Review: The Art of Happiness (4)
The path to happiness
Everyone seeks happiness in his life and as the Dalai Lama mentioned it should be the primary goal or better the meaning of life.
The basic equipment to achieve complete happiness is just the right mental state. Ideally you shouldn’t be dependent on external things. One has to concentrate on the mind itself. There are thousands of different thoughts all day and therefore it is important to identify which of them are helpful, which are neutral and which are harmful. We should reduce negative thoughts and nourish the helpful ones.
So the first step in seeking happiness is to learn how negative emotions and behaviour are harmful to us and how positive thoughts are helpful. It lies within our own hands.
“Identify and culture positive mental states; identify and eliminate negative mental states”
This way of thinking – attracting positive thoughts and eliminating negative thoughts – is not a simple task. In fact, you can’t accomplish it by adopting a particular thought or practice once or twice.
Change takes time.
And transforming your mind takes even more time. It is a process of learning.
Through repeated practice we should try to achieve that disturbances of our mind only remain on the surface, like waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don’t have much effect deep down. Negative disturbances of the mind should dissipate very quickly, there shouldn’t be an effect on the deeper mind. In daily life there will be always situations where you feel distracted, angry, jealous etc. but the art is, that these thoughts don’t have influence on your deeper mind. Sometimes you can be thrown off the track but ideally that shouldn’t last for long.
This art takes time, as the Dalai Lama was trained since he was four years old !
Related posts:
- Review: The Art of Happiness (1)
- Review: The Art of Happiness (2)
- Review: The Art of Happiness (3)
- Review: The How Of Happiness (2)
- Review: The How Of Happiness (1)
