In Buddhism, the word “feeling” is huge, but it doesn’t have the meaning that we think. For us, it’s virtually synonymous with the word emotion, you know, but that’s not the meaning here, that’s not the meaning at all.
In the Buddhist model of the mind, everything in mental consciousness is either negative, neurotic, non-virtuous; or positive, virtuous; and the third category is often referred to as neutral, but I prefer the word “mechanics,” which are neither negative nor positive but are crucial in order to function in daily life.
You’ve got concentration, good memory, discrimination – states of mind like that. Then you have one called “feeling.” What does it refer to? Well, we have either pleasant, unpleasant, or you can say neutral – well, forget the neutral, okay, just don’t worry about them.
And these pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings can also be experienced by the sensory consciousness, as we well know.
What does that mean? The word “happy” is another word for pleasant – a happy feeling, a pleasant feeling. The word “blissful,” the word “rapture,” the word “ecstasy” – what all these words refer to are levels of pleasant feeling – we understand this.
Then you’ve got unhappy, unpleasant feelings, all the way to the extreme examples of like being tortured, the most unbearable painful or the most terrible physical and mental suffering, you know? And we have a pleasant or unpleasant feeling every millisecond.
Buddha’s general point is this: he has observed everybody wants happiness – we say it like that – “We all want happy feelings.” And nothing wrong with that! As Lama Yeshe says, “The more pleasure, the better!”
Given that we all want happiness, happy feelings, we’d better learn to know how to get them.
The fundamental mistake we make is that we’re addicted to believing that happy feelings, happiness, comes from outside us – beautiful boyfriends and delicious cakes and healthy babies and money in the bank.
But not only that, we even conflate the happiness with the cake – this is totally mistaken! If I say to you, “Tell me about your happiness, Mary,” you’ll proceed to describe the new boyfriend, you’ll proceed to describe the rainbow: you’ll describe the external object, as if it’s the happiness itself.
Pleasant feelings are mind, and they are triggered – indeed we can see this – by contact with certain objects. But the crucial thing is they are not the direct result of the object: the objects are merely catalysts. This is huge to understand.
All we want is happy feelings, and all we do not want is unhappy feelings or suffering, and this is what drives our lives, and the methods for getting happiness and stopping suffering are the essence of Lord Buddha’s instructions.
He says we are making the mistake of believing that happy feelings are caused by getting a chocolate cake, are caused by Fred praising me: this is the nature of samsara and this is the disaster, because it’s just not true, he says – it’s the wrong analysis. It’s not a moralistic issue; it’s a practical one.
Let’s look at the experience of the cake – forget Fred, you know? You have attachment there, which drives us. First of all, it’s dissatisfaction: “I don’t have enough, something’s missing, oh, what do I want, what’s missing? Okay, cake!”
Then attachment now starts exaggerating the deliciousness of cake. Then intention comes in: “I’ll get the cake.” Attachment drives you to the cupboard, you get the cake, you put it on the plate, and now attachment’s got this function of anticipating, all excited, and all the time, of course, exaggerating its deliciousness, so can’t wait to get the cake in the mouth.
Finally, you get the cake in the mouth – and what happens? Pleasant feeling, which is what attachment anticipated, is definitely triggered – no question, no question – but the tragedy is attachment’s still right there, sort of sitting on your shoulder running the show.
Up till this moment attachment’s been doing the job of craving and expecting and anticipating and manipulating to get the cake, with all this excitement, you know? This is all attachment: all the fantasy building up, anticipating the pleasure that contact with the cake will trigger. That’s what this whole exercise is about!
The pleasure does come, and you’d think attachment would be quiet now, having finally got what it wanted. But no. Now attachment reverts to its default mode of dissatisfaction: “Not enough, Robina! Put another piece in the mouth, I’m not content yet!”
And then it’s downhill from there, and by the fourth piece, before you know it, pleasant feelings have turned into disgusting feelings and you want to vomit. This is called the suffering of change.
Even though the happiness doesn’t last, it’s still a moment of pleasant feeling. But the problem is the misunderstanding of the main causes of the pleasant and unpleasant feelings. We think they come from the cake.
Okay, now, if cake is not the main cause of that happy feeling that does come, then we have to ask the question, “Well then, Lord Buddha, please, what is the main cause of happy feelings because I want happy feelings, please?”
He gives us his assessment, and this is the essence of Dharma practice – but it’s the long-term one. He’s not arguing that cake doesn’t trigger a happy feeling. But you’ve got to ask the question – you’ve got to ask the question – where did that happy feeling come from? If it doesn’t come from the cake, and it’s not a function of attachment, where does that happy feeling come from?
Very simply, happy feelings are the fruit of past virtuous actions, accumulated from countless lives and stored in your mind, like money in the bank. And then what happens is eating the cake is like putting your ATM card in the machine and out comes the 20 dollars, the happy feelings.
Because we don’t know that we have a store of happy feelings, it’s like we assume that putting the card in the slot is the cause of getting the 20 dollars, just like eating cake is the cause of getting happy feelings.
But we have to have created the merit in the past! If there’s no merit in your bank vault, I don’t care how much cake you put in your mouth, you won’t get a happy feeling!
We have to understand technically where does happiness come from: past virtue! You’ve got to store it in your mind, and then you put your ATM card in and a happy feeling comes out, and because you understand it’s now all based on virtue – even your cake – you can now think, “This is the fruit of my past generosity, how amazing, aren’t I fortunate, and I’ve got a happy feeling, that’s the product of my past virtue, and I’m going to offer this to all sentient beings.”
Instead of the usual, which is grasping at it, which totally wastes it, like getting your $20 then using it as toilet paper.
Now with the right view, you create more virtue and put more money in your bank, and you don’t piss it down the toilet and only get suffering in the future because you misunderstood it. Are we communicating here, people?