Happiness

A PATH

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

MAHATMA GANDHI

We sometimes have to feel like explorers, burning with the desire to do what’s worth doing and to live life in such a way that we have no regrets when it comes time for us to die. Let us learn freedom. The key point of spiritual practice is to gain control over our mind. It is said: “The goal of asceticism is to achieve mastery of the mind. Without that, what good is asceticism?” “Asceticism” means “exercise,” in this case the training of the mind.

Our aim in taking the spiritual path is to transform ourselves with a view to helping others free themselves from suffering. This may at first make us aware of our present powerlessness to do so. Then comes the desire to improve ourselves so as to overcome that obstacle.

Once we have embarked on the spiritual path and begun practicing it resolutely, the important moment comes several months or several years later when we realize that nothing is as it was and, in particular, that we have become incapable of knowingly harming others. And that pride, envy, and mental confusion are no longer the uncontested masters of our minds. We need to ask ourselves if our spiritual practice makes us better people and contributes to the happiness of others. It is important to ask that question over and over again and to focus lucidly upon it. What have we achieved? Stagnation, regression, or progress? Once inner well-being is firmly grounded within us, it becomes easier to gradually extend its radiance to all those around us and to our social activity.

There is no one method that will allow us to progress unhindered toward liberation from suffering. The diversity of ways reflects the diversity of people. Every one of us starts from the point at which we find ourself, with our own temperament, our own intellectual architecture, our own beliefs. Every one of us can find a congenial method for working on our thought processes and gradually freeing ourself from the yoke of harmful emotions.

Some may wonder whether it is a luxury to seek to dispel their own inner pain in order to attain inner freedom when so many others are suffering from famine, extreme poverty, war, and countless other disasters. Why don’t we simply try to relieve their suffering immediately? If that were possible, scientists too would give up their research just to work on emergency cases. Likewise, what would be the point of spending five years building a hospital? Electrical and plumbing work doesn’t cure anybody. Why not just head for the street, set up some tents, and begin treating the sick straightaway? What would be the need for studying, learning, and becoming expert in any given field? The same holds true for the path to inner transformation—it can never be arbitrary. The knowledge, love, and compassion of the sage don’t just appear out of nowhere, like a flower blooming in the clear blue sky. As Aristotle said, “It would not be fitting to leave the greatest and noblest of all things to chance.”

LISTENING, THINKING, MEDITATING

Like any apprenticeship, the practice of the spiritual path has several stages. We must first be taught and then assimilate the teaching. A child is not born with innate knowledge. We must then take care to ensure that the knowledge does not become like a beautiful book that is rarely opened. Deep consideration must be given to its meaning. The Buddha told his followers: “Do not accept my teachings out of mere respect for me. Examine them and put them to the test as the goldsmith examines gold by cutting, heating, and hammering.”

Mere intellectual understanding is not enough. It is not by leaving the doctor’s prescription by the bedside or learning it by heart that we are cured. We must integrate what we have learned so that our understanding becomes intimately bound up with our mind’s flow. Then it ceases to be theory and becomes self-transformation. Indeed, as we’ve seen, that is the meaning of the word meditation: familiarization with a new way of being. We can familiarize ourselves with all sorts of positive qualities in this way—kindness, patience, tolerance—and continue to develop them through meditation.

Throughout this exercise, practiced at first in brief but regular sessions, we seek within ourselves a particular quality that we then allow to permeate our entire being until it becomes second nature. We can also meditate to acquire inner calm by stabilizing the mind through concentration on an object: a flower, a feeling, an idea, a representation of the Buddha. The mind is unstable at first, but we learn to tame it, just as we would return a butterfly to the flower of concentration every time it flutters away. The goal is not to turn our mind into a dutiful but bored student, but to make it flexible, stable, strong, lucid, vigilant—in short, to make it a better tool for inner transformation instead of abandoning it to its fate as a spoiled child resistant to all learning.

Finally, we can meditate in a nonconceptual way on the very nature of the mind by looking directly at consciousness itself as an open presence, a pure awareness that always lies behind the screen of thoughts, or by contemplating the very nature of the thoughts that cross our mind.

There are many other ways of meditating, but as varied as they are, they all share the common function of being part of the process of inner transformation. Meditation differs from mere intellectual reflection in that it involves a constantly recurrent experience of the same introspective analysis, the same effort to change, or the same contemplation. It is not about experiencing some sudden flash of understanding, but about coming to a new perception of reality and of the nature of mind, about nurturing new qualities until they become integral parts of our being. Meditation is a skill that requires resolve, sincerity, and patience far more than it does intellectual panache.

