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November 26, 2018 - January 5, 2019
The vision of happiness conjured here challenges our everyday notions of joy, making a convincing argument for contentment over collecting “good times,” for altruism over self-centered satiation. And beyond that, Matthieu suggests how we can all cultivate the very capacity for such happiness.
What I discovered never called for blind faith. It was a rich, pragmatic science of mind, an altruistic art of living, a meaningful philosophy, and a spiritual practice that led to genuine inner transformation. Over the past thirty-five years, I have never found myself in contradiction with the scientific spirit as I understand it—that is, as the empirical search for truth. I have also met human beings who were enduringly happy. More, in fact, than what we usually call happy: they were imbued with a deep insight into reality and the nature of mind, and filled with benevolence for others. I
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But when, over dessert, the publisher proposed the dialogue, my father froze and, after a few seconds of silence, replied: “I cannot refuse that.” That was the end of my quiet, anonymous life. When I learned of his answer, I was a little concerned that my father, famous for his relentless demolition of views that he considered wrongheaded, would tear me to pieces. Fortunately the encounter occurred on my turf. My father came to Nepal, and we spent ten days in a forest inn above Kathmandu Valley, recording our conversations, an hour and a half in the morning and another hour in the afternoon.
Simplifying one’s life to extract its quintessence is the most rewarding of all the pursuits I have undertaken.
Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves. LUCA AND FRANCESCO CAVALLI-SFORZA
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.”
For Saint Augustine, happiness is “a rejoicing in the truth.” For Immanuel Kant, happiness must be rational and devoid of any personal taint, while for Marx it is about growth through work. “What constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute,” Aristotle wrote, “and the popular account of it is not the same as that given by the philosophers.”
For some people, talking about the search for happiness seems almost in bad taste. Protected by their armor of intellectual complacency, they sneer at it as they would at a sentimental novel.
By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.
For someone who has achieved a goal, completed a task, or won a victory, the tension they have long carried with them relaxes. The ensuing sense of release is felt as a deep calm, free of all expectation and fear.
One year before her death at Auschwitz, the remarkable Etty Hillesum, a young Dutchwoman, affirmed: “When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn’t matter what side of the prison fence you’re on. . . . I’ve already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, I already know everything. And yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.”
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.
Changing the way we see the world does not imply naive optimism or some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance adversity.
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore.8
Our day-to-day experience tells us that things are “good” or “bad.” The “I” that perceives them seems to us to be equally concrete and real. This error, which Buddhism calls ignorance, gives rise to powerful reflexes of attachment and aversion that generally lead to suffering. As Etty Hillesum says so tersely: “That great obstacle is always the representation and never the reality.”9 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.
As the Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa explains: “When we talk of ignorance, it has nothing to do with stupidity. In a way, ignorance is very intelligent, but it is an intelligence that works exclusively in one direction. That is, we react exclusively to our own projections instead of simply seeing what is there.”
If we were to convince ourselves that satisfying all our whims would make us happy, the collapse of that delusion would make us doubt the very existence of happiness. If I have more than I could possibly need and I am still not happy, happiness must be impossible. That’s a good example of how far we can go in fooling ourselves about the causes of happiness. The fact is that without inner peace and wisdom, we have nothing we need to be happy.
What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred? Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind. A Japanese astronomer once confided to me: “It takes a lot of daring to look within.” This remark—made by a scientist at the height of his powers, a steady and open-minded man—intrigued me. Recently I also met a Californian teenager who told me: “I don’t want to look inside myself. I’m afraid of what I’d find there.” Why should he
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truth
My friend the philosopher and Buddhist practitioner Alan Wallace has written: “If you bank on achieving genuine happiness and fulfillment by finding the perfect mate, getting a great car, having a big house, the best insurance, a fine reputation, the top job—if these are your focus, wish also for good luck in life’s lottery.”3 When you spend your time trying to fill a leaky barrel, you neglect the methods and above all the ways of being that will allow you to find happiness within yourself.
This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.
As the French philosopher Alain has written, “You don’t need to be a sorcerer to cast a spell over yourself by saying ‘This is how I am. I can do nothing about it.’”
We all know how very clever and tireless our consumer society is at inventing countless bogus pleasures, laboriously hyped stimulants designed to keep us in a state of emotional tension capable of triggering a kind of mental anesthesia. A Tibetan friend of mine who was contemplating the flashy advertising billboards in New York commented: “They are trying to steal our minds.” There is a distinct difference between true joy, which is the natural manifestation of well-being, and euphoria, the elation caused by passing excitation. Any superficial thrill that is not anchored in enduring
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You may imagine that the fever was making me delirious, but I was absolutely clearheaded, and the contrast between the situation and my feelings was so comical that I began to laugh in the dark. This was definitely not a case of happiness via relief; rather it was an experience of innate serenity, brought into sharper focus by particularly unpleasant external circumstances. It was a moment of “letting go,” that state of deep satisfaction found only within oneself and which is therefore independent of external circumstances.
