Four Levels Of Happiness In Buddhism - Analytical Meditation

A daily meditation on the four levels of happiness in Buddhism. Investigate the varying depths of happiness you get from sensory pleasures, positive states of mind, meditation, and the very nature of reality. This episode offers an opportunity to reflect on where we derive our happiness from and how we can live happier lives by understanding how each kind of happiness relates to desire, attachment, compassion, and our own meditation practice.

Transcript

Most of us would probably agree that we want to be happy.

But what is happiness?

In a way,

It's our job as human beings to figure out an answer to this question for the unique life that each of us lives and for the unique body and mind that each of us has.

But there are a lot of overwhelming external forces that tell us what happiness is or what it should be that can drown out this inner search.

In particular,

We hear a huge number of messages from society and advertising and the media that material things and external measures of success are what bring happiness.

Still,

It's also important not to dismiss the importance of external things,

Of health and safety,

Of some measure of wealth,

And of all the wonderful joys of sensual pleasure – beautiful sights,

Beautiful people,

Great food,

Great music,

Pleasant smells.

What I like about the strand of Buddhism I learned that's rooted in the Tibetan tradition is that we don't renounce or avoid sensual pleasure,

But we come to understand pleasure as one of the continuum of things that brings happiness and meaning to life.

In our last episode we had a talk by Venerable Sanjay Kadro on the four levels of happiness as Buddhism sees them.

Sensual pleasure is seen as the first level of happiness,

But then there are three more that follow,

And each one is said to provide greater and greater satisfaction.

In this meditation,

We explore these four levels of happiness in a way that lets us each have a taste of these levels and lets us decide for ourselves whether such a ranking of happiness might be true.

Settle into your meditation posture,

Either cross-legged on the floor or sitting in a chair with your legs uncrossed,

Feet flat on the floor.

Straighten your spine,

Tilt down your head,

Half-close your eyes,

And relax all the muscles in your shoulders,

Neck,

And face.

Place your hands palms up in your lap,

One atop the other,

Or palms down on your knees.

Set a motivation for your meditation session to explore the sources of happiness with openness and curiosity so that I can make the most of my life bring the most joy and meaning to myself and others.

Now focus on your breath for one minute.

Bring your attention to your nostrils,

Where the breath comes in and out,

Cool as it comes in,

Warm on the way out.

Or you can focus on your abdomen rising and falling with the in and out of your breath.

Bring all of your attention to your breath,

But don't stress out if your attention wanders.

Realize that when you notice you have wandered,

You're already on the way back to focus,

And that you don't need to push thoughts and perceptions that intrude away,

And you also don't need to bring them closer.

Just let them pass by naturally,

And let your attention go back to your breath for one minute.

One minute.

One.

One.

And now we explore the first level of happiness,

Sensory pleasure.

Try and picture various sense pleasures now to get a feel for them in your meditation.

Think of places and images and movies and songs whose sights and sounds you enjoy.

What places do you love to be?

What movies,

Paintings,

Or photographs do you love to look at?

What music fills you with pleasure?

What are your favorite foods and restaurants?

How do you like to be touched?

And what and who do you enjoy touching?

From beach sand and summer grass to your pet and your partner.

All of these things genuinely make us happy.

But what are their drawbacks?

First of all,

They're impermanent.

None of them lasts.

It's inevitable that we leave the beautiful place,

The TV show ends,

The songs finished,

The meal's over,

The vacation's done.

We finished making love with our partner,

And so on.

So if our happiness is wholly dependent on external sensory pleasure,

Then there's a little bit of constant disappointment at these experiences running out in the various ways that they do.

Think about how or whether this is true for you with some of the sensual pleasures that you enjoy.

The other problem is that we naturally get attached to these sense pleasures.

We don't have to feel bad about getting attached to them.

It's a natural feeling to want to have more of something pleasant.

And it's a feeling we don't want to deny.

But there are different ways to process those feelings,

And some of them generate disturbing emotions inside us.

We can feel an unpleasant sense of craving when we don't have some of the sense pleasures we enjoy.

And that craving can keep us from appreciating whatever's in front of us right now.

Sometimes we can feel that we can't even be happy without those external sources of pleasure,

That we have to have them.

