On Ego, Happiness, And The Suffering They Bring

Ego Fulfillment Does Not Lead To Being Happy, Happiness Does Not Exist, But There Is A Way Out Of Suffering

It’s Not About You

Liberation Is A Release From The Imposing Control Your Passions Have On Your Life, And How They Obfuscate The Truth From You

“It’s not about you” is a frequently heard refrain in spiritual conversations, and it is often wielded by individuals who know the words, but not the underlying intent of that statement.

At best, it is used to cutoff anyone who, correctly or incorrectly, proclaim they have made some spiritual progress because, they are ‘obviously’ bragging. But it is used more frequently by individuals who have a very simplistic understanding of what it means. And to some extent — unknowable by any of us — some of those who wield this remonstration are hypocritical individuals who don’t really believe that there is such a thing as spiritual progress possible — for anyone other than perhaps themselves. So they shoot down anyone who might unfortunately speak publicly of such progress in their presence.

It’s a pity, truly, because I believe the result of directing such a statement, in an uninformed way, at someone, is to undermine their precious development of a heartfelt intention to better themselves in a spiritual way, i.e., by training their mind. And it creates doubt in the mind of everyone within earshot.

The problem is, there is a widespread prejudice towards anyone who talks about his or her own meditative experiences — especially by those who excel at clothing themselves in the trappings of a tradition, adopting a veneer of knowing important matters, while simultaneously failing in every way to expend much effort towards that most important task — to actually integrate such knowledge into their understanding in an effort to learn about themselves. In short, they are dangerous fakes who never tire of criticizing others.

Yes, it is true, it’s not about you because ultimately there is no “you.” And yet, you enjoy a precious human life, which is an opportunity to learn and perfect your knowledge, mostly by letting many imperfect understandings drop away, and directly experiencing reality free of the structural errors we normally impose on our cognitive faculty. We frequently overlook the effect of the imposition of what we think of as “absolutes” on our understanding.

It’s not about you in the sense that it is not about your passions, which imprison you. Liberation is a release from the imposing control your passions have on your life, and how they obfuscate the truth from you. You may be very happy, proud, even impressed with yourself for having had some spiritual experience or other, but these are passions, and they will lead you astray.

This doesn’t mean that the experiences are worthless. How could they be? Yes, it is an amazing accomplishment, but thinking so, relishing the achievement even a little bit, will lead you to become attached to it in its conceptual form. This is the metaphorical “emergency brake” of spiritual development. After falling into a pattern of passionate attachment to your accomplishments, forward motion is as likely as when driving a car with the emergency brake engaged — lots of friction and energy expended, with ever increasing damage done!

And yet, this does not mean that intentionally and actively crushing these passions when they arise is the correct antidote. Any positive action to abandon these passions is a step in the wrong direction. It involves a judgment about the passions, just as those who direct their formulaic criticism at some hapless discloser of real or assumed personal progress are judging those individuals.

Your objective should be not to judge, because all judgments are impositions of belief upon direct imperience. The correct objective is to note these passions as they arise, and let them naturally dissolve by letting them go, not holding onto them, not allowing them to lead you into a state of self-love, or self-importance, nor self-loathing — in other words, selfness. This means to see them for what they are — more of the same natural activity of reality, nothing more.

How does one do this correctly? Like most other mind-training accomplishments, this is not something that can be done via the intellect. Reading these words and ‘putting them into effect’ just won’t accomplish what needs to be accomplished. You see, once you make passions something to be abandoned, or purified by you, you have already created a dualistic understanding that will obfuscate the truth — these passions are just more of the same natural activity of reality — and they have no power over you unless you react to them, allowing them to lead you down a long path that leads nowhere. Thus, it is the belief that they are something negative to be let go of, that is an imposition of a false dichotomy of things to be judged by a judge.

This is the reason why flinging the statement, “It’s not about you,” at someone, is an error. The speaker is missing an opportunity to possibly learn something. We should always be open to the possibility that everyone we meet may have something precious to share with us — to teach us — even if they themselves do not realize how they help us. This has happened so many times in my life that I have lost count. Why can people teach us something, when they are not conscious of it? Because everything is the same natural activity, manifesting in a coherent, yet creative, response to whatever is at the moment. Not meeting another person in an open, accepting and nonjudgmental way blocks any possibility of learning, and unwittingly manifests something unfortunately true about you — you’re very impressed with yourself aren’t you!

