No Happiness Other Than Peace
November 02, 2023

The Buddha said that there was no happiness other than peace. Now some of us might argue with that. We can think of other ways we could be happy besides being peaceful. But you have to look: What does happiness consist of? The mind has a place where it can stay, and it’s not being pushed off. When it gets pushed off, then it’s just a little blip of pleasure, but then it’s gone. It’s not really happiness.

So what you have to do is find something where you’re not being pushed off, where the mind can stay. There are a lot of things out in the world where you really can’t stay, so you have to look inside. You’ve got the breath, which is coming in, going out all the time. But then the problem is that the mind itself is used to being pushed off, so it’s already ready to jump off at the next opportunity.

So you have to teach it, “Okay, you can stay here.” In the beginning, the breath may not be all that exciting or interesting. But if you stay with it and pay attention to it, you begin to notice there are variations in the breaths. Some breaths are more comfortable than others. And you have the choice: You can breathe in ways that are comfortable. And then you have to keep reminding the mind, “Okay, stay here, stay here, and things will get better.”

So in the beginning, you need to give a lot of pep talks to the mind. And you have to realize that you can’t let the disturbances of the world come in and pull you away. This is a problem when you leave the monastery after being here for a while. You find that the environment outside is not so conducive. You’ve got to create your own internal environment, reminding yourself of what really is important to you. What the world may say is important is one thing. What’s really important for you is something else. You’ve got to maintain the state of your mind. There’s nobody else who’s going to maintain it for you. And there are a lot of people out there who would like to excite your greed, and aversion, and delusion for their purposes, so you have to resist their efforts.

So think of the breath as being a shield—when you have the breath energy filling the body, when your awareness is filling the body, and it can repel things coming in from outside. It’s as if you have a force field to repel negative energies. But that means you have to make sure you have good energy inside—which is one of the reasons why we stick with the breath and learn to study the breath, examine the breath, adjust the breath, so that it really does feel good all the way through the body as you breathe in, all the way through the body as you breathe out.

Then you maintain that as your home: a place where the mind can stay, where it can find some peace and true happiness inside.

You can’t take the monastery with you, but you can take these skills. And these skills will stand you in good stead because you begin to notice that the things outside—even though they may seem to be pulling you out, and there are people out there who want you to be distracted from your own well-being—but the real question is whether you’re going to be complicit with them, whether you’re going to go along with them or you’re going to resist.

So build up some good energy inside so that you can resist the bad energy outside. With that skill, you can go through the world unharmed. The things that are important to the mind can’t be harmed. The things that are not important—things that can be harmed—you have to realize, okay, these are not as important as what you’ve got inside.