our own potential — ideally in our own enlightenment — or we are almost bound to get swept up in superficials and feel overly busy and out of our depth.

If we are so busy changing externals that we have no time to change our mind, we are, according to Buddhism, being lazy and wasting time. It’s a bit like trying to chop down an old oak tree with a blunt axe for hours or days on end, not taking out the necessary few minutes to sharpen it.

Your happy seat

But if we enjoy some time out to relax into our hearts and experience the peace and clarity of our mind, observing in our own experience how all our thoughts arise from and fall into our root awareness, we will be able to let go of our busy, overwrought imaginings for we will no longer be grasping at them. If we make our deep ocean-like mind peaceful, wise, and loving, its emerging waves will be too. Otherwise, we can become so identified with mountain-2the waves and froth on the surface of the ocean that we forget where they’re coming from and think that they are arising under their own power, out of our control. And the detail then feels overwhelming; we easily lose the plot. As Geshe-la says:

We have to manage our time and energy in such a way that we can be of maximum benefit to others, and to do this effectively we need time alone to recover our strength, collect our thoughts, and see things in perspective.

Who doesn’t love vacations!? Most people I know love the idea of being able to get away from their worries and enjoy space and freedom. Frankly, we could be doing this every day of our lives if we wanted to, sans the expense and jet lag. Tibetan meditators called their meditation seat “the happy seat” for good reason.  

This ability to relax and go deep, to access our own inner peace in order to cope, has always been important. But in our complicated, fast, over-stimulated modern society, I would argue that it is now a crucial life skill that everyone needs to learn as soon as possible.

More in the next article. Meanwhile, I’d like to invite you to share any practical experience on how you cherish others without letting the responsibility worry you.

Related articles:

How is your meditation going?

Want quicker results from your meditation? Start where you are.

Clarity of mind meditation

Ten ways to be happier

Who doesn’t want to be happier? That, and wanting to be free from suffering, are the two basic wishes of all living beings, from world leaders to the smallest gnat. Generally, however, as Shantideva says:

Although living beings wish to be free from suffering,
They run straight towards the causes of suffering;
And although they wish for happiness,
Out of ignorance they destroy it like a foe. ~ Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

Someone at work posted an article called Ten Simple Science-Based Ways to be Happier Today, perhaps not surprisingly one of the most read leadership articles of 2013, and it inspired me to give a Buddhist version.

1.      Exercise more

As it explains in the article, exercise helps prevent depression, helps us relax, increases our brain power, is good for our physical health and weight, etc, etc. This we all know, really.

exercizeMy teacher Geshe Kelsang encourages people to stay healthy through exercise and good diet. Although our mind goes on forever and so we need to put most of our effort into keeping our mind healthy and increasingly strong, we also have to look after this meaty body despite its limited shelf life. At the moment we have a precious human life with which to help ourselves and everyone else, so we need to take care of this body as our vehicle, rather as an ambulance driver takes good care of her ambulance so she can drive around helping people. Those with a Tantric empowerment even have a commitment to take care of their body, not needlessly weaken it, let alone destroy it.

Prostrations are recommended if we want to combine our exercise directly with a spiritual practice. I think with a little mindfulness it is also possible to transform any exercise into the spiritual path – for example, when I get a chance to swim laps, I enjoy thinking Dharma thoughts, and bathing in water-like blessings and/or prostrating to an ocean of compassion, etc. Maybe some of you do some creative things, care to share?

See # 5 below too.

2.      Sleep more

“Sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.”

For those who have not gained control over their deeper levels of consciousness, sleep may come from dullness and its imprints — but we still need it!!

For ordinary beings sleep helps to restore the energy of the body and to bring the elements of the body into harmony, thereby making the body comfortable and prolonging life. ~ How to Understand the Mind page 166

The book also says:

Sleep is also the basis of the development of all the things we experience in dreams.

remember you are dreamingI think this refers to the fact that the appearances in dreams actually arise from the dreaming mind, are perceptions of the dreaming mind. This is no different to when we are awake — our mind is the basis for the perceptions of our waking world too. There is nothing outside the mind. So dreaming can really help us to understand this, to increase our wisdom.

