Live Session Summary, Sunday, January 14, 2024: It was good to be with you for our Live session today. Today’s theme was finding our way home to true happiness and freedom.
Here are some of the main themes, quotes, and poems:
The Dalai Lama often says, “Everyone wants to be happy.” No one wants to be unhappy, stressed, fearful, angry… and yet, if we look around us, how many people are truly happy, genuinely joyful, fully at peace in their lives?
As with the song, ‘looking for love in the all the wrong places,’ we search for happiness and peace where they cannot be found—in conditions and experiences that may provide some short-term pleasure, but fall short because they are impermanent and are incapable of providing lasting happiness or well-being.
We think of happiness as coming from conditions and experiences—getting enough pleasant experiences and keeping at bay the unpleasant ones. But true happiness is ‘an inside job,’ determined more by one's state of mind than by external events.
The Buddha speaks of suffering as arising from clinging to what we desire—what we think will bring us happiness—but it is the clinging that prevents us from realizing the happiness and freedom that is our very nature and that arises naturally when we let go of clinging.
In a well-known sutta, or discourse, the Jata Sutta, a brahmin came to the Buddha and said, “A tangle within, a tangle without. People everywhere are tangled in a tangle. Who, Master Gotama (the Buddha’s family name), can untangle this tangle?” The Buddha replied that those who follow the ‘noble eightfold path’—the Buddha’s training in living wisely and kindly, cultivating wisdom, and training the mind in meditation—can find their way out of the tangle.
We can relate to the way we find ourselves caught up in a tangle—of wanting, disliking, confusion, doubt, etc.—and, perhaps, have experienced the peace and freedom that comes from letting go of clinging. I shared the Indian story of a way farmers catch monkeys by taking a coconut and making a hole in it large enough for a monkey to get its hand inside, and placing a tasty treat inside the coconut and chaining the coconut to a solid object. The monkey puts its hand in the coconut to grab the treat and when it tries to pull its hand out is unable to do so because the hole is too small for its clenched fist. The monkey tries to get its hand out, but keeps holding on to the treat, not letting go of it… and is captured.
The image captures the way we hold on to what ties to suffering and are unable to let go—as with an addict who tries to relieve their craving by getting another hit of their drug, but getting the drug only strengthens the addiction. It’s helpful to reflect on ways in which we cling—to our desires, beliefs, experiences, views of ourself, possessions—and stay mired in suffering.
The way out is to stop fueling our suffering, to open fully to our experience and shine the light of awareness on it. As Eckhart Tolle said, “Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.” When we open to our experience, without clinging, resistance, or judgment, we can see that everything comes and goes—thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, mind states—and when we stop fueling our clinging, we can come back to the peace, joy, and freedom that is always available, always here, even when it is obscured by clinging, resistance, or unconsciousness.
I shared these quotes and poems:
• "All of humanity's misfortunes stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" (Blaise Pascal)
• “We go to the infinite web of life with a thimble, so we come away thirsty” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, 20th century spiritual teacher)
• Poem, “Love After Love” (Derek Walcott)
I hope this is helpful. Have a wonderful week and see you next Sunday, January 21 at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
