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 !

This post is about inner worth and the difference between happiness and pleasure.

Inner Worth

A sense of inner worth is very important these days. Not just that you have a inner worth but also the source of it plays a major role. The best thing you can do is to gain strength from multiple sources and not just a single one.

For example building your inner worth just on material things is very risky because if you loose your fortune what else do you have ? If there is no second or third anchor you can count on there is nothing left but depression.

Happiness vs. Pleasure

Have you ever asked yourself what the difference between happiness and pleasure is? Most people are often confused about this.

One way to explain the difference is to describe the target of these states of mind. Happiness relates more to the heart and mind and pleasure more to the physical senses. “Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it’s there, the next day it may not be.”

Knowing this difference can be a great help making right decisions. Before you make the decision just ask yourself:  ”Will it bring me happiness (or just temporal pleasure) ? ” Depending on the answer you can make your decision much easier.

Living with this knowledge means that your achieved form of happiness will be much more stable and remains despite the up’s and down’s of life. This form of happiness should be part of your very being.

This is the first part of several entries I would like to make about the book “The Art of Happiness”. I will try to summarize the main ideas of the discussions between the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler and I will also try to add my own thoughts about certain topics.

Basic Idea

The purpose of our existence is to seek happiness.

The essential point is that happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external events. It’s always better not to be dependent on external factors to be happy. Your happiness should be a result of your state of mind and attitude. So success may result in a temporary feeling of elation but sooner or later our overall level of happiness tends to migrate back to a certain baseline. After a appropriate time period we always fall back to our day-to-day level of happiness. The length of that period depends on the importance of that event.
The interesting question is: Is it possible to modify the level of this baseline so that our “normal” happiness is on a higher level ?

Comparing Thoughts

Comparing a present situation with the past or comparing ourselves to others is very often the main source of unhappiness. For example let’s take a look at the income of a person and let’s assume that this year it is about $20′000. And let’s further assume that the person is happy right now. After months or maybe a year (that depends on the person) that person normally isn’t happy anymore with his income because he got used to this specific amount. After a pay raise for example to $25′000 he will be happy again, but it will not last forever, so the absolute amount can’t be a factor to be happy. It’s the pay raise itself that makes the person happy, but unfortunately only for a short time period. I think that the more frequent one gets such pay raises the shorter the time will be that the person is happy.

The second comparison we make and which makes us unhappy is the comparison with others. Most people can’t be happy if the neighbor is making more money. The absolute amount is not important anymore even if it is way too much to spend in a life time, people can be unhappy if someone else earns more.

The key thing is to get independent of external factors.