The Quiet Mind: Discovering Happiness As Our Natural State

In this 20-minute talk, we will explore what happiness isn't and what it is.

Is happiness found in possessions? Relationships? Is it a special state only available to some of us, some of the time?

Or is happiness our true nature, simply an absence of agitation and lack, and to experience it we only need to slow down our thinking so that happiness can emerge as the quiet background of our being?

Join me in this exploration of our essential nature to discover how happiness simply is the result of a quiet mind.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

My name is Yakov and I'll be your companion in this exploration of what happiness is.

So before we begin,

Close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths.

Feel the body,

The point of contact with a chair or a cushion.

And feel the breath coming in and going out.

And feel this sense of aliveness,

The sense of being,

Being alive and being conscious.

We may not know what we are or we may think we definitely know who or what we are.

Both are fine.

But there's definitely this sense that we are alive,

This sense of presence.

So just allow yourself to be that.

If you can't physically be still,

If you are listening to it when you're doing something else,

Just pause and take a couple of deep breaths and just connect with the feeling of the body.

Even a couple of breaths is enough to ground ourselves,

To let the mind relax a little,

Let the thinking slow down.

Okay,

So happiness.

Presumably we all want to be happy.

This is something everybody wants.

And supposedly everything we do in life is to be happy,

Is to move us towards happiness.

But we rarely question what happiness is or we think we know what it is.

That's why we don't question it.

That was certainly my experience.

I thought I knew what happiness was and that's why I wasn't questioning my definition.

So as we begin this exploration,

I invite you to think for yourself.

Ask yourself this question,

What happiness is for me?

What does it mean to me to be happy?

And we will begin by exploring what happiness isn't and then we'll talk about what happiness is.

So first,

What happiness is not.

Happiness is not found in possessions.

That was my definition,

That was my understanding,

That happiness is getting what we want.

And this is so common I find that we believe that getting what we want will make us happy.

And we do feel some joy when we get what we want,

But that joy doesn't really last.

So we continue looking for something else,

Believing that that next thing will surely make us happy.

And reflect on your own experience.

Remember the time when you got something that you really,

Really wanted.

Whether that was something that you bought for yourself or something that you got as a gift.

And just reflect on how long that happiness lasted.

If things could give us happiness,

Wouldn't it last forever when we got what we wanted?

And if it didn't last forever,

If it disappeared,

Then maybe happiness is something else.

So when we want something and we get it,

The happiness that we experience when we finally get it is not the happiness of having that object.

It's the happiness of stopping to want that.

So we experience happiness because the wanting thought finally stops.

And that we call happiness.

So when we get what we want,

The search temporarily stops.

And in that end of searching,

We experience happiness.

But we equate it with the object that we got.

But it is not the object,

It's simply the end of searching,

The end of wanting that object that brings us happiness.

And it doesn't bring us happiness,

It simply allows it to shine because the wanting temporarily stopped.

I find it similar to an addiction.

If we are addicted to something,

We experience joy the moment when our wanting for that substance temporarily stops.

But then we go on trying to get more of that substance,

Or more of that behavior.

And when we get it,

Again,

We feel joy.

And then we think it is happiness,

But it's simply the end of wanting.

So I really like this phrase that desire is the endless shopping basket.

So desire is really not,

It never stops.

We want something,

Then we get it,

Then we want something else.

And then we believe that when we get that,

We'll be happy.

But when we finally get that,

We realize that the happiness doesn't last and we want something else.

So desire is an endless shopping basket.

So another common misconception is that happiness is an emotion.

The thing about emotions is that they're disturbances in our natural state of being.

They're like ripples on the surface of a quiet lake.

And emotions,

The word emotion,

By the way,

Comes from the Latin word emovera,

Which is to disturb.

So they're disturbances.

Emotions invariably change for something else.

They cannot stay,

They cannot last.

Even the most pleasant emotion we experience will change.

So if we want lasting happiness,

It cannot be found in emotions,

Because they will change.

And because I believe that happiness to be an emotion,

A heightened state,

I searched for it in,

And I think many people search for it in substances,

In various mind-altering substances,

And they may give us pleasant states.

They may give us a heightened state,

But that heightened state always changes for something else.

So happiness cannot be an emotion because emotions are temporary.

So happiness is also not found in relationships,

Because happiness cannot depend on another person.

If we believe that our happiness depends on another person,

Then it's not happiness,

It's dependency.

Then we'll feel fear of losing that person.

We'll try to secure them being with us.

This will turn into manipulation.

This cannot be happiness.

If happiness is present,

It must be present in us,

Not in another person.

So now,

I invite you to reflect on the time when you were happy,

When you felt at peace,

When you felt content.

And it could be,

It could be the time when you got what you wanted,

Although that,

I assume,

Did not really last very long,

And was quickly replaced by wanting something else.

So the seeking didn't stop.

But I find that we experience happiness and contentment and peace often when we are,

Could be in nature,

When we're watching a beautiful sunset,

Or it could be being with a loved one,

Or it could be watching a beautiful object like a painting or a piece of art.

But in all of those moments,

Our mind quietens,

Our thinking slows down.

And in that gap between thoughts,

When our mind gets quiet,

We experience happiness,

We experience peace.

