Can God/Happiness be found here and now?

Brahma at its work station, watching and lording for an aeon

True happiness can't be found in this world
(Ray Sunkel • The Advocate • Jan. 16, 2010)
A CHRISTIAN VIEW: Many of us want true happiness in the new year, but many are looking in the wrong places. True and genuine happiness cannot be found in the things of this old world. True happiness can only be found when we have a right relationship with our Lord. God wants you to be happy and be a delightful person to be around. You might be asking, "How can I or anyone be happy in a world filled with so much uncertainty?" More>>

Happiness is Always Here and Now
Seven Jaini (Wisdom Quarterly)

While this would seem to be true from a Buddhist point of view as well, actually true happiness is available here and now and anytime, since it does not depend on externals. One needn't wait for heaven or a deity to allow it or provide it. Three things cause happiness (nongreed, nonhatred, and nondelusion), and three things take it away. The heavens are, indeed, happy places. But the happiest ones of all are those immersed in the meditative absorptions and nobler attainments (ariya puggala).

Neither the gods, the God, the heavens, or a heaven can provide that. In fact, in some ways they make those attainments more unlikely. When living in a world where unsatisfactoriness and impermanence are hard to discern, one is not inspired to practice the Dharma that leads to complete liberation. While one thinks that a world (be it a heaven or other type of world) is permanent, one sees no reason to bother.

But even the long-lasting worlds are radically impermanent, constantly passing away, dependent on karma, subject to unsatisfactory states (dukkha), and ultimately impersonal. Without discerning these things, the mind and heart is not released, nor is release or an enduring peace even sought. Happiness, by comparison, is easy. Anyone attaining even the lowest form of absorption and holding that state at the death-proximate moment will by virtue of it be born into a corresponding "heaven." And in that corresponding world one will experience excellent strands of sensual delight.

There are lesser heavens, lesser grades of beings. These beings are reborn according to minor good deeds that bear their result at a fortunate time in the transition process -- so good karma is a great friend. Remarkably, there are superior states, superior beings, superior forms of happiness. The Buddha taught two things -- the way to nirvana and the way to the heavens. In a sense, he taught only one thing, the way to happiness, otherwise known as the way to the end of suffering.

Buddhism is nontheistic. Many might therefore be surprised that the Buddha talked about heavenly or celestial worlds. But he did. Buddhist cosmology is replete with deva realms. More might be surprised that the Buddha talked about God and gods. But he did. There is Great Brahma, a kind of exalted being (actually a station occupied more like a presidency than any eternal position) born at the beginning of a world evolution, who exists through to the period of world devolution (a span known as a great aeon or maha kalpa). That great god sounds quite like the personal, unthinkable "God."

There are other Gods (brahmas) and many, many other "gods" (devas). That is not to say that we are not all one -- for that Oneness connecting us all, that interdependence, that experience of non-separation, that too can be called GOD as Eastern mystics and Western ravers rave about.

So then, in that sense, there is only "one" God. Monotheism frequently misses this crucial distinction and fights wars in the name of ideology on account of it. One supposes that brahmas don't mind if they do. Take the case of Baka Brahma. And there are avatars, gods incarnating (descending, spontaneous appearing) in this world to intervene. Take the case of Sakka, king of the "gods" (Tavatimsa devas). He sounds quite like the more personal God of Christian lore. Other godlike beings (asuras, nagas, kinnaras, garudas, suparnas, yakkhas, and even devas from other realms) aren't always so benevolent.

It comes down to karma, the universal law of intention or cause and effect. The brahmas, the devas, and all other beings are bound by it. It is impersonal, but it metes out where people live, what form they take, how long they live, how attractive, rich, "lucky," influential, wise, foolish, or popular they are. So Karma, too, can considered G.O.D. in a transcendent sense: as the Generator, Operator, and Destroyer of things. This is the Trinity, or three parts, of God/Fate talked about in many cultures. Christians find great comfort in personalizing it -- insisting this is right and everything else is wrong -- saying it was a Jewish God (YHWH), a Jewish incarnation (Y'shua), and a Universal spirit (like oneness, wisdom, or karma).

All this talk, which makes little sense to anyone but Church officials, Theologians, and cloistered contemplatives, was lifted from Hinduism. There, the three facets of GOD -- the major functions of karma-being-worked-out or intention finding personal expression -- are personalized as Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a similar idea they personalized as the Moirae and the Parcae, respectively, with a Zeus (Sakka, deus, dios, deva, deity, divinity) King of the Gods, still constrained and subject to the operation of karma being worked out. And it's all so convoluted, we call it "mythology" and forget about it. But it's just ways of getting at something very real: There is happiness, beings seek it there and there, but it's always here and now (wherever that may be) and within.