Suffering as Happiness and Unclean as Clean

The Relation between Incorrect Consideration of Nonstatic as Static and of Suffering as Happiness

We were speaking about our incorrect consideration of things that change. We consider that something like a relationship is going to last forever, whereas, in fact, it is eventually going to come to an end. Then, we consider that, even while it lasts, we incorrectly consider that it is static and unchanging, whereas it also changes from moment to moment.

Our belief that this projection of our incorrect consideration is correct can be doctrinally based. We read all sorts of fairy tales and see Hollywood movies that tell us that we’re going to live happily ever after, so we have this expectation and that’s false. It can be doctrinally based like this, but even if we understand that the propaganda we have been fed is absurd and false, even when we understand that life is not a fairy tale, nevertheless, we don’t really want to accept that. There’s still automatically arising incorrect consideration. There is a great deal of resistance, if we examine ourselves, to accept what we know is really impossible.

We need to examine more deeply, and we find that there are other types of incorrect consideration that, in a sense, feed each other. They feed this misconception of everything being static and unchanging. Why do I want to consider this relationship as stable and static, and so on? Because I consider it to be happy, “I have a happy relationship,” and, “it makes me happy to be with you.” The next level is to understand that we have incorrect consideration of what’s called “suffering as happiness.”

What does this really mean? It’s very much connected with this process of change. We think, for instance, that “holding my loved one’s hand is happiness; it makes me feel happy.” Well, if it really made us feel happy, it should do so forever. However, the longer we hold somebody’s hand, eventually, it becomes very uncomfortable. We want to do something else. We don’t want to go through the next 20 years being glued to the other person’s hand. Then, their hand and ours start to sweat and it becomes very uncomfortable.

If our loved one strokes our hand or some part of our body, well, if they continue doing that for an hour, we’re going to get very, very sore. It’ll turn into pain. Or, if we sleep with somebody and have our arm around them, very quickly our arm falls asleep and is very, very uncomfortable. If this were true happiness, the longer we had our arm there, the happier it should make us, but obviously, it doesn’t. This is a false conception that any of these things are true happiness. They are not true happiness because they’re going to change into unhappiness and they’re going to end, of course.

No matter how much we love somebody, if we stay with them too long, they start to get on our nerves, “Please, I need to be alone for a little while.” We don’t want them to follow us to the toilet. Again, we could have this misconception of suffering as happiness based on some sort of doctrine: we were taught that this is true happiness, “If you buy this car, you will truly be happy,” and so on. So, we could be fed this by propaganda, advertisement, or this incorrect consideration could just automatically arise. This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as happiness and that Buddhism is saying that everything is miserable and horrible. It’s not saying that, but we need to understand the reality of things and not exaggerate. “It’s very nice to be with you, but…”

Things change, and what we consider to be happiness, we can enjoy; nevertheless, ultimately, it’s not going to satisfy. It will change; we will feel frustrated, and so on. So, there are a lot of problems still involved. We get bored with something if we have it all the time. I might like ice cream very much, but if I were to have to eat only that for the next several years, I would get very bored with it. All of us would. This is the incorrect consideration of “suffering as happiness.”

Let’s analyze and spend a little more time thinking about this. What do we really consider to be “happiness”? Are we exaggerating it, or what are we doing? What’s our attitude toward it? Try to understand the connection between our expectations about happiness and the misconception that we might have in terms of things being stable, always staying the same. Because – to relate this to our discussion of voidness, although this isn’t yet in the domain of voidness – what we have to understand is exaggeration, and that this is what we have to clear out, that we exaggerate things, and then we imagine that the reality corresponds to that exaggeration.

[meditation]

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