"I am Happy" is actually sadness

This is well recognised. I remember someone at college recognising this, that the moment we decide we are "happy" we become unhappy, or at least it marks the end of happiness.

 Now intuitively I understand this to be like that quote from Shaw's Pygmalion (I think) "the eye needs some distance in order to see"

When standing on a mountain we can see everything else except our own mountain.

We cannot see our self.

And the corollary is that what we can see is not our self.

So when we see happiness it is because we have moved away from happiness.

However recent insights into Anatta present another view.

"I am happy" involves constructing a self within consciousness. The actual move that makes this realisation and sentence is a move of making a self, and then hanging happiness on this self.

But in so making a self, attaching to that mental form, and then hanging happiness on it so that we can participate in that happiness (vicariously) means we are no longing "being" happy and are instead trying to grasp happiness. And that grasping (for and by who?) is what kills it.

The common analogy in this blog is the child playing with a doll. The child will be well happy playing with the doll in the moment, being present and experiencing the world as it unfolds in real time. Perhaps the child will imagine that the doll is happy. This is a lovely moment.

But the moment the child wants that happiness of the doll for them self and grasps it then the child is no longer free and happy. It is trying to get at something that it perceives it does not have.

The child is now unhappy and the only way it can see to get happy is to somehow get the happiness from that doll. It coverts the doll, can't be separated from it, and enters into a really unhealthy relationship with the doll where its own happiness is dependent on the doll.

Eventually however the child drops the doll and enters present moment again and stop grasping for what is "in" the world, and the child "becomes" the world again and the field of experience is free, open and wide and the child is absorbed in play and happy again.