That old saw about the path of the arahant being selfish: What’s selfish about a happiness that doesn’t deprive anybody of anything? People around you will pick up a sense of ease, a sense of peace, from the peace that you develop in your mind.

"That old saw about the path of the arahant being selfish: What’s selfish about a happiness that doesn’t deprive anybody of anything? If you could go out and concentrate people’s minds for them, that would be a noble activity, but you can’t. What you can do is get into a concentrated mind state yourself and be an example to other people. People around you will pick up a sense of ease, a sense of peace, from the peace that you develop in your mind, the sense of happiness that comes when you can stay longer and longer and longer in one place and realize that you don’t have to get pushed out. No matter what happens, no matter how loud the noises around you are, how insistent outside stimuli maybe, they don’t destroy the breath. They don’t destroy your ability to stay with the breath.

This is a kind of happiness that comes with practice. So it’s worth working on. It’s a happiness that does withstand scrutiny.

Yet even this is not the ultimate. It’s not the happiness the Buddha went in quest for. He found teachers who taught him concentration, all the way to the state of nothingness and the state of neither perception nor non-perception, yet he realized that that wasn’t what he wanted. But when he realized that he could use that kind of happiness as part of the path, that’s when he finally discovered a happiness that’s not constrained by space or time or anything at all. There’s no place there. There’s no time there. A happiness that’s totally independent of conditions. There’s nothing you have to do for it. You clear away the obstructions and there it is. No matter how much you look at it, you can’t find anything lacking in that happiness. This is the one happiness that does withstand scrutiny, the one happiness that repays all your efforts to attain and understand it."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Unparadoxical Happiness"

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