The source of happiness and misery

• How to apply the teachings to our life in a practical way
• The source of our happiness and suffering are from inside, not from external sources
• How we usually try to rearrange everything external to ourselves
• How to work with the mind to change the way we perceive situations and prevent emotions from going up and down

MTRS 69: The source of happiness and misery (download)

Motivation

Let’s start with our motivation to listen and pay attention carefully today so that we can learn about ourselves. Why do we want to learn about ourselves? Because that’s the secret to being happy. Our happiness comes from inside—it’s an internal experience. If we learn how to have a happy mind it’s not only good for us, it’s good for everybody around us. If we really think about happiness in a deep way, we’ll see there are many different kinds of happiness, many different levels.

We might want to aspire for higher levels of happiness that we didn’t know about until now. We might also want to broaden our perspective so that we think about the happiness of other living beings and want to help them attain the kind of happiness that lasts, that doesn’t depend on changeable circumstances. For that reason we’re going to listen to the Dharma teachings this evening with a large mind thinking of the benefit and welfare for all living beings. We’re aiming to improve ourselves so that we can contribute more to their welfare and happiness. Let’s take a moment and generate that kind of motivation.

The usual view of happiness and misery

Up until now we’ve been going through the book Mind Training Like Rays of the Sun. We’re in the last remaining pages of it and in the midst of a very complicated discussion about the nature of reality. Now we’re going to simplify that complicated discussion into the bare basics which are very important for us to understand. We can get lost in the complicated philosophy and forget how it applies to our lives, so it’s quite important not to forget that.

When I encountered Buddhism, one of the things that really struck me very much was the teaching that our happiness and misery come from inside of ourselves, because I never thought of things that way before. Like most people, I thought that happiness and suffering come from outside of me. If we look at the way we live our lives, we’re always trying to rearrange everything external to ourselves to make it the way we want it to be, and the world doesn’t cooperate.

When we’re little, we think that we want to rearrange things so that we get certain toys and we get away from the bullies in school. Then when we hit teenage years, we want to rearrange things so that we can be with our friends and get away from anybody who is interfering with our autonomy and independence. And when we get into our twenties, we want to be with a partner and get a job and get rid of anybody that’s going to interfere with that. So, we go through all these different passages in life where psychologically there are different things that we do at each stage. There’s a very interesting book I read years ago called Passages that talks about these things you do at different stages of your life.

We all go through that, and it seems like there’s a lot changing, but actually our view doesn’t change very much. Our view very much remains like, “I’m a self-enclosed entity, and I want to be happy. That’s the whole reason I do anything. Happiness comes from outside, so I need to line up everything that is going to make me happy—food, career, fame, praise, sex, beautiful scenery, beautiful music and everything like that. I’ve got to line it all up, and I have to get rid of anybody and everything that interferes with my getting what I want because what I want is going to make me happy.” That’s basically how we see things.

And we care about other people to the extent that they make us happy. When they stop making us happy our caring about them definitely changes. Our view of them changes. We don’t care so much. This is our whole worldview—that our job is to rearrange the external world to make it perfect, to make it what we want it to be. That’s what we set as our life goals. “I want to make a certain amount of money. I want to have a certain kind of personal life, a certain kind of social life, a certain kind of prestige in certain areas and so on and so forth.” This is our goal. This is how we live and try to get all of those things. We work very hard, but it’s not really assured that we’re going to get any of it.

Sometimes we look at other people and say, “Well, they have what I want, and I couldn’t get it. How come they have it? They’re happy. They have this and that and the other thing that I want. I should have it.” But then if you talk to those people for more than two and a half minutes, what you find is that they usually have things to complain about, too. Something is wrong. Something is unsatisfactory. They can’t get what they want. They want more. They want better. No matter who we are or what we’re doing, we have our motto: “More and better, more and better.” So, we try and get everything that we think is going to make us happy—more of it and better.

And we don’t question that worldview. We live our life according to it, but we don’t question it. Even after we hear the Dharma and we begin to question it, most of the time our mind just reverts to the habitual old worldview—everything external is the cause of my happiness and the cause of my suffering. Let’s question that a little bit.

