Happiness & Rapture

Adam Mizner's Dhamma Talk on the Five Happiness & Rapture. Adam Mizner has dedicated many years to the in-depth study of Daoism, western Hermetics and the Buddha Dhamma, is initiated into and teaches methods from these traditions. He is a senior lay disciple of Ajahn Jumnien in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism. This deep spiritual background has a large influence on his approach to internal development teaching.

Please note: This track was recorded live and may contain background noises.

Transcript

The Buddhist path is a path leading to the ultimate happiness.

Nibbāna is described as the ultimate happiness.

But the Buddha said the path is beautiful in the beginning,

Beautiful in the middle and beautiful in the end.

That means that it generates happiness in the beginning,

In the middle and the end.

It should not be a suffering all the way up until you finally achieve Nibbāna.

Ajahn Chah said that if you can let go a little,

You'll be a little happy.

If you can let go a lot,

Then you'll have a lot of happiness.

And if you can let go completely,

Then you'll be completely happy.

But the Buddhist path is not just letting go.

It's a balance between developing and letting go.

And developing leads to happiness along the way,

In the beginning and the middle.

It's not just the path of Vipassana alone.

Often we feel like we have to give up things in the world in order to pursue the path.

And this is true.

If you don't give up the things of the world,

You're not really pursuing the path at all.

But we're not giving up happiness for misery.

We're giving up a lower happiness for a higher happiness.

And as you traverse the path further and further,

You continuously give up lower happiness for higher happiness.

The correct practice leads to the development of pithy.

Pithy is joy and rapture.

It manifests both in body and mind.

The three components of the path,

Sila,

Samadhi and banyak,

Can all develop pithy.

We use all three of them to develop pithy.

It carries us on the path.

It inspires us on the path.

When you're filled with pithy,

The practice is easy.

And the practice is,

After all,

All about attaining happiness.

From the very basic level of cultivating sila,

Restraining from negative actions,

Immediately leads to a happier mind state.

When we indulge in negative mind states,

When we indulge in negative action,

It leads to an unhappy mind state.

Benefiting beings leads to happiness.

Working for the benefit of others,

Serving others,

Leads to pithy.

When we practice serving others,

Pithy is generated in the mind and body.

Serving others is a major component of the path.

To serve all beings.

We serve those that are below us in their spiritual attainment with compassion.

Cultivating compassion and serving beings.

We serve those that are above us in spiritual attainment with devotion.

Cultivating devotion and serving all beings.

When you serve beings with devotion,

Pithy arises.

When you serve beings with compassion,

Pithy arises.

When you serve beings because you feel like you have to,

Or to follow convention,

Or because somebody asked you to,

Or so that you look like you're helping,

Or because you feel indebted,

Pithy does not arise.

In order for serving beings to lead to pithy,

We have to serve beings with devotion or compassion.

Cultivating these qualities in your action leads to pithy.

This is the pithy of sila.

Pithy arising from our conduct.

Pithy also arises directly out of samadhi.

Pithy is one of the factors of jhana.

In this way,

They say that pithy is caused by the seclusion of body and mind.

Seclusion does not mean living alone in the forest.

It means allowing the mind and the body to become still.

The body is secluded from movement,

So you have maintained a single posture.

The mind is secluded from sense input and from mental distraction,

Resting the awareness on a single component.

This is seclusion of the mind.

Even outside of meditation,

A normal healthy person with a relatively healthy mindset will find a kind of bliss,

A mild form of pithy arising when they just have seclusion of body and mind.

When they let go,

Don't need any entertainment,

Rest on the hammock and just relax.

This leads to mild pithy because it's a mild version of seclusion of body and mind.

Practicing samadhi leading to jhana is a more intense version of seclusion of body and mind and therefore leads to a more intense version of pithy.

So within seelah,

A cultivation of seelah,

Refraining from negative actions leads to pithy.

Letting go of negative actions leads to pithy.

Developing the good qualities,

Serving others,

Developing compassion,

Developing devotion leads to pithy.

Benefiting beings leads to pithy.

This energy that we develop with our seelah empowers our samadhi,

Deepening our pithy,

Deepening rapture.

And you begin to develop joy for the past.

When your practice is filled with joy and it leads to rapture,

It's easy to practice,

You want to practice,

Practice becomes natural.

When it's nothing but eating bitter all the time,

You don't want to practice,

When it becomes hard work it becomes a chore.

If it's hard work and it's a chore,

This is not an error in the path itself,

This is not an error of the dharma,

The error is in the way you're practicing.

Not serving others,

Not practicing seclusion of body and mind.

Banyar,

The third component of the path,

The practice of insight,

The practice of wisdom,

Discernment,

Seeing clearly the way things are and letting go.

As I quoted Ajahn Chah earlier,

Letting go leads directly to pithy,

Leads directly to sukha,

Leads directly to happiness.

Sometimes we can't let go immediately,

So we need to use skillful means to develop pithy.

This can also be considered the practice of banyar.

We apply antidotes to our negative mind states.

It happens all the time,

Each day we are given opportunities to go the negative way or the positive way.

We're out shopping all day,

Running around doing worldly chores,

And we come home and it's raining,

We come home and pull up the motorcycle,

And then remember something vital that we had to do.

We've already been out all day and we're tired,

So aversion arises.

Ah,

Damn it,

I just want to go home and rest,

I've had enough.

This is an unskillful mind state leading to suffering,

Aversion leads to suffering.

