Tag: happiness

How To Uproot Disharmony

I attended a wedding over the long weekend. It was a joyous occasion, full of love. That got me thinking. How can we keep all of our relationship joyous and full of love like it was the first day of a union? If we think about any relationship, it seems that if you remove whatever disharmony there may be, once you remove that, the relationship becomes smooth. You can feel the love in that relationship. So today, I want to talk about how to uproot disharmony in our relationships.

In one of the books, I read a verse that goes when I associate with others, I will consider myself lower and hold everyone supreme.

Just to be clear, we are not talking about being like a doormat when we consider ourselves lower. What we are talking about is not putting ourselves as a center of attention. We usually are me centric if you will. Our needs, wants, and happiness must come ahead of everyone else’s. I love you as long as it does not disturb my comfort is our typical attitude. And we’re now shifting that attitude so that we get over our egocentric self-importance or self-cherishing. Our self-cherishing is where all our delusions come from, all our anger, our attachment, fear, or anxiety, all our selfishness, all our negative actions, all our suffering. So this self-cherishing is the source of our disharmony. That is the reason we are cycling around in what’s called the samsara cycle of impure life, because of this ego mind, grasping at a self or me, that doesn’t exist.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that our self-cherishing, our obsessive self-concern is like a mountain in front of the valley of cherishing others loving others. If you have ever been to Vail Valley from Denver, you know what he is talking about. There is this beautiful valley that you cannot see until you cross the mountain in front of it. Just like that, we cannot see the vast valley of cherishing others because of this mountain of self-cherishing.

Everywhere we look, our mind is polluted by this surface of self-concern. It just alters everything we see. You know, we can’t actually see what’s going on because we’re so obsessed with ourselves. And that’s just reflected in our minds. So why is it? Why is it that we regard ourselves as so precious, but not others? I am just one person others are countless. Why are we so obsessed about me?

One major reason is we’re so familiar with thinking about ourselves, it’s a familiarity of habit. We have been doing it since beginningless time in every life, which is why we’re still circling in suffering. Since beginningless time, we have grasped a truly existent I this is the root of it. So a truly existent I is an I that exists from its own side. But basically, we have two ego minds that are the very kind of root of all our problems. And one is called self-grasping, meaning we’re grasping at a self that exists from its own side.

We think there’s a real me or real I and we think everyone else is not me or either other or self or there are also others or them or you know, him or her or something like that. We have done this experiment before. Show of hand where is the me in this room? Every one of us thinks we are that me and everyone else is something other than me right? Now if the I was inherently existent, it would be the same for all of us. But it’s not.

So it’s only our ignorance that thinks I’m really me, and everyone else is really other. Because I have this sense of real me, I then think that this me is more important than all the other me’s. So I’m more important than you just as simple as that.

So since we regard ourselves or I as so very precious and important, we exaggerate our own good qualities and develop an inflated view of ourselves.

We spend so much time contemplating our real or imagined good qualities that we become oblivious to our faults. It is often so painful to admit that we have faults that we make all types of excuses rather than alter our results view of ourselves, and one of the most common ways of not facing up to our own faults is to blame others. For instance, we have a difficult relationship with someone. We naturally include that it’s entirely their fault. That’s true, isn’t it? They should really change, you know. And then we’ll be so happy. Because you know, it’s hard to change even one person, it’s impossible to change anyone other than ourselves, to be honest, and it’s definitely hard to change everybody.

So we naturally conclude it’s their fault, we’re unable to accept that it is at least partly our fault when we have difficult relationships. So instead of taking responsibility for our actions, or making an effort to change our views or our behavior, get rid of our faults. We argue with them and insist that they must change an exaggerated sense of our own importance thus leading to a critical attitude towards other people making it almost impossible to avoid conflict. So the fact that we’re oblivious to our faults does not prevent other people from noticing them and pointing them out. But when they do we feel that they’re being unfair. So unfair.

This is self cherishing. That arises from self-grasping ignorance. Our inherently existing self. This is the source of all our disharmony. If we learn to remove that, our relationships become easier. Life becomes frictionless. It just flows.

Going With The Flow

Let’s talk about going with the flow today. As we all know, life is a flow. Life keeps changing all the time. It’s like a mountain stream running all the time. Its nature is to flow. Sometimes it feels as if we barely get out footing and all of a sudden the ground is shifting beneath us.

