Happiness

A TWO-WAY MIRROR:

LOOKING WITHIN, LOOKING WITHOUT

Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.

TIBETAN SAYING

While everyone wants to be happy one way or another, there’s a big difference between aspiration and achievement. That is the tragedy of human beings. We fear misery but run to it. We want happiness but turn away from it. The very means used to ease suffering often fuel it. How could such a misjudgment occur? Because we are confused about how to go about it. We look for happiness outside ourselves when it is basically an inner state of being. If it were an exterior condition, it would be forever beyond our reach. Our desires are boundless and our control over the world is limited, temporary, and, more often than not, illusory.

We forge bonds of friendship, start families, live in society, work to improve the material conditions of our existence—is that enough to define happiness? No. We can have “everything we need” to be happy and yet be most unhappy; conversely, we can remain serene in adversity. It is naive to imagine that external conditions alone can ensure happiness. That is the surest way to a rude awakening. As the Dalai Lama has said: “If a man who has just moved into a luxury apartment on the hundredth floor of a brand-new building is deeply unhappy, the only thing he’ll look for is a window to jump out of.”¹ How many times do we have to hear that money can’t buy happiness, that power corrupts the honest, and that fame ruins private life? Failure, separation, disease, and death can occur at any moment.

We willingly spend a dozen years in school, then go on to college or professional training for several more; we work out at the gym to stay healthy; we spend a lot of time enhancing our comfort, our wealth, and our social status. We put a great deal into all this, and yet we do so little to improve the inner condition that determines the very quality of our lives. 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 falter before what promised to be an absolutely fascinating research project? As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Look within; within is the fountain of all good.”²

It is something that we must learn how to do. When we are thrown into confusion by inner troubles, we have no idea how to soothe them and instinctively turn outward. We spend our lives cobbling together makeshift solutions, trying to imagine the conditions that will make us happy. By force of habit, this way of living becomes the norm and “that’s life!” our motto. And although the search for temporary well-being may occasionally be successful, it is never possible to control the quantity, quality, or duration of exterior circumstances. That holds true for almos every aspect of life: love, family, health, wealth, power, comfort, pleasure. 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.

The main culprit here is our muddled approach to the dynamic of happiness and suffering. No one would deny that it is eminently desirable to live long and in good health, to be free in a country at peace where justice is respected, to love and to be loved, to have access to education and information, to enjoy adequate means of subsistence, to be able to travel the world, to contribute as much as possible to the well-being of others, and to protect the environment. Sociological studies of entire populations clearly show that human beings enjoy their lives more in such conditions. Who would want anything else? In pinning all our hopes on the external world, however, we can only end up being disappointed.

For instance, in hoping that money will make us happier, we work to acquire it; once we have it, we become obsessed with making it grow and we suffer when we lose it. A friend from Hong Kong once told me that he’d promised himself that he’d save a million dollars, then quit work and enjoy life, and thereby become happy. Ten years later he had not one million but three million dollars. What about happiness? His answer was brief: “I wasted ten years of my life.”

Wealth, pleasures, rank, and power are all sought for the sake of happiness. But as we strive, we forget the goal and spend our time pursuing the means for their own sake. In so doing, we miss the point and remain deeply unsatisfied. This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life. As the economist Richard Layard puts it: “Some people say you should not think about your own happiness, because you can only be happy as a by-product of something else. That is a dismal philosophy, a formula for keeping oneself occupied at all costs.”⁴

If, conversely, happiness is a state that depends on inner conditions, each of us must recognize those conditions with awareness and then bring them together. Happiness is not given to us, nor is misery imposed. At every moment we are at a crossroads and must choose the direction we will take.

CAN WE CULTIVATE HAPPINESS?

“Cultivate happiness!” I said briefly to the doctor: “do you cultivate happiness? How do you manage?” . . . Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.

CHARLOTTE BRONTë, Villette

Charlotte Brontë makes her point with great wit, yet it would be a pity to underestimate the mind’s power of transformation. If we try resolutely over the course of years to master our thoughts as they come to us, to apply appropriate antidotes to negative emotions and to nourish positive ones, our efforts will undoubtedly yield results that would have seemed unattainable at first. We marvel at the idea of an athlete’s being able to clear an eight-foot high jump, and if we hadn’t seen it on television we wouldn’t believe it possible, since we know that most of us can barely clear four. When it comes to physical performance we soon run into limitations, but the mind is far more flexible. Why, for instance, should there be any limit to love or to compassion? We may have varied dispositions to cultivate these human qualities, but we all have the potential to progress continually throughout our life, through persistent efforts.

Oddly, many modern thinkers are, in the words of one French author, dead set against “the construction of the self as a never-ending task.”⁵ If we were forced on principle to give up every long-term project, the very concepts of apprenticeship, education, culture, or self-improvement would become meaningless. Leaving aside the spiritual path, why bother reading books, undertaking scientific research, learning about the world? The acquisition of knowledge is a never-ending task too. Why accept that but neglect our own transformation, which determines the quality of our lived experience? Is it better just to allow ourselves to drift? Isn’t that how we crash on the rocks?

MUST WE SETTLE FOR BEING OURSELVES?