Non-Reliant Bliss

Buddha said that we are living in Samsara. A way to think of Samsara is that all of our pleasures are temporary and impermanent. By grasping at pleasures we necessarily suffer because those things will go away. Then we will feel bad - then in some time we will feel better, setting ourselves to feel bad again. We go up and down and around in circles chasing temporary happiness that is dependent on outside and impermanent things. That’s Samsara and that’s how most of live.

Now a lot of time I use the word, ‘we’ when I discuss these things. We means ‘me and you’. I should say ‘most of us’, perhaps, because there could be a high level Bodhisattva or Buddha reading these things. Of course they know I’m not including them in that ‘we’. So is it totally presumptuous for me to say that this is how the majority of us live our lives? Well, in order to find out some analysis is needed. Here’s an interesting insight. There is a website called ‘we feel fine‘. They go out and search blogs, thousands of blogs for any sentence with “I feel” in it. Then it grabs those sentences and aggregates them into reports, so at least from the blogging community you can see a running list of people’s feelings. It’s really quite a strange thing to read all the feelings. So take a look, go to the site, start the app and then click ‘mounds’. If everything is going as usual, you will see that the most common feeling is ‘better’, then right after that is, ‘bad’. I see this as circular - better, bad, better, bad, better, bad. Like that. The reason it goes like that is because people are depending on outside things for their happiness!! It’s true. Those things we have no control over and they change. Our relationships change, our cars get old, our bodies oxidize! So if we rely on things like this we will necessarily go from good at the start, to bad as they change and then good again as we find a new object to depend on.

So what’s the alternative? I’ll tell you about a person I met at a Zen sitting once. His name was Creed and he had had a tough life - had problems with drinking. I asked him how he came to Zen. Hew was in the military and one day he was in a hammock on the Mediterranean Sea with his unit. They had eaten very well - delicious seafood. His stomach was full and he had this really wonderful view of the sky and as he watched, the sun began to set. He watched the sky for maybe like a half an hour and he became just full of bliss. He lost himself into the sunset, going with the clouds and changing with the colors. He was really blissed out - a rare experience but one that many of us can relate to. Then the show ended, the sun went down and it was beginning to get dark. He came back to himself and then suddenly he realized that bliss did not come from the sunset - from out there. The sky didn’t reach out and penetrate him and put bliss in him. That bliss lay inside of him always as a potential, it was his, but he didn’t have control, he didn’t own it. He didn’t like the idea that he was dependent on these outside things and so he started to search for a way to connect with that bliss in a complete, non-dependent way. He eventually found himself in Scottsdale sitting Zazen with us. I didn’t see him again after that time, but I really enjoyed his company and his story inspired me. This is a story of renunciation and true seeking, it is very beautiful. To understand this and to attain this is to be free from Samsara forever.

So I really hope that all those people out there feeling bad, better, bad, better, can connect with their deepest potential and soon become happy without reliance. Then I hope that they help others to reach the same state.

Take care everyone!

Oh, and thanks, danimator, for the link!

Link to We Feel Fine

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