Think Seriously about Happiness

Happiness is an undefined term that’s really important in our lives, and yet all too often we don’t really look carefully at the experience of happiness.

We don’t think seriously about happiness. We just see other people going for this pleasure or that, and we think it looks like fun; so we follow them without really looking at what we’re doing.

The Buddha wants you to look very carefully inside yourself: What are your dealings with the world? What are your dealings inside over the issue of happiness? To what extent do you lie to others; to what extent do you lie to yourself? To what extent do you harm others; to what extent do you harm yourself in your search for happiness? Can you clean up your act?

This is something we all have to look at deeply within ourselves in order to answer properly. But the proper answer is, “Yes, you can do it.” You can clean up your act—if you see that it’s important enough.

So try to nurture that sense of its importance. After all, we live for the sake of happiness. Everything we do is for the sake of pleasure, so let’s make it a pure pleasure, a pure happiness, a pure bliss that involves no harm, no feeding at all.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the book, Meditations 8, (pdf) pp. 108-109.