If the whole universe can be found in our own body and mind, this is where we need to make our inquiries. We all have the answers within ourselves—we just have not got in touch with them yet. The potential of finding the truth within requires faith in ourselves.

The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude, and contentment. To look for total satisfaction in the world of the senses is a futile endeavor, since everything changes from moment to moment—work and self—and where can satisfaction be found?

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The Illusion of External Seeking

Everybody is unhappy simply because of unfulfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn’t available. Whatever we attempt is a reflection of our inner thirst, which we hope to quench in all these external ways.

What we are looking for lies within us. If we gave our time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found.

Mindfulness is not just a word or a discourse by the Buddha, but a meaningful state of mind. It means:

• We have to be here now in this very moment.
• We have to know what is happening internally and externally.
• We must be alert to our motives and learn to change unwholesome thoughts and emotions into wholesome ones.

Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates our habitual mental reactions, which are the primary cause of suffering.

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Contentment Versus Self-Satisfaction

We could become quite satisfied with ourselves because we are sitting in meditation and endeavoring to practice the spiritual path. However, such satisfaction with ourselves is not the same as contentment.

• Contentment is necessary: To be content includes knowing we are in the right place at the right time to facilitate our own growth.
• Self-satisfaction is detrimental: To be self-satisfied means that we no longer realize the need for growth.

Trying to achieve something in the spiritual world is just as foolish as trying to achieve something in the material world. There is nothing to achieve—there is only letting go. As we let go more and more of ego identifications, desires, and support systems, true bliss will arise.

Restlessness and worry are always connected to desire. When we recognize this and let go of the desire, the heart is purified and the mind is calmed.

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Suffering as Our Best Teacher

It is often thought that the Buddha’s Doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all.

Suffering isn’t going to go away—the one who suffers is going to go away.

Suffering is our best teacher because it hangs on to us and keeps us in its grip until we have learned that particular lesson. Only then does suffering let go. If we haven’t learned our lesson, we can be quite sure that the same lesson is going to come again, because life is nothing but an adult education class.

If we don’t pass in any of the subjects, we just have to sit the examination again. Whatever lesson we have missed, we will get it again. That is why we find ourselves reacting to similar situations in similar ways many times. Eventually, we will find—mostly in retrospect, of course—that we can be very grateful to those people who have made life most difficult for us.

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Loving-Kindness, Sympathetic Joy, and Acceptance

The missing link in our practice can only come through the practice of loving-kindness towards ourselves in spite of everything we know about ourselves. Only then will we be able to love others without criticism or judgment.

The Heat of Anger

The Buddha compared anger with picking up hot coals with one’s bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry, of course.

The Antidote to Depression

Joy with others (mudita) is a sure antidote for depression. Anybody who suffers from depression is suffering from the lack of joy with others—the lack of sympathetic joy. One cannot always have joyful occasions or joyful thoughts in one’s own life, but if one has joy with and for other people, one can surely find something to be happy about.

A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.

Accepting What Is

Contentment with our life as it is brings a feeling of great lightness, for we lose the burden of continually craving for situations and people to be different. Things are as they are. Refusing to accept this creates dukkha (suffering) and brings pain. It is like pushing against a sealed door:

1. We push and we push until our hands hurt.
2. But we cannot open it.
3. If we are wise, we accept that this is simply how it is—the door is sealed and it is perfectly all right that it is so.

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Conclusion: Relinquishing the Unhappy One

If we want real happiness, the only way it can arise is by letting go of the one who is unhappy.

It is not a question of trying to hold on to the one who is happy. Rather, when the unhappy one is relinquished, nothing else remains except the happiness of tranquility and pure awareness. It is not that we kill or annihilate something that actually exists; rather, we get rid of a deluded mind state.