Trick your brain for Happiness: An Excerpt
Happiness is within us.
All of us wish to be happy, and we should be happy. We fixate on our attributes to be happy. We attach our joy to the circumstances, like an evening with friends, weekend romantic moments with our partner, time spent jogging or playing our favourite game, etc.
Indeed, we indulge ourselves in these activities and remain happy.
Let us analyze it further because we find a person who was happy yesterday is unhappy today or says he has become unhappy over time. Why?
In Sanskrit, there are four words for happiness.
Sukha (Fleeting pleasure)
Santosha (Contentment)
Mudita (Spiritual Happiness)
Ananda (The Bliss)
These are the four different levels of happiness. Together, they form a path that leads us to happiness that cannot be shaken.
Fleeting Pleasure (Sukha)
Happiness that comes from pleasant experiences is Sukha. Sukh (pleasure) is, inseparably, enjoyment, or comfort in a simple word. Sukha is the happiness we feel when we are firmly inside our comfort zone. We never think about the state that is essential to our happiness. We never think that a few of our comfort zones can disappear in the blink of an eye.
Sukha remains always linked with its opposite—Dukh (suffering)
This pain-pleasure dichotomy is one of the basic conflicts. These pairs of opposites plague our lives. We live in the feeling of being separate from others and the world. Like hot and cold, birth and death, praise and blame, Sukh (pleasure) and Dukh (suffering) inevitably follow each other because our well-being depends on external conditions. It will always come and go. This problem that Buddha noticed led him to formulate the first noble truth.
“All life involves suffering.”
Contentment (Santosha)
The simple antidote to this problem of the endless chase after the mirage of fleeting pleasure is to cultivate Santosha (contentment). Santosha is essential because it is the easiest way to reduce the agitation caused by frustration, discomfort, and unmet desire.
Santosha is nothing but being satisfied with what we have. Accepting what we are, without feeling the need for anything extra to make us happy. Santosha is not desiring anything other than what we need. Thus, we achieve contentment. When we give up striving for what is out of our reach. We stop expecting more from life than it can give and let go of mental patterns that destroy our satisfaction, such as comparing our skills, character, possessions, and inner attainments with those of the people around us.
Spiritual Happiness (Mudita)
Practicing Santosha calms the mind. If we wish, we may step into the next level of happiness, Mudita (Spiritual Happiness).
Mudita, in its purest form, is the joy that comes from out of nowhere. It is like a message from our deeper self, which can change our state in an instant. It gives rise to feelings, such as gratitude, exaltation, equanimity, and the capacity to see beauty even in things we rarely find beautiful.
Mudita can be cultivated by practice.
The Bliss (Ananda)
When Mudita becomes our entire field of experience, we find ourselves in touch with the most profound level of joy: Ananda (Bliss). (In reality, bliss is too ordinary a word to convey what Ananda is.)
Ananda is ecstasy, the rapture, a joy that arises spontaneously from the very depths of the universe and connects us instantly to the vastness of pure being. Ananda is the divine power in the form of happiness. When someone touches it, he knows he has touched the deepest level of reality.
Ananda is nothing but in unison with God. The same association of joy with divine experience can be found in Sufi poetry, in the Kabbalah, and in the writings of Christian mystics.
To end, I would like to mention Joy is like a butterfly that comes and sits on our hands but can never be grasped or held.
Loving-kindness practice, being grateful to self and others, and consciously letting go of grudges remove the sludge that builds up around the heart and keeps joy away.
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