Before we can even break the habit of doing that, we have to question and see if our habit is correct or incorrect. All of society enforces that habit and that way of thinking. That’s what the advertising industry is based on. “You have to get this in order to be happy, and that’s for sure going to make you happy.” That’s what the movies tell us. If we look at the message we get by watching TV programs and movies, the characters in all these things have to get some things and get away from other things in their effort to be happy. Everybody believes in this.

But is that really true? Does my happiness come from outside? If our happiness really came from outside that would mean that external objects and external people themselves have the power to make us happy. That would mean that the happiness somehow exists inside them, so we need contact with them and then we become happy. If that were true everybody should be happy from the same things.

If happiness comes from outside, happiness exists in those other people and things. Those things should give happiness to everybody, because those people and things have the ability to give happiness inside of them. Our worldview is that my happiness has nothing to do with me and my state of mind.

It has everything to do with the qualities of the object. “This food has the ability in and of itself—this chocolate cake—to really make me happy. It has nothing to do with my mind. I need this chocolate cake because it has the good taste and the good texture and the this and that and the other thing.” If that were so, that chocolate cake would make everybody happy, because it would exist independently, from its own side, as having goodness and happiness and pleasure inside of it.

However, not everybody likes chocolate cake. We know those people are cuckoo, but on the other hand, they like potato chips, which I think are disgusting, so they think that I’m cuckoo because I don’t like potato chips. If the potato chips really had goodness inside of them, I would also like them. Why? Because all of that would exist in the object, independent of its relationship with anybody.

It would also mean that any time we had chocolate cake we would always experience pleasure from it—because it has the pleasure-making ability inside of it, independent of us. That means that when we are sick to our stomach, we should be able to eat chocolate cake and feel better. It means that when we’re already full, we should be able to eat chocolate cake and feel happy. Because this thing—independent of us—has the ability to cause happiness.

When we use the vocabulary of inherent existence, this is what we’re talking about. We’re saying that something inside of it, from its own side, has some wonderful characteristics and has the ability to cause happiness. If that were so, if it could do that from its own side, anybody should be able to have happiness from it. And we should be able to have happiness from it any time whatsoever, because that pleasure exists inherently in the object or in the other person.

That’s not the case in reality, is it? Not everybody likes chocolate cake, and some people find it disgusting. Even those who like it sometimes look at it and go, “Bleh.” It doesn’t bring happiness. But if we don’t have that “bleh” feeling very often then we think that chocolate cake is really great, and we put all our efforts into getting it. And look at how we live our life to get that chocolate cake.

If there are other people in line in front of us, we push them out of the way. If the chocolate cake is stale when we get it, we complain. When we get our chocolate cake, we eat it very quickly, so we can get another piece before somebody else eats it. If we’re really craving it, we will lie to get it. We will steal to get our chocolate cake. I’m using the example of chocolate cake, but substitute in something that you really, really want. It could be money, new sports equipment, a relationship, acknowledgement in your job, popularity—who knows? We all want different things. Substitute that thing you want for chocolate cake and see how our view completely takes over our life and how we really lose our senses in many ways. We’ll do almost anything to get whatever it is we think will make us happy.

Most of us can look in the past and see how we’ve done that many, many times. I think a lot of times the things we don’t feel good about in our lives have involved this attempt to get things that we think are going to make us happy. We do all sorts of stuff because our mind isn’t thinking clearly. And sometimes the things we work to get do make us happy but not for a very long time. We’ve all had lots of happiness before. Where is that happiness now? We ate chocolate cake how many times in the past? Do we have any everlasting happiness from it? No, we have clogged arteries and obesity and all sorts of other things. 

Similarly, we think that our misery comes from outside. Why am I miserable? Because this person criticizes me; that person interfered with me getting what I want; this person over here has something better than what I have; this person bosses me around; this one forgot my birthday—all these people are trying to control me and tell me what I should be. None of them listen to me. I’m a total victim to all their selfishness. They just take over and try to control me and disrespect me, and on and on and on. Right? Why do I have suffering? Why do I have problems? It’s always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it? Always. My suffering always comes from other people.

