Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute teaching from Camp Cedar Glen in 1977, Joseph Goldstein explores the Buddha’s pragmatic map of happiness across different realms of existence. Opening with a Mark Twain story about heaven and preconception, Goldstein outlines three ascending types of happiness: sensual pleasure (appreciated in moderation through moral conduct and generosity); the bliss of concentration, where a unified mind experiences rapture and peace superior to sense pleasures; and the supreme happiness of insight, a direct, luminous seeing into the nature of mind that brings freedom. He then reads directly from classical texts—the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, the Third Chan Patriarch, and the Song of Mahāmudrā—encouraging listeners to receive these pointers as fingers pointing at experience rather than the experience itself. The Q&A explores how enlightenment relates to sensory enjoyment, how householder practice compares to monastic retreat, and the authentic difficulties of beginning meditation. Pitched at practitioners in an active two-week retreat setting.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 CCG.mp3
UUID: c420096a-f101-4b74-bef5-58135152cb55
Teacher: Joseph Goldstein
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Joseph Goldstein)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,885
This recording by Joseph Goldstein was made on April thirteenth nineteen seventy seven at Chewy, California during a two week meditation retreat. The Buddha did not teach Buddhism. What he taught was the Dharma, the law, the truth. He taught how we create for ourselves a lot of problems and how we can extricate ourselves from those problems, from that suffering. He also taught about the possibilities of happiness and also the paths leading to the experience of that happiness.
The story by Mark Twain about a person who died and went to heaven. When he arrived in heaven, the angel in charge issued him a pair of wings and a halo and a harp. And he went around for a few days trying to play on the harp but he had never taken lessons and he wasn’t getting anything nice. And he wasn’t used to moving with wings. He was having a difficult time.
Actually, all he wanted to do was to be in a Mississippi River type saloon smoking a cigar. And as soon as that desire materialized in his mind, there he was in the heavenly equivalent of that saloon with a cigar in his mouth. It took him a few days to realize that his own preconceptions of what heaven was about in fact limited the kind of happiness or enjoyment he could have. We often do the same thing with regard to happiness. We have certain preconceptions about what happiness means and our own opinions about it, our own views sometimes limits the wide range of possibilities that we can experience as human beings.
The Buddha spoke of many different kinds of happiness. The first kind is that with which we’re most familiar, that is the happiness of sensed pleasures. He saw the danger of becoming attached to them but he also appreciated the kind of happiness and joy and light that they bring to the mind. We can see it in terms of being in beautiful places or hearing beautiful music or having very blissful body sensations or good food, good taste. Each of these kinds of sense pleasures is a real enjoyment in our lives.
It’s a mistake to interpret the teachings as thinking that they’re illusory or not real because they are real. They’re changing and impermanent but in the moment of their enjoyment they do in fact bring a kind of a real kind of happiness at its own level. And often in the Buddhist scriptures you read of the Buddha’s appreciation for things of great beauty. A clear mind makes one even more sensitive and more appreciative of the kind of joys that exist in the world of the senses. It’s the first kind of happiness, happiness of sense pleasures.
They’re nice and we all enjoy them. There’s a higher kind of sensual happiness And the Buddha talked about this kind of happiness with reference to the heaven realms and he described six different heavens of sensual delight and there are different kinds of heavens above that. And the descriptions of the heavenly worlds and as Jack mentioned the other night, whether you take it to be outside someplace or actual manifestations of mind, it doesn’t really matter. The descriptions of the heavenly worlds are exquisitely wonderful. Beings are born there with bodies of light, no pain in the knees, no aches, no tension, Everything on all sides is beautiful.
Due to the accumulated force of a lot of good karma, it’s only good things come to one from all sides, from all the senses. There are different kinds of heavens corresponding to different kinds of personalities, people. There are heavens which are designed for people who like bodily pleasures described in terms of the celestial pleasure groves where these beings of light are sporting. Palaces made of jewels and every kind of possible enjoyment is provided. There are heavens for celestial musicians, people who delight in sound and beautiful music.
There are whole heaven realms where that appreciation of music is happening. There are heavens for intellectuals, people who delight in the workings of the mind and what the mind can create. There are even heavens for yogis and it’s said that Maitreya, the bodhisattva who will be the next Buddha, is now residing in his last life before coming to earth as becoming a Buddha. He’s now living in Tuśita heaven which is the fourth of the sixth, living there teaching Dharma to the beings there. Taking rebirth in heaven is somewhat easier than taking birth as a human being.
