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Post by ivory on Apr 30, 2011 21:04:20 GMT -5
I'm interested in this discussion and I want to get to the bottom of it. But it's not easy. I think that almost anyone can attest to the fact that happiness is fleeting.
I'm looking at where I'm at now and where I was when it was quite obvious that I was seeking happiness. At this time it's not obvious because I don't feel happy and I don't know what makes me happy anymore. In other words, I feel quite numb. Perhaps it's because of the influx of negative emotions.
What you ask is somewhat difficult to answer because there are still desires, but motivation has worn thin. Perhaps that's because happiness has been seen to be impermanent.
On another note, I can see how one might interpret what you said as to give up searching for happiness. But if one were to take that attitude, ultimately they'd probably try to give up happiness in hopes that it would bring happiness, which would in turn perpetuate the search for happiness.
I've come to find that the spiritual path is ultimately not about doing. It's more about acceptance and surrender. So I don't know if the search for happiness can be given up, or if it's something that falls away naturally when the illusion of permanent happiness has been seen through.
It's interesting that you say that the search for happiness is the single greatest obstacle to freedom. I don't remember who said it for sure, but I think it was Steven Norquist who said the single greatest obstacle was the need to feel special.
I'm going to contemplate this / inquire into some more, but this is that I have right now.
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Post by smokey on Apr 30, 2011 21:43:38 GMT -5
. The ancient Vedanta, Sufi and Mystic Christians were also nondualists. However, they teach that to reach that state of nonduality takes millions of lifetime through evolution, then involution of consciousness. They teach: If Everything is by definition -- EVERYTHING -- then Nothing is included in Everything. (In this reality, the opposite of Nothing would be Something.) The striving for happiness is the desire to know Everything. Since we are limited by past experience, what we experience now as happiness is only Something. When that Something is gone or loses its newness, it becomes Nothing and we are unhappy. Then we go looking for Something else. Although it seems possible mentally to stop striving for happiness, it may not be possible if evolution demands that we continue to expand our awareness to know Everything. What if these ancient teachings are correct and it is impossible for the mind to completely stop its dualistic thinking until past mental impressions(sanskaras) are eliminated through the sufficient experience of opposites through countless lifetimes? Does that mean minds striving to end their nondualistic thinking will recur in their next life to be dualists? (Smokey may have gotten a little carried away in his speculations. But maybe the ancients are right and it's just his reckless organic desire to know Everything.)
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Post by ivory on Apr 30, 2011 21:55:24 GMT -5
The ancient Vedanta, Sufi and Mystic Christians were also nondualists. However, they teach that to reach that state of nonduality takes millions of lifetime through evolution, then involution of consciousness. I don't know about this "many lifetime" business, but believing in that nonsense is only going to be a hinderance. I hear stuff about reincarnation but it makes no sense when you take into consideration that there are no separate persons (no you, no me, no anybody). If there are no separate persons, then who is going to reincarnate let alone be born or die?
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Post by smokey on Apr 30, 2011 22:14:50 GMT -5
. They say what recurs is the mind that believes it is separate. This continues through evolution, then involution of consciousness to ultimately reach the realization that there is no separate self -- only the one Self which is Everything. Thinking there is no separate self is not REALIZING there is no separate self. When it is realized, there is nothing left to say -- you're done. .
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Post by waterdog on Apr 30, 2011 22:23:28 GMT -5
. The ancient Vedanta, Sufi and Mystic Christians were also nondualists. However, they teach that to reach that state of nonduality takes millions of lifetime through evolution, then involution of consciousness. They teach: If Everything is by definition -- EVERYTHING -- then Nothing is included in Everything. (In this reality, the opposite of Nothing would be Something.) The striving for happiness is the desire to know Everything. Since we are limited by past experience, what we experience now as happiness is only Something. When that Something is gone or loses its newness, it becomes Nothing and we are unhappy. Then we go looking for Something else. Although it seems possible mentally to stop striving for happiness, it may not be possible if evolution demands that we continue to expand our awareness to know Everything. What if these ancient teachings are correct and it is impossible for the mind to completely stop its dualistic thinking until past mental impressions(sanskaras) are eliminated through the sufficient experience of opposites through countless lifetimes? Does that mean minds striving to end their nondualistic thinking will recur in their next life to be dualists? (Smokey may have gotten a little carried away in his speculations. But maybe the ancients are right and it's just his reckless organic desire to know Everything.) Maybe if you saved up enough energy throughout your life you could sustain yourself long enough to reincarnate? Hypothetically of course.