Then what’s my technique to get rid of that suffering? It’s to get rid of those people or get rid of their behavior, make them change, so they will be what I want them to be. So, we have wonderful advice for everybody. “This person should not talk so much; that person should talk more.” Don’t we all have that advice for some people? We all know people in our life that leave us thinking, “Shut up, already.” And then there are other people that we think are good, that we want to get to know. For them, we think, “Oh, please talk more.”

We have our little things that we want everybody to do. And then we think, “You don’t praise me enough. You don’t appreciate me enough. You don’t listen to me. You ignore me. You have your own image of me that has nothing to do with who I really am.” It goes on and on and on. We have a list of complaints about other people that just goes for miles, doesn’t it? It would be interesting one day to take out a whole roll of butcher paper and write out all of our complaints, and then look at it and say, “If all of those things went away, would I be everlastingly happy?”

Audience: It would take more than a day.

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): Well, you could type, if you type fast.

But we think, “If I could change those people and make them do things differently, I’d be happy.” We want to change the people in our personal life—friends and family member—and make them act differently or change them. We want to go to the “old friend store” and get a new friend. And it’s not only that kind of thing, but we want to arrange it all and control it all. We think that’s going to make us happy, and it doesn’t, does it?

Have you had the situation where you’ve complained about somebody’s behavior, and the other person has really tried hard to change that behavior to please you, but you still complain about him? Something is still wrong with him. Have you ever noticed that? We notice it more when we’re the ones who try and change to make somebody else happy, and they keep complaining about us. We notice that more.

But you’re getting the idea that there’s something very wrong with our worldview in thinking that happiness and suffering lies outside. We can get little glimpses of how false this is on a daily basis just based on the mood we’re in when we wake up in the morning. We all know that if we wake up in a good mood, the day goes well. We meet many nice people, and even if somebody gives us some feedback we don’t like, it’s not too bad. Our mind’s balanced, so we can handle it. We don’t freak out.

But when we wake up in a bad mood, everything causes us suffering, doesn’t it? Everything. If we wake up in a bad mood, and somebody says, “Good morning”—grr! We all bow to each other in the Meditation Hall—[Venerable Chodron makes an angry face]. You go to breakfast—“Ugh! What are they serving for breakfast?” You sit down with the people you love and care about, and you think, “Ugh, they’re just so boring, so sickening.” When we’re in a bad mood, everybody is wrong. Everybody is full of faults. Everything is nasty. The world is out to get us, and we’re sure about it.

If you’re in a good mood and you meet the exact same circumstances, your whole feeling about them is totally different. This is something that we see very clearly when we do retreat because we’re having the same daily schedule, and we do the same things at the same time. We’re not talking very much. You get up, brush your teeth, meditate, eat breakfast, meditate, eat lunch, meditate, take a walk, meditate, have medicine meal, meditate, go to sleep. It’s kind of like that. What you see is that from day to day our happiness and suffering is up and down. Our mind is like a yo-yo. Very little in the external environment has changed, but how people and things appear to us is completely dependent upon our mood.

Sometimes when somebody is clicking their beads in the meditation hall, we might think, “Enough is enough, I’ve had it. They cannot click their beads in the meditation hall anymore. It means they are discourteous, rude, disrespectful, without mindfulness, without introspective alertness, without conscientiousness, trying to cause harm, trying to bug me deliberately—and I am going to tell them.” And in the middle of the meditation session, we tell them.

Everybody else in the hall is going, “What’s going on?” But it’s all coming from our mind. It’s not coming from the other person. If you were lonely and you heard somebody else clicking their meditation beads, wouldn’t you be happy? If you had gone years without meeting another meditator, and you heard somebody clicking their beads, you would be so excited. But if you look at the way our mind works, we just zero in on something, and elaborate it so it’s far worse than it really is. We make a huge deal out of it and cause a lot of turmoil amongst everybody we’re living with, and they’re scratching their heads, saying, “Why is today different than every other day?”

Our thoughts create our experiences

My point here is that we need to look at ourselves and see how we are creating our experience through how we think and interpret things. So often we have emotions, and we think they are the only thing anybody could possibly feel in that circumstance. But if we pay close attention we see that actually there’s a whole lot of thoughts lying behind our emotions. Those thoughts have to do with how we are interpreting the event and the object—how we are describing it to ourselves.

