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

Pleasures become obstacles only when they upset the mind’s equilibrium and lead to an obsession with gratification or an aversion to anything that thwarts them.

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

So long as we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise from the confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell ourselves “I’m happy! I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to repaint a wall in ruins.

As influential as external conditions may be, suffering, like well-being, is essentially an interior state.

The fleeting experience of pleasure is dependent upon circumstance, on a specific location or moment in time. It is unstable by nature, and the sensation it evokes soon becomes neutral or even unpleasant.

We incur suffering but we create unhappiness.

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.

Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things.

If we do take the time to explore our inner world, it’s in the form of daydreams and imagination, dwelling on the past or fantasizing endlessly about the future.

Everything is relation; nothing exists in and of itself, immune to the forces of cause and effect.