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

by Matthieu Ricard

Yet the wise man is indeed relevant to our lives in that he strikes a note of hope: he shows me what I could become. He has trod a path open to all, each step of which is a source of enrichment. We can’t all become Olympic javelin athletes, but we can all learn to throw the javelin and we can develop some ability to do so. You don’t have to be Andre Agassi to love playing tennis, or Louis Armstrong to delight in playing a musical instrument. In every sphere of human activity there are sources of inspiration whose perfection, far from discouraging us, in fact whets our enthusiasm by holding out an admirable vision of that to which we aspire.

Spiritual practice can be enormously beneficial. The fact is, it is possible to undergo serious spiritual training by devoting some time every day to meditation.

It is very fruitful to watch how thoughts arise, and to contemplate the state of serenity and simplicity that is always present behind the scrim of thoughts, be they gloomy or upbeat. This is not as complicated as it might seem at first glance. You need only give a little of your time to the exercise in order to feel its impact and appreciate its fruitfulness. By gradually acquiring through introspective experience a better understanding of how thoughts are born, we learn how to fend off mental toxins. Once we have found a little bit of inner peace, it is much easier to lead a flourishing emotional and professional life. Similarly, as we free ourselves of all insecurities and inner fears (which are often connected to excessive self-centeredness), we have less to dread and are naturally more open to others and better armed to face the vagaries of existence.

If there is a way to free ourselves from suffering We must use every moment to find it. Only a fool wants to go on suffering. Isn’t it sad to knowingly imbibe poison? SEVENTH DALAI LAMA

This is true not only for human beings. Animals devour each other in the forests, the savannahs, the oceans, and the skies. At any given moment tens of thousands of them are being killed by humans, torn to pieces, and canned. Others suffer endless torments at the hands of their owners, bearing heavy burdens, in chains their entire lives; still others are hunted, fished, trapped between teeth of steel, strangled in snares, smothered under nets, tortured for their flesh, their musk, their ivory, their bones, their fur, their skin, thrown into boiling water or flayed alive. These are not mere words but a reality that is an intrinsic part of our daily lives: death, the transitory nature of all things, and suffering. Though we may feel overwhelmed by it all, powerless before so much pain, turning away from it is only indifference or cowardice. We must be intimately concerned with it, and do everything we possibly can to relieve the suffering.

Buddhism speaks of pervasive suffering, the suffering of change, and the multiplicity of suffering.

Pervasive suffering is not yet recognized as such. The suffering of change begins with a feeling of pleasure and turns to pain. The multiplicity of suffering is associated with an increase in pain.

These correspond to three modes of suffering: visible suffering, hidden suffering, and invisible suffering. Visible suffering is evident everywhere. Hidden suffering is concealed beneath the appearance of pleasure, freedom from care, fun. A gourmet eats a fine dish and moments later is gripped by the spasms of food poisoning. A family is happily gathered for a picnic in the country when a child is suddenly bitten by a snake. Partygoers are merrily dancing at the county fair when the tent abruptly catches fire. This type of suffering may potentially arise at any moment in life, but it remains hidden to those who are taken in by the illusion of appearances and cling to the belief that people and things last, untouched by the change that affects everything.

There is also the suffering that underlies the most ordinary activities. It is not easy to identify or so readily localized as a toothache. It sends out no signal and does not prevent us from functioning in the world, since, on the contrary, it is an integral part of the daily routine. What could be more innocuous than a boiled egg? Farm-raised hens may not have it so bad, but let’s take a brief look into the world of battery farming. Male chicks are separated at birth from the females and sent straight to the grinder. The hens are fed day and night under artificial lighting to make them grow faster and lay more eggs. Overcrowding makes them aggressive, and they continually tear at each other’s feathers. None of this history is apparent in your breakfast egg. Invisible suffering is the hardest to distinguish because it stems from the blindness of our own minds, where it remains so long as we are in the grip of ignorance and selfishness. Our confusion, born of a lack of judgment and wisdom, blinds us to what we must do and avoid doing to ensure that our thoughts, our words, and our actions engender happiness and not suffering. This confusion and the tenden...

As it happens, wherever life exists in the universe, so does suffering: disease, old age, death, separation from loved ones, forced coexistence with our oppressors, denial of basic necessities, confrontations with what we fear, and so on. Despite all that, this vision does not lead Buddhism to the view held by certain Western philosophers for whom suffering is inevitable and happiness out of reach. The reason for that is simple: unhappiness has causes that can be identified and acted upon. It is only when we misidentify the nature of those causes that we come to doubt the possibility of healing.

Any active cause must itself be a changing one; nothing can exist autonomously and unchanging. Arising from impermanent causes, unhappiness is itself subject to change and can be transformed. There is neither primordial nor eternal suffering.

We all have the ability to study the causes of suffering and gradually to free ourselves from them. We all have the potential to sweep away the veils of ignorance, to free ourselves of the selfishness and misplaced desires that trigger unhappiness, to work for the good of others and extract the essence from our human condition. It’s not the magnitude of the task that matters, it’s the magnitude of our courage.

