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Happiness and Joy

I want to just continue on with this third segment today, which is um entitled Happiness and Joy. Now, some of you might be thinking, wow, this is a real downer. Why did you bring that up? Some people really don't want to talk about happiness and joy and think it's unrealistic to do. So, you know, I know people like that, they'd say, okay, this is where I get off the program, and some people are very attached to talking about things in that kind of ebullient way, but I think what we want to do is take a grounded look at our own sense of happiness and joy, because whether we're aware of it or not, that's what we're going to try to steer towards. Um you know, one of the things that Dalai lama says is that everybody and all the buddhist teachers, everybody wants happiness and nobody actually wants to suffer and that's in its own way profound. You would um you would look at it and say, well you would never know that to look at how sometimes how we're behaving, you know, that that's what we...

want, but all beings even um even if you look at the squirrel who was borrowing its way into my house, which is now creating some mild suffering from me, the squirrel is only trying to create happiness and well being for itself. So when you see things that way, even bad behavior is, sometimes we say, it's uh my friend Krishna Das, he says, you know, everybody wants to be happy, happy, but maybe some of us have bad aim, you know, so if you see that people are sort of steering towards that kind of um happiness in their own terms, it can it can make you feel more sympathetic towards. Um and I have a deeper understanding. Um then we also say that, you know, we we can become confused about how to achieve that and also how to have clarity about what we even, what would even give us real happiness. And sometimes people have uh goals and aspirations and things that they think are going to make them happy, that actually create further suffering. I think if we all look and I really want to get into this is an active process for us, how do we organize ourselves for happiness? Like if you really look at your lives and say, you know, this would make me happy, that would make me happy. And I think we might find that it's a little bit project oriented uh as opposed to just kind of um allowing spontaneity and sort of uh energy of the moment to give us that kind of contentment and feeling. So I thought I'd take the example of a vacation. You know, people, people go on vacation to be happy. Don't we take a vacation because we think will be happier there, you know, and there's such a concerted effort on a vacation to be happy and we plan so hard and we think we'll go to this hotel of that hotel or you know this island, you can see people, I used to teach a workshop in Maho Bay in the Virgin Islands which is paradise as far as human earth is concerned if you've never been there, it's on ST john in the Virgin Islands and you could see the people coming from their urban existences, you know, and they'd be on the boat from, you know, there's only a fairy goes to Saint john you can't fly there. And so they would all have flown in, they have all their gear, they're all organized going to retreat kind of like vacation spiritual retreat and the boat you see them. Uh huh. Are we there yet? You're out in the middle of the water going towards this beautiful in this beautiful tropical environment and you can't turn it off. So even the vacation time that we take um I can tell you for sure from personal experience, do an hour of sitting practice better vacation than a week in the Virgin Islands. Ha because really if we can't change our mind internally no matter what we do to the external environment, it's only gonna be a temporary relief at best and maybe even torment us further. You know now we get there and we had it all planned out, we're gonna go to the beach and scuba diving and so forth and then we get down there and there's clouds across it starts to rain. You see people on this is one out of four days I have here, this is my vacation is being ruined. So, you know, um, this idea of working with our internal environment towards happiness and not focusing only on the manipulating the external environment is a very important thing that we're going to look at. So giving it back to you what makes you happy. That's what I'm asking. I'm asking our friends out in the online world truly, let's take a chance here. What actually makes you happy and what is your notion of happiness? Um mm hmm. You know in Bhutan, I don't know if you know that country, but it's a small country north of India that somehow has escaped the sort of crush of entering the modern world and it's a buddhist little tiny little buddhist kingdom, It's kind of very sweet place. And they actually have something there that has been written about called the um um the gross national happiness index, The G. N. H. You know how we have the GMP here gross National product and that's how we're measuring, how are we doing, you know, they actually are using a different measurement, but how the rulers of that country are trying to figure out if the people are happy enough there and how to make them happier. Um I mean I'm not saying it's a perfect place, it's on this earth, they have their own problems of course, but just this orientation towards thinking about the well being, you know, of of our lives here and not just a mad crush towards some kind of project success. You know, I think this is an idea that's happening all over the place and we're just going to look at it together here today. So what I want to ask is what's your P. H. I. Today? You see what that would be Personal happiness index? Okay. Yeah. And how do you measure it? Um and I want to lead us through a series of contemplations to at least just even think about the possibility that you relate to this idea, you can define the happiness anyway. You like that's the first rule. We're getting off that spiritually judgmental kind of like uh you know my ideas or the highway. However you want to define happiness in this case is up to you. And I want to ask you a series of questions that will marinate on together. Uh and maybe we can do this as a contemplative practice and then have a good ripping good conversation with both are live audience online people. So if you will just indulge in, just go on this ride with us for a little bit, if you can take your meditation