Happiness will depend on where you are in your consciousness.
If you are asleep, pleasure is happiness. Pleasure means sensation, trying to achieve something through the body that is not possible to achieve or forcing the body to achieve something it is not capable of. The body can give you only momentary pleasure, and each pleasure is balance by pain in the same amount, to the same degree. Each pleasure is followed by its opposite because the body exists in the world of duality. Just as the day is followed by night and death is followed by life and life is followed by death, it is a vicious circle. Therefore your pleasure will be followed by pain, yur pain will be followed by pleasure.
If you are people who are in between, who are neither asleep nor awake, who are just in a limbo, a little bit asleep, a little bit awake. You sometimes have that experience in the early morning - still sleepy, but you cant say you are asleep because you can hear the noise in the house etc. These people enjoy nature, its beauty. They enjoy silence, they enjoy what they had ever enjoyed before, and that is far more lasting. For example while you dance, suddenly you forget your body, your body becomes weightless. The grip of gravity over you is lost, suddently you are in a different space. But this is also not the ultimate.
The ultimate happens only when you are fully awake, when all sleep is gone, when your whole being is full of light, when there is no darkness within you. All darkness has disappeared and with that darkness, the ego is gone. All tensions have disappeared, all anguish, all anxiety. You are in a state of total contentment. You live in the present; no past and no future anymore. This moment is all. Now is the only time and here is the only space. And then suddenly the whole sky drops into you. This is bliss. This is real happiness.
Therefore pleasure is animal, happiness is human, bliss is divine.
- Pleasure binds you, it is a bondage, it chains you. Happiness gives you a little more rope, a little bit of freedom. Bliss is absolute freedom.
- Pleasure is dependent on others. Happiness is not so dependent on others, but still it is separate from you. Bliss is not dependent, it is not separate either, it is your very being, it is your very nature.
Pleasure is physical, physiological. It can be sexual, it can be of other senses, it can become an obsession with food, but it is rooted in the body. The body is your periphery, your circumference; it is not your centre. and to live on the circumference is to live at the mercy of all kinds of things that go on happening around you.
Pleasure is dependent on the other. If you love a woman/man, if that is your pleasure, then you feel unhappy, in despair, sad without her/him - then you have created bondage for yourself. If you are seeking after money and power, then you will be dependent on money and power. The more you have the more you will become miserable. It is a double-edged sword. The more you demand, the more you desire, the more you feel youself lacking something - the more hollow, empty, you appear to yourself. If food is pleasure, just a taste for a moment, when the food passes across the taste buds on your tongue. If you go on eating the same food everyday your taste budgs will become unresponsive to it. Soon you will be fed up with it. That's how people become fed up - one day you are running after a man or a woman and the next day you are trying to find an excuse to get rid of the same person.
