2016
Will This Lead to Happiness?
At yesterday’s Sunday Sangha, Thomas kicked off a lively discussion about the nature of desire and the “hallucination of perception” that getting what we want will make us happy. He offered this passage from Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening:
“Sensual desires arise from the fundamental misperception that they will actually bring about a lasting happiness–something that, given their impermanence, is not possible. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Anna’s lover comes to this realization:
‘Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires.'” (The mistake women make too, I might add.)