(previous installment here)
Wright: What is it about the pursuit of pleasure in the conventional way that makes it the road to unhappiness, according to Buddhism?
Joseph Goldstein: First, I think it’s important to realize that the path for each of us will depend on the form that we engage in it, so what I’m saying will be different for monks and nuns as opposed to us as lay people. So, to the pursuit of pleasure.
We all do that. We all want to feel comfortable and be in nice surroundings. So I think there are two issues here. One is how addicted we are, how much our happiness depends on our fulfilling those sense desires, or whether we simply enjoy them as they come, without that strong addictive quality.
But on a deeper level I think the Buddha’s point, which can be born out in our experience, is that pleasure doesn’t fulfill its promise of happiness. Our culture, the media and advertising bombard us with the message: Get this, do this and you’ll be fulfilled. And the Buddha is pointing out that even though in the moment it may be a pleasurable experience, precisely because it all has the nature to change it’s not going to provide the lasting happiness that we’re really looking for. And this is not this is not some abstruse philosophic doctrine. We just know this from looking at our lives.
Wright: Gratification evaporates.
Joseph Goldstein: How many pleasurable experiences have you had in your life? Innumerable. We all have.
Wright: How many lasted?
Joseph Goldstein: Yes. And we’re left in the same position of always wanting another one.
Wright: Yes.
Joseph Goldstein: There’s a there’s a funny little story — there’s a teaching figure in the Sufi tradition called named Nasradeem and there are many teaching stories about him. So one day he’s sitting in front of this big pile of chili peppers, you eating one after the other and his mouth is burning and his friends and disciples come up. “What are you doing? Why do you keep eating them?” And he says, “Well I keep waiting for a sweet one.”
In a way that’s what we’re doing. We keep looking for the next hit of pleasure experience. Not that there’s anything wrong in that moment of pleasant experience; it’s just not going to give what we’re expecting from it.
Wright: Right. But I think what what some people what skeptics might say is “Okay. It’s true. I get this thrill and there’s this crash and then I get another thrill and I get another crash and it averages out to zero.” But the thrills are special. They’re fun. The way a lot of people probably think about Buddhism is: Okay, you don’t get the crashes but you don’t get the thrills. You’re still averaging out to zero, and it’s just a question like — whether you like pizza or whether you like a roller coaster ride. So there must be something that replaces. You kind of hinted at this, but it’s very hard for the rest of us to understand. If you take away all — not that you’re taking away all — the little pleasures of life, if people no longer pursue so many intense pleasures, and don’t get as many intense pleasures, what does Buddhism offer to replace that joy?
Joseph Goldstein: Well I think that there are two two aspects to your question. One is, it’s not that we stop. Our life is always filled with pleasure and pain and neutral experience. So it’s not that as one enters the spiritual path or the Buddhist path, all of a sudden we’re withdrawing from the roller coaster experience. That’s still happens. It’s the nature of being alive. What we are withdrawing from is the illusion that the highs are going to provide a lasting kind of happiness. We still have the highs and the lows and we’re open to it all, but there’s a much greater sense of ease and equanimity with those changes. So that’s one aspect. It’s not that experience stops happening. It goes on happening in just the same way but without that addictive quality to it.
But on a deeper level, one of the things we discover through a spiritual path is that there are much deeper and more fulfilling experiences of happiness and of joy. I’ll give you a very mundane, simple example. When I’m busy in my life, and speaking with a lot of people, and going to a lot of meetings, and I go for a walk in the woods generally what happens, even though I am trying to be present in my body, my mind will be rehashing things that have happened, or my plans. So my experience of walking in the woods is nice, but it’s also filled with a lot of mental activity.
When I go for a walk in the woods when I’m on retreat, when my mind is really silent, it’s like entering a wonderland. The difference in the experience is so extraordinary because I’m really quiet, I’m really present, I am experiencing nuances in the woods, in what I’m seeing and hearing and feeling and smelling. The sense of joy and completion is so much more profound than when I’m walking through the woods and my mind is just chattering away. So it’s not that we’re giving up something in order to come to a kind of flat neutral space. We’re actually giving up what prevents us from an extraordinary fullness of experience.
It’s remarkable, because this is not some great spiritual attainment. I’m not talking about going off and spending 50 years in a cave in the mountains. It’s just taking a little bit of time to retreat from the busy-ness of the world at times, and to learn how to quiet the mind a bit. Then it’s like whole worlds open up.
Wright: And then on an everyday basis. I mean, you’re meditating every day, right, and so you’re getting some of this in the course of your everyday life.
Joseph Goldstein:Exactly, exactly.
(continued here)
meditation
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