Thanissaro Bhikkhu on the Ultimate Goal

"[The Buddha] talks about the goal just enough to make you understand that it’s worth pursuing: the ultimate happiness, the ultimate freedom, totally outside of any physical or mental location in space or time. As he says, if you hold to a perception that the goal might be accompanied by any kind of suffering or regret, drop that perception. Don’t listen to it. The deathless is totally satisfying and ends all your hungers. Once your hungers are satisfied, that solves all your other problems as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Uses of Right Concentration"

"I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people depict the Buddha’s teachings like this: There really is no happiness in the world, and contentment lies in just admitting that fact and basically giving up on the search for happiness and learning how to be equanimous and unaffected by anything. That’s the best that can be expected. There is no transcendent. There’s nothing unconditioned. It’s just a matter learning how to accept where you are. That’s almost too depressing to think about, if that’s what it was all about. But fortunately, it’s not. The Buddha did find an ultimate happiness, one that is totally satisfying — so totally that it’s more than anything you could think about, more than anything you could imagine. Can you imagine not hungering? For most of us, just that idea stretches our imagination a lot. We’re used to being hungry and we find satisfaction in things that seem to satisfy the hunger, at least for a while. We forget that a lot of the things that are appealing i...

"[The Buddha] talks about the goal just enough to make you understand that it’s worth pursuing: the ultimate happiness, the ultimate freedom, totally outside of any physical or mental location in space or time. As he says, if you hold to a perception that the goal might be accompanied by any kind of suffering or regret, drop that perception. Don’t listen to it. The deathless is totally satisfying and ends all your hungers. Once your hungers are satisfied, that solves all your other problems as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Uses of Right Concentration"