the pursuit of happiness

The Plantation Villa   

A calming place in the middle of nature, a place for healing and staying within a community in Sri Lanka

Since the start of this new time in our world - with the pandemic, the recent war in Ukraine and other economical and political issues taking great effects on people’s lives, there is a current emerging trend where it feels like people are travelling more for happiness than tourism. Well, isn't tourism for happiness? True, but while an ordinary holiday will bring some temporary relief and happy memories, what travellers are increasingly looking for is something longer lasting, an actual shift in life.

{Happiness} has been infused in our collective thinking as something to be conquered, earned, strived for, or maybe {mostly?} bought. It has been manufactured as something that comes from the outside, as a situation, a relationship, a holiday, or an object. But while we are constantly lured by our attachment to machines, products and pleasure seeking in our modern environment, how many of us do in fact find happiness?

An idea common in eastern philosophy is that happiness is inherently dependent on morality. In that sense, happiness is not sought after but is in fact a by-product of a mind that is free from what Buddhism calls the '3 fires of the mind': greed, hatred, and delusion. They are so called fires because they promote agitation, over thinking, and worries. While greed and hatred {including all shades from aversion, to repulsion, up to the instinct of destruction and killing} are straight forward, delusion is more subtle. For us, we can see that delusion is equal to living in an illusion, such as the hope that happiness is something that will come in a bag.

The way to prevent the intrusion of these tendencies in our mind is mindfulness. But this is not the bravado about 'conquering the mind'. Mindfulness has a passive, soft component to it. It is not the focus of the CEO doing business, but more of the herder watching the animals calmly graze in spring. In fact, meditation would come much easier if the doors of relaxation were firstly open.

But to be relaxed, one has to be calm. And to be calm, which is almost second nature to being happy, one has to develop the cooling qualities of generosity, compassion, and wisdom, the opposite of the fiery shades mentioned above, and the formation of what we would call 'moral qualities'.

Above all, wisdom is certainly the defining factor for the fruition of happiness. This is because the maturing of wisdom is not a provisional action, but rather a complete change of how one sees things. The mind which would previously grasp at external objects in the hope of sustaining moments of happiness, now gives place to a mind that perceives the transitory nature of all things, and the impossibility of depending on external happenings to achieve that happiness. It is a mind that has turned inward. 

Ironically, for Buddhism the mind that looks to the outside world and runs without reins is considered in bondage, while one that is composed and contained through mindfulness is correlated to true freedom {another second nature of happiness}.

The dawn of wisdom is the realisation that so many times we have grasped onto the illusion of being able to hold happiness, mistaking something that is more of a product from a whole lifestyle, for something that can be acquired as an isolated unit.