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

Suffering can be triggered by numerous causes over which we sometimes have some power, and sometimes none.

Unhappiness is altogether different, being the way in which we experience our suffering. Unhappiness may indeed be associated with physical or moral pain inflicted by exterior conditions, but it is not essentially linked to it.

We incur suffering but we create unhappiness.

This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.

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.

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

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

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.

We look for happiness outside ourselves when it is basically an inner state of being.