We try so hard to keep things the same. I think human beings like familiarity. We resist change. Our brain is wired for familiarity bias. We would rather accept known pain than unknown pleasure! The reason for this is that the pain of loss is usually a lot greater than the pleasure of gain. Give an example of people staying in toxic job.

Even then, life keeps changing. It changes from moment to moment.

Look outside. Look at the flowers, the trees. A hailstorm comes and all of that is gone in an instant. Example of a 100 year old tree uprooted on University Blvd.

Has anyone heard of the phrase Managed Growth? It’s a term that was in fashion 15 years ago. In reality, there is no such thing. Either you grow or you shrink. There is no other option.

Examples of IBM, Blockbuster

We always try to fix things because we don’t like the flow of life. As soon as we fix something to our liking, something else breaks though or so it seems. That is what Buddha calls impermanence.

One moment gives rise to the next moment and the moment after that and so forth. So if you think about it, there are no things per se. Because things would imply a sort of permeance and everything keeps changing moment by moment. By that thought process, everything is an event.

Someone would say, well our body is a thing. Is it really though? It keeps changing. Your body is not what it was 10 years ago for sure. Sometimes changes are so subtle that it looks like it is not changing. Well, not in my case! My weight scale tells me it is going up every day!

In Buddhism, it is called a functioning thing. As opposed to a thing that may be static.

For example, take a seedling. Its function is to create a sprout. And then it goes out of existence. There is no seed anymore.

And the sprout becomes a sapling and goes out of existence and so on.

This means everything is an event. Everything is always in the nature of change.

We have to learn to accept and go with it, adapt to it.

Why is this important? The Sooner we accept the fact that Change Is the Only Constant, the more adept we will become.

If we accept that change is part of nature, we will not try to force things, we will try and accept things as they come, this, in turn, will reduce our anxieties, and stress because we are no longer fighting against the flow.

If we fight against change in our minds and in our hearts, we are going to lose because impermanence is the reality.

Not one of us wants to be unhappy. If we all want a happy life then our only option is to go with the flow. We can call it patience, resilience, grace under fire, and whatnot.  It is a way to stay peaceful, calm, and accepting no matter what life throws at us.

If good things happen, we are happy; if bad things happen, we accept them happily.

The only way to be happy is to stop being unhappy. Does that make sense?

We are unhappy because we don’t accept what is going on in our lives. We are fighting. We are trying to fix things. We are trying to build these dams in the flow of the river called life.

This is where the practice of patient acceptance is so important. It is the ability to accept wholeheartedly. We accept it as it appears without wishing it to be otherwise.

Let’s look at an example. Say you want to go for a hike. You prepare for your hike, load up the car and start driving. You drive for two hours and all of a sudden there are thunderstorms. If we get unhappy that it is raining, it would ruin our day. Instead, you accept that it is raining. We can pull out an umbrella to protect us from the rain.

And you can use this example for anything else that may be going on in our world. If we don’t like injustice in our society, bring out the umbrella, meaning act to help people and solve problems, but don’t let it disturb your inner peace.

Change Your Mind, Change Your World

Today, let’s explore how a simple way of changing our minds can change our experiences. While researching this topic, I discovered that there is a book with the same name. How cool is that? So last session we talked about how Happiness is an inside job and how pain and pleasure are within us. How we let external conditions dictate our mood.

I am sure we all had some kind of problem today. It bothered us. It disturbed our peace. But if you think back, was that an external problem or an internal problem? I would bet a pretty penny it was an external problem. We let our external problems power to make us suffer. But it is all about perception. Say one day is going great. We feel like everything is going our way. Traffic is flowing smoothly, coworkers are on their best behavior, and so forth. The very next day, we feel like the whole world is against us. Someone cuts us off in the traffic, coworkers sound like they are demanding and whatnot. It is the same set of characters but we despise them! Why? Because our internal compass is off that day.

Let me tell you a story. I was driving through rural Mississippi about 20 years ago. I saw a small vendor on the roadside so I stopped. She was an old lady selling boiled peanuts. I bought a few and started talking with her. I asked her how her day was. She said it was an especially good day. I asked her what made that an especially good day. She said, well, I would make $20 today. Think about it! $20 was an especially good day. Granted I was in rural Mississippi in the early 2000s but still. She just had a particularly bright outlook on life you can tell. I bet she hardly had a bad day.

