This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Uncaused Happiness; Four Truths of Happiness (4 of 4) Well-being from Letting Go. It likely contains inaccuracies.

Guided Meditation: Uncaused Happiness; Dharmette: Four Truths of Happiness (4 of 4) Well-being from Letting Go - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 22, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Uncaused Happiness

Hello and welcome to this Friday meditation. I would like this meditation to build on, or continue with the momentum of these last two weeks of teachings, to offer something rather radical. Something that maybe would turn things around quite drastically for a few of you, having to do with where you center your life. It has to do with happiness.

The deepest, fullest happiness that can come from Dharma practice, in a certain kind of way, doesn't come from a cause. It doesn't come with reasons. It doesn't come with anything changing in the outer world. Often we're looking to be happy by having things go well for us in the world, and we're unhappy when they're not. But to have an inner life independent of what happens around us—independent of success and failure, independent of praise and blame¹, independent of being liked or not liked—there is a happiness inside that is not dependent on what's happening in the world. It is not dependent on all kinds of things that we ordinarily think we need to change in order to be happy.

So, a happiness without cause, a happiness without reason. A happiness that comes when we are letting go of searching, letting go of wanting, letting go of the stories that we tell ourselves. Stories that might have some truth to what's happening around us or in the world, but still, we might be telling ourselves stories about it, remembering it, thinking about it, making commentary.

Letting go of stories, letting go of searching, of wanting. Letting go of resistance. Letting go of doubt. Letting go of all the extra ways in which we stir ourselves up, all the ways in which we live in a reactive mode or an activated mode. Just to be here without all those things.

And here turns out being here in a full way. Being here without all those other things is where we can find happiness that has no reason. You could say it's there because we're not stirring ourselves up, so that may be a reason, but those kinds of reasons are talking about what's absent. Nothing has to be present. Nothing has to be happening. Let go enough, and happiness comes.

Let go enough into mindfulness, into awareness, and there's a "yes" in our whole system. A yes to be here, yes to be attentive. There can be a yes to physical pain and emotional pain. Oddly enough, there can be joy and happiness together with physical or emotional pain if we've let go enough.

So to meditate, assume a posture that supports you to let go deeply. Is there a posture for you where you can be present, not fall asleep, but also let go into this moment?

Gently closing the eyes, and immediately letting go of whatever you can. And in the letting go, let go into the body. Breathing. If anything is activated, let go, relax, settle into the body.

Breathing in order to gently brush aside your stories, your preoccupations. Gently take deeper breaths and deeper, longer exhales, as if it's sweeping whatever is extra away. Blowing it away and settling into your body here as you exhale. Long exhale, quieting the mind as you do so.

Letting the breathing return to normal and taking a few moments to definitively feel, sense that you are here in this body at this time. And in this definitive feeling of being here, as you exhale, settle into it as you let your thinking drift away.

Things like wanting and not wanting, searching, expecting, trying to fix, searching for answers, being caught in stories—all those come with a certain degree of tension, pressure, stress, agitation. Maybe you can't have them stop, but as you exhale, let there be a quieting of them and a shifting of your life center from the stories, from the wanting, to this body breathing here.

Rather than wanting something or trying to make something happen, rather than "doing" meditation, shift your way of being to allowing. Allowing something to arise. If you feel calm, allow that to grow. If you feel content or happy, allow that to surface. Allow it to be there, the feelings of it. And if there's any way that somehow inside you have a "yes" to being present, aware, here, now—allow that yes.

Allow the present moment to flow into your being, maybe like an underwater spring that flows water into the lake from the lake bottom. Allow whatever goodness, whatever wholesomeness that can surface once you let go.

Any sense of goodness, well-being that you might be feeling, that is not there for a reason—it just is because there's space and room and quiet for the humming of the body to show itself. For the humming of a subtle, attentive, aware body and mind. Allow that humming, allow that well-being to spread through your body, to spread through your heart, to spread through your mind.

And then, as we come to the end of this meditation, whatever benefits that you receive from meditation, whatever way that you are calmer, happier, more at ease—don't leave it just for something to do in meditation. It can grow for you if you consider how you can bring it with you, or have it as a reference point for how you interact with people today.

If there was a very non-threatening way to meet someone in the current state that you are in, what would it be like to be with, talk with someone that you'll see today if you were the way you are at the end of meditation? Is there some way that it's beneficial for you to be this way in the conversation, in the encounter? Is there something you can offer the other person? Offer them a calm space? Offer them greater goodwill? Gaze upon them with whatever well-being that's present?

In this way, we begin bringing the benefits of practice into the world, while at the same time those benefits can grow for us.

May it be that whatever happiness we experience, may we wish happiness for others. May it be that whatever safety that we feel, that we support the safety of others. Whatever peace that we experience, let that be a gift we give others. And whatever freedom, letting go we have of attachments and clinging, let's appreciate meeting others without those attachments, without our clinging.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Four Truths of Happiness (4 of 4) Well-being from Letting Go

So, hello and welcome to this fourth of four talks on the truths of happiness. Maybe it's a bit bold to put those two words together—the four truths of happiness—but hopefully I am allowed to do it as a continuation or building on the central Buddhist teaching on the Four Noble Truths²: suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path of practice leading to the end of suffering.

