Equanimity, Straight Up, Please

Post Date:April 27, 2010

Lately, the quest for unconditional happiness keeps popping up as an appropriate and necessary goal for our attention and energy.  Various workshops, seminars, classes, discussion groups, and other types of events promise to divulge the techniques for discovering the source of happiness.  From the overabundance of these workshops and the like, I can only surmise that people desperately want nothing more than to be happy. 

There certainly isn’t anything wrong with being happy, and everyone deserves not to be inundated by the suffering that permeates this world.  But I feel compelled to offer a caveat about this wide-ranging market for happiness and the diverse workshops, seminars, and classes that this need has spawned:  the techniques that dominate these workshops and the supposed results may only propose a quick-fix kind of approach that may do more harm than good.  For example, one workshop that purports to teach a secret Taoist methodology describes the resulting experience as a “mild orgasm” (Thank goodness, it isn’t a “big orgasm” or nothing else would get done!); another claims that one hour of this technique is more valuable than one-hundred years of meditation.  Many of these techniques claim to be from authentic spiritual lineages—taught in secret, until now but with an (understandably) hefty price tag!  These are “secret” techniques, after all, and the market demands no less of a price.

 “Bliss” should not be confused with the real core of Taoism—the cultivation of the calm stability of body and mind, which stands in opposition to a bliss buzz.  The Book of Balance and Harmony, an anthology of writings compiled by a 13th century Taoist Mater of the School of Complete Reality, warns against mistaking such activities for real essence:

    Toiling frantically at religious exercises,
    They struggle madly to circulate vitality and energy;
    Counting their breaths and massaging themselves,
    They vainly aim for pleasant sensations.

One might ask, What is wrong with “pleasant sensations”?  Nothing at all, but only if  we recognize them as temporary things within the continuum of our experience.   If the sensation becomes the goal, though, then all that is being cultivated is an addiction to the “pleasant.”  In other words, we become bliss junkies always looking for our next happy fix.  The underlying and irrefutable fact is that nothing is permanent—pleasant experiences included—and to be preoccupied with bliss means that you are fixating upon stringing one sensation after another in a never ending stream of narcissistically driven superficial happiness.
  
More problematic, though, is that such attempts to generate happiness over and over mask the very real suffering of this world—both for others and for oneself.  The experienced “bliss” does not provide the tools to address the root of suffering but rather covers the symptom (unhappiness) with an analgesic (Bliss) without treating the underlying disease (or dis-ease).    To focus upon having “happy” experiences (i.e., “mild orgasms”) over and over diverts energy from interrogating the root cause of ones unhappiness—generating a thin layer of “I-feel-good-right-now” so why bother with  “why-I-am-not-happy-in-the-first-place.” 

Instead of such temporary fixes, we would be better off returning to the crux of Taoist practice.  Instead of patchwork remedies that are watered-down and packaged for immediate relief, we would benefit by following the sage advice to “Turn the attention inward to illumine within.”  If we can look at our own “inner design,” then we will

    Dissolve accumulated borders
    Clarifying the mind,
    Be free of addictive habituation.

The goal is to not be the caught up in the inevitable cycles of happiness and suffering, thereby moving beyond the need for fixes.  As the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings attributed to the historical Buddha, reads:

    The wise walk on cling to nothing.
    They are neither elated by happiness
    Nor cast down by sorrow.

While some read such advice to “cling to nothing” as apathy, in reality, it is to let go of all illusory attachments in order to be in this moment without any obstructions.  To reside in equanimity and arrive at the experience as described in a carving over the lintel of a Taoist hermitage,

    The recluse’s heart is a placid lake unruffled by the winds of circumstance.

To be “unruffled” in all circumstances—to be free from the roller-coaster of happiness and sorrow and drink deeply from the wells of equanimity—surely trumps a temporary shot of “Bliss.”

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