Yes, always remember it’s not about you… Note it, and move on, allowing the judge, the judgment, and the associated passions to once again rest in their natural state, which is to say, spontaneously free — of attachment, of judgment, even of any true self-existence, and most importantly, of any effect on you at all.

But don’t just think about it! Allow this process to happen naturally by using your attention and not focusing on these judgements and negative passions. You will be amazed when realize that you are free of their imposed suffering. Amazing!

Just don’t fall into the error of believing that because the natural state of reality is spontaneously free of all these passions and judgments, there is nothing to do — that all you have to do is just abide naturally as you already are — judgments and all. This activity responds to what we are paying attention to, even if we think we are being nonjudgmental.

Remember, this is not about you! Don’t conflate your ‘self’ with the natural state of reality. You need work. You’re like a “disturbance in the force.” Pay attention to the reverberations of these subtleties. They are your teacher.

If all of this sounds as if it is self-conflicting advice, then you are sensing the tension between the problem and its solution, which is not a simple imperative direction. Instead, it is like a dance along a tightrope. Lean too far in either direction and you will fall. Keeping your balance enables you to make your way forward.

Searching for Happiness? Then You’re Doing It Wrong

Searching For Happiness Always Ends In Suffering — But Ending Our Suffering Is The Primary Condition For Being Happy

Searching for happiness always ends in suffering — but ending our suffering is the primary condition for being happy. Why search then, when we all know how it will end? Why not just end our suffering to allow that which we seek to arise naturally?

Ok, but how to end suffering? There is a simple prescription that works every time, but it takes practice and much reflection on how it actually works to get the effect we seek:

To suffer is to continue wanting something that you can never have.

No living being wants to suffer, yet we humans are always searching for happiness, an effort that brings us nothing but suffering because we never find “true happiness,” which is lasting happiness. How does searching for happiness bring us suffering? Because our lack of success in finding it frustrates our desire to be happy, and that frustration is suffering.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t desire anything at all because even wanting to end suffering is a desire, and desires are what provide motivation in our lives. Without desires we would all quickly die naked and emaciated in a pool of our own excrement — if we existed at all.

At a more profound level, there is a similarity between the motivation that desire brings to our lives — which focuses our attention on the accomplishment of certain things — and happiness. It has to do with what exactly happiness is, rather than being about a cause or condition for happiness to arise.

There is a fellow named Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, former secretary to, and oftentimes French translator for, the Dalai Lama, who is famously called the “happiest person on Earth” by some scientists, as well as many bloggers and advocates for the wellness benefits of meditation, because of the findings of some neurological studies of his brain after his decades of meditation. Those scientists found that Monsieur Ricard shows evidence of having outsize areas of his brain that are associated with happy and compassionate feelings. While the connection between brain structures and happiness is tenuous at present, since the label of “happiest person on Earth” has been applied, it is useful to use the recipient as an illustration to bring out an important point about happiness — having happiness does not mean you are necessarily happy.

Matthieu has written books whose titles start with the French word “plaidoyer,” which can be translated into English as “plea,” in the sense of a strong and well-argued defense of something, or “advocacy” for something. For example, he has written “Plaidoyer pour le bonheur” (Plea for Happiness),” “Plaidoyer pour l’altruisme” (Plea for Altruism), and his latest: “Plaidoyer pour les animaux” (Plea For The Animals). He advocates for these things because they concern him — he’s not happy about the treatment of animals by humans, nor the widespread unhappiness and suffering in the world, and the lack of more extensive altruism which we need as a means to end suffering.

I mention these concerns of his in order to point out the obvious discontent he feels over many aspects of human life today, that drive him to write these books advocating certain changes in human behavior. And if we did make these changes — even a single one of us, I imagine — that would make him happy because it would help to bring about the changes he seeks.

So, apparently the “happiest person on earth” can still be unhappy about the state of the world — because he still has desires — that people change so that they lessen their suffering and that of other sentient beings in the world.