Everything depends upon our mind, including our sense of self. I think I may have talked about this in the past but let’s just reiterate. We all have this strong sense of self. Who we are. We are certain types of people, we do x and not y, and so forth. But if you think about it, this sense of self is not constant. It is ever-changing. Think about your 10-year-old self. I bet when you were ten, your sense of who you were was totally different from who you are today! Your 10-year-old self may not recognize who you have become. I am sure that’s true in my case. And you can say the same thing about your 20-year-old self and so on. So our sense of self is evolving. It is a good thing. And if we know it is constantly changing why are we hanging on to that sense of self? If we realize that our sense of self depends upon our thoughts, it becomes liberating! We are free to change our thoughts and in turn our sense of self. How cool is that?

Our sense of self is always based on our delusions. Our anger, jealousy, pride, attachment, and so on. But as long as it is an imputed sense of self, why not impute a happier state of mind? Because the universe gives us what we want. If we are always identifying ourselves as a tired, frustrated, and angry person then that is what the universe will give us. We do what we intend to do anyway. So why not create the intention to be happy all the time? If we are feeling completely rattled and overwhelmed, rather than identifying with that rattled and frustrated self, why don’t we tell ourselves, we are peaceful? We identify ourselves with our peaceful nature. We are this inherently peaceful person who happens to get rattled or frustrated every now and then. Now, we have changed the basis of our imputation all of a sudden. We are no longer identifying ourselves with the unhappy or angry but recognize that those are just our delusions that flare up from time to time.

We have talked about this before that we have the unlimited potential for peace. We are like this golden nugget that has some dirt on it. We recognize that we are not this dirty rock but actually a golden nugget with some dirt. As soon as we realize and accept that, we begin the work of removing the dirt from our golden nugget so we can be that peaceful person all the time.

Happiness Is An Inside Job

I am here to reveal a secret today. We are going to talk about how happiness is an inside job! Let me ask you first. Where does happiness come from? Where does suffering come from? Let’s look at the real causes and conditions of real happiness. Inner peace is the real cause of happiness.

Buddha said that we have limitless potential for peace, happiness, and joy within ourselves. It is our Buddha nature. We have the potential to be permanently free from suffering. What gets in the way is our nature of trying to fix everything. If we think about it, every day we wake up and we try to fix problems. We are putting out fires we call them. But are they fires? A lot of times in trying to fix things, we lose our inner peace. We get bogged down in these so-called fires and sometimes the fire consumes us! I am sure all of us have experienced these patterns in our lives.

Even though inner peace is the source of our happiness, we keep wanting external conditions to make us happy. I think we talked about this before but I am going to give this example again to drive the point home. We all derive pleasure from some type of food. It gives us joy and satisfaction. For me, that is pizza. But can pizza really make us happy? When I start eating pizza, the first few slices are like heaven. After the third slice, I can hardly eat. Now if I keep eating, I would become uncomfortable. After maybe the 10th slice, I would start to throw up and all of a sudden, I am suffering. There is no joy in continuing to eat pizza. So what does that tell us? It tells us that happiness is not coming from pizza. If pizza could bring happiness, it would not change to suffering.

And we can use other examples in a similar way, money, cars, and houses. Even relationships cannot make us happy. You fall in love with someone and they can do no wrong. Every little quirk they may have, you find adorable! Some time goes by and now, you find them annoying. The same quirks that you thought were adorable are now disgusting! What happened? Your attachment went away that’s all.

Love, on the other hand, can make you happy. Genuine love has no expectations. It does want anything in return.  

If you think about what makes us unhappy, there is a long list. Traffic makes us unhappy. Someone cuts us off and now our whole day is ruined. Why do we give the power of our happiness to some stranger who does not even know we exist? We seek happiness in social media in all places. We like that we have “friends” and “followers” on social media. How many of these friends genuinely care about our well-being? There are businesses that give you pictures so it looks like you are on vacation in a foreign land! How crazy is that? You put these pictures just to impress some stranger! Where is the happiness in that?

We rearrange our lives just to make sure we remove things that make us unhappy and bring in things that make us happy. But that is just a temporary solution because new things pop up that make us unhappy. If we think our problems come from sorting out external events, we will never be happy.

Let me ask you a question. How many of you have been truly happy for a straight 24-hour period? No sad thoughts, no anger, no jealousy, no uneasiness, just pure happiness. Very few of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hours. And those of us who had a few of those, how many times? Very few times I am sure.