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Post by enigma on Apr 30, 2011 23:27:26 GMT -5
I'm interested in this discussion and I want to get to the bottom of it. But it's not easy. I think that almost anyone can attest to the fact that happiness is fleeting. Yeah, well everyone can, right? In the history of humanity, not one human has found the secret to a permanent state of happiness. If it exists, since everyone in the world has been looking for it, you'd think somebody would have found it. If somebody had actually found it, the whole world would be beating a path to his door. I believe that's the case, though I don't think the search for it has totally ended. I originally wrote the original post on a Tolle forum because my experience with Tolleites is that the majority struggle with depression or lonliness or apathy; no motivation or joy, and many wonder what went horribly wrong. What went horribly wrong is that the illusion is seen as empty, but the search for happiness goes on. It's my opinion that Tolle was ready to do anything to end the noise in his head ("I can't live with myself anymore") and so when it appeared as if there was something else doing the living, the thinker was readily abandoned, without all the existential crisis of killing off the seeker who was able to at least find fleeting happiness. The search can't be given up by deciding to give up, which is why genuine insight into the futility of the search is often necessary. (Which is why I rambled about it) Nobody searches for something that they are absolutely certain cannot be found. I Feeling special was likely the author's way of finding happiness, but not everybody cares about being special. Everybody cares about being happy. Groovy. Thanks for being willing to explore it.
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Post by enigma on Apr 30, 2011 23:30:42 GMT -5
"The striving for happiness is the desire to know Everything."
How do you figure?
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Post by onehandclapping on May 1, 2011 0:30:08 GMT -5
What Enigma, no hot without cold?!?!! Walking on shaky ground here bud. I mean are you gonna say the Easter Bunny isn't real either?? Talk about a slippery slope. People might get the idea that you mean there is no filtered water without tap water. No left hand turns without right hand turns. No bird poop on your shoulder without bird poop on your head.......errrrr wait a second...... People might even get the impression that you are saying....(GASP!!!) there is no God without.........(whispered) the Devil. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! Socialist! You must be a democrat. Trying to spin your web of clarity around the hearts and minds of this fine forum.
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Post by someNOTHING! on May 1, 2011 4:43:16 GMT -5
All searching is the search for permanent happiness, regardless of what it's called. If it's clear that all periods of happiness result, in some way, no matter how subtle, in an exactly equal amount of unhappiness, we would all lose interest in the pursuit. If it were more obvious than it usually is; if an hour of happiness were immediately followed by an hour of equal and opposite unhappiness, we would quickly tire of the roller coaster, become exhausted, and come to rest wherever we are. Movement just for the sake of movement is no longer about being happy, it's just an attempt to keep alive the idea of the person who is moving, and this becomes oppressive and exhausting. So the question becomes, can the happiness that 7 billion people are continuously looking for their entire lives actually be found? Is it even possible? We're all familiar with the basic idea of how dualistic perception works: 'Hot' is a dualistic idea that is only experienced as a reality against the background of the idea of 'cold'. In the absence of either of those polar ideas there is no conceptually formed experience of hot or cold. The experiences cannot be stored in memory and recalled later as 'my experience of hot' or 'that was really cold'. In the absence of the concepts, there is just the raw, unmediated experience of THIS, without conceptualization or the attending stories about those conceptualized experiences. IOW, there is only the present moment of THIS, and THIS, and THIS, always happening now. The quality of the experience of THIS is radically different from the experience of the concepts ABOUT THIS, as everyone here knows who has had even the most brief glimpse of 'being fully present'. This is the 'real' world, but almost everybody lives almost their entire lives in a conceptual world ABOUT this real world. The conceptual experience of hot and cold is an imaginary, dualistic imitation world formed in the mind, and it's this personal world in which most people live. There isn't actually a memory structured, conceptual, dualistic world of hot and cold. This is the illusion; a thought constructed world in which we live out our lives in a kind of dreamy somnambulism because it feels safer, more structured, predictable and controllable. Since it IS an illusion, it's really none of those things. It's an imaginary world in which all experiences are literally dependent entirely on the opposite experience, and so in order for one idea to have an experiential quality, the other idea must be simultaneously present in mind. I can only recall the experience of 'hot' as long as I can recall the experience of 'cold' that defines it. All dualistic experiences are mutually defining and, as they say, two sides of the same coin. Memory is highly volatile, and so if for some reason you didn't experience cold for some period of days, weeks or months, the experience of 'hot' would actually begin to fade, even if 'objectively' you're experiencing nothing BUT hot. The experience loses it's defining opposing quality and the whole duality starts collapsing as an experiential reality. You may be sweating continuously, and yet you can't really say what it is to be hot because you can no longer clearly recall what it's like to be cold. All dualistic conceptualizations work this way, and so in order to have the dualistic experience of being happy, you must, at the same time, have a clear recollection of what it is to be unhappy. Your subjective experience of being happy is literally defined, at that moment, by your ability to contrast it with your past experience of being unhappy. This is not usually happening on a fully conscious level, but if you look at that feeling of happiness, you can see that it is painted against the background of your own perception of unhappiness in that moment. You can see that, if you've been seriously unhappy for a while, it actually takes very little to make you happy. If you've been deliriously happy for a while, there's almost nothing that can keep you there. Hencely, there is a continual, self regulating, self defining, completely balanced movement between happy and unhappy. In spite of what we tell ourselves in order to keep this movement going, the subjective balance of happiness and unhappiness cannot be tipped in either direction and kept there. There isn't even actually a state of happy or unhappy, just the movement from one polarity to the other and back again. The feeling of anticipation is enjoyed while the movement is happening, and when the movement stops briefly at the 'destination', there is the momentary absence of desire which is experienced as happiness, and then the movement begins in the other direction. This is how everyone's life has unfolded, and will continue to unfold, whether they admit it or not. This is how ALL experience works for everybody. All duality sticks have two opposite ends. There are no one-ended sticks. There is a way out of this, which is what non-duality is all about, but it must be clear that it is not about finding permanent dualistic happiness, and this pursuit has to come to an end. There is an enormous amount of energy and momentum invested in this search, and this is the single greatest obstacle to Freedom. Yeah, that's pretty much one of the ways I'd like to say it! ;D/ Nice! The illusion of being imprisoned by bricks of concepts and bars of belief. Interesting to watch folks pace back and forth between the ideated walls, looking out through imagined bars, and appearing so proud of their becoming free, only to defend their fortress.