But those are not because of an object or a sunset or a person.

But those are simply because our mind slowed down.

In that moment,

We are not seeking something in the future.

We are not believing that we are not happy because we don't yet have what we want in the future.

In that moment,

We simply are present to worries.

So if happiness happens when our mind slows down,

When it gets quiet,

Then happiness,

Therefore,

Is the result of the quiet mind.

But why is our mind not quiet all the time?

Well,

Because we're busy going after happiness.

We're busy trying to secure things that we believe will make us happy.

And it's also because we are misidentifying ourselves with the content of our mind,

With the thinking that's going on in our mind,

Rather than recognizing that we are the context,

That we are the space in which that thinking takes place.

So now,

Let's explore what happiness is.

If we talked about what it isn't,

What is it then?

So happiness is simply an absence of lack.

If we think of happiness as simply the absence of lack,

Rather than some special state,

It never turns into something that we search for,

Seek in the future.

And there's nothing special in absence of lack,

Isn't it?

It's simply the absence of wanting,

Of craving,

Of seeking something other than what is right now.

And what is lack?

Lack is always a thought about the future.

So lack is always for the thought.

It's not for ourself.

Ourself is always content.

It's always happy.

It is that space where a thought of lack appears.

And when we misidentify ourself with that thought of lack,

When we think that that is who we are,

That's when we overlook that quiet sense of happiness that is always in the background,

That is always available.

So happiness is familiar.

It is not a special state.

It is not a heightened state.

It's more like coming home.

It's more like a grounded,

Calm feeling of contentment and okayness and peace rather than some adrenaline-fueled state of joy of finally getting what we want or accomplishing something.

So it's very,

In a way,

It's very prosaic.

It's very ordinary.

And that's why we overlook it,

Because we think it must be something else.

So when we experience one of those moments I talked about earlier,

When we are in nature or with a loved one or watching a beautiful piece of art,

And the mind stops for a moment,

And we feel that happiness and peace,

We overlook them because we think we do not recognize the importance of them.

We do not recognize what actually happened.

So when the thinking slowed down,

The happiness and peace that we seek appear.

They didn't appear because something changed in our outer circumstances.

They just appeared because the thinking slowed down.

So paradoxically,

What we seek is only prevented by our seeking for it.

What we long for is only veiled by our longing for it.

So what veils happiness is our thinking.

It's like standing in the middle of a room and then going out of the room,

Trying to find a way back to the room.

But no matter where we go,

In what direction we go,

We're only going to get away from the middle of the room.

The same with thinking.

When we think about getting what we want,

Believing that it will make us happy,

That thinking only gets us away from recognizing the nature of happiness and contentment that is present right now.

So that only clouds those natural states of who we are beyond thought.

So what can we do then?

What can we do to stop overlooking that natural state of happiness and contentment that is always available and that is who we are?

That is the property of our self as awareness or consciousness.

That is the context of our experience of feelings and thoughts and sounds that we learn to identify as ourselves.

So what can we do?

One way is meditation.

Meditation is simply being present and noticing.

First noticing that we are not our thoughts.

That if we can observe our thoughts,

That means that we are not them and we notice that they come and go and they change.

But we as the observer,

We as the witness of thoughts,

We do not come and go.

We do not change.

We stay unchanged.

So that means that we are not the content.

We are not our thoughts.

We are not our feelings.

We are not the sensations in the body.

We are not the sounds.

We are something else.

So we start to dis-identify,

Take a step back from our thinking.

So there's more and more that grows a bigger and bigger gap between our thoughts and ourselves.

And we realize that we're something bigger than the contents of our experience.

Another helpful method could be self-inquiry,

Which is simply asking when we want something or we are dissatisfied about something.

We believe we need something to be happy.

We can ask who is it that wants it?

I want that.

Who is that I?

Where is it?

And then don't try to answer it.

Simply be quiet and still and let the answer appear.

I want that.

Who is that I?

Where is it?

Don't try to answer it with your mind.

Just be open to the answer appearing.

And the third way that can be helpful is simply doing nothing.

If happiness is the natural result of a quiet mind,

What can we do to quiet the mind?

Simply doing nothing.

Nothing can quieten the mind faster than doing nothing to quieten the mind.

It's like we have a cup of water with some some mud in it and we want the mud to settle down and we want the water to clear.

If we stir it,

The more we stir it,

The more it gets muddy,

The more it gets unclear.

But if we just let it be,

The mud will naturally settle down and the water will clear.

The same thing with our thinking.

If we just allow ourselves to be in the present moment and to drop the effort to quieten our mind,

Just simply flow from one perception to the other.

It's very helpful if you're in nature and you can just watch a bird fly by and then watch a tree wave slightly in the breeze and just let yourself flow with your attention flow,

Be taken by a natural flow.

Do not direct it.

That will quieten your mind,

But don't try to work it as a technique,

Just simply allow it to happen.

And when the mind will quiet that happiness,

That peace,

It will naturally shine through without you trying to do anything.

Because trying to do something would be just more thinking,

Would be just more dissatisfaction and trying to get something that we believe is not present right now.

So thank you for listening and for joining me in this exploration.

Thank you.