Through how we describe things we experience happiness, and we experience misery. Say we get up in the morning and breakfast is leftovers again, re-heated oatmeal. We could say, “This is disgusting. I want banana pancakes and not reheated oatmeal. Why do these people do blah-blah-blah?” We could really complain and stir everybody up—that’s one option. Or we could look at the same breakfast and say, “I am so fortunate to have food,” because we are very fortunate to have food, aren’t we? But we hardly ever think of how fortunate we are to have food. We usually think the food isn’t what we feel like having, but if we change out mind and train it so that we feel fortunate for having the food, then we feel happy when we eat. If we don’t change it and we just let our mind be, then we feel miserable. The external situation is the same.

The same kind of thing happens all the time when we have conflicts with other people. Conflicts are kind of normal. We have conflicts on a daily basis with other people; we have misunderstandings all the time. But we don’t see them as misunderstandings—we see them as “this person is trying to harm me.” All of a sudden we’re mind readers, and we know they are deliberately trying to harm us. How do we know that? We don’t ask; we just know. Then we develop this attitude like, “I’m a victim. These people are deliberately being rude and discourteous to me.”

We have a whole history together, right from the get-go. “When I met them, they never liked me. I’ve never liked them for that matter either. And they’re always trying to do this thing to poke at me and provoke me and they’re just that kind of ‘bleh’ person.” That’s how we describe a situation, and then we believe our description, and we react to the other person as if they were the most horrible person on the planet who is deliberately trying to harm us.

Then of course the other person is thinking, “What in the world is going on here?” Meanwhile, we’re sitting there thinking, “You do this and that. You don’t listen to me. You don’t respect me. You’re always sabotaging me. You care about everybody else more than you care about me—and you’re talking behind my back.” Our thoughts go on and on and on, and we’re sure our view is right.

We make ourselves miserable, and we damage the relationships with other people that way, because they don’t always know what in the world we’re talking about. We’re so sure that our interpretation is right that we don’t even see it as an interpretation. We think that what we’re perceiving is direct experience. “There’s an objective world out there and I am perceiving it as it is—objectively.” We’re not seeing that our thoughts are creating how this thing is appearing to us, and then we emotionally react to what we’ve created through our inappropriate attention. This happens all the time. The thing is that if we stop, analyze and check, very often we’ll see that we’re mistaken.

“Do other people really have those qualities? Is the situation really as I’m apprehending it?” Very often it’s not. Many times when we’re in the middle of a strong emotion, we can’t see beyond our nose. We’re convinced that this is how things are. But have you had the experience where you calm down for some time and then you look back at an something and say, “Why did I get so upset about that?” Have you ever had that experience?

It’s like, “What was I thinking that I was so super sensitive and accusatory towards the other person?” Because some time has gone by and that emotion has passed, so we look at the situation again and what we saw in the situation at that time is not what we see in it right now. Then we go, “No wonder that person doesn’t talk to me now.” It’s interesting because when we’re in the middle of it, if somebody suggests to us that we’re not perceiving it accurately, we get really mad at them. And then not only the original person is our enemy, but this person who is trying to help us also becomes our enemy because they’re not corroborating our view of being the victim.

If we look, we see all this kind of stuff going all the time—how our mind is making up stories, believing them, having emotions about them. Then the emotions provoke us to say and do different things, which then create a reaction from the other person that makes us more unhappy. We react to that, and then the whole thing goes around and around. Because if somebody says, “Please wipe your dish and put it away,” and they don’t make three prostrations first—“Why are they talking to me like that? What does this really mean? They’re bossing me around. They don’t appreciate me. They’re always manipulative like this.”

We go on and on, and we psychoanalyze the person. We think, “Oh, they’re really passive-aggressive. Something’s wrong, and they won’t tell me about it, so they’re acting this way. They’re definitely passive-aggressive—maybe they’re even borderline. Oh, that’s it! That’s why the relationship hasn’t been good for the last twenty-five years: they’re borderline.” We do our little psychoanalytic trip, and we’re all wrapped up in these thoughts that we’re so sure are the external objective reality.

If you look at it, what we’re actually doing is making ourselves into a victim. Isn’t that one of the things we do most often when we’re unhappy? “I am a victim.” We make ourselves into a victim and then we get angry because we don’t like being a victim or we slink away and have a pity party. But who made us into the victim? We did that.