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
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By gradually acquiring through introspective experience a better understanding of how thoughts are born, we learn how to fend off mental toxins.
EXERCISE How to begin to meditate 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. This potential needs to be developed and matured in order to achieve a more stable sense of well-being. However, this will not happen by itself. You need to develop it as a skill. For that, begin by becoming more familiar with your own mind. This is the
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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.
Selfishness, or rather the feeling that one is the center of the world—hence “self-centeredness”—is the source of most of our disruptive thoughts. From obsessive desire to hatred, not to mention jealousy, it attracts pain the way a magnet attracts iron filings.
The wise man always remains connected to the depths.
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 can learn to acknowledge that death is a part of life, distress will gradually give way to understanding and peace. “Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of great tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life. The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life.” These words were
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An “anxious and insecure” person will lack self-confidence and doubt the possibility of encountering genuine benevolence and affection, while yearning deeply for it.
An “insecurely avoidant” person will rather keep others at bay than risk further suffering. Such a person will avoid becoming too intimate with others, either in a fearful way or by silencing all emotions in his mind and retreating within the cocoon of self-absorption. He has high self-esteem, but his self-esteem is defensive and brittle; he isn’t very open to emotions and memories, and is often bored, distracted, “compulsively self-reliant,” and not very caring.
The eighth-century master Shantideva writes: “If there is a cure, what good is discontent? If there is no cure, what good is discontent?”
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.
No serious analysis or direct introspective experience can lead to a strong conviction that we possess a self.
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.
Things are neither as they appear to exist nor are they entirely nonexistent. Like an illusion, they appear without having any ultimate reality.
Indeed when the ego is predominant, the mind is like a bird constantly slamming into a glass wall—belief in the ego—that shrinks our world and encloses it within narrow confines. Perplexed and stunned by the wall, the mind cannot pass through it. But the wall is invisible because it does not really exist. It is an invention of the mind. Nevertheless, it functions as a wall by partitioning our inner world and damming the flow of our selflessness and joie de vivre. Our attachment to the ego is fundamentally linked to the suffering we feel and the suffering we inflict on others. Renouncing our
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When we get a close look at the tenor of our everyday thoughts, we realize the extent to which they color the inner film that we project onto the world.
As Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche explains: These trains of thought and states of mind are constantly changing, like the shapes of clouds in the wind, but we attach great importance to them. An old man watching children at play knows very well that their games are of little consequence. He feels neither elated nor upset at what happens in their game, while the children take it all very seriously. We are just exactly them.3
When a painful emotion strikes us, the most urgent thing is to look at it head-on and to identify the immediate thoughts that triggered and are fanning it. Then by fixing our inner gaze on the emotion itself, we can gradually dissolve it like snow in sunshine. Furthermore, once the strength of the emotion has been sapped, the causes that triggered it will seem less tragic and we will have won ourselves the chance to break free from the vicious circle of negative thoughts.
It is easier to work with the disturbing effects of a strong emotion when we are in the midst of experiencing it, rather than when it lies dormant in the shadow of our unconscious. At the precise moment of the experience, we will have an invaluable opportunity to investigate the process of mental suffering.
“Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves,” Lord Chesterfield once told his son. This is the best path to gradual change.
Craving, hatred, and the other passions are enemies without hands or feet; they are neither brave nor intelligent. How have I become their slave? Entrenched in my heart, they strike at me at will. Fie on such ridiculous patience! SHANTIDEVA
Behavioral studies have also shown that those who are best able to balance their emotions (by controlling them without repressing them) also demonstrate the greatest selflessness in the face of the suffering of others.3 Most hyperemotive people are more concerned with their own distress at the sight of suffering than with the ways in which they might help to relieve that suffering.
So the more we cultivate loving-kindness, the less space there will be for hatred in our mental landscape.
As for anger, it can be neutralized by patience. This does not require us to remain passive, but to steer clear of being overwhelmed by destructive emotions. As the Dalai Lama explains: “Patience safeguards our peace of mind in the face of adversity. . . . It is a deliberate response (as opposed to an unreasoned reaction) to the strong negative thoughts and emotions that tend to arise when we encounter harm.”
