Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness

by Chade-Meng Tan

Here is the analogy. Imagine you have a pot of water full of sediments, and imagine that pot is constantly shaken and agitated. The water appears cloudy. Imagine that you stop agitating the pot and just let it rest on the floor. The water will become calm and, after a while, all the sediments will settle and the water will appear clear. This is the classical analogy of the mind in the alert and relaxed state. In this state, we temporarily stop agitating the mind the same way we stop agitating the pot. Eventually, our mind becomes calm and clear, the same way the water appears calm and clear. Happiness Is the Default State of Mind There is an extremely important quality of mind in the calm and clear state that is not captured by the above analogy. That quality is happiness. When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful! But why? Even after I found myself able to access that mind on demand, it did not make a lot of sense to me. Why should a calm and clear mind automatically be happy? I put that question to my friend Alan Wallace, one of the Western world’s top experts in the practice of relaxed concentration (a practice known as shamatha). Alan said the reason is very simple: happiness is the default state of mind. So when the mind becomes calm and clear, it returns to its default, and that default is happiness. That is it. There is no magic; we are simply returning the mind to its natura...