Because we are so bogged down on external conditions, we are not even able to be truly happy for a straight 24-hour period.

When we go on vacation in paradise, our whole goal is to be happy. We land and the rental car counter has an issue with our reservation. All of a sudden the paradise does not feel like paradise anymore. This story plays out every day at a tourist destination. I had an interesting tour guide last year in Egypt. A young man took us on this old-fashioned boat tour in the river Nile. We were talking about his client base and he said sometimes people come and they get upset about some view or something where he takes them. He said he usually tells them, you paid so much money to come here, just be happy. I thought he had this figured out. He is right. We have the choice to be happy no matter the external conditions.

The true source of our happiness is inner peace. So regardless of what happens out there, let’s try to keep our inner peace.

Mental Stabilization

We have been discussing the six perfections for the past four weeks. Someone sent an email asking me what the purpose of six perfections was. The function of these six perfections is to make our lives smoother and with less friction. Today we will continue with this series and look at mental stabilization also known as concentration. What is concentration? Concentration is a mind whose nature is to single-pointedly focus on a virtuous object and whose function is to prevent distractions.

To understand this, it is important to look at what it is not. Concentration is not an act of will to force ourselves to focus on something or another. It is not like we say let’s focus on this pen. It is actually to eliminate that which does not belong. Here is a perfect example. I am sure you all have tried concentrated orange juice. It is simply the removal of water from the juice. Meaning removing water from the juice.

So there are several components of concentration. The first one is the stability of mental capacity. We have talked about this before the human mind is incapable of multitasking. What we call multitasking is rapidly switching from one task to another but it is not multitasking. Just like when we see a fan moving, the blades can seem like one because they are moving so fast. Similarly, multitasking is an illusion. Anything other than what you should be doing is a distraction such as texting and driving.

Part of concentration is not about narrowing our focus. Because when we narrow our focus we lose the context. So an aspect of concentration is actually to zoom out. When you talk about someone who is not with you and someone mentions a bad quality of the person who is not with them, the mind zooms in as to why that person is no good, and all of a sudden, that person becomes the worst person in the world in our mind. When we like or dislike something, we tend to justify it. When we try a new thing, a lot of times, we judge before we even try it. So it is not the object that is good or bad but our feeling towards it makes it good or bad. Once our feeling is set, we will follow the feeling as opposed to keeping the context.

A perfect example is when one falls in love. The person can do no wrong. They are not looking at context but just their feeling. Sometimes goes by and now they have a few arguments. All of a sudden the feeling towards the person changes and they can do no right! Everything they do annoys the person. Again, no context at all. No person is all good or bad. But it is the lack of context that makes things difficult.

Another element is to keep an eye on important vs urgent. We respond to emails all day long without regard to whether it is important or not. Urgent tends to distract your concentration from important. We have discussed this before as well and often we get hung up on urgent matters of the moment rather than keeping our focus on the larger goal.

Another aspect of concentration is stability for personal benefit.

Relaxation is very important for our personal benefit. Tension is distracting. When there is tension in any part of your body, it requires your attention. For example, if there is pain, our mind keeps going to that part of the body as opposed to being here and now. It is important to relax. Relaxation includes relaxation of the body and relaxation of the mind. When we are tense, we would trigger a flight, fight or freeze response within ourselves. We need to make decisions consciously rather than make reactive decisions. A reactive decision tends to be a mistake. Always perform a check to see if you are relaxed. We as a society don’t value relaxation but that is very important for our long-term health.

Interest is another quality that is needed for concentration. When we look at something, we don’t value differences between experiences. Sometimes we think we have already done something or experienced something, but there are always subtle differences. If we think it is the same, we are not paying attention and if we are not paying attention, we are not concentrating. So if we cultivate interest, it will increase our concentration. Because interest prevents us from being distracted. We need to develop a beginner’s mind towards everything that we are doing right now. Because a beginner’s mind is always interested. That means you are mentally present as opposed to in the past or the future.

Confidence is another quality for the development of concentration. Confidence in the certainty of one’s path. If not, you will not be putting in your full effort and lose concentration. Once you chose to take a path, remove all self-doubt. Every action is beneficial; you either accomplish what you wanted to or learn from the experience.  Don’t let outsiders influence your decision and break your confidence.

As you can see, concentration is one of the important perfections and if we understand and apply it correctly, it is of great benefit.