The first is the truth of suffering—not only the kind of suffering that is obvious to the eye, but also the kind, as we have seen, that exists in subtler forms. The second is the truth of the causes of suffering—ignorance that engenders craving, malice, pride, and many other thoughts that poison our lives and those of others. Since these mental poisons can be eliminated, an end to suffering—the third truth—is therefore possible. The fourth truth is the path that turns that potential into reality. The path is the process of using all available means to eliminate the fundamental causes of suffering. In brief, we must: Recognize suffering, Eliminate its source, End it By practicing the path.

There are two levels of experience here, which can be compared respectively to the waves and the depths of the ocean. A storm may be raging at the surface, but the depths remain calm. The wise man always remains connected to the depths. On the other hand, he who knows only the surface and is unaware of the depths is lost when he is buffeted by the waves of suffering.

But how, you might ask, can I avoid being shattered when my child is sick and I know he’s going to die? How can I not be torn up at the sight of thousands of civilian war victims being deported or mutilated? Am I supposed to stop feeling? What could ever make me accept something like that? Who wouldn’t be affected by it, including the most serene of wise men? The difference between the sage and the ordinary person is that the former can feel unconditional love for those who suffer and do everything in his power to attenuate their pain without allowing his lucid vision of existence to be shaken. The essential thing is to be available to others without giving in to despair when the natural episodes of life and death follow their course.

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.

No matter how tenderly he’d felt for his wife, and despite the great sadness he most surely felt, allowing himself to be consumed by grief would have added nothing to his love for her.

Remaining painfully obsessed with a situation or the memory of a departed loved one, to the point of being paralyzed by grief for months or years on end, is evidence not of affection, but of an attachment that does no good to others or to oneself.

If we let ourselves be overwhelmed by our personal problems, no matter how tragic, we only increase our difficulties and become a burden on those around us. If our mind becomes accustomed to dwelling solely on the pain that events or people inflict on it, one day the most trivial incident will cause it infinite sorrow. As the intensity of this feeling grows with practice, everything that happens to us will eventually come to distress us, and peace will find no place within us.

It is essential to acquire a certain inner sense of well-being so that without in any way blunting our sensitivities, our love, and our altruism, we are able to connect with the depths of our being.

An “anxious and insecure” person will lack self-confidence and doubt the possibility of encountering genuine benevolence and affection, while yearning deeply for it. Such a person will be less trusting, more possessive and jealous, and will fall prey to nagging suspicions, often on a purely imaginary basis. She is excessively ruminative and vulnerable to depression, and tends to become overly emotional when stressed.

How can we help deeply wounded persons? By giving them enough love so that some peace and trust can grow in their hearts. How can they help themselves? By engaging in a meaningful dialogue with a human and warmhearted psychologist using methods that have proven to be efficient, such as cognitive therapy, and by cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, and mindfulness.

We can learn from suffering if we use it wisely. On the other hand, resigning ourselves to it with a simple “that’s life!” is like renouncing from the get-go any possibility of the inner change that is available to everyone and that allows us to prevent suffering from being systematically converted into misery. Just because we are not defeated by such obstacles as illness, animosity, criticism, or bad luck in no way means that events do not affect us or that we have overcome these obstacles forever; it only means that they no longer block our progress toward inner freedom.

Neurologically, we know, emotional reactions to pain vary significantly from person to person, and a considerable percentage of pain sensation is linked to the anxious desire to suppress it. If we allow that anxiety to overwhelm our mind, the most benign pain will soon become unbearable. So our assessment of pain also depends on our mind. It is the mind that reacts to pain with fear, rejection, despondency, or a feeling of powerlessness; instead of being subjected to a single agony, we accumulate a host of them.

THE POWER OF IMAGES

Buddhism has traditionally turned to what modern psychology calls mental imagery to modify the perception of pain. We may visualize, for instance, a soothing, luminous nectar that soaks into the center of pain and gradually dissolves it into a feeling of well-being. The nectar then permeates our entire body and the pain fades away. A synthesis of the results published in some fifty scientific articles has demonstrated that in 85 percent of cases recourse to mental methods enhances the capacity to endure pain.4 Among these diverse techniques, mental imagery has proven to be the most effective, although its efficacy varies depending on the visual support. For instance, one may visualize a neutral situation or a pleasant one, such as a beautiful landscape.

Using mental imagery

When we are completely self-absorbed, we are vulnerable and fall easy prey to confusion, impotence, and anxiety. But when we experience a powerful sense of empathy with the suffering of others, our impotent resignation gives way to courage, depression to love, narrow-mindedness to openness toward all those around us. Increasing compassion and loving-kindness, the ultimate in positive emotions, develops our readiness to offer relief to the suffering of others while reducing the importance of our own problems.

Ultimately we come to see that behind the pain there is a pristine awareness that does not change and that is beyond pain and pleasure. We may then relax our mind and try to allow our pain to rest in that state of pure awareness. This will allow us to stop being the passive victim of pain and to resist or reverse its devastation of our mind.