Also the yoga of sleeping taught in Tantra is incredibly helpful and time-saving – better than spending almost a third of this precious, hard-to-attain human life zonked out. Sleep doesn’t have to be a waste of time. We can actually learn to use our sleeping mind to meditate if we train in the six stages of Mahamudra Tantra.

At least it is a good idea last thing each night to let go of and purify the bad parts of the day, not entering our dream world with a deluded, upset, anxious mind. There is nothing to stop us turning our mind in a positive direction as we lay down, and we can ask the Buddhas and the Dakinis to bless our minds while we sleep. They will.

Trijang Rinpoche, Geshe Kelsang’s own root Spiritual Guide, even recommends a nap if we are feeling negative or anxious during the day. You can find out more about the yoga of sleeping in your free ebook Modern Buddhism.

3.      Move closer to work

‘Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”’

Although I do travel quite a lot, I’m lucky in that my daily commute at the moment is a rather delightful bike ride through the streets of Denver. But if we have no choice, we can remember that everything is transformable. Actually being stuck in traffic can give us the opportunity to listen to teachings, develop a happy mind, practice patience, remember the kindness of the people in the cars around (for without them, there would be no road), and so on. We don’t actually have to be “stuck”. Those moments of pause throughout our day — eg, at red lights, when our computer spends an age booting up, waiting for an appointment at the doctor’s office, last in the long line at Starbucks — are a perfect chance to check in with our mind to see if it is peaceful and positive.

4.      Spend times with friends and family

“The only thing that really matters in life is your relationships to other people.”

A study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics states that our relationships are worth more than $100,000! Not sure how they got that figure … but we do all know that money doesn’t buy us happiness, don’t we?! Nor does status etc. At least theoretically we know this, though this recent New York Times article shows that people still chase after more and more money and prestige … we chain ourselves to our own desks.

I am sitting at an airport café writing this, and enjoying the loud laughter, almost hysterical laughter, coming from a group of Bosnian friends sitting at a table close to me. They are having a blast! Love is where it’s at. If spending time with friends and family brings out our love, it’ll definitely make us happy. If it brings out our frustration, dislike, and attachment — not so much.Pope and little girl

Everyone can be a friend. To a Bodhisattva, a so called “friend of the world”, who has trained in universal love and compassion, everyone is a friend. I liked the recent footage of Pope Francis jumping out of his Fiat 500 every few feet, or so it seemed, to hug random strangers!

However, I think we also need time alone, and to learn to love being on our own, happy with ourselves, both in general and if we are interested in pursuing a spiritual path. I have spent many, maybe most, of my happiest hours alone. There are numerous benefits to solitude explained in the scriptures and experienced by past and present spiritual practitioners.attachment 3

Alone or surrounded, it all depends on what we are doing with our mind. If we have love, we can be on a retreat in the middle of nowhere and feel very connected and happy. If we don’t, we can be sitting in the midst of family and friends and feel left out and lonely.

The most reliable friends, if you ask me, are enlightened beings, holy beings — those who’ve perfected their love, compassion, and wisdom, whether Buddhist or otherwise. They unrelentingly see the good in us, looking beyond our faults to our pure nature, and are always there for us. We could do a lot worse than getting used to hanging out with them on a daily basis, sharing with them our good and our bad times.

5.      Go outside

I love going outside, personally, enjoying the elements. So, it seems, does everyone else around here (Colorado) who work so they can play – I sometimes wonder if a love of the great outdoors has supplanted the work ethic I’ve found everywhere else in America …

I’ve read various studies that say getting into nature is very helpful, and one thing I enjoy doing when I am walking around is the Tantric self-generation practice of remembering that the 4 elements of water, wind, fire (heat), and earth are the four Dakinis – Dakini, Lama, and Khandarohi, and Rupini. This blissful practice gets the inner elements into balance – good for both the mind and the body. You can check this out in The New Guide to Dakini Land.staunton state park 2

I think a wonderful practice while outside is to offer the flowers, sky, and other delights to the Buddhas around you and at your heart, with the wish that everyone enjoy a Pure Land.

