There are many varied and passing desires in life but if you look closely there are three absolutely simple, fundamental desires, really deep, desires. You don’t think about them because they are just part of you. None the less they play at the very root of the mind. One is you want to exist. You don’t think about that, but you really want existence to carry on. You may not want your particular experiences but you do want existence itself. Secondly you want consciousness, you want to feel and know and thirdly you want to be happy.
I feel some emotion when I say this to you because it is such a powerful recognition. Across the whole world, human beings are striving to be happy. They seek to do things and go places and have things and feel things which bring happiness to their minds. You can use different words to describe this same desire: peaceful, contented, satisfied, confident, secure. You like these things, these happy things, you want these things and, in the moment you have them, it feels good, feels right, feels true. That’s because happiness is a default in humanity, not misery. It is something you recognise as genuine and natural, happiness has the flavour of a natural rightness to it and sadness, misery or upset does not, such things feel like a problem, something wrong. Happiness feels like something right.
If what I’m saying sounds obvious, don’t overlook it, give it some attention. It’s a milestone recognition, it’s a powerful knowledge. Happiness is not just a passing mood, some pleasure you’re seeking for your own indulgence. It’s a default state, it’s structural. Happiness is the rightness you keep trying to return to through all the various ways people stimulate themselves. The Upanishads describe the rewards of such temporary pursuits as the pleasurable and the search for the higher truth of happiness as the good, in other words, the big release from the ups and downs of passing moods and sensations but they’re both talking about happiness: the pleasurable and the good. Sadhana is our attempt to regain and establish a more permanent, more long-lasting state of happiness because that’s right, is the rightness of you.
Such happiness is the default of human beings. This is ananda (spiritual contentment), not something mysterious to be found at the end of some advanced meditation but present as the default substance of everyone alive. In your best moments, when life is flowing, when things are being easily achieved, when your relationships are gracious, when you’re productive and meaningful things are happening, then whoosh! There it is, that atmosphere that is then around you and in you and expressing through you, that joy, it’s ananda.
Simply appreciate the possibility of this, ananda is actually substance. It’s substantially you; within the substance of you. Simply stay with the flavour of what’s being presented here, recognise it.
There’s a ladder of happiness. All of the time people are trying to do things that bring pleasure, satisfaction, relief. The methodology people use to do that is individual and varied and fascinating. Perhaps we can consider it in a hierarchy. At the lower level is physical, sensory happiness, pleasuring the senses. That sort of happiness is very short-lasting and it’s not reliable, it needs to be topped up and there is a diminishing return when you do so. It certainly works but there is a diminishing effectiveness in it. What normally happens is that we try to remedy that by replacing it with a different sensory pleasure, something that will perhaps bring back those highlights. The pleasures of the senses are amazing, wonderful, thrilling, to be lived, but the point is we can’t rely on them for our continuous welfare.
Perhaps a little higher than that is emotional happiness. Good. If we don’t have that, we feel uneasy, we’re not happy when we’re miserable. You want to get away from that and get back to something that feels more natural to you, happiness.
Above that – mental happiness, intellectual happiness. The pleasure of reward in your mind when you’re doing something purposeful. For example, when you’re engaged in a meaningful task, you’re fully involved and it’s giving you a sense of purpose, or you’re studying or involved in some complex project but you’re really engaged and going for it and giving it your all, and you’re lost in the momentum of that, there’s a great pleasure in it, a meaningful sense of purpose that provokes satisfaction. This is a form of happiness. All these ways are triggers, good things to do – sensory, emotional, intellectual. Triggers that bring you, unknowingly, into this ananda, no longer blocked by any obstacles of discomfort, agitated senses or problematic thoughts in the mind. Those things have been removed and then what there is, is ananda. It’s not that you’ve created it only that you have removed the obstacles. This is the big discovery.
If we really like apples and we haven’t had an apple for six years; we get an apple and we eat it. It’s great. We might think the happiness is in the apple. It definitely is not. The happiness isn’t in the apple, it’s in you. The act of eating the apple invokes what’s already in you but has been impaired because of regret that you have not been eating apples. This is what’s happening with happiness. If I do that, that thing is going to give me happiness. It seems like that but what’s happening when you have the thing there’s a satisfaction, a relief and, in that moment of relief, somehow other elements about you have disappeared, have dissipated and there’s a kind of wholeness there and that wholeness feels right to you. So we mistakenly think the thing is where the wholeness is, but it’s not. It’s you.
Higher than the intellectual happiness is what we can call spiritual happiness and this is ananda. This quality has an enduring permanence. It is impaired by other things in your system that get agitated but, as soon as they are removed, it’s there. That’s not true for the other types of happiness. It is true for this.
There’s a maturity and a wellness in this spiritual happiness which is not dependent on things, situations and people. It transcends events. It’s enduring throughout and it has been like that throughout your whole life, so we want to give the name ‘ananda’ to it