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

by Matthieu Ricard

The word happiness, writes Henri Bergson, “is commonly used to designate something intricate and ambiguous, one of those ideas which humanity has intentionally left vague, so that each individual might interpret it in his own way.”

Once at an open meeting in Hong Kong, a young man rose from the audience to ask me: “Can you give me one reason why I should go on living?” This book is a humble response to that question, for happiness is above all a love of life.

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.

The world of ignorance and suffering — called samsara in Sanskrit — is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.

“Suffering may hurt, but it is not an evil.” It is not an evil when, unable to avoid it, we turn it to profit to learn and to change, while recognizing that it is never a good thing in and of itself.

Even if we display every outward sign of happiness, we can never be truly happy if we dissociate ourselves from the happiness of others.

Happiness is a skill, a manner of being, but skills must be learned.

No matter what your outer circumstances might be, there is always, deep within you, a potential for flourishing. This is a potential for loving-kindness, compassion, and inner peace. Try to get in touch with and experience this potential that is always present, like a nugget of gold, in your heart and mind.

Gold nugget

And yet the world cannot in itself be called unfair; all it does is reflect the laws of cause and effect, and impermanence — the instability of all things — is a natural phenomenon.

Says S. Kirpal Singh: “True humility is freedom from all consciousness of self, which includes freedom from the consciousness of humility. The truly humble man never knows that he is humble.”1 Not feeling that he is the center of the universe, he is open to others and sees himself as part of the web of interdependence.

In a hermit’s day, every instant is a treasure and time is never wasted. In the silence of his hermitage, he becomes, in the words of Khalil Gibran, “a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.”

When we keep putting off our spiritual life to tomorrow, we end up copping out every single day.