We say, “Oh, these people never listen to me,” but have we ever tried talking to them? We just think,  “Nobody listens to me,” but we don’t even talk to them. We don’t ask them how they are or make the effort to have a conversation. So, we’ve made ourselves into the victim because we think, “they’re like this.” Then we believe it, make ourselves miserable, and get angry at them.

And the whole thing is so useless, isn’t it? When you think that we all just want to be happy and not to suffer, all these ruminating, proliferating thoughts, all these accusations, the victim mentality—the whole thing is so useless. This is all a product of our ignorance because we think everything exists objectively outside, how we perceive it. We’re not realizing that how we “perceive it” is through this whole filter of me, I, my and mine. We’re just making everything into whatever all of our nutty thoughts want to make it into and then we’re miserable.

We have the power to change our minds

The good news about all of this is that if our happiness and suffering doesn’t come from outside, if it comes from our own mind and the way we interpret things, then there’s some hope on the planet. Because while we cannot control everybody else and make them into what we want them to be, we can work on ourselves. So, we can we can look inside and ask, “What are my unproductive mental habits? What are the disturbing emotions that I habitually fall into that make me miserable? What are ways of seeing things that are actually incorrect?” We can do this kind of questioning and challenge a lot of our mental and emotional habits, a lot of our thoughts. If we start letting go of a lot of these useless things, then we’ll find that actually there’s a possibility of being happy.

When we say in Buddhism that we’re responsible for our happiness or suffering, that’s actually something good because if we’re responsible, we can change it. If somebody else is responsible for our happiness and suffering, what can we do to change it? How can we change anybody else? We’ve been trying our whole life to change everybody else, but if we start and try to change ourselves something might actually change. We’re the ones that can change us, and that’s the field of what we can change—ourselves, not others.

The Buddha teaches us how to change ourselves, and that’s the beauty of these teachings. It’s not just, “Stop being angry,” because how can we make ourselves stop being angry? It’s not just, “Stop being a victim,” because we believe it too much. Instead, what the Buddha teaches us is how to look at situations differently so that we describe them to ourselves in a more realistic way. When we start to describe situations differently, we experience them differently.

I was reading an article in the New York Times last week. It was called something like, “What Pets Can Tell Us About Marriage.” It had some very interesting points. When your pet throws up, you don’t get mad—you go clean it up. When your pet whines they want food, you go feed them. You don’t kick them out of the house. When your cat doesn’t feel like being pet, you put it down. You don’t get angry. It had these kinds of examples of usual behavior that animals do that we just forgive. “Oh, you ruined all the furniture? You clawed all my new furniture?” We’re mad for about half a second, but then we just forget it. It’s a cat; it’s a dog. This is their nature.

When I was little we had a German shepherd. My mom was cutting a salami on the counter and the doorbell rang. When she answered the door and came back, there was no salami. It was a big salami, and now it was gone. When your pet does something like that, you forgive your pet. You love your pet. When your spouse does something that you don’t like—something not even as bad as eating the whole salami or ruining all your food or throwing up on the carpet just after you’ve cleaned it—your spouse does some small thing and people go through the ceiling.

This article was just saying we should think about how we react to our pets and how we cut our pets a lot of slack, but when it comes to human beings, we demand perfection. They’ve got to be perfect and they’ve got to be what we want them to be when we want them to be it. It was an interesting article. They were actually talking about emptiness and self-centered thought, but the Times writer didn’t know it. This is the whole thing—why are we so demanding of some people and cut other people a lot of slack? Why? Does it make any sense? The people we’re most demanding of are usually the people that we care about the most, but then we’re so demanding of them that we drive them away. We make them feel stifled.

It’s very interesting how we create an image of somebody, try and make them fit that image, and then get very upset with them when they don’t. But it’s all coming from our own wrong way of thinking. Instead, we can change our view and think, “Here’s another person who is just trying to be happy and free from suffering. That’s all this other person is. They’re not some evil being who is trying to make me miserable. They’re just trying to be happy and free from suffering. Whatever they’re doing, it’s because of that. It’s not because they really want to hurt me, and it’s not because I’m totally worthless.”