My point here is that being happy is based upon the enjoyment of the satisfaction of a desire, or the enjoyment of some event in our lives, while happiness is something other than being happy. Happiness is a conceptual abstraction that suggests that ‘happiness’ can endure over the course of your life, but being happy is always an evanescent occurrence that we can only hope to retain a memory of because the experience is over soon over. Thus, ‘happiness’ is something completely different than being happy, as Matthieu Ricard himself tries to explain:

“Authentic happiness is not linked to an activity; it is a state of being, a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions. While ordinary pleasures are produced by contact with pleasant objects and end when that contact is broken, sukha — lasting well-being — is felt so long as we remain in harmony with our inner nature. One intrinsic aspect of it is selflessness, which radiates from within rather than focusing on the self.”⁠

Thus, we are never in a state of “happiness” — that word is merely a short-hand for certain qualities of our understanding, and a certain way of being in the world that, combined together, lead us to not suffer.

Given the presence of these qualities of understanding and way of being in the world, we can be in a state of comfort at all times — a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint in which we feel unconcerned, light as a feather, floating on air, bubbling over with joy, or perhaps even ecstatic:

The goal to be sought is not momentary elation, but an enduring, universal omnipresent enjoyment: “… Unshakable freedom of mind, this is the goal…⁠” when achieved, then “to whatever place you go, you shall go in comfort; wherever you stand, you shall stand in comfort; wherever you sit, you shall sit in comfort; and wherever you make your bed, you shall lie down in comfort.⁠

The Buddha felt the goal was tranquillity — not happiness, and “unshakable freedom of mind,” i.e., tranquillity, is the necessary condition for comfort. Comfort means freedom from worries/torment/frustration, i.e., suffering — so the absence of suffering is not happiness, nor even happy feelings directly… those are, as the ancient Greeks pointed out, conditions that lead to suffering because you fear the loss of your happiness because you know happy feelings always end.

Happiness, as a state of being, like “I’m a male human being” is a state of being, continuously eludes us because, like the arrival of midnight, feeling happy is over as soon as it occurs. Happiness is not a state we are ever in — it is something else.

That’s why we confuse ourselves when we conflate happiness with happy feelings. After all, we all want to be happy, so when it happens, it makes us “happy” to feel that way. But the happy feelings don’t last simply because they are already over as soon as they happen, and only for as long as they happened — and like a junkie, we need a new fix to replace it almost immediately. We’re addicted to the satisfaction of our desires — because we want to be happy.

Thus, “happiness” is just the name we give to a particular way of being in the world. It is an enthusiasm for life and what we do in life — even the parts that others would find to be drudgery. It is only possible when we have an open acceptance of the way things are, brought about by a deep understanding of how things are the way they are. And this state of being is called tranquillity.

Along with that tranquillity, we gain the ability to stop desiring what we cannot have — even that we can accept that we will not be able to always stop desiring such things! This is accepting the present moment as it is. Which says nothing whatsoever about how we might feel about how things will or could be in the future, so that, although we accept the present moment, we can, like Matthieu Ricard, be discontent and motivated to help bring change in our life, and to the world.

So a big part of happiness is the outlook that we manifest in our lives, such as when we respond to someone and say “Sure! I’d be happy to help!” And it goes even deeper than that.

We often confuse this state of being tranquil for happiness, because tranquillity is, among other important qualities, a mental state that is free-floating and spontaneous. And it is this which is the source of our capacity to stop suffering, as one is — at all times — able to accept things as they are so that one does not desire that which one can never have.

This led me to an insight that: “What every living being is seeking is comfort — not happiness.”

Every living being seeks comfort — the absence of suffering — not the presence of ‘happiness,’ which is normally — and incorrectly — considered to be a sort of glow that lays over a continuing string of happy moments. But: Happiness is not what you get out of life — it’s what you put into it.

And that is tranquillity’s secret! It allows us to remove the suffering from our lives, and if we are compassionate and generous towards others, also from the lives of all other living beings. That is, Tranquillity is not the effect of not suffering — it is the necessary condition for not suffering.

Comfort, on the other hand, is immediately known when experienced because comfort is the essential character of certain visceral experiences — those that viscerally, not mentally, make us comfortable. A comfortable chair is not that intrinsically. It is only in the sitting that a chair is experienced as comfortable — by that particular sitter. Someone else might find the chair horribly uncomfortable!

