Everyone wants to be happy. In order to be happy, you first have to know what happiness is. You have to know its nature in order to aim for it. If you know what it is, and hold the thought of it in your mind, then this can help you find it. The Buddha said, “Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.” [8] If you know the nature of unconditional happiness, you can bring it into your life.
When I say happiness, you’ll recall that I not mean sense pleasures. There is nothing wrong with pleasures of the senses, but they do not constitute true happiness. Real happiness is far richer and deeper than any sense pleasure. It comes from deep inside of you. It is always there waiting for you to experience. Sense pleasures, on the other hand, result from what happens to you in the world.
The kind of happiness we all seek is lasting. It is lasting because it is independent of circumstances. In other words, it is unconditional. It does not result from anything you do or that is done to you, and it does not go away. It is always there inside of you.
Another type of happiness is the kind that is not always there for you. Happiness of this kind is conditional and results from what happens to you in life. You feel this happiness only if the conditions of your life meet your requirements for happiness. Because your life circumstances constantly change, this happiness will go away once the required conditions are no longer present.
Learning to Experience Unconditional Happiness
In Chapter 3, we’ll explore how to learn to experience unconditional happiness. One need only turn their attention to it and accept happiness without conditions. Absent emotional attachment to desires for the “desirable,” attention may fix solely upon true and unending happiness.
Everyone Wants to Be Happy
If there is one thing in life that is certain (besides “death and taxes”), it is that everyone wants to be happy. Philosophers and religious leaders throughout time have said this. I cannot think of anyone who would disagree. People want numerous things in life, but most of these things are thought to bring happiness, which is what people want most of all.
Aristotle said that happiness, by itself, makes for a life that lacks nothing. It is, in his words, self-sufficient. [9] The Buddha said, “All desire happiness.”[10]
Swami Satchidananda, in his book on yoga, said,
Who would not like to be happy always? Everybody wants that. [11]
St. Thomas Aquinas, the great religious philosopher, also noted that all men want happiness. He said man’s will or innermost direction in life is towards it. In theological terms, he said that to know and love God is to find happiness. He may be saying here that our natural will toward happiness is synonymous with, or because of, our desire to know and love God.[12]
Setting aside what these people have said, it is just common sense that everyone desperately wants to be happy. When you look past nearly all the possessions and circumstances that people want in life, happiness emerges as the true goal. If you ask yourself, why do I want this or why do I want that, it is usually because you believe it will make you happy.
There are other reasons, of course, for what you want in life. For example, people are happy at the idea of having children, but may also be impelled to want children for basic biological reasons. People want food and shelter for reasons that go beyond happiness. People also want sexual gratification. However, basic happiness is what people want most of all.
Wanting Things Because We Believe They Make Us Happy
Obviously, we strive for most things because they will be beneficial to our lives. However, much of the time we also want them because we think they will make us happy. Perhaps hoped-for happiness gives us the major motivation to acquire things or do things. Sometimes, however, it is the only motivation. Aristotle said:
Honor, pleasure, understanding, and every virtue we certainly choose because of themselves, since we would choose each of them even if it had no further result; but we also choose them for the sake of happiness, supposing that through them we shall be happy. [13]
Unlike other things, happiness is something we want only for itself. It is not the means to some other end. In other words, we do not want it because of anything else or because it will lead to something else. Aristotle further said:
Happiness, by contrast, no one ever chooses…for the sake of anything else at all…Happiness, then, is apparently something complete and self-sufficient, since it is the end of the things achievable in action…we regard something as self-sufficient when all by itself it makes a life choiceworthy and lacking nothing; and that is what we think happiness does.[14]
Unconditional Happiness, Conditional Happiness, and Sense Pleasures
It should be clear by now that when I refer to happiness, I usually mean unconditional happiness, which is happiness that does not result from anything. Happiness is natural to you, and is waiting to be uncovered and experienced by you. I may refer to unconditional happiness as happiness, true happiness, real happiness, or lasting happiness.
