ON DISENCHANTMENT AND ASSUMPTIONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF HAPPINESS

ON DISENCHANTMENT AND ASSUMPTIONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF HAPPINESS

"We all practice for the sake of happiness, for a happiness that goes deeper than ordinary pleasures. But in coming to the practice we often bring assumptions about happiness — how it works, why we're unhappy, what we can do to be happier — assumptions that we're hardly even aware are assumptions because we assume them so strongly. We just take it for granted that they're true. And sometimes they get in the way.
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Two of the most common assumptions are ones that get most in the way. The first is that we're unhappy because we can't accept the way things are; that the purpose of the practice is to learn more acceptance. In other words, we're essentially neurotic, as in that old distinction between neurosis and psychosis: The psychotic person thinks that two plus two equals five. The neurotic person knows that two plus two equals four, but hates them for it. Our problem is that we simply can't accept the way things are. If we could only learn how to accept that two plus two does equal four and it's perfectly fine, then we'd be happy. And so in that model, the purpose of the practice is to learn acceptance.
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But even Freud recognized that getting people past their neuroses would not solve the problem of happiness. As he said, it would simply lead them to the level of ordinary, everyday misery. And yet part of the common theory says, well, you have to learn how to accept that because that's just the way things are.
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Another model is that we're unhappy because we have a sense of separateness. Inside we're divided. Outside we're separate from other people; we're separate from nature. All we need to learn is how to develop a sense of oneness, a sense of interconnectedness, and then we'll be happy. But that's not how the Buddha saw interconnectedness. He saw that the way things are interconnected in terms of cause and effect is actually a cause for suffering. And even a sense of oneness, he says, is inconstant. It contains a subtle sense of stress. If you cling to it, you're going to suffer. There's a passage in the Canon where he describes the highest form of oneness, which is the oneness or non-duality of consciousness, in which you have a sense of consciousness as a totality, containing everything. Yet even that, he says, is inconstant, stressful, and not-self.
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What these two ideas about happiness have in common is that the way things are out there is already a given, and we're simply on the receiving end of what's given, so we have to learn how to develop the proper attitude to what's already there: Accept and try to find oneness within the way things are. But the Buddha's take on things is different. Reality is only partly a given. 

We are also shapers of our reality. We have an active role in shaping every present moment that we experience.
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Now, the present moment is not entirely plastic, entirely responsive to everything we want out of it. Some of it is formed by influences coming in from the past, but part of it comes from our intentions in the present moment. In this way we are both producers and consumers. We produce our suffering and then we consume our suffering. We produce our pleasures and we consume our pleasures. Understanding this point helps to open the road to a deeper happiness, because there is a happiness, the Buddha said, that is not produced and not consumed. It just simply is. But the way we keep feeding on the happiness we produce gets in the way.
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So for him, the purpose of the meditation is not to celebrate oneness or to celebrate acceptance. It's to develop two very different kinds of emotions: disenchantment and dispassion. The Pali word for disenchantment, nibbida, also means distaste, disgust, or revulsion, which may sound strong, but it needs to be strong. 

It's an antidote to our strong attachment to feeding on things. 

That attachment, the Buddha said, is the essence of suffering.
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The word upadana, which means clinging, also means the act of eating, of taking sustenance. He says that upadana lies at the essence of suffering and stress. So what we need to learn is how to look at the things we feed on until we develop a strong sense that we don't want to feed on them any more…"

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from "Disenchantment"
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You can read the entire talk here:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/meditations4.html#disenchantment