Our normal idea of ‘Happiness,’ on the other hand, is a vague conceptual abstraction which attempts to extract the essence of the emotion we call “happy” — perhaps so that we can distill it and sell the bottled essence, or find a magical fountain that continuously showers whoever bathes in, or drinks from it, but whose conventional meaning — but like all conceptual abstractions, fails to grasp the lived reality of happy moments at all.

So how does one seek happiness if it means “being happy?” Our cluelessness in this regard is every marketeer’s wet-dream, and the great time-suck of our lives.

“Being happy” is an ephemeral emotional state, as all emotional states are. So, while we might be able to experience being happy, it won’t last. And what made us happy yesterday might not make us happy today. It depends on how our day is going, meaning how we otherwise feel, and what is happening in our life at that moment.

Comfort, in contrast, is a visceral experience that lasts as long as our physical and mental situation is stable.

But what is comfort? Comfort is the absence of unfulfilled desires — the absence of suffering. We are only comfortable when we aren’t lacking something we feel we need or want, or want to change.

Notice that I don’t quibble about whether desires are good or bad. It doesn’t matter. If we desire something and we are not getting it, then we are frustrated and that makes us suffer. Comfort is not the opposite of suffering, it is the absence of suffering — and it is definitely not happiness. The opposite of suffering is enjoying. When our present moment is void of any suffering at all, we feel comfortable. Our enjoyment of that present moment, void of suffering, naturally arises once it is no longer obstructed by frustration caused by unfulfilled desires.

Instead, ‘happiness’, is that which we are able to bring to our lives when we have accomplished tranquillity — which is not the ending of desire, but rather the acceptance, and possibility of enjoyment, of things as they are, including, specifically, that some desires will not be fulfilled and should be let go.

Thus, happiness is our stance towards our life and everything in it. It is our enthusiasm and bliss to be living in this very moment, even moments that others would categorize as drudgery. The “glow of happiness” is nothing more than this light that we ourselves bring to our lives once we have learned how to achieve tranquillity and thus how to avoid suffering — the effect of which is comfort in every moment of our life.

How do we bring happiness into our lives? We can begin by practicing enthusiasm, goodwill, compassion, leading up to the attainment — through particular techniques of meditation — of great responsiveness (often called great compassion, but it’s much more than that).

Pulling water from the well A liminal vision always comes: Life, hot and hard, Fought counter to the ground.

Is this samsara, Like the Orientals like to say? Or is it the Word, God’s Logos on display?

Occidentals beseech God: “Send a postcard our way!” “Answer our cries for deliverance!” “Ease the burdens of our days!”

But why would God answer The secret yearnings in our heart? God gave us life! What more should we want?

Samsara is suffering Wrought by ignorance So the Buddhists say, All of This is as it is, yet We can break free of its sway.

And I in my acceptance Find a dance within the sway Dancing a dance of fullness Each and every day!

Pulling water from the well A welcome vision now comes Life, hot and hard A blessing in every way!

God speaks to us in Lives Buddha-nature manifests us all And I in my happy acceptance Pull water from the well.

Because this essay has been presented in a general way, I have glossed over certain issues. For example, kinds of suffering, as not all desires are equal, and not all desiring is originated by us individually. I will now quickly touch on one major issue — that of power — which I will discuss in more detail in two related essays: one explaining the technique of avoiding suffering in more detail, and another touching specifically upon the issue of power — but not the wielding of power, or the having of power, but rather, the granting of power — which is the genesis of much suffering in the world today.

Many kinds of suffering — those that appear to be out of our control — are often, and perhaps mainly, the result of a previous transfer of power by ourselves or by others, that gave agency to another being, or body, over us, with the expressed purpose of accomplishing something, such as “democratic government.” All such power transfers are inherently corrupting and lead always to suffering, because of the same processes I have just described in this essay, though on a grander scale.

Implicit in any such transfer of power is a need that was felt to be outside the capabilities of those who, singly or collectively, created the power by transferring the agency to effect or control them to the power holders.

And as we see today, democratic government, as a prime example of the problems that result when power over others is created, has been corrupted to the point of standing in flagrant disregard of its original mandate — with its gerrymandering, stolen elections, political parties that represent only their own need for hegemonic control, and who present inauthentic candidates to voters, who then, once elected, are either incompetent, insincere, or criminal — the exceptions being the few who are honest, dedicated, and beholden to no organization, who, finding themselves marginalized and robbed of any possibility of effectiveness by the party apparatchiks, become causalities of the internecine struggle for power that is the sole goal of all political parties.

