Excerpted from 'The Pursuit of Happiness', essay by William Hart, published in the Sayagyi U Ba Khin Journal, printed in 1983

What in fact is the happiness which is sought so avidly? If we examine it closely, we shall see that it is nothing but the gratification of our senses. This is what is offered to us millions of times every day, through each of the five bodily senses as well as through the mind. We are constantly receiving invitations to experience new and yet newer sensual pleasures. One who has experienced a wide range of such pleasures is considered really to have lived. Sensory gratifications become the primary purpose of life.

But can we call this pleasure happiness? There is a difficulty in doing so, because whether physical or mental, whether gross or refined, whether crude or aesthetic or intellectual, all this sensory gratification has one common characteristic: it is transitory. Once attained, it passes away, sooner or later. No pleasure of the senses can remain forever. And when it is gone, we seek to replace it with a new pleasure, and when this fades, still another pleasure…..We pass our lives in a state of continual agitation and tension, always seeking new gratification, never satisfied with what we have experienced. As fast as we may pursue it, pleasure flees from us. In fact the more avidly we seek it, the faster the goal recedes…. Every sensory gratification strengthens the conditioning to seek further gratification. And as the habit grows stronger, it becomes more difficult to satisfy.

….Actually, the very act of pursuing is not consonant with happiness. Pursuit assumes a dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs, a longing for what does not exist. In seeking the far-away goal of satisfaction, we are at the same time trying to avoid the unsatisfactory present…. If attempting to indulge our cravings is not the way, then perhaps we should try the opposite - deprivation…. The problem is that suppression does not eliminate a craving; it merely confines the craving to the unconscious mind….

There is another choice before us, a middle way: self-observation. This is what we learn to do in the practice of Vipassana meditation. When we develop this faculty of dispassionate self-observation, we come to realise that it is the very pursuit of pleasure which has always kept us unhappy. So long as we were pursuing the pleasant and fleeing the unpleasant, we were dissatisfied, agitated, full of tension. Now, at least in the moments when we are really doing Vipassana, that agitation is gone……This is real happiness - not something dependent on a chance configuration of external circumstances, but a happiness within our own control, regardless of what the circumstances may be. This is real liberty: the freedom from craving, aversion, illusion - self-mastery.