Look for Happiness Inside

Close your eyes and settle on the breath. Stay with it all the way in, all the way out. And then again with the next breath. And the next. You’re trying to make this place your home. We try to make a home in the world outside, but what does the world have to offer? There’s gain and there’s loss. Status, loss of status. Praise, criticism. Pleasure and pain. These things are really unreliable.

If you try to base your happiness on the good side, i.e., the gain, the status, the praise, and the pleasure, it’s bound to flip around to the other side at any time. And of those things, even the good things of the world aren’t all that good. They don’t provide any satisfying happiness that goes deep into the mind.

That’s the difference between the world and the Dhamma. The Dhamma goes deep into the mind. So place your happiness here. Start by looking not for things, but for activities you can do that are good, like being generous, being virtuous, and meditating. You find that you can generate happiness inside, a happiness that’s a lot more reliable and goes deeper inside. So this is where you want to place your hopes for happiness, inside here.

You sit down and look at your mind, and it seems to be a mess. Well, you can clean it up. Bit, by bit, by bit, it gets cleaner and cleaner, becomes more of a good place to stay. So work with the breath to make the body feel comfortable. Be alert in your mind to notice what the mind is doing that’s unskillful and then bring it around to what’s skillful. This way, as you clean out things inside, you find you really can turn this house of the body into a home, a place where it is comfortable to stay. And it’s good to stay. You know about the world—you have windows, after all. But you don’t place your happiness out there. You place your happiness in here, where it’s going to be safe.

So work on cleaning out your house inside. Any greed, aversion, and delusion that you recognize inside, just let them go, let them go. You don’t have to keep them; you don’t have to feed them. Let them fend for themselves. You can let them die. It’s one of the few things the Buddha said whose killing he condoned. Someone once asked him, “Is there anybody who’s killing you do condone?” The Buddha said, “One thing. Anger. Kill your anger.” That’s not against the precepts.

So clean things out inside. Kill any defilements you have inside, any of the pests that you have inside your mind. In that way, you have a good place to stay, here. You don’t have to try to depend on the world being reliable. You don’t have to depend on the world being there for you all the time. After all, some day you’re going to leave it. And this is a place where you can’t stay anyway. It’s a place where we come through, but we can’t stay here. But you do stay with the qualities in your mind. So make sure that those are good. Look for your happiness here. That’s when it can be secure.