Meditation is followed up with action, that is, by being applied in everyday life. Of what use is a “great session” of meditation if it doesn’t translate into improvement of our whole being, which can then place itself at the service of others? Once the seeds of patience, inner strength, serenity, love, and compassion have come to maturity, it is to others that we must offer their fruit.

LIKE A WOUNDED STAG

But we need time and the right conditions to reach that maturity. It is often helpful, in order to stabilize and develop a meditative practice and inner transformation, to seek out the quiet solitude of a secluded place. That is what a wounded stag would do, hiding in the forest until his injuries heal. Here the wounds are those of ignorance, animosity, envy. In the whirlwind of daily life, we often feel so hurt and drained that we are too weak even to do the exercises that would give us strength.

Withdrawing into solitude does not mean losing interest in what happens to other people. Quite the contrary, putting some distance between ourselves and the world’s activity gives us a new perspective on things, broader and more serene, and helps us to better understand the dynamic of happiness and suffering. By finding our own inner peace, we learn how to share it with others.

These times of solitude are useful only to the extent that the understanding and strength we gain from them are able to hold up against life’s storms. And that has to be verified not only in adversity, when we are vulnerable to dejection, but also in success, which can often move us to arrogance and complacency. This is no easy thing; our habits and inclinations are tenacious. They are like rolls of paper that we try to flatten but that spring back and curl up the moment we let go. It requires patience. It should come as no surprise that a hermit can spend years discovering the true nature of his mind.

And yet he is not cut off from society, since he taps into the most ancient source of human behavior. He doesn’t dedicate his life to contemplation because he has nothing better to do or because he’s been rejected by society; he dedicates himself to elucidating the mechanisms of happiness and suffering with the idea that it will be of benefit not only to himself, but also and above all to others.

In our modern societies, it would hardly be reasonable to expect many men and women to devote months or years to the life of contemplation. On the other hand, anyone can set aside a few minutes a day, and occasionally a day or two, to sit and look clearly into his own mind and into his perception of the world around him. This is as essential as sleep to one who is exhausted or as fresh air to one who has long breathed the polluted air of the city.

WHERE THE PATH LEADS

Everybody (or almost everybody) is interested in happiness. But who is interested in enlightenment? The very word seems exotic, vague, and distant. And yet ultimate well-being comes from fully eliminating delusion and mental toxins, and thus suffering. Enlightenment is what Buddhism calls the state of ultimate freedom that comes with a perfect knowledge of the nature of mind and of the world of phenomena. The traveler has awakened from the sleep of ignorance, and the distortions of the psyche have given way to a correct vision of reality. The divide between subject and object has vanished in the understanding of the interdependence of all phenomena. A state of non-duality has been achieved, above and beyond the fabrications of the intellect and invulnerable to afflictive thoughts. The sage has come to see that the individual self and the appearances of the world of phenomena have no intrinsic reality. He understands that all beings have the power to free themselves from ignorance and unhappiness, but that they don’t know it. How could he fail to feel infinite and spontaneous compassion for all those who, spellbound by ignorance, wander lost in the trials of samsara?

While such a state may seem very far removed from our daily concerns, it is certainly not beyond reach. The real problem is that it is so close we can’t see it, just as the eye doesn’t see its own lashes. An echo of this Buddhist concept is heard in Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”¹ Enlightenment is genuinely within reach insofar as we all carry within us the potential of our true nature. Unlike Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote that “we will all die unfinished,” Buddhism says that we are all born complete, since each being holds within him a treasure that needs only to be actualized. But that doesn’t happen by itself. Milk is the source of butter, but it won’t make any if we simply leave it to its own devices; we have to churn it. The qualities of enlightenment are revealed through transformation at the far end of the spiritual path.

The fact is, each stage is a step toward fulfillment and profound satisfaction. The spiritual journey is like traveling from one valley to another—beyond each pass lies a landscape more magnificent than the one behind it.

BEYOND HAPPINESS AND SUFFERING

From the point of view of absolute truth, neither happiness nor suffering has any real existence. They belong to the relative truth perceived by the mind that remains in the grip of confusion. She who understands the true nature of things is like a navigator landing on an island made entirely of pure gold; even if she looks for ordinary pebbles, she won’t find any.

The Tibetan hermit and wandering bard Shabkar sang of enlightenment and compassion:

Relaxed, at ease in that very state of freedom,

I arrive at the immense sky-realm

That is an unconditioned absolute state.

When it is left to itself, as a vast sky

Utterly transparent and serene,

The poisonous, painful bindings that are mental constructs

Loosen by themselves.