Activity

Sunday mornings are good for YouTubes while I’m making breakfast or whatever. I especially likes ones this where two opposite viewpoints sit down for a respectful chat. Sam describes the Buddhist idea that life is suffering, but we can find happiness and peace in succinct way here, and without jargon. The last line really nails it. You use spiritual practices to find peace, knowing that the unpeaceful moment will come, knowing that even in the midst of the best meal you’ve ever had with your favorite person in the world, there will be something imperfect about it. The unreality is, that seeking the ultimate moment of happiness is not possible and the feeling of unhappiness due to knowing that or due to whatever imperfection is in that moment is just as unreal, just as fleeting and is not a reason to pursue or avoid anything. They are all just experiences to have.

“There are many ways into that. I guess the most common is to recognize that we all suffer and we’re all going to die. Even if you are the luckiest person you have ever met and you live longer than anyone, eventually you’re phone will start ringing with all the bad news of the people you love who died and are disappearing. That fundamental mystery that we all have to confront that this life is impermanent and that even when we have everything we want or nearly everything even when we’re not sick and no one around we love is sick, still there’s this constant undercurrent of dissatisfaction. Even when you are getting what you want, in the very act of gratifying a desire your contact with your direct experience is still less than perfectly satisfying.

In fact your pleasures just recede. You get the bite of the perfect food, that chocolate cake that you’ve been looking forward to, and even in the act of savoring it, in the next moment, it’s a little too much and you need a drink of water. You wouldn’t want that experience itself to persist forever. So there’s this search for happiness in a context that seems perfectly designed to frustrate that search.

So I’ve used spirituality as a way to ask this question; if it’s possible to be truly happy and truly peaceful and connect with a durable form of well being before anything happens, before you get what you desire, even in the midst of physical pain or disappointed or anything conventionally negative.”