Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
How Do You Get Happiness?
John D. Hughes
Recorded
Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia
3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
A.B.N. 42 611 496
488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date of recording: 26/6/88
Transcribed by Alec Sloman
Checked by
Frank Carter & Leanne Eames
CD Reference
26_06_88T5S2i
File Name: 26_06_88T5S2i_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title: "How Do You Get Happiness?"
What happens is you find just by observing the reality that everything is deteriorating. So you clean your house, everything’s clean, within a week it’s dirty. The dust blows in.
Now, when...if you get food, it's fresh, you'll leave it, it goes bad, you can't eat it.
When you observe just the simple things around you, if you've done any physics you know it's the third law of thermodynamics, which is a physics law which says:
"Chaos increases as a function of time."
That's one way of expressing the law of entropy. In other words, disorder is the natural consequence, or all systems run to disorder.
So for example, sugar is crystallized, you put it in tea, it goes to liquid. You don't observe the sugars come out and recrystallize. You have to put a lot of energy to recrystallize sugar.
So what happens is, and it’s even in physics, what it says, if you don't tend to things they deteriorate. Now until you know that, if you don't tend to your mind it deteriorates, you'll end up like senile, slobbery old men and women. Revolting.
So, by neglect you can't say, “She'll be right mate”. Because she won't be right. Because everything is impermanent; changing, changing, changing.
So as a function of time, things deteriorate. You have to put a lot of energy to make things get better.
So, in other words, each day your body basically, for most people, gets worse and then gets better. Each day your mind gets better. Now even western psychologists know that in the first one year of life there’s more learning done than in most of your life.
Because in the first year or so you learn major skills like learning how to walk, learning how to talk. Major learning skills.
Young children can pick up a language by the time they're four, and if you try to learn a new language when you're adult you struggle with it. So basically, you're deteriorating from the day you're born, that's what it really amounts to.
However, there's no law that says you can't do something about it. Now, what do you do about it, what do you about making your IQ increase? If you've seen the averages the IQ curves deteriorate very rapidly.
So by forty or fifty most people's IQs have dropped thirty or forty points. However, if you cultivate your mind, you'll go against the stream of the averages and you'll get brighter.
Because of past kamma, I had a very high IQ as a kid, very high. And if I bothered to do an IQ test I'd be well above the average now.
Now what is it that you do? Remember, you've got one asset; your ability to understand things. For example, if you couldn't understand mathematics there could be an error on your bank account, you wouldn't pick it up. It’d cost you money.
So, you've got to, until you get to the position where you know what’s what some, and know what to cultivate and what not to cultivate. If you had some bad land, say there was salt in the soil, and you had some good land, you wouldn't waste your energy and effort cultivating the bad things, you'd spend your effort cultivating the good things.
So until you untangle where you're at, until you actually start somewhere, and you make a vow, you say I'm sick of being stupid, I want to be intelligent. I'm sick of being unhappy, I want to find the path that makes me happy. I'm sick of being robbed or bashed or raped or killed or whatever you want to say. I want to get to a better happiness. And I want to know why it happens.
Now once you say I want to know why things are like they are, then you're interested in one thing only, you're interested in the truth of what's what. Then, you say well who knows the truth of what's what?
So you can go and test people out. You can say, you could run around and do a survey. You could say to people, could you tell me why people are born, and birth is suffering? Remember it's a big trauma being born. Could you tell me why birth is suffering, living's some suffering, old age, sickness and death is suffering, can you tell me why that happens?
Now, if you go and shirt collar most people, like an answer like "That's the way it is", is not an answer. So you've got to understand, do things happen from causes, or do things just happen for no reason at all? Until you know that everything happens driven by causes, you're getting nowhere.
So you've got to understand good causes make happiness, bad causes make unhappiness. But if you mistake a bad cause thinking it will bring happiness, and you're wrong, it'll soon show up, the error will soon show up and you'll be unhappy.
So druggies think drugs are happiness. In a short time they find out that they’re in pain. They made an error. They mistook something that was unwholesome and a cause of misery, and they took it for a cause of happiness. Then their IQ deteriorates, their health deteriorates, everything deteriorates. Sometimes the deterioration is so rapid, so fast, they're dead. And that's that.
So there's no time, because a human life isn't all that long. There's no time to muck around. Now, this is hearsay for most of you, but you've had an infinite number of lives in the past and every one of them has been a dud. You've learnt nothing in an infinite time, because you still don't know what’s what.
So you, if you think there’s nothing to be learnt you'll never learn. So you’ve got to do like a stock take and you say, "What do I really know?" Well, if you observe it you know your unhappiness, you know that you haven't been perfectly happy. And then you go and talk to other people and find out they're not happy.
Now that for most people is where the investigation stops. They don't want to know about it; they don't continue on. So is there a path or isn't there a path that leads you to happiness? That’s what you want to know.
So I've met people who are perfectly happy, and I know what caused it because I've talked to them about it. And although it's not apparent to you, I can tell you this without a lie, I have more happiness in one day of my life than this whole roomful of people have had in their lifetime.
So I'm very happy, and I know why that's so. And I'm not gonna tell
you. Oh, that's not right, I'm your teacher. Yeah. So I'm not gonna tell
you. You think water will bring you happiness. Well, suck it and see.
Well, where did your misery go? Does it work?