There’s no birth process as we know it but rather spontaneous appearance age about fifteen or sixteen, all ready to enjoy. Now it’s wonderful. Munindra speaks a lot about the heaven worlds when questioned. He knows about them in great detail and my mind gets off on it a lot. Jack is somewhat more skeptical.
And often people would come to Munindra with some kind of doubt. They would like listening to the possibility but not quite believing it. And after long descriptions of the wonderful joys of these realms, Munindra would often add at the end, You don’t really have to believe it. It’s so, but you don’t have to believe it. What’s the path leading to the enjoyment both of sense pleasures in the human realm which we know and experience in our lives and also as it’s taught the cause or the path leading to the experience of these heavenly realms.
The Buddha gave a very clear map. The path is very well marked out.. The cause of sense pleasures coming to people is the result of two kinds of purification. Purification of conduct with regard to certain level of moral restraint and we’ve discussed it in terms of the five precepts, not doing those actions which involve very gross levels of anger or greed or delusion, not killing, not stealing, being honest, being truthful, not making the mind deluded with intoxicants. That kind of very basic moral restraint which provides the possibility of harmonious relationship and also the cultivation of generosity. Becoming kingly in our giving is the cause in turn of our enjoying all these different realms, all these different kinds of sensual happiness.
It’s not by accident that things happen in the world. There’s a cause behind everything happening. When you understand the causes both behind suffering and behind happiness, then there’s the possibility of beginning to direct your life in the path you choose. The happiness of sense pleasures, both in the human realm and the celestial realms, there’s a higher kind of happiness even than that of heavenly sense pleasures And that’s the happiness of concentration. When the mind becomes concentrated and one pointed to a fairly substantial degree.
There arises in the mind body a wonderful experience of rapture and bliss and light. It’s a unification. Instead of the mind that’s scattered and restless, instead of the mind that’s even jumping from one sense pleasure to another, it’s a mind that is collected and unified on an object and a wonderful sense of happiness and well-being envelops the mind and body. And that experience of the bliss of concentration There’s no desire at all for the happiness that sensual pleasures bring because one is experiencing a more fulfilling kind of happiness. That time it’s not a question of giving anything up, it’s a question of preference.
The happiness is so superior to the happiness that we can enjoy through the senses becomes a strong motivation for cultivating that kind of mind. In the cosmology, the level, the plane of existence which corresponds to this development of concentration called the Brahma worlds. And they’re beings who have attained to absorption, jhana, level samadhi, high level concentration and take rebirth in these Brahma lokas. They’re the highest planes in the planes of existence, the highest development that the mind can attain to. It’s interesting that in the lower Brahma worlds beings are said to have three senses.
There’s mind, eyes, sight and hearing. The other senses are not there. And in the higher Brahma world, there’s only mind, mind realms. You know the possibility of developing concentration is very real. It’s not that it’s only for a few yogis sitting in the caves of the Himalayas.
Many people through practice have developed their mind to such an extent that they can experience the bliss of this kind of one pointedness. It’s a very real possibility for any of us who take the time and the discipline to train the mind in that way. But there’s an even higher kind of happiness than the happiness of concentration, and again one that’s possible for all of us to experience, and that’s the happiness of insight. It’s called Vipassana happiness. And it occurs at a stage in practice when the mind becomes so clear and so luminous it’s seeing all phenomena of mind and body, both internally and externally, with such illuminated precision.
It’s that first feeling of real understanding of how things are. It’s that feeling of coming home. Oh, this is how it is. You know, if you take a piece of crystal glass and polish it, the kind of shine that that glass contains, the mind has the potential to have that same degree of luminosity. And in that clarity come feelings of rapture and happiness and peace and stillness and calm and insight.
There’s an indescribable kind of happiness that accompanies that illumination. It’s a happiness that we have not experienced before in this life either through sense pleasures or even through the bliss of concentration because the happiness of insight, the happiness that comes from that first taste of freedom, the happiness from seeing clearly in a very profound way, in a life transforming way what this is all about, who we are. The path to that kind of happiness and the expression of it has been described in very many ways in different traditions. All the words that we’ve used during this course, in the readings, in the books and people that you’ve heard or read outside of the retreat, all of those words are not it. They are pointing to something.