From these feelings of craving,

We can become sad.

We can become irritable to the people around us and cause relationship problems.

We can even be driven to act out physically,

To try and get the things that we think will make us happy in unhealthy ways through manipulation or to excess that harms us like when we overeat,

Or even through lies and violence.

If we look at some of the biggest problems in the world,

Many of them are caused by attachment to pleasures that drive powerful people to do awful things.

Still,

The answer from the Tibetan Buddhist approach is not to eliminate sense pleasures from our life,

But to integrate them with the higher forms of pleasure in a way that makes them more pure,

More joyful,

Easier to accept when we have them,

And easier to let go of when we don't.

This is jumping ahead a little to the next levels of happiness.

For example,

We can integrate this first level of pleasure with the second level of pleasure,

Which is positive states of mind,

Using the technique of universalizing.

That means,

As we enjoy something,

We wish that everyone in the world could have this wonderful thing too.

We can integrate sensory pleasure with the fourth kind of happiness,

The wisdom understanding interdependence or emptiness.

We can see that the thing we are enjoying that appears to exist outside ourselves is actually interdependent through an infinite number of parts and causes and conditions,

That it relates in a way to the whole universe,

Including our own body and mind.

Where is that thing outside ourselves that we think brings us pleasure all by itself?

Sights are invisible electromagnetic radiation that our brains turn into imaginary color and form.

Sound is the soundless vibration of air that our brain hallucinates into music and voice.

Taste is the reaction of our tongue and brain to chemicals sliding over our taste buds.

Smell is our nose making emotional reactions to chemicals that float into our nostrils.

Touch is the vibrating of skin against different materials.

And then everything we see,

Hear,

Taste,

Touch and smell is made of parts that have infinite causes.

So that's another way to deepen our appreciation of sensory pleasure,

To realize its interdependence.

The second level of happiness is positive states of mind.

From this Buddhist perspective,

Positive states of mind like love,

Compassion,

Kindness and generosity offer a higher level of happiness than sense pleasures.

When we're with people we love,

We have the second level of happiness,

Like a parent has to her child,

A child to her parent,

Or the warm feelings for our friends and for people we're in common cause with in the world to accomplish what we believe in.

That's also there in the love that we feel for our pets.

Bring to mind now a time that you had one of these positive states of mind and mull around this idea to see if it's true for you.

Is it true that the times I've felt unconditional love,

Compassion,

Kindness or generosity were more pleasurable than a great vacation,

A great TV show,

A great meal,

A great song,

A massage,

Making love,

Or some other sensual pleasure?

Take a look at this second level of happiness,

Positive states of mind,

And notice how and why this form of happiness might be greater than sense pleasure.

Because sense pleasures can tend to be a little self-centered,

Like this tastes so delicious to me,

This feels so good to me.

Whereas this second form of happiness is more altruistic,

More concerned for others.

We're less focused on our own pleasure and more on others' happiness.

And the beautiful irony of this is that focusing more on others makes us happier than the more selfish focus on ourselves with sense pleasure.

Like the Dalai Lama says,

If you must be selfish,

Be intelligently selfish,

Because the true cause of our own happiness is cherishing others.

The third level of happiness is one that comes from meditation.

When you develop your concentration to a certain degree,

There's a deep,

Timeless form of happiness that's sometimes called bliss.

It's possible for anyone to experience this bliss of meditation if they put some effort and focus into meditation and have the right instruction.

There are technical names for this kind of bliss when it's perfected,

Shamatha or calm abiding.

And it's said that this pleasure that comes from deep meditative focus is better than sex,

Drugs,

Any sensual pleasure,

And that you don't feel hungry or tired or thirsty or physically uncomfortable when you're in it.

You're happy just sitting and meditating for long stretches of time.

Of course,

Most of us don't have this level of concentration.

But for a minute,

Let's try and get a taste of it.

Try and let all of your sensory focus dissolve.

Let go of sight,

Smell,

Taste,

Touch,

Sound.

And also let go of fantasies of these senses,

Memories,

Or plans.

Try and turn your mind inward for a moment and focus on your inner experience,

The mind focusing on the mind.

Thoughts and sensory experiences may still arise in this mind watching the mind.