References in this book to conditional happiness will always refer to the ephemeral, the circumstantial. Such happiness results from good things that happen to you in the world, all destined to fade away when their causes end. You might think of it as a glimpse of real happiness, or a taste of real happiness. Conditional happiness, however, always carries with it the knowledge that it will end. This knowledge can cast a bit of a pall over happiness.
Sense pleasures are the reactions of our senses and emotions to that which is physically pleasing in the world. Tasting something, for example, can give us a sense pleasure. We can sometimes mistake sense pleasures for happiness, as they often accompany feelings of conditional happiness. Sense pleasures do not, however, result in unconditional happiness.
The Nature of Unconditional Happiness
There is no single definition of happiness. However, by looking at the various descriptions that people have shared, we can get a sense of its nature.
A Deep and Lasting Sense of Well-Being
Happiness is a deep emotional and physical sense of well-being. Some describe it as a sense of human flourishing. Well-being or flourishing includes a sense of joy, satisfaction with life, contentment, tranquility, harmony, equanimity, and peace, coupled with the certainty that these feelings will remain indefinitely. This happiness is deep, fulfilling, and is present all of the time. Sensations will at times overwhelm this happiness, but it will still be there when the sensations are over.
Aristotle described happiness as a feeling of eudaimonia, which is the Greek word for “human flourishing.” He said anyone experiencing happiness has the best experience possible.
The Buddha described happiness as “what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease.” St. Thomas Aquinas described happiness as “man's perfect good,” and “man's supreme perfection.” [15]
Unconditional happiness is not a mere sensation, such as delight or pleasure. Delight and pleasure can sometimes mimic happiness, and may even contribute to happiness, but these sensations are transitory. They come and go.
If you fall in love, for example, the thrill of love will be your focus, and you will feel many exciting emotions. But even when passions cool, your experience of unconditional happiness can be there for you. It will help you build a rich relationship. As you settle into day-to-day life with your new spouse or partner, your ability to experience real happiness will help keep your relationship new and interesting.
If tragedy happens in your life, grief can overtake you. After a time, however, your experience of unconditional happiness can help create a place in your heart where you no longer grieve, but lovingly remember.
Unconditional Happiness Is Not the Result of Anything
Unconditional happiness does not result from reactions to physical and emotional stimuli. Chemicals can induce such reactions. Instead, unconditional happiness arises from within an individual and is always present. You know it as coming from yourself.
Happiness as an Advanced State of Awareness
God-consciousness, nirvana, self-realization, God-realization, liberation, and enlightenment, are all said to be advanced states of awareness. People describe all of these states as happy and joyful. Unconditional happiness is associated with all of these states of awareness.
Certainty That This Happiness Will Not End
A defining characteristic of unconditional happiness is the certainty that the feeling will not end. Real happiness does not depend on anything and does not result from anything you have. It just is. When you experience this happiness, you sense that it is endless.
As I sit in meditation, and experience real happiness, I get a deep sense that what I experience is something entirely different from everything else I experience in life.
As I go about my day, I have all kinds of feelings, some good and some bad. Underlying all of these feelings, but barely noticeable, is the awareness that they are temporary. My experience of unconditional happiness, especially in meditation, does not include any feeling of it being temporary.
Happiness as a Feeling of Satisfaction with Life
Unconditional happiness can mean a feeling of deep satisfaction about your life as a whole. It is not a feeling about anything in particular. Instead, it is a feeling of satisfaction with your life up to this moment, and about your expectations for life in the future.
The following are five standard questions used by psychologists to measure satisfaction with life. A person answers each question using a 7-point scale, with 1 being “strongly disagree” and 7 being “strongly agree.” A higher overall score indicates a higher degree of satisfaction with life.
