A while back, Yael responded to one of my posts with this comment, and I've been wanting to reply for a long time:
I have a question that's been bugging me for a while - just wondering what your opinion is. I understand the idea that focusing on achievements/successes/any external thing is a barrier to permanent happiness and likely to lead to suffering (at least some of the time) (if I understand well enough). But then, if I accept this, and just experiencing the present moment is always enough, no matter what it brings, then where does the motivation to do anything (except progress further towards enlightenment) come from? Or is the key to aim to do things that we think will bring good, but not tie ourselves emotionally to the result?
This is one of the more challenging questions asked by people interested in the meditative path, especially for those who already have ambitions to change the world for the better. It's one that I struggled with for a long time myself (and still do, from time to time).
Short Answer
My short answer (at the present point in my development) is that you don't have to be a monk and give up everything to benefit from meditation. There are huge benefits to ourselves and to others if we make a little effort to improve our habits, be less selfish, and express love more often. By changing ourselves in this way, we can learn to help others how they need to be helped (and not how we want to help them).
What we need are unwavering commitment to improving ourselves, developing true happiness, and building compassion for others.
Long Answer
The longer answer, is that when our minds are in an uncultivated state, we're influenced heavily by delusions, particularly the delusion that we exist as "independent selves" separate from other people. We're influenced strongly by powerful desires, which are primarily self-serving. Acting upon those desires causes harm to others as well as ourselves. Under the influence of such forces, how could we reasonably expect to make fully rational decisions about how to best contribute to the world?
In my own life, I've had tremendous ambition to "save the world." Influenced by movies and stories of heroes like Gandhi, etc., I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be the one to save the world, and help as many people as possible. But as I've slowly chiseled away at the notion of "the self" and have diminished my self-centeredness, I've come to recognize that helping as many people as possible doesn't necessarily mean doing it in the way the big shots did, or even being remembered for it. It's my belief that it's really important to first understand how we should help before we dive in.
First, what exactly are we helping with? I'd say that for a do-gooder like myself, I'm interested in helping people suffer less. When it comes down to it, one thing matters more than anything else in life -- whether you're happy or suffering. Anyone would prefer to be happy, and I really can't think of any other way to help a person that is more convincing.
So then, how should we help? We must understand how suffering works. What is it's nature? Where does it come from?
On the surface, it seems like there are many causes of suffering. Some people suffer because they are ill, dying, or hungry. Others suffer from insecurity, sadness, loneliness, or low feeling of self-worth. Others are bored, exhausted from work, stressed, or overwhelmed. Others suffer because they want what they cannot have or because they hate what they do have. Still others suffer from anger towards rivals, anger towards friends, anger towards other groups, or anger towards themselves. And that's just a fraction of the list.
But how could we solve all of that suffering, even limited only to the cases listed above? There are so many apparent causes (sickness, lack of food, a particular person, something someone said, insecurity from childhood, etc). We don't even know where to start. Not to mention that solving one person's problems ("firing that guy who bothers me at work") may be creating suffering for another (the guy who got fired is now unhappy). Where do we begin?
Without going into a long explanation, the wisdom of the path of meditative development is this: suffering and agitation are a result of an ordinary human mind. So long as the mind is not developed properly, suffering will arise again and again without end.
Example: You could end my immediate suffering resulting from interaction with an unpleasant coworker by firing him. But is that the end of suffering? No, of course not. I'll suffer the next time I feel slighted, cheated, diminished, insulted, etc. There is no end to suffering through "fixing" the external world.
I think that some people might say "well isn't what you're talking about really passive? Aren't you just saying that I have to learn to live with my problems, and that's happiness? I don't buy it!" From my own personal experience, it is not simply accepting my problems, or learning to be OK with them. It goes well beyond that.
Every moment becomes rich and full (even when sitting in front of a computer screen!). The feeling we're after is not the one where you "come to terms" with something bad and say "oh well, I guess that's the way it is", it's the feeling of deep happiness and satisfaction with everything that is in the present moment. If this whole thing were just about accepting bad things that happen to us, that'd honestly be pretty weak. Trust me, it goes way deeper than that.
Think of one of the happiest, most love-filled moments of your life. Maybe when you saw an old friend after not seeing them for a long time, or when you got married, or when you hugged a loved one and just felt wonderful. It's like that, but it sticks with you all the time. Happiness begins to lie just beneath the surface, just waiting for any excuse to express itself.
(Not that I claim to be there yet. But I've certainly experienced it for sustained periods of time. And it's happening more and more as I work at it. Lovely, this life is.)
Thanks for the question Yael.
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EDIT: I realized that I was still unclear, so I'm including the comments as well here:
Yael:
Jeff, thanks for the answer =)
I think I am beginning to understand better. Would you think it right to say then, that until you have understood suffering and happiness for yourself, and found lasting happiness so that you are not driven by the search for happiness, you cannot act effectively to improve the world, because you might be led astray by delusions? That only when you are free of your own quest for happiness, can you really be beneficial to others?
Jeff:
To some degree, yeah. I think the point that I failed to address in the post was that personal development occurs in stages. At each stage, you become less and less concerned with the "little things" and the stuff that drove you in the past that actually doesn't matter (because it was a reflection of some delusion that you now can see through). You become more aware of the way the world really works, particularly the human world. We kind of have these assumptions that we operate on, where each person is 1 number, and people can all be treated as individual and separate beings.
As you make progress, you start to see more and more that things aren't what you thought they were (things are more interconnected, we are not independent, we are not truly an unchanging "self", etc.), and as a result, you start to see what truly matters, and what was based on faulty assumptions we've been running on for a long time.
I don't think you need to "go all the way" and be perfectly happy before you start fixing the rest of the world. I think it's important to be both pushing for change in the way that you think matters most in the present, but also continuously working on understanding what matters most from a less "confused" and deluded perspective (in other words, self improvement and understanding). I'm definitely a big fan of taking action now, and not waiting until things are perfect to get started. You can only learn once you start doing!