But try and see that these are made of something more subtle,

That thoughts and perceptions are made of this subtler aspect of mind.

Focus on the mind rather than the contents of the mind and see whether it has an appearance.

Is it bright or dark?

Is it spacious or compact?

For a minute,

Let the mind meditate on the mind with curiosity and openness and see how a side effect is a kind of joy and lightness that's always been available to you.

The last and highest level of happiness available to us,

From the Buddhist view,

Is the happiness of wisdom,

Understanding the interdependent nature of reality.

This is sometimes called emptiness.

One of the ways to understand this wisdom is through the logic of dependent origination,

Seeing how all things are interconnected through an endless chain of interdependent parts,

Causes,

And conditions.

But this particular way of understanding reality cuts at the root of our suffering,

Which is a sense of separateness and loneliness,

A feeling of independence from others and from a universe that we're actually entirely interconnected with.

So to explore this idea,

Let's meditate on it in the context of an object of pleasure and then of ourselves.

Bring to mind one of the objects of sensory pleasure that you enjoy.

Now analyze how it's made of parts,

Ingredients,

Molecules,

Light,

Particles,

Skin and muscles,

Whatever it is.

There's actually no thing there,

No meal,

No TV show,

Even no partner that's separate from those parts.

It's kind of mind-blowing and can be a little scary to see things this way.

Don't go to an extreme and convince yourself that it doesn't exist at all though.

You're just getting in touch with how it actually exists,

Not negating existence.

Now look at how all those parts have causes.

They didn't just spontaneously come to be.

They came from other things.

Food came from plants and animals,

Water and sunlight.

Media came from the minds of its creators and an interaction with the history of all our culture and technology.

And other people,

Even our partner,

Are built out of things that they ate and heard and saw and their parents and their parents' parents.

And each of these chains can be traced back forever so that we're all connected to the history of evolution of life on this planet,

To the birth of our star,

The heavy elements in the universe,

And even the origin of the universe.

Like Carl Sagan says,

If you want to know how to bake an apple pie,

You have to go all the way back to the Big Bang.

And the third element of how things exist,

The last element,

Is that in addition to the object's parts and the causes that brought them together,

Is our mind.

Our mind plays an essential role in projecting a wholeness,

A thingness,

A you-ness onto this collection of caused parts.

Meditate on this way of seeing your object of pleasure now as a collection of parts with infinite causes and your mind projecting a label of wholeness,

Separateness,

Onto them.

And then,

For the last part of this meditation,

The highest form of happiness,

Steer this analysis onto yourself.

See how your body and mind are also made of parts,

How all your body's parts have causes,

And how your own mind labels this interdependent,

Constantly changing bundle of caused parts with the illusion of an unchanging independent you.

In meditation,

In a way that goes beyond words now,

Try and see yourself in this fuller,

More dynamic,

Wholly interdependent way for a taste of the highest form of happiness that comes from wisdom.

Namaste.

And now,

As we come out of the meditation,

Think for yourself whether this hierarchy of happiness makes sense.

Maybe take these ideas with you through today and tomorrow and beyond and see if they're true for you.

It's pleasure,

The happiness of positive states of mind,

The happiness of bliss in meditation,

And the happiness that comes from the wisdom understanding the interdependent nature of reality.

Is it really true that as we experience each of these four types of happiness,

That the happiness is greater,

Stronger,

Purer,

More expansive?

Take this idea on at least as a hypothesis for a little while and decide for yourself with the motivation that we want to be happy in order to make our life and the lives of everyone we encounter as joyful and meaningful and connected as we possibly can.

Reviews

This was so beneficial to me. I appreciated the way it broke down the four levels in a way that I could feel.

I’m newly exploring Buddhism and it’s really resonating with me. Thank you so much!🙏❤️

So much to let percolate in my mind. I really appreciate how you articulated complex concepts into meaningful chunks that I can wrap my head around. Thank you.

Very beautiful 🙏 rich and deep, with so much wisdom and kindness and with a wonderful flow from the first beginning to the end, through these four happiness states to be and these meditations within.
A jewel 🙏 many thanks for sharing 🙏

Wow!

Loved it! Very pleasant and insightful meditatation. I hope I can apply this and be even happier ♡ ♡ ♡