Satisfaction with Life Scale Questions
1. In most ways, my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
3. I am satisfied with my life.
4. So far, I have gotten the important things I want in life.
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.[16]
To use this scale, add the responses to each question to come up with your score. Here is the way the scores translate to the degree of satisfaction with life:
30 - 35 — Very high score; highly satisfied
25- 29 — High score for satisfaction
20 - 24 — Average score for satisfaction
15 - 19 — Slightly below average in life satisfaction
10 - 14 — Dissatisfied
5 - 9 — Extremely dissatisfied. [17]
The Source of Unconditional Happiness
What is the source of unconditional happiness? The source is you. Real happiness comes from inside of you. It comes from deep inside of you and does not result from anything that happens to you. As it arises, you experience that happiness merely by allowing yourself to do so.
The experience of real happiness is always there. You can say that it is natural to you. However, your ability to experience it can be obscured or blocked. In both yogic and Buddhist philosophy, if you can eliminate what obscures it, what remains is real happiness.
As we will see in Chapter 3, what prevents you from experiencing unconditional happiness is that your attention may be hostage to your endless desires for what you mistakenly think will make you happy. Once you let go of these relentless desires, natural happiness emerges.
The Buddhists like to use the analogy of the teacup. When you pour out the tea, you reveal the empty cup.[18] The emptiness of the cup was always there; you just needed to remove the tea to see it. In the same way, happiness is always there, and to experience it you just need to remove from your life your obsession with desires for what you think will make you happy.
The Ultimate Source of Happiness
When I say that happiness comes from deep inside of you, I am speaking of the source of your mind and body’s experience of happiness. That experience in turn has a source, which I call the ultimate Source of happiness.
That Source may express as the human body itself. The body may be able to be happy, all by itself. Alternatively, something other than the human body may trigger that experience. It may be the body’s reaction to the Divine, God, or some other energy of the universe. Some people say there is one energy or Source, others say there are many. People have many opinions, but nobody knows with certainty.
The Buddha says we create or construct the experience in our minds, regardless of its ultimate Source. In other words, regardless of what our senses take in from outside of ourselves, our experience of happiness is the creation of our minds.
I talk about the ideas surrounding the ultimate Source of happiness in Chapter 5.
How Happy Can You Be?
Some psychologists who study happiness use the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS). This measure of happiness is not the same as the Satisfaction with Life Scale, discussed earlier. Rather than asking about your satisfaction with life, the SHS presents four questions, each of which asks you (in different ways) to subjectively indicate your level of happiness. You measure your level of happiness using a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being the happiest. In tests on many participants, the average scores ran from 4.5 to 5.5. Those scoring 4 or less were encouraged to seek testing for depression. A score of 5.6 or above, on the other hand, indicated a person who was happier than average. [19]
Do these levels of happiness show what is possible? Are most of us doomed to live at a level of happiness that is just a point above depression? I do not believe so.
Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Buddha observed that we live in a state of suffering, and we do not know it. People who thought themselves happy found out that they were not. Perhaps many considered themselves happy because they were happier than average. The Buddha introduced people to an entirely new scale of happiness. Measured against his scale of possible happiness, nearly everyone was indeed suffering.
In 2012, the London Daily Mail ran a story about Matthieu Ricard, a French-academic-turned-Buddhist monk whom the article called the “happiest man in the world.” Scientists studied Mr. Ricard’s level of happiness by examining the activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex, which is an area of the brain said to reflect feelings of happiness.[20] His readings were higher than anything previously reported.[21] The monk’s extraordinary level of happiness was attributed to regular meditation.
What the Buddha seems to be telling us, and what Mr. Ricard demonstrates, is that our potential for happiness is far beyond anything we can imagine.
Swami Satchidananda said, “The same world can be a heaven or a hell.” [22] Here the Swami may be saying that we have an extraordinary power to make ourselves happy. Likewise, Jesus hinted at happiness on Earth that is greater than any of us can imagine when he said that Heaven is “spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it,” [23] and that “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” [24]
Conditional Happiness
Temporal, conditional happiness is felt when something good happens in your life. For example, it is the feeling you have as a result of getting the job you wanted or having your girlfriend or boyfriend say “Yes” to a proposal of marriage. It is the feeling of watching your baby take a first step. Conditional happiness is about as close to real (unconditional) happiness as most of us get. However, it is not the real thing.
