The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [17]
The Buddha told us to master our worldly desires so that we can see the truth of the world around us. Our minds literally control our senses. We must, then, control our minds. If we don’t, we’ll have an enraged wild elephant on our hands: very difficult to manage. Essentially impossible. We should fear our desires “more than poisonous snakes, savage beasts, dangerous robbers or fierce conflagrations.” Charmingly, he adds, “No simile is strong enough to illustrate this danger. But think of a man carrying a jar of honey who, as he goes, heeds only the honey and is unaware of a deep pit in his path! Indulge the mind with its desires and you lose the benefit of being born a man; check it completely and there is nothing you will be unable to accomplish.”1 Once he became the “Enlightened One” (which is what “Buddha” means), the Buddha did not leave humanity to go off and enjoy his new bliss. Instead, he made it his business to help as many others as possible. Helping people in this world is not the goal of Buddhism; the goal of Buddhism is enlightenment. But you need to control your desires and be a model of virtue in order to get there. And once you are there, one branch of Buddhism (the biggest one) insists that enlightenment will demand that you offer your life to humanity, so that virtue is a goal. But it still is not the goal. The goal is the blissful annihilation that is nirvana.
In Aristotle’s idea of happiness, there is nothing higher than virtue. His idea of virtue came with weighty responsibility. If we could believe this, and follow through on it, virtue would likely make us happy. We have all had moments wherein we were aware of ourselves doing the right thing, and we felt happy. Also, we have worked hard in gloom and yet found ourselves happy at the end of the task. Yet something keeps us from making virtuous happiness a way of life. We get tired. Or just drawn back to the television. Virtue as a route to happiness cannot be discounted, but it has its difficulties. It was the later Hellenistic age that invented a lighter kind of happiness theory. The Epicureans defined happiness as joy in common pleasures: eating, drinking, sex, and friendship. Such pleasure-oriented graceful-life philosophy has an opposite set of limitations. Epicurus did not go so far as to say that virtue was for suckers, but he did say that politics and trying to change the world was largely a fool’s errand. True enough, but some progress can be made, and for the individual a moral mission in life can be a very joyous thing.
Learning to control your desires, to just shut off wanting what you want, is a premier idea in all the graceful-life philosophies or self-help. Epictetus said, “Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one’s desires, but by the removal of desire.” Seneca explained his Stoicism as, most essentially, that reason “tames the madness of our desires.” Marcus Aurelius, also identified with Stoicism, said you should be able to sleep in a palace one night and on the floor of a hut the next and be equally happy both nights. In his explication of a very different graceful-life philosophy, Epicurus wrote, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”2 But despite calling for people to control their desires, Epicurus was a defender of pleasure. He said to be careful not to indulge in pleasures so much as to become ill, or to become dependent and thus a slave to it. But that was no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Pleasure is great! “I do not know how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste, withdraw the pleasures of love, withdraw the pleasures of hearing, and withdraw