Unfortunately, today, we also see even the power we grant to educate and inform us is used in such a way that it is directly harmful, dangerous, and at times destructive of our needs and desires — damaging and undermining our very ability to survive as a species.

Is it any wonder that we are suffering today?

Suffering? Here Is A Way To End It

When We Accept The Present Just As It Is, We Can Do So Because Of The Tranquillity We Have Accomplished Through Our Meditative Practice

Some might think of this as a surrendering to what actually is right now, and this can be the case prior to the actual accomplishment of a state of tranquillity. Once we reach tranquillity, however, by its very definition, we face whatever the present moment brings with an open acceptance of whatever it is.

The former, surrendering, is an intentional act; whereas, the latter, open acceptance, is an autogenous response.⁠

It is different, though, in regard to what we will get.

Since open acceptance is an autogenous response — always in response to what is right now — it does not help us deal with the future. We can also be discontented with the present state of things — with an eye towards their presumed continuation as is, or deteriorating in some way — and yet still accept them as they are right now. For example, we can accept our current situation in life right now and yet still desire to improve our situation because we feel that we could do better.

If we have been able to develop tranquillity, and with it the ability to accept whatever will come, we will not suffer even if our desire to improve or ameliorate something is defeated. This is because tranquillity affords us the autogenous response of open acceptance of what is, but it does not undermine our cognitive capacity to see the possibilities for an improved future.

And if we are so inclined, we can focus our attention in ways that may create the conditions necessary for a desired change to occur, from what is at this very moment to what we would like to have be the case in the future.

We, of course, cannot know the future, so how can we know if a desire can be fulfilled or not, unless we try? And the truth is that it is our desires that motivate us to accomplish things that we wish to have in our lives.

The key to the correct approach here is to keep in mind at all times that unfulfilled desires cause frustration, which is suffering, and so we must temper our expectations in such a way that we always maintain a state of tranquillity, remaining open to whatever actually comes. This means that we are vigilant in monitoring our expectations, not allowing ourselves to become so attached to a certain idea — which is only an imaginative construction at this point — that we come to crave it’s realization.

This way, we will not be frustrated by what does come, or less so, or not for very long, and thus we will not suffer as much, or at all, if our desire remains unfulfilled. And presumably, our desires will be tempered to some degree by our experience going forward. This is called wisdom. So far, so good.

This combination of vigilance in not desiring more than we can get, keeping an open acceptance of what does actually arise, and focusing our attention in ways that may create the conditions necessary for a desired change, while protecting ourselves from harm, is fairly straightforward — if we are able at all times to remain vigilant regarding the formula: continuing to desire that which we cannot have leads to suffering.

But there is something more. If we can, all at the same time, remain cognizant of our desires and learn to turn away from those that we wisely know that we cannot have satisfied — at least in the near term — while remaining genuinely enthusiastic about whatever may come in the future, then we can experience the exact same satisfaction from our selective desires, as we might have obtained from those that we could never satisfy.

Contemplate that for a few moments. It’s not just a matter of not suffering, it’s a way to be happy in each and every moment of your life.

Which is to say, our happiness can lead to our being happy — which sounds like a tautology if you misunderstand “happiness” to mean being happy, rather than being enthusiastic for whatever may come into your present moment.

And there is a dialectical nature to all of this: even if our desire not to desire that which we cannot have fails completely, because we have desired something that we really knew, or “should have known” would never happen, if we enthusiastically greet this failure — and learn from it — we not only do not suffer because of it, we may develop a greater wisdom to apply to our future efforts.

Everybody Seeks Comfort — Not Happiness

Is There A Difference Between Being Happy And Having ‘Happiness’?

Being happy is a state of being, which any of us can experience at any moment; but having ‘happiness’ is a figment of our collective imagination because happiness is just a conceptual abstraction, and having that concept in our head does not bring about our being happy; but rather, fills us with feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and resentment — in other words, our suffering.

There are two ways to attain comfort: to have all your needs and desires fulfilled, which is the marketing pitch of modern consumerism; or to accept what you have and can have, and no more. An example of this is the Buddha’s insights on how to end suffering.