Conditional happiness seems to come when your mind says that it is all right to be happy. It seems that your mind has certain rules, requirements, or conditions for happiness. When you meet those conditions, you feel happy. Once those conditions no longer exist, the happiness goes away. Therefore, this kind of happiness is contingent upon time and circumstance. (The mind’s rules and requirements for happiness are detailed in Chapter 3.)
Conditional happiness is not as deep as unconditional happiness. It is probably not as deep because some part of you knows it will end. As I said earlier, a defining characteristic of unconditional happiness is the sense that it will never end. This knowing makes for the deep sense of well-being associated with it. Conditional happiness, on the other hand, will end. As conditional happiness may have the same source as unconditional happiness, the awareness that it is temporary may be in the background. This awareness undermines the experience of happiness that you could have if it were unconditional.
The first time I saw my daughter walk was pure delight and pleasure for me. It was obviously delightful for her as well, judging from the huge grin she had on her face. I remember very well how happy I was. However, my happiness was temporary. For a moment, I allowed myself to be happy, and then the rush of everyday cares took over.
You can experience conditional happiness when you fulfill one of your desires. For example, if you believe that getting a certain job will make you happy, and you get that job, you may be happy for a time. The job itself is not necessarily the cause of this happiness. Instead, because you got the job, you let yourself feel happy.
If you win the lottery, then for a time everything will seem golden. You will be happy. But it will probably not be because of the money. Perhaps you believe that you should be happy if you win the lottery, so you permit yourself to be happy.
The happiness you experience from getting a new job or winning the lottery will be temporary. Once you acclimate or adapt to your new job or your new wealth, you go back to your everyday cares, and happiness is gone.
In a sense, anything new and pleasant has the power to allow you to experience happiness because it distracts you from your ever-present unfulfilled desires. For young children, everything is new and has the power to distract them. For example, while you cannot talk a child out of being unhappy, every parent knows the trick of distracting a child. It is amazing how children can go from miserable to happy in the blink of an eye.
Anna, a seventeen-year-old girl, has a crush on a boy in her class. One day he smiles, says hello, and asks, “Would you like to go to a movie with me?” Her sense of happiness is immediate, because right then everything in life is perfect.
After you get used to something, you do not react to it much, one way or the other. It has lost its power to elicit a reaction.
For example, Anna and her dreamboat start dating, and for Anna the next three months are a dream. After that, her normal angst returns. Still, they are in love, and the boy has the power to make her periodically very happy. They marry. By the time she is forty, they are old friends and sometime lovers. Her husband’s power to give her ideal happiness is now gone.
As we age, most of what happens has lost its power to distract and delight us. If you are counting on the same-old-things to divert you and make you happy, you are out of luck. You are pretty much doomed to an existence of boredom, vague discontent, or actual depression.
It occurs to me that conditional happiness is like a new diet. A new diet can work for a while, but you adjust to it and then the weight starts coming back. Likewise, a new circumstance can bring you happiness, but once you adapt to it, you are back where your started.
Sense Pleasures
Most people, upon reflection, will acknowledge that sense pleasures are not the same as happiness. Delight, pleasure, and excitement, produced by sensations, are sense pleasures and can all be wonderful. However, they are not real happiness because they do not come from inside of you, and because they are inherently transitory.
In this book, I am using the term sense pleasures to indicate physical and emotional reactions to those things that your six senses perceive. The six senses are sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and mental perception. Notice the addition of the sixth sense, mental perception. All senses take into awareness what happens in the world, and mental perception is part of that process.
Sense pleasures include physical reactions to what happens. These reactions result from such everyday activities as eating and drinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling something. Sense pleasures also include emotional reactions resulting from your perception of things that happen. For example, if you see something funny you laugh with delight. If you see something romantic, you react with a feeling of warmth.