All the judgments on others and ourselves are useless. It’s all incorrect. They’re just doing what they’re doing because they’re trying to be happy—that’s all. Wouldn’t you say that’s what motivates everybody? Look at what British Petroleum is doing right now. We’re calling them names up and down, but aren’t they, from their side, just trying to be happy? Yes, they’re trying to be happy.

We think the way they’re trying to be happy is incorrect, but they’re just trying to be happy and to avoid suffering, just like us. If we can bring our interpretation away from the self-centered view and really see what is going on with others, it becomes much easier to accept them. It becomes much harder to attribute bad motivations to them, which makes it much easier not to get defensive around them.

When we get defensive, what’s going on in our mind? Have you noticed how quickly we get defensive? Some tiny thing happens and—boom! We’re there protecting ourselves, explaining this, that and the other thing because we think that they’re blaming us. Maybe they’re just asking where the napkins are, but we have to give them this whole story because we think that by asking where the napkins are they are insinuating that we are incapable. 

All this is coming from our false projection. If we just dealt with things as they are, it would be much simpler. If somebody needs a napkin—here’s a napkin. That’s the end of it. I get the opportunity to give somebody a napkin, to benefit somebody, to make them happy. It’s easy.

Instead, I choose to get defensive, and I have to explain, “Well, we used to keep the napkins here, but now we keep them over there. You just weren’t here on the day when we moved the napkins, and it’s not my fault that you don’t have a napkin.” Look at what we do, how many stories we tell to try and wiggle our way out of the assumption that the other person is blaming us when they’re not at all. But we interpret it as they are and react that way.

This is coming from our mind. If we learn to stop and say, “Is that person really doing that? No, they’re just trying to be happy and free from suffering. I want them to be happy, so what can I do to facilitate their happiness? What can I do to facilitate them not suffering?” If we can approach the world that we meet in that way, we’re going to be a lot happier. Our speech is going to be better. Our actions are going to be better. And it comes from shifting our mind—changing how we look at other people. We don’t have to climb to the top of Mount Everest and get altitude sickness in order to change the world. We just have to change the way we think.

The whole point of what I’m saying is that we think things exist the way they appear to us whereas they don’t. We’re imputing qualities, motivations, a whole description of the situation. We’re thinking that we’re seeing external things, so this causes us to generate a lot of attachment, anger, jealousy, arrogance, resentment. You name it, we generate it, and then we become miserable. And we do things that make other people miserable.

If we learn to look at situations differently there’s a possibility of undoing all of that, because we see that what we think is out there isn’t out there from its own side. Therefore we can see it in a different way. We can relate to it in a different way.

Questions & Answers

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: He’s saying that now you’ve heard enough Dharma and you’re practicing, but when you get angry you can say to yourself, “In ten minutes or maybe in an hour, it’s not going to be a big deal to me.” That helps you calm down, right there in the moment. But at the same time your mind is holding on to something, being kind of rough, unhappy and miserable underneath it all. You can see that it’s because the mind is being very narrow, so how do you open the perspective up to see that there’s more than what we’re just seeing at that very moment?

We have to stretch our mind, and sometimes it’s very hard in the moment. Even psychologists describe a “refractory period”: a point when we can’t take in any new information. But I think it’s really helpful to come back to it during our meditation sessions when the situation isn’t red-hot in front of us. At that time we start dissecting it, broadening our view, seeing that there’s so much more going on than what we’re locked into at that moment and practicing this new view. And we do this over and over again.

If we do that, it stops the habit of narrow-minded interpretation. So, even if the narrow-minded interpretation comes, it becomes easier to take in new information. That refractory period isn’t so long because we’ve practiced this new view outside of that time.

Usually what our mind is focused on when we’re really stuck in it is me, I, my, and mine—and what’s happening to me is the most important thing in the universe. Sometimes it’s just very helpful at that time to say, “This is just one thing that’s happening. It’s not the most important thing in the universe. At this very moment, while this person is criticizing me, some people are dying, some people are killing, some people are starving. There are so many different experiences that this moment isn’t just all about me and what’s happening to me. What is the experience of other living beings right now?”