And it needs to be said that until recent times no one ever really claimed that the Buddha’s way would lead to being happy. It is only recently that “happiness” and “being happy” have become more common in Buddhist thought and teachings, in line with the evolution of modern cultural norms.

It is the first of the two options above, to attain comfort, that I would like to focus on here, however.

The way of consumerism is the predominant way most people today comport themselves, and it only works because there is a deeper and much more rational motivation behind our behavior than a search for ‘happiness’.

The point that I’d like to establish is in the title of this section: that everyone seeks comfort and not happiness. The proof of this is that consumerism couldn’t work unless people desired comfort over happiness.

If people truly preferred being happy, they would drop out and live a happy life directly, without engaging in the “Rat Race,” which is a way of life in which people are caught up in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth or power.

In other words, most people today are caught up in a system and way of life that only promises happiness, but can never deliver it because: a) it’s just an abstract concept, and b) actually having it undermines the motive force of the consumer economy — like a virus that kills off its host.

Everyone has the option of following the Buddha’s suggested path to reach their goal of being happy: by ending your suffering. However, all too many Buddhists seem to want to be Buddhist today because they think that being that — a buddhist with all the trappings — will make them happy. This is the so-called “spiritual materialism”⁠ that corrupts Buddhism and every other spiritual tradition, to varying extents, today.

The Buddha’s path doesn’t make you happy, although you might experience being happy while on that path; instead, the Buddha taught how to end suffering, which leads to the satisfaction called comfort. All too often today, that message is corrupted, by those that should know better, into a search for ‘happiness.’⁠

The goal to be sought is not momentary elation, but an enduring, universal omnipresent enjoyment: “… Unshakable freedom of mind, this is the goal…” when achieved, then “to whatever place you go, you shall go in comfort; wherever you stand, you shall stand in comfort; wherever you sit, you shall sit in comfort; and wherever you make your bed, you shall lie down in comfort.”

Instead, most people strive to satisfy their needs and desires through their active participation in the “Rat Race,” putting off the possibility of their being happy — which is their stated goal — until some future point when they will have achieved their comfort.

Therefore, that which everyone seeks is comfort — not ‘happiness.’

Because the marketing arm of consumerism knows this — that people actually seek comfort, and not ‘happiness’ — an ever-expanding bundle of crafted desires are converted into ‘needs’ by them, which people, now referred to as consumers, then struggle to fulfill.

Thus the goal of life is presented as ‘happiness’, and people are inculcated with the idea that that is what they truly desire most of all. This is extremely effective as a motivation because what is more rare than a commodity which does not actually exist?

The consumerism way, structured as it is, can never lead to being happy because of all the unfulfilled needs and desires that energize this way of life. So the goal is always just out of reach, and an ever-increasing consumption is presented as the only solution to our unfulfilled needs, in an ad infinitum gnawing hunger for more:

Any community that lives on staples has relatively few wants. The community that can be trained to desire new things, even before the old have been entirely… consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.

Being happy and having ‘happiness’ seem connected, but that is only because of our habit of distinguishing things into parts, such as qualities, facets, or attributes, different conceptual types and classifications, etc., and then thinking that they are all real things in and of themselves. But concepts are not real. When we pull things apart, what’s left are just abstractions that we have cut out from the real whole, and in the case of being happy, that real whole is you and the however brief moments sprinkled across your life when you are actually in a state of being happy or joyous.

An abstraction is always an idea about something, rather than the thing itself, and more relevantly, an abstraction is an idea about some specific quality, facet, or attribute of a thing, or the type or classification it can be put into. You know, like “having sex” is only an abstract idea about sexual relations, when it’s just words written on a page. Or “beauty” is a feeling that arises within our awareness when something is present before us that has some often difficult to determine quality about it that seems to spark a feeling of beauty within us, and we pick that feeling out and say that something is ‘beautiful’. We may see the same thing tomorrow, and not even take note of it, but today — magnificent!

Think about this, it’s not something present before us that is ‘beautiful’, it is you and I that are filled with a feeling of beauty when we see it, so it is we that are “full of beauty.” And this is another kind of abstraction, one in which, after abstracting some quality from ourselves, we then assign it to something outside ourselves.

Have you ever noticed that when someone criticizes you, it’s usually for some quality that they are missing, or some act that they didn’t or did do?

