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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.