The path leading to the end of suffering doesn't just lead us to a dead end. It leads us to happiness. The Buddha was said to be the "Happy One." The people who practiced with him were noted for being happy and smiling. Happiness and peace are probably the most common emotional characteristics of someone who has attained Awakening in this early Buddhist tradition.

So what can we say about happiness? I offer these things as a complement to the Four Noble Truths of suffering—as the "Four Truths of Happiness."

The first truth is that there is happiness that we can avail ourselves of. The second is that there are the conditions for the arising of it. We don't cause it, but we allow certain conditions to bring it about. The third is the truth of maintaining it. It's not the truth of the end of happiness, but the truth of sustaining it, keeping it going. The Buddha emphasized maintaining, sustaining, increasing, developing, and growing wholesome qualities. Wholesome qualities and well-being, happiness, are closely connected. And then the fourth is that, just like there's a path of practice to the end of suffering, there's a letting go that leads to the practices of happiness. Or say it differently: there is a letting go that surfaces, that gives birth to the ways of being that promote happiness.

What I mean by this is that both the fourth of the Four Noble Truths and the fourth of these "Four Happinesses" are explained as the Eightfold Path³: Right View, Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Lifestyle, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

In the ancient text, there are two ways that these are discussed. One is as practices that lead to the end of suffering. But the other way they are presented is that these are ways of being that arise for us as we let go of clinging, as we let go of our craving. Rather than something we intentionally do, the ancient description is that they become us. We become endowed with them. We become filled with them. They become who we are rather than what we do.

We see the way we see. We don't have to practice seeing this particular way; we see Right View. We see in that way as a natural outcome. Just like if someone points out to you something that you haven't noticed yet about anything, then after that is pointed out, you can never not see it. It's now built into who you are that of course you'll see it.

So there is Right Resolve. Of course you're not going to be cruel. Of course you're not going to be unkind. Of course you'll be kind and compassionate. That just arises out of this deep state of letting go. You become compassion; you don't practice compassion. You become free of cruelty; you don't practice being without cruelty. Right Speech becomes a description of who you are, not a prescription. It isn't that you have to do this now; this describes how you speak. So all of these then become descriptive rather than prescriptive.

So there is a letting go, and this is the welling up, the arising of well-being.

There is this deep letting go, this freedom that allows something that's deep within us to manifest as a different kind of happiness than ordinary happiness in daily life. Ordinary happiness is dependent, is conditioned. Things have to come together in the right way. We have to win the lottery, we have to have the right date, the right experience. We have to get something that brings us a lot of pleasure. We have to get praise, or we have to feel that we're doing something good in the world. It's always there's a reason for it. And some of those forms of happiness—nothing inherently wrong with them—some of them involve craving and can produce a lot of suffering.

But there's a whole other way of being happy that comes with a very deep letting go. A letting go that doesn't leave us with nothing. A deep letting go of craving, of clinging, that doesn't leave us to be a blank slate, a big blank, but makes room for this big "yes." This warmth, this hum of yes. This hum of goodness, of well-being that is portable. We can take it with us. It lives within us as who we are.

Maybe we don't always feel it for sure, but it's available if we stop. It's available if we slow down. It's available if we let go. It's available if we just turn our attention to it here. There is a yes. There's a delight. There's a pleasure of simply being here, present, alive. To be alive without any hindrances. To be alive without any clinging. To be alive without any resistance allows for a kind of natural, harmonious functioning of all the functions of our life, all the inner faculties that we have.

And there's something remarkable that can arise when everything is in harmony from all the letting go. All the ways we limit ourselves, shut ourselves down, resist ourselves, get caught in something—to not be caught and let the homeostasis, let the natural healing occur, the natural opening occur. When there's a certain kind of inner harmony, inner allowance of this goodness to flow from deep within, then there is a happiness which doesn't depend on anything in the world. Then there's a well-being and a peace that's a paradigm shift. It's a revolutionary change. It's a radically different way of living our lives than the way that most people live and what society tells us to live and how it wants us to live it.

We then become centered, oriented around a different way of being in the world than what advertisers want us to do, politicians want us to do. We become settled, peaceful, and something beautiful flows out of us.

A furnace that's warm and producing heat does not need a little space heater next to it to make it warm. When your furnace of love, furnace of happiness, well-being, of peace is strong enough in you, you don't need small space heaters of praise and blame, success and failure, pleasures and avoiding displeasures. You don't need the world to provide you because you're radiating something beautiful.

So I hope that this has given you something to consider. Something maybe to challenge you with, but more important than that, something that you will experiment with. Something that you'll now go into the world, live your day with this question, with this exploration, this kind of feeling centering on yourself. Where is that happiness? Where does it arise from? What are the conditions that allow it to arise? If I let go, if I center myself on it, where's the happiness that's not dependent on the world? And can I trust it and live my life from that? Live a good life.

So thank you very much. I'll be here again next week, and I guess I'll be here right through the whole Thanksgiving week, Thursday morning as well. So for those of you who come this next week, I look forward to our time together. And the rest of you, I wish you well and for what might be happening next. Maybe as you go into this week in whatever circumstance you have, maybe you'll be really well supported staying close to a happiness that's not dependent on anything. That's what we can be thankful for.

Thank you.