What is the difference between happiness and pleasure?

Q: What is the difference between happiness and pleasure?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: Pleasure depends on things, happiness does not.

Q: If happiness is independent, why are we not always happy?

Nisargadatta Maharaj:  As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall also believe that in their absence we must be miserable. Mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs. Hence the importance of convincing oneself that one need not be prodded into happiness; that, on the contrary, pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite.

But why talk of happiness at all? You do not think of happiness except when you are unhappy. A man who says: ‘Now I am happy’, is between two sorrows — past and future. This happiness is mere excitement caused by relief from pain. Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as: ‘there is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about’. After all, the ultimate purpose of all sadhana is to reach a point, when this conviction, instead of being only verbal, is based on the actual and ever-present experience.

Q: Which experience?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

Q: What remains to discover?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: The universe without and the immensity within as they are in reality, in the great mind and heart of God. The meaning and purpose of existence, the secret of suffering, life’s redemption from ignorance.

Q: If being happy is the same as being free from fear and worry, cannot it be said that absence of

trouble is the cause of happiness?

Nisargadatta Maharaj:  A state of absence, of non-existence cannot be a cause; the pre-existence of a cause is implied in the notion. Your natural state, in which nothing exists, cannot be a cause of becoming; the causes are hidden in the great and mysterious power of memory. But your true home is in nothingness, in emptiness of all content.

Q: Emptiness and nothingness — how dreadful!

Nisargadatta Maharaj: You face it most cheerfully, when you go to sleep! Find out for yourself the state of wakeful sleep and you will find it quite in harmony with your real nature. Words can only give you the idea and the idea is not the experience. All I can say is that true happiness has no cause and what has no cause is immovable. Which does not mean it is perceivable, as pleasure. What is perceivable is pain and pleasure; the state of freedom from sorrow can be described only negatively. To know it directly you must go beyond the mind addicted to causality and the tyranny of time.

Q: If happiness is not conscious and consciousness — not happy, what is the link between the two?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: Consciousness being a product of conditions and circumstances, depends on them and changes along with them. What is independent, uncreated, timeless and changeless, and yet ever new and fresh, is beyond the mind. When the mind thinks of it, the mind dissolves and only happiness remains.

Q: When all goes, nothingness remains.

Nisargadatta Maharaj: How can there be nothing without something? Nothing is only an idea, it depends on the memory of something. Pure being is quite independent of existence, which is definable and describable.

Q: Please tell us; beyond the mind does consciousness continue, or does it end with the mind?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: Consciousness comes and goes, awareness shines immutably.

Q: Who is aware in awareness?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: When there is a person, there is also consciousness. ‘I am’ mind, consciousness denote the same state. If you say ‘I am aware’, it only means: ‘I am conscious of thinking about being aware’. There is no ‘I am’ in awareness.

Q: What about witnessing?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: Witnessing is of the mind. The witness goes with the witnessed. In the state of non-duality all separation ceases.

Q: What about you? Do you continue in awareness?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: The person, the ‘I am this body, this mind, this chain of memories, this bundle of desires and fears’ disappears, but something you may call identity, remains. It enables me to become a person when required. Love creates its own necessities, even of becoming a person.

Q: It is said that Reality manifests itself as existence — consciousness — bliss. Are they absolute or relative?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: They are relative to each other and depend on each other. Reality is independent of its expressions.

Q: What is the relation between reality and its expressions?

Nisargadatta Maharaj: No relation. In reality all is real and identical. As we put it, saguna and nirguna are one in Parabrahman. There is only the Supreme. In movement, it Is saguna. Motionless, it is nirguna. But it is only the mind that moves or does not move. The real is beyond, you are beyond. Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable can be yourself, you are free of your imaginations. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realisation. We miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination.

You have to give your heart and mind to these things and brood over them repeatedly. It is like cooking food. You must keep it on the fire for some time before it is ready.

Q: Am I not under the sway of destiny, of my karma? What can I do against it? What I am and what I do is pre-determined. Even my so-called free choice is predetermined; only I am not aware of it and imagine myself to be free.

Nisargadatta Maharaj: Again, it all depends how you look at it. Ignorance is like a fever — it makes you see things which are not there. karma is the divinely prescribed treatment. Welcome it and follow the instructions faithfully and you will get well. A patient will leave the hospital after he recovers. To insist on immediate freedom of choice and action will merely postpone recovery. Accept your destiny and fulfil it — this is the shortest way to freedom from destiny, though not from love and its compulsions. To act from desire and fear is bondage, to act from love is freedom.

(Source: I Am That: Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, 94. You are Beyond Space and Time