seat, this is sort of a contemplative kind of practice. Yeah, and I want to um ask a series of questions. You don't have to write these down, but just sort of process them through your mind as we're talking about them. How happy are you? That's the first question really, think about your own happiness. And are you happy? Are you miserable or you sort of happy? Are you extremely happy in general? The general tone of your life sort of in this time of your life, how would you define describe your happiness? How do you like your job, your work? How much do you enjoy being at work? Are there obstacles there for your happiness? Are there things there that or um that you enjoy more than others? What's the overall tone of your relationship with your job? How happy are you with your family life? You could include your extended family. They're your parents, grandparents, Children, cousins. How happy are you with your spouse, Your partner in life, your nearest and dearest. If you don't have one, you can think about that a little bit. Would you like to? How do you visualize that? How happy are you about your body? Do you like your body? Does your body give you joy? Do you enjoy being in that body being with that body? Yeah. Mm. How about your personality? How you express yourself in the world? Are you happy with your personality? Are you happy with the amount of money that you have your relationship to money in general? Your relationship, the livelihood career and any topics that kind of relate to any of those, just sort of scan your life and sort of see which parts that are kind of lighting up as you know, radiating a sense of health and well being and which ones feel like a little bit troubling. So with that in mind, what would you change if you could change it? How would you like it to be different than it is? And if you can see those things that you would change to be happier, what's stopping you from making those changes? What's between you and actually just making those changes? And then overall question, what kind of activities? Mhm. Couldn't would you consider engaging in in order to help make that transformation? What really in your heart of hearts do you feel would be helpful to, you would make a positive contribution to that to becoming more genuinely happy and more joyful in your life. And try not to add an extra layer of evaluation. We're just sort of innocently trying to take a look at our own existence here. This is just one sort of way of doing that. So if you can avoid getting all torn up and whether this is a good idea or not, just go along with the exercise. How happy are you with your job, your family, your spouse, your body, your personality, what are the obstacles to your happiness and what would you change if you could and what's stopping you from making that change? You know, with no judgment. Just sort of look at it and see what you can discover. So that was a chance to really just kind of scan. Didn't take very long. It's very honest. Hopefully just innocent convert exercise. I see your faces are all in different shapes at the moment. I've kind of bewilderment, which is good. We should we should let ourselves get a little bewildered every once in a while. So just try to imagine one of us getting kind of intense about our practice and going, you know, I gotta go all the way through this year, I've been dilly dallying long enough here and buddha was like that, he was intense practitioner if nothing else, of course lot of other things, but there was a lot of focus and heat in the way he went after this, you know, and he's sitting, he tried in India at the time. There were a lot of aesthetic practices that were very popular, you know, going on very little food. So they say if you starve the body, the spirit is going to emerge from that. So he theoretically was down to one grain of rice that day, you know. Uh they would even meditate in campfires, you know, to sort of torture the body. And these practices are extent today to some extent in certain traditions where you go, if you could just turn the body off and torture the body then somehow you can get to the spiritual dimension of the, of the reality. And he tried all those things. What's interesting is that he was an experimental kind of person. So he tried all those things and he was sitting there and supposedly and other great meditators to have tried these kind of things like the miller rapper that we talked about yesterday. So he's obviously very gaunt at this point and kind of fragile as you can imagine. You know, that's kind of not enough food for a human body. So he's sitting there like in this kind of intense Hayes of austere practice and he hears this, I imagine it this way. I actually did this on one of my records. this maiden named Sujata is she sort of carries she's selling it would be my version would be the good humor truck comes by the modern telling of the tale, the good humor truck comes up but she comes by singing and she has this kind of rice cruel yogurt kind of thing that she's selling and she offers it to him, he goes, he just says I've gone as far as I can go in this direction, let me just have something to eat now and eats it and he feels much stronger and much better and much better able to meditate. So this is credited the beginning of the middle way. You know, it's not a question of like stuffing our face and like you know lunch is over, everybody come back in here, we're going to talk some more and meditate or the other extreme of like you know, starving yourself and kind of really denying any of the essential activities of life. So that's um supposedly then he from then on he had a sort of more middle way approach of avoiding too much the extremes. Um and the thing that then happened that relates to your story is he was sitting there practice and he's still in the mental domain, he's trying to find out where is this space? This enlightened space, where is this enlightenment everybody's talking about? And he's looking everywhere for it, you know? And and then he has a flash memory of his childhood, just like you, the fig tree in his grandma's backyard, whatever the equivalent was. And he just has this simple memory of being happy as a child and running around playing, and he goes, it's right here, this feeling that I'm taught that I've been seeking everywhere is right here, I've already experience that I have this well being. I can reference my own experience, I can come inside my own experience and find it.