That opens our mind tremendously. I find that very, very helpful because it also helps me put in perspective how serious this thing is that I’m getting all upset about. Usually, compared to what’s going on on the planet, what I’m upset about is not so serious.

Audience: What mental factors are associated with the narrowness of mind?

VTC: Definitely ignorance, because we’re grasping at a real me. There’s also attachment, because we’re attached to our own happiness. There’s self-centeredness, because my happiness is more important than anybody else’s. Often, there’s anger or resentment: “Somebody’s intruding on what I want, my happiness.” There’s often a bunch of other different mental factors there. Also, this mental factor of what we call inappropriate attention, that pays attention in the wrong way—this is the mind that makes up all the stories.

I find it quite helpful sometimes when I see that my mind is making up stories to just say, “Stop. I’m making up a story. I don’t need to make up this story about this person.” Of course, that depends on seeing that we’re making up stories when we’re doing our practice. This is why it’s so important to bring things that happened to us before into our practice now, so we can reinterpret them and work with them again. That way we set up a new habit of working with these things in a different way.

Sometimes it’s very helpful to take something from the past that you aren’t peaceful with in your mind. You bring it up and you investigate: “How am I making up a story? How is my self-centeredness involved? How is my ignorance involved? How is my attachment to my own happiness involved? How is inappropriate attention involved? How is anger or resentment involved?” You start looking at the way the mind works, seeing how it works, and you begin to see how it’s really stuff that’s totally off the wall. The more you can see this in your practice, the easier it becomes to see it in different situations.

Also, what we do is we start noticing certain stories that we make up repeatedly. One might be the “you’re bossing me around” story. Or another one might be the “you’re not listening to me” story. Or another one might be the “nobody appreciates me” story. We might have certain choice stories that we have cultivated out of habit over the years that whenever anything happens—wham! We just go right into that story.

Look at all of our issues with authority. We have these stories that we make up about people that we put in positions of authority, and it’s the same story again and again and again and again. Or sometimes the same problem comes up again and again in different friendships. So, it’s helpful to look in our life and ask, “Where are my habits? What are my wrong way of thinking habits?” It’s important to really see what stories we tell ourselves repeatedly that are incorrect.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You’re saying what you feel happy about is when you’ve done something productive during the day, you look back at your day and say, “I feel good about what I did today because I produced something. Something’s there that wasn’t there before.” That’s coming from outside, but at the same time you do get a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Whereas if you just laid around and watched TV, you wouldn’t get that sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

I think all of us like to feel some sense that we are efficacious people, and we can do things that are good, that count in the world. I think there’s nothing wrong with feeling good about what we’ve done. In fact, it’s nice to feel good about what we’ve done. Where we sometimes can get into trouble is if we only feel good about certain things that we’ve done, but we don’t feel good about other things that we’ve done. Maybe those other things are equally as beneficial, but we haven’t trained our mind to feel good about them.

Maybe there’s somebody who just feels good when they clear a lot of stuff off their desk, build a deck or do something. But they haven’t trained their mind to feel good when they clean their room, help somebody clean their house. Or they haven’t trained their mind to feel good when they sit quietly and change their own way of thinking, read a Dharma book, think about it and have new thoughts. Maybe they haven’t trained their mind to feel happy about all those other ways of feeling happy aside from the usual things they’re habituated to.

I think it’s good to train our mind to feel happy about all the different things we do during the day. Because if we only feel happy about some things then when our body stops being able to do those things, we’re up a creek, aren’t we?  It’s helpful to train ourselves to think, “Well, even sitting here and working with my mind, sitting and reading a book and thinking about it, having some new thoughts and questioning myself—that’s something actually that’s very productive.” We may not have anything to point at and say, “look what I did,” but in the sense of our own internal feeling and our own self-knowledge, our ability to be kind to others, we’ve made some progress that day, and we can feel good about that.

If we train our mind to do that and feel good about that, it gives us more ways to be happy because you can work with your mind even when you’re sick. Whereas if all of our happiness depends on our body doing things, then when we get sick as we age, it becomes much more difficult to be happy. So, this is how we can expand our way of feeling fulfilled. And it’s helpful for us to see that even just a kind word to somebody can make a difference in their life. We can feel good about that instead of just brushing that off. We can understand, “Oh, I can do that.”