You May Find The Direct Way To Happiness After Studying This Core Teaching From Buddhism

Desire takes learning to do correctly

Happiness is a multi-billion dollar industry. From self-help to scientific conferences, yoga classes to therapy techniques — we’ve got some indisputable guidelines figured out.

• Perform meaningful work.
• Build up networks of personal relationships.
• Turn within for joy as much as externally.

It’s great advice. But will it make us happy forever?

To find what will, we have to borrow some ideas from Buddhism — whose central goal has been to cure suffering and find permanent, indestructible joy.

And the foundation of its path? Four realizations:

(1) Suffering characterizes life (more than anything else).

(2) Craving produces life.

(3) Since this root source can be removed, there is an end to suffering.

(4) A path exists to get you there.

The key’s right in front of you.

Clinging desperation that you must get what you want — or you’ll be miserable. It makes you suffer right from the get go!

Once the craving is fulfilled, another takes its place. Endlessly, until you die. What happens then? Don’t say nobody’s ever come back from it, so we can’t possibly know.

Because the Buddha went backwards from it. He remembered where his consciousness was, in the moments when he was born. And traced it back to before that.

Onward — until he analyzed all past existences. He experienced all the life lessons, karmic laws, that this continuum brought.

Why do I mention this? Not to make you “believe” in the supernatural feats of consciousness.

It’s to state the source of where these teachings of Buddhism come from: someone’s direct experience.

It can be yours, too, if you test, apply, argue, and actively engage with it like the Buddha said you should.

Desire =/= Clinging.

I’ve written previously on how most people dangerously misunderstand these four noble truths.

Suffering ends when you have no more delusional clinging. When you no longer go after what are actually sources of unhappiness.

Yes, that means the result is devoid of a lot we consider normal!

• Not needing romantic partnership, because you’re already exuding all the love you could ever experience.
• Desiring to perfect one’s mind, rather than stimulate it.
• Urges to help others with the “tool” of a body/mind, rather than stomp on others in order to pamper it.

The Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa once instructed that passion without an object becomes compassion: simply because it has nothing to cling onto to deform itself, it returns to perfection.

So make this clear in your head.

Desire isn’t the enemy. Buddhism is not about shutting down your ability to function in this world.

Neither is Buddhism some irrelevant set of philosophies: simply look around you. There isn’t a single person out there not searching for happiness.

It’s about wisdom. The ability to end craving, which ends all neurotic forms of life.

So if a way to permanent well-being has been found and replicated successfully — why not give it a shot?

The highway to happiness is the bliss of wisdom. The bliss of ethics. The bliss of concentration. These are called the “three trainings,” which are the fourth noble truth summed up as succinctly as possible.

By freeing ourselves of clinging to one desire after the next, we open ourselves to perform our devoted purpose in life.

By removing all attachment, we receive true (and permanent) love for what matters.

And most importantly, after seeing how we keep ourselves stuck in misery, we help those around us to come out of it along with us!