It’s as if you went outside on the night of a full moon and somebody was standing there pointing up at the moon. If you went out with some degree of understanding and wisdom, you’d see the person pointing and then look up at the sky and see the moon. If you were not quite so wise, you would see the person pointing and look at the finger. The words are all fingers. They’re fingers pointing to a truth that can be experienced.
There are many different kinds of fingers. There are long ones and short ones and fat ones and thin ones. The idea is not to get attached to the finger, right, to see where it’s pointing and then to look. Tonight, what I’d like to do is to read from some very direct pointings. There’s some there’s some high texts which express very clearly both the way and the experience of this Vipassana happiness or the happiness of insight, the happiness of clear seeing.
I think it would be helpful if you sat up and meditated while listening. The words are so direct and so powerful they can be illuminated in the moment of hearing them if you listen with a still and concentrated mind. Listening in this way, let the mind be still and quiet and not necessarily judging or evaluating or commenting on the words, but rather use the words as a pointing to an experience. Feel what the words are talking about. This first is from the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation.
When one seeks one’s mind in its true state, it is found to be quite intelligible, although invisible. In its true state, mind is naked, immaculate, not made of anything, being of the voidness, clear, vacuous, without duality, transparent, timeless, uncompounded, unimpeded, colorless, not realizable as a separate thing but as the unity of all things, yet not composed of them, of one taste and transcendent over differentiation. The one mind being verily of the voidness and without any foundation, one’s own mind is likewise as vacuous as the sky. To know whether this is so or not, look within your own mind. Being merely a flux of instability like the air of the firmament, objective appearances are without power to fascinate and fetter.
To know whether this be so or not, look within your own mind. All appearances are verily one’s own concepts, self conceived in the mind like reflections seen in a mirror. To know whether this is so or not, look within your own mind. Arising of themselves and being naturally free like the clouds in the sky, all external appearances verily fade away into their own respective places. To know whether this is so or not, look within your own mind.
There being really no duality, pluralism is untrue. Until duality is transcended and at one then realized, enlightenment cannot be attained. The whole saṃsāra and nirvana as an inseparable unity are one’s mind. Again and again, look within your own mind. Keep that sense of investigation of your mind, of a direct looking at what the mind is.
Again, this is some more from the third Chan patriarch of China. The great vehicle is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When attachment and aversion are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against.
To set up what you like against what you dislike is the dis ease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail. The way is perfect like vast space when nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth, only cease to cherish opinions. If you wish to move in the one way, do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas. Indeed, to accept them fully is identical with true enlightenment.
The wise person strives to know goals, but the foolish one fetters themselves. There is one dharma, not many. Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant. One thing, all things. Move among and intermingle without distinction.
To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non duality because the nondual is one with a trusting mind. Words. The way is beyond language for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today. There’s been so many different ways of expressing the truth of insight, truth of understanding how the mind is working and how to experience it.
This is from the Song of Mahāmudrā which was said by a very famous Indian sage, Tilopa, to his disciple Naropa, who in turn taught Marpa and Milarepa and the whole Tibetan Kagyu lineage. Mahāmudrā means the great symbol. Again, another word for the one mind or the way, the Tao. Mahāmudrā is beyond all words and symbols. But for you, Naropa, earnest and loyal must this be said.
The void needs no reliance. Mahāmudrā rests on naught. Without making an effort but remaining loose and natural, one can break the yoke, thus gaining liberation. If one sees naught when staring into space, the idea of center and boundary dissolves. If with the mind one then observes the mind, one destroys distinctions and reaches Buddhahood.
The clouds that wander through the sky have no roots, no home, nor do the distinctive thoughts floating through the mind. Once the self mind is seen, discrimination stops. In space, shapes and colors form, but neither by black nor by white is space tinged. From the self mind, all things emerge, but the mind by virtue and by vices is not stained. Do not with the body but relax.
Shut firm the mouth and silent remain. Empty your mind and think of naught. Like a hollow bamboo, rest at ease your body. Giving not nor taking, put your mind at rest. Mahāmudrā is like a mind that clings to nought.
Thus practicing in time you will reach Buddhahood. Those who abandon craving and cling not to this or that perceive the real meaning given in the scriptures. At first, the yogi feels his mind is tumbling like a waterfall. In midcourse like the Ganges, it flows on slow and gentle. In the end, it is a great vast ocean where the lights of son and mother merge in one.
