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The way this podcast works, is we offer two weeks of new interviews and our guests’ guided meditations, and then we follow those with two weeks in which I share lectures and meditations from the How to Train a Happy Mind sequence in progressive order. Often these are reruns of the classic episodes that started this podcast, but sometimes I create new ones or share ones from our train A Happy Mind community that meets every Sunday morning. By the way, if you want to join us there, you can sign up at trainahappymind.org.

This week, we’ve reached the end of the meditation sequence. The final stage is a summary of every step of the path from the preciousness of life to the ultimate interdependent nature of reality. In my own meditation practice, I go through this sequence every day, and yesterday I was surprised while I was chomping on a heaping pile of nachos to have the owner of my favorite Mexican restaurant come over to tell me that he had read the book—twice in fact—and that he also now does the complete path meditation each morning when he wakes up.

So, if you end up enjoying this episode or have benefited from others you’ve heard in the past, please consider supporting the podcast and educational programs with a tax deductible donation. You can find a link to support us at howtotrainahappymind.org.

Introduction to the meditation

Scott Snibbe: Before we get into the meditation, I found a wonderful quote a couple years ago from Brian Wilson, he really is such a genius, such a beautiful person who made so many happy songs, who was so depressed, and had so much struggle with mental illness. There’s so many documentaries about him. I’ve seen many, and in one of the last ones I saw, he said, “I’ll tell you something. I’ve learned it’s hard work to be happy.”

I think there’s something to that. It’s not like a course in life hacks. It’s very deep what it takes to be happy. Sometimes when I give interviews on the book, they ask, what’s the one thing, what’s the one takeaway? It’s not one thing. I mean, the one thing would be to really get into it. It’s not something that’ll take a few minutes or a day, but it’s maybe the most worthwhile thing you’ll ever do with your life — to go deeply and to inquire on the causes of happiness and suffering, practice the meditations.

Anyway, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll do a long version of all the stages of the path. Sometimes I do it in as much detail as we’ll do today, when I have enough time. As you can probably tell, I really love meditation. My main obstacle is just the family, having time, make sure I finish my meditations so I can make breakfast with my daughter and stuff like that.

When I have enough time, I wake up early enough, or if it’s the weekend, I will do a lamrim meditation like this, a long one; or if I’m on a plane or a train, that’s a great place to do long meditations. But then otherwise I do it much quicker. I told you the very quickest way to do it: just say those eight phrases or eight words.

Settling into the meditation

Settle yourself into a meditation posture.

As we learned, meditation is not always relaxing, although it helps to be relaxed, also to better understand your mind, to steer your thoughts and actions toward the true causes of a happy, meaningful life, to become a source of happiness for the people around you, and to make your life and your every action bring about a better world.

Once again, bring your focus to your breath. It comes in and out of your nostrils, or with the rise and fall of your abdomen. Notice how your breath is a sensory experience reflected in your mind. If other thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intrude on your focus, on your breath, just let them pass by.

No need to push them away. No need to bring them, closer. just stay focused on your breath for one minute.

The preciousness of life

Each of us woke up today, alive in our remarkable bodies, and if we have some degree of health, clean water, if we can read and write, then we’re more fortunate than billions of people on earth.

For a moment, feel grateful for these basic endowments.

Then for more, if you have them, a place to live, money in the bank, a job, family, friends. What can we accomplish in these next 24 hours?

At the very least, we can be a source of comfort, help, and joy to those around us, and whether we succeed or not, just having a compassionate motivation guiding our actions, becomes the cause of our own happiness.

Now without any arrogance it’s nice to feel good about ourselves that we found an interest in going beyond simply survival.

To probe the deep questions of existence itself, for a moment again, expand your mind to think about your role in the universe.

It took four billion years for life on our planet to evolve into a form that could reflect on itself the nature of reality, consciousness.

What responsibility do we have as such highly evolved beings?

What if humanity is unique? What if we’re the only intelligent life in a universe of billions of galaxies, 8 billion years old? If that’s true, how do you want to spend today?

