Our search for perpetual gratification often plays out in intimate relationships. Take my friend who was very much in love with his new wife, but plagued by rage and bitterness over her sexual unavailability when she became pregnant. He could not help taking it personally. His happiness in her pregnancy was overwhelmed by his inability to tolerate his own sexual frustration, and he could not get past the feeling that if she really loved him she would be as interested in sex with him as he was with her. He was restricted by his tunnel vision; his own pleasure or displeasure was his only reference point.
We identify with the feelings of violation, rejection, or injury and we long for a happiness in which no such feelings could arise. Yet as Freud pointed out, even intense erotic pleasures are tinged with unhappiness since they all must come to an end, in the form of a relaxation of tension. Post-orgasmic depression is a well-known phenomenon. We long for this not to be so, but it is physiologically impossible.
The Buddha's point about happiness is very similar. As long as we continue trying to eliminate all displeasure and preserve only pleasure for a prolonged sense of well-being, no lasting happiness is possible. Rage, envy, and the desire for revenge will always interfere. Real life and its complications inevitably trickle in. There is a well-known story in the Buddhist tradition, that of Kisagotami, that illustrates how important it is to give up that approach to happiness.
Kisagotami was a young woman whose first child died suddenly somewhere around his first birthday. Desperate in her love for the child, Kisagotami went from house to house in her village, clasping the dead child to her breast and asking for medicine to revive her son. Most of her neighbors shrank from the sight of her and called her mad, but one man, seeing her inability to accept the reality of her son's death, directed her to the Buddha by promising her that only he had the medicine she sought. Kisagotami went to the Buddha and pleaded with him for medicine. "I know of some," he promised. "But I will need a handful of mustard seed from a house where no child, husband, parent, or servant has died."
Slowly, Kisagotami came to see that hers was not a unique predicament. She put the body of her child down in the forest and returned to the Buddha. "I have not brought the mustard seed," she told him. "The people of the village told me, 'The living are few, but the dead are many."' The Buddha replied, "You thought that you alone had lost a son; the law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence."
Kisagotami's story resonates, not just because of our sympathy for the horror of losing a child or because of our fear of a world in which such tragedy is possible, but because we all, like her, feel that our situation is unique and that our emotional pain requires relief. In the privacy of our own minds, we are aggrieved and single-mindedly self-centered. We still seek absolute gratification that is intolerant of frustration.
But the most difficult part of Kisagotami's story for me comes when she lays her child down in the forest. Even though he has been dead for a long time, I still feel slightly aghast at the idea of her leaving him there. Yet this is precisely what the Buddha is asking us to do. He did not teach a method of recovering primal emotions or embracing some sort of injured child that lies buried within. The Buddha helped Kisagotami find happiness not by bringing her dead child back to life, but by changing her view of herself. The inner development he alludes to is a development beyond the private childish perspective of me first that we all secretly harbor.
Happiness a la Buddha
The root cause of our unhappiness is our inability to observe ourselves properly. We are caught in our own perspective, unable to appreciate the many perspectives of those around us. And we are unaware of how insistently this way of perceiving drives us. Only through the uprooting of our own self-centeredness can we find the key to happiness. Buddhist meditation practice is one way to catch hold of this me-first perspective and begin to examine it. But it can happen in incidental ways. A teacher of mine, for example, remembers standing in line for food at a silent meditation retreat when someone suddenly spilled the large serving bowl of soup. "It wasn't me," he remembers himself thinking spontaneously. "It's not my fault."
Immersed in the quiet of the meditation retreat, he was all too aware that his reaction was patently absurd. Yet this is the kind of response we all have much of the time without being aware of it. Buddhist meditation is a way of coaxing the mind to deal with frustration in a new way, experiencing it as an interested observer instead of an aggrieved victim. Rather than responding to the inevitable frustrations of life with "Why me?" the successful practitioner of meditation can begin to see how conditioned our everyday sense of self has been by the insulted response to disappointment.
Our True nature
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