Are enlightened people happy?

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No. Enlightenment makes you calm and clear, and removes subject from object so that the separation needed in order to consider yourself as happy is gone.

Take care to note that I’m not saying that enlightened people don’t feel emotions. They do. Anger, sadness, disdain, contempt, enlightened people in general can feel a much wider range of emotions than you can. And they can mix together in odd ways.

The issue isn’t with emotion, it’s with the concept of “being happy.” It’s meaningless, borne out of a dualistic frame of mind. What’s the opposite of being happy? What emotion, if I’m feeling in that particular moment, means I’m not happy? Sad? Angry? Either being happy or not, well, I can’t answer that, because I don’t understand what it means. I’m pissed off all the darn time. Can I be pissed off and joyful at the same time? Pissed off and mirthful? Pissed off and blissful? Absolutely.

Have you ever asked someone if they’re happy or not? They have to sit there and think about whether to make a life change or not. It’s this general, background self-conception one has, to say whether a number of things are lining up. Do I like my job, relationship and lifestyle, how I’m seen by others, all of these things that feed into this concept we have of being happy?

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Boring stuff ahead, skip if if dry technical explanations don’t interest you. I put it in here because the detail is important to satisfy some of the claims made above. Anybody can, of course, ask questions for clarification in the comments.

As someone who is enlightened, all these things only appear when I’m focusing directly on that cluster of objects. When I’m not, they’re gone, in the deep background, silently controlling how I perceive and think. The self is completely unconscious. There’s nothing there to consider whether it is happy or not.

There is only what is in front of me at any given time, or whatever it is I care to meditate on. These objects can make me feel lots of different kinds of emotions, They are incredibly rich, deep, and multilayered, and while they begin with the self, by the time they reach consciousness they’re very far from it. Self is simultaneously the origin of all experience, yet also mostly irrelevant to what is eventually experienced. One cannot be aware of everything, one cannot not have a self, what enlightenment does is pushes self to the periphery. This makes self-derived conceptualization such as “am I happy” meaningless. I’d need to focus on the self to bring the object to the forefront of mind, and then consider whether it’s happy or not. But the self is not real, so I can imagine anything I want of it, as opposed to a chair, which has its inalienable physical properties.