“The Buddha never promised a “happiness” in the sense of a “kama assada” or “sensual pleasures.”
– In fact, he showed it is our tendency for upadana for sensual pleasures that keep us bound to the rebirth process (samsara.)”.
This is what one must in the end come to see.
It is impossible for us to contemplate a ‘good state’, however sublime, where feeling does not figure. Everything that we treasure inwardly is intimately connected with a deep-seated emotion. The trouble is that emotions are not constant.
If I were to say: ‘I will have a deva existence one after another, times without number. That way I will forever experience pleasant feelings, one life after another without end. The ‘only’ price I will have to pay is the ‘limited anguish’ each time I am approaching death. That is insignificant compared with the millions, perhaps billions of years spent there. I am willing to pay such a small price’. Now this is an impossible dream (besides being a wrong view) because there can be no guarantee of a next ‘happy’ existence if one is not on the Path (in fact, most will be in the apayas); and if one is ON the Path, those ‘happy existences’ will come to an end as a matter of course.
Not having EXPERIENCED Nibbana is the problem. When it is said that kama assada is not there, we equate that State with a ‘neutral one’, one of neither pleasure nor pain. That will simply not do. We do not crave a ‘neutral’ existence, one merely ‘free of suffering’, we crave a positive, a pleasant existence. It is like this: some one is feeling pain, another is enjoying, and a third is just sitting doing nothing. Not knowing what Nibbana is, we automatically equate Nibbana with the third state. Certainly not as anything positive and therefore ‘worth to be experienced’.
In life we see that we can enjoy the pleasant, but have to pay for that by experiencing the unpleasant as well. It is the two sides of a coin. You must accept the unpleasant in order to have the pleasant. Nibbana would here equate with rejecting both – throwing away the coin. Free of the unpleasant, yes, but at the price of giving up on the pleasant.
I remember an instance when I was a boy, about 9 or 10 years old. This thought occurred: ‘What if some supreme being appeared now and told me : You have a choice! You see what trouble grow-ups have to go through. You will be free of all that, but you will not experience one happy moment either. That or the same as it is with everyone else. Choose” I was unable to choose. When I related this to others later on in life, no one seemed to know what I meant. “SO? That is how it is. Enjoy as much as you can. What’s the problem?” Now I find myself pondering the question again.
Now this is where aveccappasada in the Buddha comes in. I have no doubt that Nibbana exists … there MUST be such a state as Nibbana, there MUST be a state that excels any known ‘in this world’. It is only that I know nothing ABOUT it, I only know OF it, and that because of confidence in the Buddha. What?…all those Buddhas, Paccekabuddhas, Arahants, an infinite number of them, the Ones who made it to the Highest Goal, were they….?
What Nibbana IS NOT, that it is NOT suffering, that I can see. What it IS I cannot know until I get there.