📔 Book: Happiness

Author:: Matthieu Ricard
buddhism

🧾 Description

A molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk, described by scientists as "the happiest man alive," demonstrates how to develop the inner conditions for true happiness.Never has happiness as an emotional and physical state of being been so widely discussed. Matthieu Ricard is one of the most compelling voices on the subject, and one of the few who can bring together the teachings of Eastern and Western thought.In this accessible new work, Ricard provides a straightforward assessment of how to create true and lasting happiness. He addresses the pursuit of a meaningful life at its most fundamental level--the strengthening of the inner conditions that lead to genuine happiness. Ricard helps readers form new patterns of interaction with themselves and with the larger world, working toward happiness step by step, starting with 20 minutes of daily mind training and meditation.

Highlights

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• Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is.JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
• According to André Comte-Sponville, “By ‘happiness’ we mean any span of time in which joy would seem immediately possible.”5
• By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.
• Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.
• One year before her death at Auschwitz, the remarkable Etty Hillesum, a young Dutchwoman, affirmed: “When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn’t matter what side of the prison fence you’re on. . . . I’ve already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, I already know everything. And yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.”7
• As Etty Hillesum says so tersely: “That great obstacle is always the representation and never the reality.”9
• We all strive, consciously or unconsciously, competently or clumsily, passionately or calmly, adventurously or routinely, to be happier and suffer less. Yet we so often confuse genuine happiness with merely seeking enjoyable emotions.
• How do we dispel this basic ignorance? The only way is through honesty and sincere introspection. There are two ways we can undertake this: analysis and contemplation. Analysis consists of a candid and systematic evaluation of every aspect of our own suffering and of the suffering we inflict on others. It involves understanding which thoughts, words, and actions inevitably lead to pain and which contribute to well-being. Of course, such an approach requires that we first come to see that something is not quite right with our way of being and acting. We then need to feel a burning desire to change.The contemplative approach consists of rising above the whirlpool of our thoughts for a moment and looking calmly within, as if at an interior landscape, to find the embodiment of our deepest aspirations.
• As the Dalai Lama has said: “If a man who has just moved into a luxury apartment on the hundredth floor of a brand-new building is deeply unhappy, the only thing he’ll look for is a window to jump out of.”1
• We have grown so accustomed to our faults that we can barely imagine what life would be like without them
• You can experience pleasure at somebody else’s expense, but you can never derive happiness from it. Pleasure can be joined to cruelty, violence, pride, greed, and other mental conditions that are incompatible with true happiness. “Pleasure is the happiness of madmen, while happiness is the pleasure of sages,” wrote the French novelist and critic Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly.
• Pleasures become obstacles only when they upset the mind’s equilibrium and lead to an obsession with gratification or an aversion to anything that thwarts them.
• In the case of lottery winners, it has been found that most experience a period of elation following their stroke of good luck but a year later have returned to their normal satisfaction level
• A Tibetan friend of mine who was contemplating the flashy advertising billboards in New York commented: “They are trying to steal our minds.”
• A study of quadriplegics found that although most acknowledged having considered suicide at first, a year after having been paralyzed only 10 percent considered their lives to be miserable; most considered theirs to be good.6
• We cannot deny the existence of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, but they are trivial with respect to genuine well-being
• For Seligman and his colleagues in the field of positive psychology, “there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation.”5