Bertrand Russell has said he would not like to go to heaven, where only happiness abounds. How can you know happiness without knowing suffering? How can you know health without knowing sickness? Where you have everything just by wishing for it, there cannot be any joy in having it.
The joy of having something comes from the length of time you have been wanting it, expecting it. Happiness really lies in the expectation. So once you achieve it, it loses its charm for you. Every happiness is imaginary: so long as you don't possess it, it seems to be abounding happiness. But as soon as it is actualized, it ceases to be happiness; our hands are as empty as before. And then we seek some other object for our desire, and we begin to expect it again. We feel so unhappy without it and imagine that happiness will come with it.
Rothschild was one of America's multi-millionaires. There is a story about him, and I don't know if it is true or not. He was on his deathbed, and he said to his son, "You have seen from my life that I made millions and they didn't make me really happy, they didn't bring happiness with them. Do you see that wealth is not happiness?"
His son said, "It is true, as I learned from your life, that wealth is not happiness, but I also learned from your life that if one has wealth, one can have the suffering of his choice; one can choose between one suffering and another. And this freedom of choice is beautiful. I know that you were never happy, but you always chose your own kind of suffering. A poor man does not have this freedom, this choice; his suffering is determined by circumstances. Except this, there is no difference between a rich man and a poor man in the matter of suffering. A poor man has to suffer with a woman who comes his way as his wife, but the rich man can afford women with whom he wants to suffer. And this choice is not an insignificant happiness."
If you examine it deeply, you will find that happiness and suffering are two aspects of the same thing, two sides of the same coin, or, perhaps, they are different densities of the same phenomenon.
Besides, what is happiness for me may be a matter of suffering for you. If I own ten million and I lose five, I will be miserable in spite of the fact that I still own five million. But if you have nothing and you come across five million, you will be mad with joy and happiness. Although both of us will be in the same situation financially -- we have five million each -- I will be beating my head against the wall and you will be dancing and celebrating. But also remember, your celebration will not last long, because someone who comes to own five million will also be faced with the fear of losing it. In the same way, my sufferings will soon wither away, because one who loses five million soon becomes engaged in recovering that loss -- which is quite possible for him.
Strange are the ways of life. My happiness cannot be your happiness, nor can my suffering become your suffering. Even my happiness of today can not be my happiness for tomorrow. I cannot say if my happiness in this moment will continue to be my happiness in the next. Happiness and suffering are like clouds passing through the sky. They come and go.
Both happiness and suffering are there, and they are facts of life. In fact, it is wrong to call them two, but we have to, because all our languages divide things into two. Really it is one truth, sometimes seen as happiness and other times as suffering. In reality, pleasure and pain are just our interpretations, psychological interpretations. They are not real situations, they are largely interpretations of them. And it depends on us how we interpret something. And there may be a thousand interpretations of the same thing. It all depends on us.