Mahāmudrā is like a mind that clings to naught. Those who abandon craving and cling not to this or that perceive the real meaning given in the scriptures. It’s the same whether the words come from Tibet or India or China or Burma, Japan, America. The understanding of the Dharma brings the same insight, the same experience of that kind of happiness and freedom. Just to close, tell a story about Ajahn Chah, Jack’s teacher.
He was staying in his forest monastery in the northeast of Thailand and a group of people came who had been traveling around meeting different teachers and meditation masters and they were asking each of them three questions. Why do you practice? How do you practice? What is the result of your practice? Three basic questions.
And Ajahn Chah, like so many great teachers, replied with three questions and he asked them, why do you eat? Why do you eat? And he said, how do you eat? And then he said, how do you feel after you’ve eaten? You have the questions and you know the answers.
Any questions? Which indicates there’s a wrong one too. I can’t follow it. Okay. The idea of right and wrong action, right, or really comes down not to some moral judgment of some things being good and other things being bad.
Rather, it’s a certain appreciation of the law of cause and effect realizing that certain actions bring pain and other actions bring happiness. For the person who has realized the non duality of our experience, for somebody who is fully enlightened, there’s no problem with that at all. The mind is purified. There’s no possibility of getting out of harmony with that oneness. For those of us who are working in a more relative truth, right?
We make certain choices in terms of what we do not from a moralistic point of view, not from thinking that some things are inherently good or bad but appreciating the significance and the result of the actions that we take. The Buddha was a very pragmatic teacher. He was not so interested in the big metaphysical questions and very often when questioned about his teaching he summed it up in one brief sentence. He said he teaches only one thing. He teaches how we get involved in pain and suffering and the way out of it to the experience of peace or liberation.
What’s interesting in terms of your question also is that the path to that extrication from suffering, right, the path which leads to happiness is exactly one of nondiscrimination. In other words, when you’re sitting here and watching your mind and watching your body, the path of practice is exactly sitting without preferences, accepting and experiencing everything that arises within the field of your awareness. In that sense, it’s practicing nonduality in every moment. And the reason for doing that is when we don’t, the mind gets caught in things that bring us pain. So it’s a very it’s a very pragmatic teaching.
Is faith the desire to be free of suffering? That could certainly be one of the one of the inspirations for faith to arise. It can arise from many things. Early in the course we talked somewhat about different kinds of faith. Sometimes people are inspired by the being of another person, right, their presence, their vibration.
It’s an appreciation of certain qualities. Right? The qual an appreciation of the qualities of love or compassion or wisdom. Faith can also be, as you say, a desire to come out of one’s own pain, one’s own suffering. It it also comes, and in the very highest sense, faith is identical with wisdom.
That is when you see how things are, when you experience the dharma in yourself, then you know there are no more doubts. And it’s not just what somebody’s telling you, you’ve seen it for yourself. And in that wisdom and insight comes a a very great faith. Does that answer your question? Uh-huh.
. Yeah. You can’t do better than that. Does someone who has reached the Vipassana insight or enlightenment, is he no longer interested in any sense pleasures? Okay.
Just to clarify a technical point and then to answer your question, Vipassana happiness you could call the gateway to enlightenment but is still a happiness preceding the happiness of enlightenment, right? It’s still a happiness connected with the workings of the mind and body, Mind and the body in a very clear and illuminated state. At the time of that experience, when the mind is at that level, there’s not much desire to go out for a hamburger. Right? Because the the happiness of that state is much greater, right?
But as with everything else, that state is also impermanent. In other words, you practice and it gets deeper and more clarity and more illumination and you reach that level, that momentum of awareness. And then maybe you stop practicing for a while and you go off into the world and do your thing and the mind comes down from that level. It’s not a, it’s not a permanent place that the mind is residing in. And again, you are interested and appreciative of the different sense pleasures that come.
So it’s not sometimes people a common fear is that they’re not so sure about this enlightenment, you know. There are none of the familiar pleasures there and maybe it won’t be so good, you know, and I don’t know if I want to give the other stuff up. The beauty of the unfolding of the path is that as you’re walking towards the very highest kind of freedom, all the other kinds of happiness come because in fact you’re cultivating those qualities of mind which are the causes for each of the successive kinds of happiness. So it’s not a question of, well I have to give everything up and then maybe I can experience that. As you are walking towards greater freedom you find that you’re being more generous and more loving which in turn is surrounding you with a lot of abundance and a lot of love, right?
