The Buddha had a young person’s sense of idealism that maybe we really could find a true happiness and maybe we can do it through our own efforts.

"Some agendas don’t even like the idea that there might be a deathless happiness. To follow those agendas is to destroy ourselves, but we go ahead and destroy ourselves willingly because we see easy happiness all around us — the pleasures of having a family, the pleasures of having money, the pleasures of having a job — and we’d rather not look at the pain that comes with having a family, the pain that comes with having money, the pain that comes with having a job. We see at least that these pleasures are visible here and now. And for something we haven’t yet seen, we’re not willing the make the gamble, especially when we see that the path requires sacrifice.

You have to give up certain of your pleasures, but that’s the way it is with the world. It’s only the human potential movement that has told us that if we cultivate our potentials then we can have everything we want: beauty, wealth, power, a great spiritual life, a great sexual life, the whole shmear. Part of us would really like that.

But if you ever look at people who’ve tried to excel in every area of their life, you find that it drives them crazy. It’s a basic principle that some forms of happiness, some forms of pleasure, require that you give up other ones. So that’s a given right there. The question is, what kind of happiness, what kind of pleasure are you going to take as your primary focus? What is something you’re not going to sacrifice? How high do you want to set your sights? What possibilities for happiness do you want to take into consideration? We have the testimony of the Buddha, we have the testimony of his noble disciples, the monks and nuns, lay men and lay women, who put his teaching into practice and found that, yes, it worked. There really is a deathless happiness. As one of the Thai ajaans said, if they could take out and show that happiness to everybody else, nobody would want any other happiness in the world, especially any happiness that would get in the way of that true happiness.

But it’s something that’s experienced totally within the mind, within your awareness. As the Buddha said, it’s something you touch with your body. It’s not just an idea you have in the mind. It’s a full experience. But until you’ve touched it, it’s just words, ideas, somebody else’s news. This is where you have to put forth your conviction, one, that it’s possible that they’ve done that, and two, it’s possible that you could do it, too.

Again, part of the mind wants that possibility, but part of it seems to be afraid of it, doesn’t want to go near it. It’s very easy to listen to people who tell you, “Oh, that kind of happiness is not really true, or maybe the Buddha was just having a weird psychological experience, and maybe he didn’t really know what he was talking about. We can just go ahead and live our lives and try to satisfy ourselves with our sensual pleasures, our relationships, whatever, and simply accept the fact that someday we’re going to have to die and that’s it.” And these are the same people who accuse Buddhism of being pessimistic.

But there’s that part of us that really wants a true happiness, a happiness that’s not going to turn around and bite us. I was reading a book a while back saying that part of growing up is realizing that you have to make compromises and have to settle for less than the best. And so in that sense, the Buddha never really grew up. He had a young person’s sense of idealism that maybe we really could find a true happiness and maybe we can do it through our own efforts."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Challenge of Faith"