And our seemingly most favorite abstractions are those about absences of things that are expected to be there. For instance, we might describe someone as armless, or limbless, which are qualities of a person missing an arm or all their limbs.

But we don’t usually abstract the presence of something that is expected to be there because it is already inherent in what a person is.

If we say that someone is armed, no one would take us to mean that the subject has arms — that is assumed. So an armed person is not someone who has arms, but someone who has a weapon — an enhancement to the arms we assume the person already has.

We don’t need to create abstractions for what is expected to be the case.

Thus, we only need the word “happiness” because it is something about a life that is missing when you are not feeling happy. We are told that our lives should be happy ones, so when we are not happy we feel we should be searching for the ‘happiness’ we don’t have. But what’s missing? Being happy is not an attribute of a life, it is the name for a state of being that someone can experience during their life. We usually don’t ask someone if they are living a happy life, we ask instead if they are happy. So instead of searching for ‘happiness’ why don’t we just do what makes us happy?

Because we seek comfort, not happiness.

Since we immediately know when we are comfortable, because comfort is a state of being in which we find ourselves without any complaints, we don’t have to search for some abstraction that we might call ‘comfortness’. We either are comfortable, or we aren’t. It’s really very simple.

Comfort can be defined as the absence of pain, the absence of stress, the absence of suffering of any kind, and the absence of any unfulfilled needs — in sum, the absence of frustration — thus, when we are comfortable, we are free from any frustration whatsoever.

Note that I didn’t say: the absence of desires. Having desires doesn’t frustrate us — it motivates us. It’s only when our efforts to attain what is desired is thwarted, that we become frustrated.

Unfortunately, being free from frustration appears to be the opposite of our normal state of being nowadays, so, in general, we are all suffering in different ways, and to different degrees. Obviously, then, we do not need to be free of desires, or we would try to not desire anything; but that’s not what we do — ever. Nor can we achieve it, directly, because even desiring not to desire undermines itself as soon as it arises.

Comfort is the state in which there are no unfulfilled desires frustrating us, not even the desire to not desire anything that we do not or cannot have. So the fact that there is nothing missing from our life right now that we truly need is what we mean when we say we are comfortable.

It might be the case that things could be better. This admission though (that it might be the case that things could be better) is evidence of at least a partial lack of appreciation for what is the case right now.

It is an inculcated habit today to want more, and this habituation manifests as an attitude of finding fault in what is now, rather than manifesting satisfaction with it.

But this is a habit that can be easily and harmlessly broken simply by the adoption of a stance toward what is now, of appreciating, rather than criticizing, what is there, in this very moment. It has to be done wittingly — that is, consciously and with focused intent: Where is the beauty in this scene? What do I, or can I, feel thankful for in this moment? What is charming about this person? Can this idea be helpful? What may I learn from this situation, and the participants in it?

Notice though that comfort is not something that is present in your life, rather, that word points to an absence — something that is not present, and that absence is called, in this case, comfort. What is it that is absent? Frustration from unfulfillable desires — the absence of unfulfillable desires makes us feel comfortable.

But we live in a consumerist economy that runs off the energy expended in searching for the fulfillment of externally created desires — on top of our authentic desire to be comfortable. How then could we ever be anything other than frustrated?

So beyond just the adoption of a stance towards each moment in which one’s focus is on appreciation, rather than criticism, there also must be a valuing of not being frustrated by what one does not have, or which is not possible to have — in this moment. It is an acceptance of what is the case at this moment in time, and not a rejection of what might be — including the acceptance that at this moment some things will not be possible, but perhaps in the future they may. In fact we can even work towards enabling the possibility of those things in the future. After all, this is what we are doing when we go to college, or get training, to find a good job.

To be happy, on the other hand, is normally a state of being pleased and content, but that is what being comfortable can be too, because when we aren’t in pain, nor stressed, nor suffering, nor wanting something we do not or cannot have at this moment, we can — with the proper attitude — be pleased with what we have.

Ask yourself: why do you seek “happiness,” but not “comfortness?” Surely you want to be comfortable, as you want to be happy.

Comfort is something that you can attain easily; whereas, ‘happiness’ is a fantasy dreamed up by marketeers who know that you cannot be manipulated into searching for something you have at hand already. So you are presented with an abstraction that, because it isn’t real, is forever out of your reach.