So all the different kinds of pleasures come back to one as you walk on the path. It’s that increasingly you’re able to enjoy them without grasping, without attachment. That’s the difference. So don’t worry. I think it ties in in a very fundamental and basic way.
In fact, in the Buddhist time he taught many more householders than monks, right? The vast majority of the people he taught were people in relationship and families with children and very many of them experience the highest kind of truth. So it’s not in any way a limitation and in fact it provides it provides a vehicle for developing unselfishness, for developing patience certainly patience for developing understanding of how the mind is working, right? It’s a very fertile field for doing the practice. In fact, in some ways it’s more in some ways it’s richer than going off to a cave, although it has its difficulties also, right?
But you’re working with the real stuff of the mind, right, and you’re continually being tested. It’s continually coming up, okay, what’s happening now? If the commitment to truth is strong enough, you work in the context of family and relationship in a very powerful way. As I mentioned just with some of our teachers, Goenka was married with a lot of kids, many, many. It’s not it’s not just a few.
So I don’t see any conflict at all. You keep saying referring to the practice or if you practice. At this point, I’m really confused about what exactly is the practice. The practice is being aware in the moment. You and Jack have both assured us repeatedly that as we continue practice, concentration gets easier and mindfulness comes out easier.
But at the same time, you’ve had a kind of a smirk on your face which implies that if you, you know, that there might be other difficulties. You know, just reading that into it. I mean, it it seems that it seems to imply that, you know, the goring doesn’t, the going gets pretty heavy. I can just answer you from my own experience of practice and that is that the smile is not so much the unsaid about the unsaid difficulties that lie ahead although there are many but more an appreciation of the difficulties in the beginning. In other words, it does get easier because as you practice the factors of concentration and mindfulness get stronger, practice becomes more effortless.
It becomes a more automatic way of living your life. While saying that, at the same time I have tremendous respect and appreciation of the difficulties that people face in the beginning. Just as an example, when I first began to practice, my body hurt so much. I’d sit cross legged and the pain would be like just somebody nailing and, you know, hammering in a nail in my knees. I could not do it.
I didn’t have the strength to sit through that pain. I know that Jack mentioned in this course, but I contrived this chair. I’m pretty tall and to sit in the chair even, it has to be just the right way to be comfortable. So I put the chair on four bricks under each leg and I put my mosquito net over it, you know, and it was sort like sitting in this throne. I sat in every possible position.
You name it, I’ve sat in it. And it took a long time and that’s why I have a tremendous admiration for people who come to Insight Meditation Center who have never sat before and just do it, you know. I was finally weaned from my chair when Goenka came to teach. I had been practicing with Munindra an embarrassingly long time. And finally Goenka came and he led courses like this where Munindra was more individual, so I had my chair in my room.
I was a little embarrassed when Munindra came in, but not enough to give it up. When Goenka came, He didn’t allow chairs in the meditation hall, you know, so there I was. It does get easier and also I know the problems that are in the beginning of practice, you know, and the only way that I know to get through them is just to keep doing it. You know, I don’t know of any magic formula that’s going to take the pain out of your body or is it going to zap the mind into instant concentration? It comes as the result of practice.
Just as you practice anything, you practice the guitar or the piano, the first time you sit down it sounds terrible and awkward and you can’t move your fingers. Every day you practice and it gets easier and after a while the music becomes beautiful. I was wondering if you could comment on, you mentioned one of the first lectures on Saint John of the Cross in the dark night of the soul where the pain of spiritual growth is this the same pain of just cringing and grasping? Okay, not only. There are times of practice quite when the practice matures and ripens, you go through perspectives on the process where you’re seeing all phenomena, yourself and the world outside, as constantly dissolving in the moment.
It’s like you’re seeing the process of dissolution in every moment of experience and the first take on that kind of dissolution of everything is fear and seeing the misery of it and it can be very unsettling, right? That’s a kind of insight that everybody has to go through in the ripening of their minds. They’re coming to that totality of oneself, right? You come through that, you experience that, it’s as if every place you try to take a stand the rug is pulled out from under you, but instantaneously and so you’re constantly being pulled off your feet.