Selected Quotes from Chapter 8
Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness
Sharon Salzberg
Liberating the Mind Through Sympathetic Joy
It is a rare and beautiful quality to feel truly happy when others are happy. When someone rejoices in our happiness, we are flooded with respect and gratitude for their appreciation. When we take delight in the happiness of another, when we genuinely rejoice at their prosperity, success, or good fortune rather than begrudging it in any way, we are abiding in media, sympathetic joy the third of the four brahma-viharas, or boundless states of consciousness.
The root of the Pali word mudita means “to be pleased, to have a sense of gladness.”
The Buddha called mudita “the mind-deliverance of gladness,” because this force of happiness actually liberates us. Unlike a state of mere excitement or giddiness, the quality of sympathetic joy challenges our deep assumptions about aloneness, loss, and happiness, and shows us another possibility.
Because there are so many constricting mind states that are impediments to mudita, sympathetic joy is considered the most difficult of all the brahma-viharas to develop. But so potent is this quality that expressing it can defeat the aversion and attachment that bind us.
…tormenting states of mind, such as judging, comparing, discriminating, demeaning, and envying, collude to get us truck, to keep us stuck, and to make us miserable. Mudita can provide…opportunity to extricate ourselves from our stuckness, to be free enough…to be happy. If we look carefully at each of those mind states where we get stuck, we can begin to understand how cultivating sympathetic joy can help to free us.
Judgment
Its all too easy to believe, or even insist, that other people should behave just as we want them to, that they should pursue lifestyles and sources of happiness in precisely the ways we deem appropriate.
To be nonjudgmental means having flexibility of mind and the ability to let go of our attachment to what seems right to us.
Sympathetic joy is nonjudgmental. Of course, a certain element of discernment is important here as well.
Comparing
Comparing ourselves to others is a very powerful mental affliction. In Buddhist psychology it is called “conceit.” When we are enmeshed in conceit, we are pulled outside ourselves, trying to know who we are and what our experience is by comparing ourselves to others.
IN practicing sympathetic joy rather than looking at others in order to define ourselves, we begin by recognizing that we do indeed deserve to be happy.
Prejudice
We can feel anger when someone we do not like experiences prosperity or praise or happiness in their lives.
The willingness to feel goodwill only toward those we like is a powerful impediment to developing sympathetic joy.
Like metta, mudita is boundless. As it develops in us, we are able to rejoice in the happiness and well- bring of others, whether we like them or not.
As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility”
Demeaning
We may look at someone else’s achievements or someone else’s happiness and find ourselves wishing that their status or condition might be diminished-as if thereby our own would be increased. This attitude of diminishing he happiness of others is based on considering happiness as a limited resource or commodity-the more someone else has, the less there is for me.
Envy
Envy, as we all know to our distress, is the inability to endure the success, prosperity, or happiness of others; it absolutely hates to see these things in other people. The experience of envy only functions to produce more and more dissatisfaction with our own condition and to make us quite miserable.
Avarice
Avarice or selfishness is a quality whereby one seeks to hold on to and conceal what one has in order to avoid sharing it with others. Avarice manifests as meanness and contraction in the mind, and is characterized by extreme possessiveness and attachment.
Avarice causes tremendous pain. There is n o peace in it. The roots of envy and avarice are aversion toward others and attachment to objects, both material and abstract.
Boredom
Mudita is said to eliminate boredom…. because it gives us some many reasons to feel happy and connected. Boredom is based on a sense of separateness and a turning away that we feel when we experience certain degrees of aversion.
Allies of Mudita
The impediments to mudita-judgment, comparing, discriminating, demeaning, envy, avarice, boredom-all are rooted in the binding forces of aversion and attachment. By contrast, qualities that support mudita-rapture, gratitude, metta, compassion-share their origin in our basic goodness, and they for a potent team to reduce suffering and to bring happiness.
Mudita depends on rapture; on our capacity to take active delight in things-and this depends upon our ability to actually let ourselves feel joy.
Gratitude brings delight. “count your blessings”
Compassion balances sympathetic joy and keeps it from degenerating into sentimentality or ignorant optimism.
The three brahma viharas all add to one another. Theirs is a benevolent alliance to brighten our minds. And because of their brightness, they add richness and joy to our perceptions. We can increasingly open to the happiness that exists. And we can see the suffering that exists as well and maintain an open heart in the face of it. In this way, as they share their strengths with one another, the bright forces of mind support us and help us to our own happiness.