Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

by Matthieu Ricard

For just a few moments, thoughts of the past are suppressed, the mind is not burdened with plans for the future, and the present moment is liberated from all mental constructs. This moment of respite, from which all sense of emotional urgency has vanished, is experienced as one of profound peace.

As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state. Understanding that is the key prerequisite to a life worth living.

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exaltation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

Living on a pendulum between hope and doubt, excitement and boredom, desire and weariness, it’s easy to fritter away our lives, bit by bit, without even noticing, running all over the place and getting nowhere. Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things.

Even so, some people think that in order to be really happy all we need do is learn to love ourselves as we are. This all depends on what is meant by “being ourselves.” Is it being on a perpetual seesaw between satisfaction and displeasure, calm and excitability, enthusiasm and apathy? Resigning ourselves to this way of thinking while letting our impulses and tendencies run rampant is the easy way out, a compromise, even a kind of surrender.

This distinction between exterior and interior well-being explains the apparent contradiction between some of these findings and the Buddhist assertion that suffering is omnipresent in the universe. When we speak about omnipresence, it means not that all people are continuously in a state of suffering, but that they are vulnerable to the latent suffering that can arise at any moment. They will remain vulnerable so long as they fail to dispel the mental toxins that cause unhappiness.

The denial of the possibility of happiness seems to have been influenced by the concept of the world and mankind as being fundamentally evil. This belief stems largely from the notion of original sin, which Freud, according to psychologist Martin Seligman, “dragged . . . into twentieth-century psychology, defining all of civilization (including modern morality, science, religion, and technological progress) as just an elaborate defense against basic conflicts over infantile sexuality and aggression.” This kind of interpretation has led a great many contemporary intellectuals to conclude absurdly that any act of generosity or kindness comes from a negative impulse. Seligman quotes Doris Kearns Goodwin, the biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, according to whom the first lady devoted a great portion of her life to helping people of color because she was compensating for her mother’s narcissism and her father’s alcoholism. Goodwin, says Seligman, never even considers the possibility that Eleanor Roosevelt was simply acting out of pure kindness! For Seligman and his colleagues in the field of positive psychology, “there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation.”5

At every moment between birth and death, the body undergoes ceaseless transformations and the mind becomes the theater of countless emotional and conceptual experiences. And yet we obstinately assign qualities of permanence, uniqueness, and autonomy to the self.

Each of us is indeed a unique person, and it is fine to recognize and appreciate who we are. But in reinforcing the separate identity of the self, we fall out of sync with reality. The truth is, we are fundamentally interdependent with other people and our environment. Our experience is simply the content of the mental flow, the continuum of consciousness, and there is no justification for seeing the self as an entirely distinct entity within that flow.

For Buddhism, paradoxically, genuine self-confidence is the natural quality of egolessness. To dispel the illusion of the ego is to free oneself from a fundamental vulnerability. The fact is, the sense of security derived from that illusion is eminently fragile. Genuine confidence comes from an awareness of a basic quality of our mind and of our potential for transformation and flourishing, what Buddhism calls buddha nature, which is present in all of us. Such recognition imparts peaceful strength that cannot be threatened by external circumstances or inner fears, a freedom that transcends self-absorption and anxiety.

Rigorous analysis leads us to conclude that the self does not reside in any part of the body, nor is it some diffuse entity permeating the entire body. We willingly believe that the self is associated with consciousness, but consciousness too is an elusive current: in terms of living experience, the past moment of consciousness is dead (only its impact remains), the future is not yet, and the present doesn’t last.

Buddhism therefore concludes that the self is just a name we give to a continuum, just as we name a river the Ganges or the Mississippi. Such a continuum certainly exists, but only as a convention based upon the interdependence of the consciousness, the body, and the environment. It is entirely without autonomous existence.

Like a shooting star, a mirage, a flame, A magic trick, a dewdrop, a water bubble, Like a dream, lightning, or a cloud — Consider all things thus.

Since altruistic love acts as a direct antidote to hatred, the more we develop it, the more the desire to harm will wither and finally disappear. It is not a question of suppressing hatred but of turning the mind to something diametrically opposed to it: love and compassion. Following a traditional Buddhist practice, you begin by recognizing your own aspiration to happiness, then extend that aspiration to those you love, and ultimately to all people — friends, strangers, and enemies. Little by little, altruism and benevolence will saturate your mind until it becomes second nature. In this way, training yourself in altruistic thought can offer lasting protection against chronic animosity and aggression. This will also be accompanied by a genuine readiness to act for the benefit of others.

When we look closely at our emotions, we find that, like musical notes, they are made up of numerous elements, or harmonics. Anger rouses us to action and often allows us to overcome obstacles. It also contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in and of themselves. Desire has an element of bliss that is distinct from attachment; pride, an element of self-confidence that can be firm without lapsing into arrogance; envy, a drive to act that cannot be confused with the unhealthy dissatisfaction it entails.

Between 1949 and now, for instance, in the United States, real income has increased more than twofold, while the number of people who declare themselves “very happy” has not only not increased but even decreased slightly. As Richard Layard, of the London School of Economics, states: “We have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nice work, and, above all, better health. Yet we are not happier. . . . If we want people to be happier, we really have to know what conditions generate happiness and how to cultivate them.”5

A good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, one can experience flow when undertaking the most mundane tasks, such as ironing or working on a production line. It all depends on how one experiences the passage of time. Conversely, without flow, virtually any activity will be tedious, if not downright unbearable. Csikszentmihalyi has found that some people enter the state of flow more easily than others. Such people generally have “curiosity and interest in life, persistence and low self-centeredness, which results in the ability to be motivated by intrinsic reward.”

Buddhist ethics is not just ways of acting, but a way of being. A human being endowed with loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom will spontaneously act in an ethical way because he or she is “good at heart.”

None of this in any way means that there is no need for rules of conduct and laws. These rules are the essential expressions of the accumulated wisdom of the past. They are justified inasmuch as some acts — theft, lying, violence — are almost always harmful. But they are guidelines. It is wisdom that allows us to identify the necessary exception. Theft is generally reprehensible because it is usually motivated by greed and unfairly deprives someone of his or her property, causing pain and suffering. But when, in the course of a famine, compassion motivates us to take food from the overflowing warehouses of a wealthy miser who would not give a morsel of food to those who are starving at his doorstep, the theft is no longer reprehensible. The law remains by and large valid, but compassionate wisdom has sanctioned the exception.