6.      Help others

“To make yourself feel happier, you should help others.”

“We scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.” ~ Martin Seligman

Cherishing others is the way to solve our problems. And we can help others practically in so many ways, it is the Bodhisattva’s way of life – Bodhisattvas promise two things, to get enlightened and to help others practically. Some of the moral disciplines of helping others in the Bodhisattva vow include, for example, going to the assistance of those in need, relieving the distress of others, and giving wealth to others. The article notes that spending money on other people, called “prosocial spending,” also boosts happiness. In Buddhism, generosity is taught to be a major source of happiness – the Bodhisattva feels amazing joy just at the word “Give”!

If you’re not sure practically how you’re supposed to help more people, Nagarjuna’s advice on the subject can be very helpful:

Even if we are not able to help others directly
We should still try to develop a beneficial intention.
If we develop this intention more and more strongly,
We shall naturally find ways to help others. ~  Universal Compassion 

The article also says:

“Volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction.”

And as you may have noticed already, there are often plenty of opportunities to volunteer at your local Buddhist Center 🙂 Or animal shelter. Or wherever.

Of course part of all this is avoiding the opposite, harming others.

7.      Practice smiling

I have sometimes wondered if I’d look more cool if I smiled less and scowled more. I have concluded that this may well be the case, but overall I’d rather be happy than cool.fake smile

Of course, you gotta mean it – fake smiles don’t count.

Interestingly:

“Smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks.”

This list doesn’t mention laughing at the ridiculousness of samsara/sense of humor, but perhaps that can be snuck in here.

8.      Plan a trip but don’t take one

I had to think about this one 🙂 Then I thought about the power of imagination. We don’t ever really go anywhere anyhow.

9.      Meditate
all you need is inside youNo list on becoming happier would be anywhere near complete without this. In fact, the things on this list can only make us happy if our mind is peaceful, and the function of meditation is to make our mind peaceful.

Buddha explained that due to ignorance we do a lot of hallucinating. On the most basic level, we hallucinate that happiness comes from outside ourselves. We almost always assume that it is to be found out there somewhere – if I can get the right partner, the right job, the right car, the right pair of shoes, etc I’ll be just fine! And until I have them, I won’t.

This is not true. What we need to be happy is mental freedom.

We chain ourselves to external sources of happiness that cannot deliver the goods. I think that uncontrolled desire is a bit like playing the slot machines. Maybe we hit some kind of jackpot — someone returns our desire for a while until one or the other of us has had enough, or we enjoy our promotion until we realize it is too much like work – but by now we are addicted to trying again and again. A morbid fascination – maybe the oranges will all line up this time!! – distracts us from looking for happiness within. Sometimes it works due to some good karma, frankly more often it doesn’t – gambling addictbut until then we keep trying, bound to the machine in a dingy crypt full of fellow gambling addicts. We need to get out of here and into the sunshine: “I’m free!” Meditation does that for us.

Happiness is a state of mind, a feeling, and therefore its real causes lie within the mind. So of course meditation has to be on this list because with it we go direct to the source. Familiarizing our mind with positivity is the most direct, effective way to become happy. This in fact is what the article says:

“Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down, it’s been often proven to be the single most effective way to live a happier life.”

This whole Kadampa Life blog is about meditation, but I’ll let the scientists conclude this section:

“… neuroimaging … concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants’ brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.”

And

“Research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness.”

10.  Practice gratitude

“Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.”

Buddha had a lot to say about this. We do some beautiful meditations on cherishing others by remembering their kindness. We are grateful to living beings and we are grateful to enlightened beings, both. I wrote more about that here.

Thanks everyone for reading. I have only touched on a few things here. I’m sure you have a lot more ideas and it’d be great if you felt like sharing them in the comments.

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.)

valentine 3Is 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.

Arrows of attachment
Arrows of attachment

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.

bliss 1Instead 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 love prisonerconstantly 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 destroylove cosmic 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.