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.