Why Do Many People Live Happily Without Feeling Suffering?

Sentient beings have been drifting in the sea of suffering since beginningless kalpas and have long grown accustomed to it; they have never experienced true happiness, and without any contrast, they have no awareness or awakening. The more ignorant sentient beings are, the less they know suffering, and they do not know their own ignorance either; they often take suffering to be happiness. To know suffering is the awakening of a practitioner of the Path, and the awakening of most practitioners of the Path is in fact taught to them by the Buddha. As long as one knows suffering, one will aspire to cessation and cultivate the path; sooner or later, one will exhaust suffering and its origin, thereby ending birth and death and attaining liberation. Ignorance is the heaviest of all afflictions, and ignorant people are also the hardest to guide and transform: no teaching or doctrine enters them, no words do they understand, all exhortations are useless, and all skillful means and methods are rendered ineffective—they are like an obstinate stone that takes in neither salt nor sauce. Because of their ignorance, they have fewer other afflictions, fewer delusive thoughts, and fewer mental discursions, and they are even less aware of the need to seek liberation. For such a person in the human realm, if they cultivate meditative concentration, they may perhaps quickly enter the concentration of the desire realm, free of scattered thoughts, but no deeper dhyāna is possible, because heavy ignorance and affliction do not correspond to the higher realms.