Many pleasures make your body feel good. The taste of food, the experience of sex, and the warmth of a fire on a cold night are all pleasurable. They all feel good, but they are not happiness. While happiness may accompany pleasurable sensations, it does not require such sensations. For example, you can feel happy even if your body is in physical pain.
The nature of what brings pleasure is very personal. For me, the taste of chocolate ice cream is extremely pleasurable. Other flavors are good too, but for me chocolate is the best. This feeling is mostly physical for me, but there is a mental component as well. I probably have old memories of happy times associated with eating chocolate ice cream.
There are biological reasons for the pleasure we feel, and there are probably scientific reasons for individual preference as well. But who cares? We all know that different things give different people pleasure. Individual differences are the spices of human life. If the same things gave everyone pleasure, everyone would be doing the same things.
By their very nature, sense pleasures start out great, but can turn to misery. Misery can result from them being indulged in to excess. A glass of wine is a wonderful thing, but seven glasses of wine can make you sick. Misery can also result from the loss of some pleasurable thing. A new toy for a child can be pure joy to him or her, but if the toy breaks, the child can be devastated. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna warns:
Pleasure from the senses seems like nectar at first, but it is bitter as poison in the end. Both in the beginning and at the end, this happiness is a delusion.[25]
If you give a baby something it wants, such as milk or a toy, the baby is content. A baby cannot tell us if it is happy in its contentment, but babies certainly seem happy when they get what they want. Babies are highly reactive little beings. Their feelings are directly linked to what is happening to them RIGHT NOW.
Take something away from a small child and see what you get. A parent who denies something to a toddler may watch in horror as the child throws its little body to the floor, crying so hard you think he or she will burst.
The important thing to know is that temporary sensations (good and bad) result from your reaction to a stimulus. The child gets a toy, and the child is happy; the toy is taken away, and the child is miserable. These sensations are automatic. They are merely physical and emotional reactions to stimuli.
Comparing Conditional Happiness with Sense Pleasures
Let us compare the experience of conditional happiness, described above, with sense pleasures. Sense pleasures are pleasant physical and emotional experiences occasioned by stimuli taken in by the senses. They usually result from automatic reactions of your mind and body. For example, if you see something beautiful, taste something sweet, or read something you enjoy, you respond with pleasure. These are reactions.
Conditional happiness, however, results when you meet your mind’s requirements for happiness. For example, if you acquire something that you desire, the world is for a time a great place, and you allow yourself to be happy.
Happiness Combined with Sense Pleasure
You can often feel moments of conditional happiness combined with sense pleasure.
For example, let us say you have a desire for ice cream, and the desire is so strong that you are dissatisfied and unhappy that you do not have ice cream. If you satisfy your desire for ice cream, you may be temporarily happy, as the satisfaction of a desire temporarily makes you feel that life is good. In addition, the ice cream also provides you with sense pleasure. You take physical pleasure in eating the ice cream. Therefore, you experience both conditional happiness and sense pleasure.
The fact that you can and do experience both conditional happiness and sense pleasure as a result of obtaining something you desire creates confusion about what makes you happy. This confusion can lead to the mistaken belief that sense pleasures can provide happiness. Little wonder that we keep seeking pleasure in the world. These are our futile attempts to find real happiness.
Real happiness does not result from the pleasures we find in the world. Real happiness is unconditional, and it is always available to us. Swami Satchidananda says:
We attach ourselves to pleasure because we expect happiness from it, forgetting that happiness is always in us as the true Self. [26]
The Happiness Set Point
To differentiate further between unconditional happiness, sense pleasures, and conditional happiness, let us look at the “happiness set point” (also known as “baseline happiness”). Psychologists describe the happiness set point as the general level of happiness (or unhappiness) at which you spend most of your time. You return to this level of happiness after experiences that increase or decrease happiness, pleasure, or pain.[27]
Think of the way you feel at those times when you are not experiencing any particular positive or negative sen