We divide the entire world between “desirable” and “undesirable,” we ascribe permanence to ephemera and see independent entities in what is actually a network of ceaselessly changing relations.

We react as if characteristics were inseparable from the object we assign them to. Thus we distance ourselves from reality and are dragged into the machinery of attraction and repulsion that is kept relentlessly in motion by our mental projections. Our concepts freeze things into artificial entities and we lose our inner freedom, just as water loses its fluidity when it turns to ice.

Buddhism distinguishes between an innate, instinctive “I”—when we think, for instance, “I’m awake” or “I’m cold”—and a conceptual “self” shaped by the force of habit. We attribute various qualities to it and posit it as the core of our being, autonomous and enduring.

At every moment between birth and death, the body undergoes ceaseless transformations and the mind becomes the theater of countless emotional and conceptual experiences.

We create the illusion of being separate from the world, hoping thereby to avert suffering. In fact, what happens is just the opposite, since ego-grasping and self-importance are the best magnets to attract suffering. Genuine fearlessness arises with the confidence that we will be able to gather the inner resources necessary to deal with any situation that comes our way. This is altogether different from withdrawing into self-absorption, a fearful reaction that perpetuates deep feelings of insecurity.

Do we not speak of building strong, resilient, adaptable, and assertive personalities? This confuses ego and self-confidence. The ego can attain only a contrived confidence built on insubstantial attributes—power, success, beauty and physical strength, intellectual brilliance, the opinions of others—and on whatever we believe to constitute our “identity,” our image, as we see it and as others see it. When things change and the gap with reality becomes too wide, the ego becomes irritated, freezes up, and falters. Self-confidence collapses and all that is left is frustration and suffering. 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.

The fact is, the less influenced we are by the sense of our self’s importance, the easier it is to acquire lasting inner strength. The reason for this is simple: self-importance is a target open to all sorts of mental projectiles—jealousy, fear, greed, repulsion—that perpetually destabilize it.

We need introspective investigation to find out what’s hiding behind the illusion of the self that we think defines our being.

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.

Indisputably, we instinctively see the self as unitary, but as soon as we try to pin it down, we have a hard time coming to grips with it.

The only way out of this dilemma is to consider the self as a mental or verbal designation linked to a dynamic process, to a series of changing relations that incorporate the perception of the outer world, sensations, mental images, emotions, and concepts.

I would lose all notion of what “my body” is were I to perceive it as a whirlwind of atoms that is never the same for even a millionth of a second. But how quickly I forget that my ordinary perception of my body and of all phenomena is just an approximation and that in fact everything is changing at every moment.

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.

We are generally afraid to tackle the world without reference points and are seized with vertigo whenever masks and epithets come down. If I am no longer a musician, a writer, sophisticated, handsome, or strong, what am I? And yet flouting all labels is the best guarantee of freedom and the most flexible, lighthearted, and joyful way of moving through the world. Refusing to be deceived by the ego in no way prevents us from nurturing a firm resolve to achieve the goals we’ve set for ourselves and at every instant to relish the richness of our relations with the world and with others. The effect, in fact, is quite the contrary.

Renouncing our fixation on our own intimate image and stripping the ego of all its importance is tantamount to winning incredible inner freedom. It allows us to approach every person and every situation with natural ease, benevolence, fortitude, and serenity. With no expectation of gain and no fear of loss, we are free to give and to receive.

In clinging to the cramped universe of the ego, we have a tendency to be concerned exclusively with ourselves. The least setback upsets and discourages us. We are obsessed with our success, our failure, our hopes, and our anxieties, and thereby give happiness every opportunity to elude us.

Happiness is bound up with distress when we lack adequate inner resources to sustain certain basic elements of sukha: the joy of being alive, the conviction that we still have the ability to flourish, an understanding of the ephemeral nature of all things.

Most of the time it is not outward events but our own mind and negative emotions that make us unable to maintain our inner stability and drag us down.

The conflictive emotions tie knots in our chest that obstinately refuse to be unraveled. In vain we try to fight them or reduce them to silence. We’ve only just gotten out from under them, we imagine, when they erupt again with renewed vigor. Such emotional distress is notably resistant to soothing, and every attempt to be rid of it seems doomed to failure. During such conflicts, our world shatters into a multitude of contradictions that generate adversity, oppression, and anguish.

Thoughts can be our best friends and our worst enemies. When they make us feel that the entire world is against us, every perception, every encounter, and the world’s very existence become sources of torment. It is our thoughts themselves that rise up as enemies. They stampede through our mind in droves, each one creating its own little dra...

For these two subjects, as for the hot-tempered, the miserly, the obsessive, thoughts swell into daily tempests that cast a shadow over life by destroying their own joie de vivre and that of the people around them. Yet this knot in our chest was tied not by our unfaithful husband, our object of desire, our dishonest colleague, or our unjust accuser, but by our own mind. It is the result of mental constructs that, as they accumulate and solidify, give the illusion of being external and real.