The Noble Truth
of achieving happiness
“The needy suffer,
The need-less don’t, Those with excess en’joy.” For more
than 40 years, the Old Buddha wandered around India as an itinerant beggar-cum-wise-man,
pointing to and accentuating the negative and promising the positive. That’s
how he earned his lunch. At his Great
Awakening (i.e. samma-sambodhi) he had understood that the positive (read: achievement,
success and so on or the sense thereof) has no future. The positive is
momentary. It doesn’t last, hence empty (Saksrit: sunja), therefore in vain.
But the negative, i.e. need, including the need to be ‘delivered from’ need,
does last. Need and the suffering it generates are the drivers of life (or
rebirth). So the Old
Buddha, like every successful businessman, and who is in the business of
delivering goods and services that eliminate need (in a word, deliverance),
built his small local enterprise into a multinational corporation (called the
Sangha) whose core service was deliverance from (i.e. by means of
elimination of) the unhappiness (or suffering) caused by (i.e. indicating or
signalling) need. When the
Sakya Buddha peaked at his great moment of awakening (i.e. samma-sambodhi)
he’d had direct experience of the after-affect of complete and
absolute need satisfaction: “Then the blessed one sat at the root of the Bodhi Tree for seven days in
one session, feeling the bliss of diliverance.” Happiness is
the self-reward for (success at) attaining satisfaction, and which happens
when ‘delivered’, i.e. freed from a need. In essence (hence a
universal principle), happiness is
caused by attainment (of need satisfaction, irrespective of the particular need). Greater, more intense
degrees of happiness, such as (physical) joy, bliss, rapture and so on result
from oversupply → absolute attainment of satisfaction (of which orgasm,
which rewards for completing one of the more important tasks of life, is the
most significant example). So why did
Siddartha not concentrate his efforts on explaining the 4 Noble Truths of
Happiness? For the same
reason none of the other Great religions did (and which made them great).
Happiness signals success, i.e. successful task ending. Success delivers from, frees, but is momentary, fleeting.
The majority of humans fail (in Christian speak: sin) sooner or later, and
for longer, eventually for good. Teaching how to succeed (and attain
deliverance, freedom) is difficult and bad for business. Explaining how to
avoid, evade, eliminate (albeit in the next life) or manage failure is
easier, and there are, obviously, far more paying customers. So the only
problem remaining to be resolved is: Which (minimum) task needs to be ended,
accomplished, achieved and so on? The answer is logic: ‘Sleep with the enemy!’ The
Buddha, Ripley and the Alien |