The four distortions: No ability to bring lasting happiness

We’ve been talking about some of our wrong conceptions: our various levels of wrong conceptions, our expectations, our rules of the universe. The last two days we were talking about how we expect things to be long-lasting and permanent, to not change, and yet they are changing all the time. We get freaked out when things change when we don’t want things to change. When we decide to change—when we initiate it—then change is good; however, when we aren’t the ones to initiate it and we don’t want it, then we’re really freaked out by it. We think, “This is not supposed to happen!”

Another one of those misconceptions where we get really stuck is thinking that things that by their nature are unable to give us lasting happiness should be able to give us lasting happiness. We get really stuck there, too. An example is holding a kitty like Karuna who just walked in! [laughter] It seems like you should be so happy holding a kitty. But then when she starts squirming, it’s not happiness anymore [laughter]. When she claws you, it’s not happiness. And when she jumps in your food, it’s not happiness. [laughter] It’s not happiness for us—for her, it is! 

So, there are all sorts of things in which we have the expectation that they are going to bring us lasting happiness. We work really hard to get them. We do backflips. We do backflips and all sorts of things to get things that we think, “Oooh, this is really going to do it for me! If I really have this, if I really go here, if I really do that, if I’m really with this person. As Karuna is saying by jumping on my lap: “If I really get on her lap then I’ll be happy!” [laughter] But that’s not what our experience is, is it?

We do these things. They bring some pleasure for a while, but after a while they become boring, or they actually become something distasteful. You get tired of sitting there with the cat in your lap. You want to do something else, or you get tired of that job, or actually, the job brings a whole lot of problems you didn’t think you were getting with it. So, this expectation—this idea we have that all these things are going to bring us lasting happiness, the ultimate happiness, and then they don’t—is a misconception that really permeates our life and leads to a lot of disappointment and disillusionment and even depression, because we’re counting on external things and external people. But they don’t have the ability to do what we want them to do, which is to make us everlastingly happy.

This doesn’t mean that you just throw up your hands and say, “Oh, there is no purpose in anything and there is no enjoyment whatsoever.” That’s not true. We all know there is enjoyment and we can do good things in the world. The problem is when we expect more of things than they can actually give us. And when you’re doing a serious spiritual practice, you start to see that real joy and real happiness comes from transforming your heart. And when we transform our heart, when we transform our mind, then we’re not so dependent on the outside world and the things we have for our happiness. And that means that we actually become much freer. We can go to different places, do different things, and our happiness comes with us because our happiness is coming from here inside us. It’s not coming from outside.