Does it work?
Have more, never had enough.
Does it work? Does it work? Alright, well what you do, if you think that water causes happiness, get it in bottles and gallons, stand on the street corner and say, “Happiness! Happiness! You want happiness!” and they say “Yeah”. “I have here some water, sir or madam, and I will sell you this bottle of water for a hundred and fifty dollars” and see how many sales you make.
But remember, there's the fair trading act. If it doesn't work, they come and sue you. If drinking water made happiness fish would be happier than human beings. So if you thought like that, you'd generate the causes for taking birth as a fish. Then you'd be eaten by another fish.
Well, is your happiness complete now? That's it then?
Student: No, I need some more.
Never had enough. And then with that you'll never need any more water
for the rest of your life. You'll have had enough then. No more water?
You got happiness now? So your happiness is complete now. You got
complete happiness now?
Student: No
Well, how are you going to get complete happiness? Drink more water? How’re you going to do it? What do you do know? You've tried that. What are you going to do now? Eat chocolate?
Student: No just stop being greedy.
Starting when?
Student: Next year.
And when will the result show? If you stop being greedy next year how long will the result take, before you see a result?
It would take about a hundred world cycles for the results to show. So be patient. It works, but it takes a while for the results to show.
Anyone else got any theories about this happiness business?
Of course you've got millions of them because that's what you've been doing all your life. You've been, you see the mind is seeking to be happy, it's never seeking misery, unless you're a play actor and you want to …
So every single action you did this life was seeking happiness. But the trouble is, it didn't work. Didn't work.
So what are you going to do now?
Student: Practice the Dhamma.
How do you know that'll bring you happiness? What evidence is there, Leila?
You've met enlightened people. You're one of the few girls in Australia who have met an enlightened being, that arahant. He's happy?
Student: Yes.
Sometimes he looks like this. Good. Good. But his mind is perfectly happy. You know that, don't you? How long has he been practicing, Leila?
Well, I'll tell you the last time I met him was one world cycle ago. That's a long time ago. A world cycle's about ten with thirty-seven naught million years. That's when I met him last, and we were both monks under one of the earlier Buddhas. So I know, since he was a monk, a world cycle ago, he's been practising a world cycle.
How long have you been practicing Buddha Dhamma Leila?
Student: As far as I know about six years.
Well. Oh Leila! Well, Leila, do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first? Which do you want?
Student: The good news and then the good news.
What do you want to hear Leila? Keep practising for another world cycle, then you might end up as a Buddhist monk and keep practising for another world cycle, you might become enlightened. If you practise very strongly, it mightn’t take that long.
Student: And if you don’t practise?
If you don't practise, you might be wandering around for the next two hundred and twenty world cycles, suffering, suffering, which isn't long.
So, any other theories of happiness Leila?
Student: Maybe you should do all those good things?
Yeah, have you done them all?
When you go to school and you see other people talking with other people and they’re not talking to you, you get jealous, that is jealousy. That's a type of practice.
I'm not putting you down Leila, but because you're a woman, women are very good at jealousy, Leila. They don't have to cultivate it much, they're, it's a natural skill they've got.
And what's the result of jealousy? That you have no authority, in other words you always work under a boss, you never can get to a high, high job position. Never get to like a managing director or something.
That's why women, there’s not many, there's a few women managing directors in Australia. But that’s why, in essence, most of the top jobs where people exercise authority, there's some exceptions, like the prime minister of England's a woman. The prime minister of India before the present one, she got shot, she was a woman.
When Sri Lanka had independence under the British the first prime
minister of Sri Lanka was a woman. But broadly, in most countries, the men
are running the, they’re in the positions of authority. If you want a
position of authority, you should never be jealous. Now the causes, the
casual chain of that outcome you can find in your meditation, if you
meditate. So jealousy is an unpleasant feeling when you have it, but it
has an enormous effect on your future job chances.
Now one way you could do it, I don't recommend this, is to intensify your jealousy and see what happens. But I don't recommend that because the pain will be too much.
So, the antidote to jealousy is a cetasika which is wholesome mind, which is called sympathetic joy. When someone achieves something good, you feel happy for them and that's abnormal by most people's standards because they ... envy is another problem. Hate, you know. There are negative minds.
You can't learn anything high in the Dhamma till you've tidied up some of these things. It's just like you couldn't do university mathematics if you couldn't pass HSC mathematics at about a ninety percent level. You'll fail, because you haven't got the background. So you've got to, you've got to stop being sheepish, you've got to hurry up and find out the path to happiness.
And since everyone in the world’s falling around having a hard time, to a lesser or greater degree, it's obviously, if you find a miserable person you don't say to them, “Excuse me miserable person, could you tell me how to get great happiness?” Because if they bloody well knew they would be happy.
So you've got to look very carefully. Sometimes you see people with the outward form of happiness. You might walk up to someone and say, "Ah, you look happy".
"Ah, yeah man I'm happy".
"What's the secret?"
"Oh, I drank
four bottles of whiskey today".
So you come back and watch them the
next morning and they wake up with a hangover and you say,
“What happened to your happiness now?”
So you've got to pursue in your mind not just a short-term fix. We're
talking about happiness that never comes to an end, stability of mind
happiness. How do you do it? Well that's the problem. Meditate and find
out, now!