Monday, January 16, 2017

Unconditional happiness

Enlightenment has been described in many ways. In Hinduism it's about liberation (moksha). In Buddhism it's often called nirvana (extinguishment), though depending on the tradition you may more frequently see it described as "awakening" or "realization."

Just what is this that you're extinguishing, or awakening / being liberated from, or realizing?

Perhaps one clue comes from the Dalai Lama, who notes:
I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.
Of course, you'll find dissenting opinions even within Tibetan Buddhism, and many people argue that a life of only happiness would be boring or impossible (because you can only be happy if you have some unhappiness to compare it with).

But suppose for a moment that unconditional happiness were desirable. For example, suppose the people are right who say that such happiness provides a foundation for both pleasant and unpleasant experiences, and is thus not contradictory. What would be required to achieve such happiness?

Well, if it were truly unconditional, then it could not depend (i.e., be conditioned) on anything. This may not sound too radical. Everyone knows it's possible to be happy despite difficult circumstances, maybe even despite arbitrarily difficult ones. But to be truly unconditional, it cannot depend even on neurotransmitters; even on your own brain.

That probably sounds preposterous to you: obviously if I had perfect control of the Buddha's biology, I could take his happiness from him. Otherwise, physicalism and causality would go out the window and nothing would make any sense.

Of course, depending on your reading, Buddhism and Hinduism do say such preposterous things.

If you do not believe in such a thing as truly unconditional happiness (and all that it requires), then of course you will be unable to discover it. Even if you do believe in it, you may find your mind generating all sorts of reasons why it cannot be done right now. There's probably a lot of practice that needs to be done first, as evidenced by all those monks who spend thousands of hours meditating. More conventionally, there are bills that need to be paid, mouths that need feeding, etc.

In other words, you don't really believe that you're free of the past actions that made you who you are today (i.e., liberated from your karma). You believe that there really is such a thing as time that will change stuff until one day you are ready to realize the truth: that you are untethered right now, and always have been.

Perhaps you can see why the more radical teachers insist that there are no practices that will get you closer to the goal (even though conventionally they sure feel that way). The switch that gets flipped isn't caused by anything outside of yourself -- after all, how ironic would it be if something outside yourself caused you to realize that nothing outside yourself can cause you to be a certain way?

Instead, that switch is more like a decision. You simply decide that your joy is not under the control of anything else. Like any other decision, there's no way to really prepare for it. The phase of gathering evidence and weighing the outcomes can take as long as you like, but the decision is a discrete event. One moment you haven't decided, and the next moment you have.

But unlike other decisions, the decision is the outcome. Deciding to buy a certain car does not magically buy the car. But deciding to be happy? Keep it up for long enough and see what unfolds.

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