We live in the age of instant gratification. So I thought I would offer you an instant gratification version of meditation today! We have talked about happiness on and off here for the past year. I have talked about how real happiness comes from within and that outer problems should not affect our inner happiness. On one level all of you have told me that it makes sense but difficult to grasp. Today, I want to prove to you that real happiness is within us. We will do a meditation known as transfer of enjoyment meditation to show this.
Before we do that though, let’s talk about how many of us can say we are really happy all the time? Forget all the time, how many of you were truly happy meaning no delusions – no anger, attachment, hatred, upset, hurt feeling, jealousy, and so forth for a full 24 hour period? Hardly any one of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hour period. It certainly comes and goes. We are happy for a while and all of a sudden, our mind starts to wonder and gets to a negative place, and poof, it destroys our happiness. So why is that? If we are on a vacation, we should be free from all worries. But even on vacation, something disturbs our peace of mind. Geshe Kelsang says in the book How to Transform Your Life, “Inner peace, or mental peace, is the source of all our happiness. Although all living beings have the same basic wish to be happy all the time, very few people understand the real causes of happiness. We usually believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result, we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring them. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we will see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.”
This is similar to what I mentioned earlier. When we are on vacation and if something sets us off, we are no longer happy. So, it is certainly not our surroundings that make us happy. I think we can say for sure that everyone wants to be happy. No exceptions. Have you met anyone that does not want to be happy all the time? Their definition of happiness may be different but they all want to be happy – free from suffering. If all of us have the same desire to be happy, happiness should be not as elusive as it has been. The reason for this elusiveness is that we are looking for our happiness in the wrong places. Some people look for happiness in food, money, travel, sex, drugs, big houses, fancy cars, and so on. None of that can give us permanent happiness. We are told early in life that you achieve a certain career goal, get married, have kids and happiness will follow. Well, the divorce rate tells us that is not true! We have turned this whole thing backward. Rather than being happy with the journey, we are teaching kids to look for a destination. This in turn creates unreasonable expectations as kids are growing up and sets up them for a lifetime of unhappiness. Happiness is a state of mind. If we develop a positive state of mind, we will naturally be happy. This is what we need to train ourselves into. Fortunately, there is a shortcut to this process called Transfer of Enjoyment meditation. This meditation is a doorway into this practice of getting our mind to a happy state in an instant. It is however not the be-all and end-all. Initially, it is a good practice to use this meditation until we get to a point where we can get into a happy state of mind on demand. Without needing any external stimulus.