The Meaning of Happiness - Alan Watts

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similar ideal might be found by a casual examination of the teachings of Hindu Vedanta as expressed in the Upanishads. For it seems as if the supreme aspiration of the Hindu yogi is to become merged into the infinite Brahman, the one reality of which all diverse forms are illusory expressions. In common with the Hinayana Buddhist, he finds the world unsatisfying because of the impermanence of its glories. Therefore he fights against all those things in himself which move him to seek happiness in the pleasures of the world, learning to see the changing forms of life as a web of delusion hiding the face of God. To him all things are God; mountains, trees, rivers, men, and beasts only seem to be what they are because of the limitations of his own senses. Once those limitations are overcome, the world of diverse form vanishes and there remains only the vast and void infinitude of Brahman in whom is eternal rest and bliss.

      Such ideas are frequent in Eastern thought, although they do not represent its deepest meaning. To most of us they are abstract and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, countless religious people maintain that the end and aim of our life here on earth is an eternal condition whose characteristics may be described in one of the following ways. First, a state beyond death wherein the beauties of life are greatly magnified and all its pains and limitations overcome. Second, a state in this life wherein earthly pains and limitations have been overcome by the exercise of human reason and skill, inspired by the Grace of God. Third, a state attainable either in the body or out of it where human consciousness has been raised above the limits imposed upon it by the personal self and its five senses, wherein all diversity of form, all pairs of opposites, have been merged into the infinite and formless divine essence from which they originally came.

      Abolishing the Universe

      All these three have certain elements in common. There is a distaste for the world as it is, implying that the wrong is not so much in the external world as in one’s own imperfect self, which is either doomed to live in this world on account of those imperfections or else which sees that world falsely, being deluded by imperfect senses. There is also the hope for an eternal state in which good things are made permanent or abolished altogether along with the evil. And, most significant of all, there is the implication that one of these religious states is the ultimate purpose of our earthly existence, from which it must follow that appropriate religious activities are fundamentally the only worthwhile pursuits for mankind. All other pursuits must therefore be considered subordinate and ephemeral, and in this view art, literature, music, politics, science, drama, exploration, and sport become vain and empty unless they are regarded simply as means of keeping body and soul together in reasonable comfort, or unless they are used for specifically religious purposes. Apart from these two uses they become simply the trimmings of life, the mere gilt on the pill, mere “relaxations” to assuage in as harmless a manner as possible our carnal nature lest its sufferings become too great for us to bear.

      The direction of this kind of religion is even more apparent when we consider the various ways and means prescribed for attaining such ideals. Among civilized peoples there are two principal ways of approach to the religious ideal, both of which have various common elements. Both are founded on the idea that the search for spiritual happiness in worldly pleasures is a snare because those pleasures are impermanent; they do, perhaps, impart a certain happiness, but because that happiness is entirely dependent on external circumstances it disappears as soon as those circumstances change. But there is something in man which makes it exceedingly hard for him to avoid the pursuit of earthly pleasures, and this tendency religion attempts to vanquish by a strongly hostile attitude to them. Hence the general antipathy in religion to all that pertains to the senses, and especially to the most elementary and important of earthly pleasures which are to be found in the sexual functions.

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