Instead we can play the antidote and think,

What great fun,

I get to ride around on the bike,

Just as a slight change of energy immediately leads to the arising of pithy.

As soon as the pithy arises,

We're at ease,

There's rapture,

There's joy,

Then letting go becomes very easy.

When we let go,

Pithy arises even more.

Applying antidotes in this way is a very skillful technique.

The world is dualistic and we can see almost anything from both ways.

We can be saddened by a relationship ending.

I can't believe that he's left my life,

I can't believe she's left my life.

Seeing the negative makes misery.

We could turn it around and say,

Great,

Now I'm free,

I have all the free time in the world,

I don't have to have the stress of being caught up with their demands.

Almost anything can be used in this way.

When you see things in this way,

Pithy arises.

Happiness becomes natural and letting go becomes easy.

Developing pithy in sila,

Samadhi and panya.

The ultimate letting go of course is the letting go into anatta and into sunyata,

Into emptiness.

The letting go of vipassana,

When we see,

Know and let go penetrating through to emptiness and not self.

However,

There's a close enemy at hand.

The enemy of indifference.

We can suppress things or become indifferent towards them,

Lazy towards them and think that we're letting go.

But it's not genuine letting go.

When we let go genuinely,

Let go with vipassana,

Let go into emptiness,

Immediately pithy arises.

When you let go of the defilement,

The wrong view,

The stress,

Pithy arises in its place every time.

So we can use this measure to see if we're letting go correctly.

If we let go and we're just left with indifference,

That's not letting go.

We have to look deeper and find out that truly we haven't let go.

That our vipassana has not yet reached a genuine state.

Instead we're painting on indifference or we're dwelling in forced equanimity.

We're suppressing using a worldly state.

When we let go genuinely with vipassana,

Pithy will arise immediately and directly.

Using this we can discern,

We can look clearly at our own vipassana practice.

Using a lower level of a skillful means to see the positive in things,

We use this simply as an antidote to pull us out of the negative mind state so that the joy arises.

When the joy arises,

We're energized by the joy,

We can get on with life,

We can achieve more efficiently and then we can let go.

Let go genuinely by seeing clearly emptiness and not self and letting go.

This letting go leads to the arising of more pithy.

Layer upon layer,

The more we discard negative qualities,

The more pithy arises.

That's why the practice is beautiful in the beginning,

Beautiful in the middle and beautiful in the end.

Discarding a lower happiness for a higher happiness from beginning to end,

Leading to nibbana which is the highest happiness.

Listening to the dharma leads to pithy if you listen to it with an open heart and an open mind.

This way you should listen to the dharma frequently.

I often listen to the same dharma talks over and over and over again and every time they lead to pithy.

Some people develop an ailment which somebody described it nicely recently.

As they develop immunity to the medicine,

They don't want to hear the dharma,

They become self satisfied and think I already know it.

I already know I've heard it before,

What's the point of listening again?

Not going to say anything I haven't heard before.

Immunity to the medicine is a great problem and basically it leads to a state where you're so inflated that you can't be cured until you cure the immunity to the medicine.

Taking delight in the dharma when we hear the dharma leads to pithy.

Delighting in the practice,

Delighting in the development of qualities,

Delighting in letting go.

Developing this attitude of delight.

Practicing it in small ways,

Getting a glass of water for somebody.

You can do it with delight.

You can do it as cultivating compassion,

You can do it as cultivating devotion.

Compassion or devotion lead to bliss in the heart,

Lead to pithy in the heart.

But if you do it just out of following the external ritual of doing it,

It doesn't lead to anything.

Delighting in seclusion of body and mind.

Not as a hard discipline that we have to do but wanting to do it.

So when you sit down,

Notice the delight,

Notice the peace,

Notice the pithy that arises from the seclusion of body and mind.

A sick mind always looks for destruction,

It always needs to be busy,

It always needs sense input.

It always needs visual stimuli,

Audio stimuli,

Tactile stimuli.

It always needs something new to taste,

Something new to smell.

Constantly distracted,

Never a moment of focus,

Never a moment of awareness,

Just constant distraction.

Consumed by the world.

We need to pull away from those habits where the defilements control the mind and learn to delight in seclusion.

Even when the body hurts when we're sitting still,

We can discern the difference between the pain of the body and the mind can still have delight.

You can delight in the practice even while it's hurting.

Physical pain need not be the arising of dukkha.

Physical pain happens because we have a physical body.

Dukkha happens because we don't deal with physical pain in a skillful way.

We could feel sorry for ourselves that the pain is arising when we're doing the practice or we could delight in the practice itself.

If we learn to do that,

The pithy will grow and become stronger and stronger and outweigh the physical pain.

Then we become charged by the pithy,

Empowered by the pithy.

Practicing for happiness leads to happiness.

Practicing for pithy leads to pithy.

The development of pithy empowers our practice and then we practice for more pithy,

Deeper and deeper,

All the way through to fruition.

The Buddhist path is nothing but the path of happiness leading to the ultimate happiness,

Nibbāna.

Reviews

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

This talk made me happy. It gave me new insight in my quest to find the skillful way.

this is what I needed to hear ...yesterday, today, and again tomorrow. ... excellent dharma for what I need to learn, and practice, right now. thank you

I love this talk. I appreciate the lack of sentimentality, and the gentle, straight-forward wisdom

Thank you Adam🙏 Well guided, well received! Sending blessings and gratitude 🙏🙏

I really liked how these concepts are explained. thank you.