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Post by kate on May 1, 2011 7:54:07 GMT -5
Sometimes I feel like it's the desire for the movement and a fear of stillness and what will be found there that is driving me more than where the movement is taking me.
I wonder if it is really about wanting this happiness thing or is it more about a terror of just stopping. It seems clear that a significant amount of suffering comes from the ongoing battle to make permanent something that has never been anything other than fleeting, and so it should be perfectly logical to conclude that peace would come by putting and end to that…and yet I just.can't.stop. And even if I do for a while I get hooked back into it so quickly, before I even realize what's happening.
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Post by kate on May 1, 2011 7:56:17 GMT -5
Oh, and thanks for posting this, enigma. It's very relevant for me right now.
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Post by smokey on May 1, 2011 10:19:23 GMT -5
"The striving for happiness is the desire to know Everything." How do you figure? According to these ancient teachings, the desire for happiness is the striving to experience enough to know Everything, which is the one Self. Self = Everything Realizing the Self must be accomplished through experience of opposites rather than thought. The mind can believe it knows what it does not know.... And no one can tell it otherwise. .
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Post by therealfake on May 1, 2011 12:00:41 GMT -5
I'm interested in this discussion and I want to get to the bottom of it. But it's not easy. I think that almost anyone can attest to the fact that happiness is fleeting. Yeah, well everyone can, right? In the history of humanity, not one human has found the secret to a permanent state of happiness. If it exists, since everyone in the world has been looking for it, you'd think somebody would have found it. If somebody had actually found it, the whole world would be beating a path to his door. Heh, I don't know where you get your information from E, but there are thousands of people who have found the secret to a permanent state of happiness, to pure love and to bliss. And while those states have no permanence in the manifested world, they do exist. The reason why teachers are important, is to help peeps discover 'that' which can't be discovered through searching and effort. There are 17 billion faces of Buddha, or God, or Shiva, or the source, or oneness, or enlightenment, or emptiness, on this planet, all of which who's true nature, is the happiness, is the love and the bliss... Teachers open the door to that discovery, but only a person can walk through it.
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Post by enigma on May 1, 2011 12:30:10 GMT -5
Yeah, well everyone can, right? In the history of humanity, not one human has found the secret to a permanent state of happiness. If it exists, since everyone in the world has been looking for it, you'd think somebody would have found it. If somebody had actually found it, the whole world would be beating a path to his door. Heh, I don't know where you get your information from E, but there are thousands of people who have found the secret to a permanent state of happiness, to pure love and to bliss. And while those states have no permanence in the manifested world, they do exist. The reason why teachers are important, is to help peeps discover 'that' which can't be discovered through searching and effort. There are 17 billion faces of Buddha, or God, or Shiva, or the source, or oneness, or enlightenment, or emptiness, on this planet, all of which who's true nature, is the happiness, is the love and the bliss... Teachers open the door to that discovery, but only a person can walk through it. I think everybody (except you) understands I'm talking about dualistic happiness, maybe because I keep referring to dualistic happiness.
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Post by enigma on May 1, 2011 12:39:43 GMT -5
Sometimes I feel like it's the desire for the movement and a fear of stillness and what will be found there that is driving me more than where the movement is taking me. I wonder if it is really about wanting this happiness thing or is it more about a terror of just stopping. It seems clear that a significant amount of suffering comes from the ongoing battle to make permanent something that has never been anything other than fleeting, and so it should be perfectly logical to conclude that peace would come by putting and end to that…and yet I just.can't.stop. And even if I do for a while I get hooked back into it so quickly, before I even realize what's happening. The terror of 'just stopping' comes from the idea that if that happens, you'll never be happy again. We also lose the sense of 'me' without that movement, but most folks don't know that until they stop moving (the mind). It's logical that peace would be the result of not chasing the fleeting happiness, but nobody really wants Peace because they don't know what it is. Conceptual peace is just another fleeting dualistic polarity. That's why you get hooked back into the excitement of the movement again.
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