Impermanence

Let’s look a little more deeply what it means to be alive. We can start by exploring our body’s parts, resting our mind on each of them. In turn, your feet, legs, torso, your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, stomach, and skeleton. Your arms and hands.

The signals coming from your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and fingers through which your brain constructs a picture of reality.

Blood circulating through your entire body once every minute.

Trillions of cells, millions dying each second, millions newly replacing them, countless spinning atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon within those cells, exchanging subatomic particles near the speed of light.

To be alive is to change in every instant.

To be alive is to change in every instant.

Then bring your mind to your cushion or chair, to the room around you and everything in it.

Become aware that these two are changing and decaying at a subtle level, instant by instant.

Then look inside your mind to observe how it changes, thoughts and feelings arise, grow, sustain, diminish, and disappear.

Happiness, sadness, yearning, fear, pain, revulsion, joy. The impermanent nature of your mind means that you can steer it in any direction. So why not direct it toward happiness, meaning, and benefiting others?

Impermanence means anything is possible. You can choose right now what good you want to accomplish with your body and mind.

Impermanence means anything is possible. You can choose right now what good you want to accomplish with your body and mind.

Mental cause and effect

Everything humans have achieved, agriculture, medicine, democracy, space flight, all of these started in the mind.

Our minds can even transform the planet as climate change proves. Yet, we often lose control of our minds and let anger and craving overtake us. Just because something pops into your head doesn’t mean you have to follow its urges or fears.

Don’t believe everything you think.

To gain control over your mind, start by simply becoming aware of what appears in it. See that you can maintain a distance from your thoughts, feelings, perceptions. You can label them. But you don’t need to react to them.

What are the causes of happiness and pain for your own mind and for the minds of others?

Is it possible that humans mostly mean well and only cause harm through confusion and conditioning?

Search through the last 24 hours alive for a time you felt you were at your best. Maybe you were caring for yourself in a moment of calm, exercise, creativity. Maybe you experienced a moment of connection when you helped someone by listening, working, or laughing together.

Rejoice in your chosen moment and briefly determine to do more nourishing things like that today for yourself and for others. Now think of something you regret from the past day. See how that action didn’t come out of the blue, but stems from a long chain of causes and effects, external influences, inner habits that are reinforced every time you repeat them.

What could you have done instead of the thing you regret?

How could you have handled the situation better?

Are you determined to act that way when it happens again?

If there’s some external influences that reinforce your habit, how maybe it makes sense to avoid them. So now consider this hopeful view of your mind.

Your nature is fundamentally kind, loving, patient wise and generous. Disturbing states of mind are fleeting.

Your nature is fundamentally kind, loving, patient wise and generous. Disturbing states of mind are fleeting.

These disturbances can be diminished by reinforcing more positive mental habits. And with each thought and action, you transform your mind.

If you haven’t already, forgive yourself for whatever it is that you regret. Let go of any guilt or shame and accept that change happens slowly.

You can feel sincere remorse for whatever harm you’ve done in the world and move on with a clear mind and a heart that’s open to others.

Refuge

Now, think about who you admire, leaders, humanitarians athletes, artists, activists, actors or humbler people in your everyday life who seem to think only of others. Your own ability to change not only means you can steer your mind toward greater good, but also that you have even the capacity, the potential of a Dalai Lama, Angari Mati, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr.

The qualities these great beings cultivated in themselves can be developed by everyone. We all have the seeds of kindness, compassion, and wisdom. Mental disturbances like anger, craving pride, jealousy are fleeting and shallow.

You can let them go simply by embracing your own capacity for good.

So whether you fully believe this or not, find refuge now in your own inner goodness for a moment and in anyone you admire who embodies virtue. Find refuge in your capacity to change and everyone else’s capacity to change too.

Watch how these thoughts affect who you are right now and how you see others.

Suffering

Now, although we experience endless varieties of suffering and conflict, the root of our mental pain lies in three delusions so strong that in Buddhism, they’re called poisons: attachment, anger, and ignorance.

Simply becoming mindful of these disturbing mental states, labeling them and understanding them is a huge step toward eliminating the pain they cause us, as we realize they are exaggerated, inaccurate ways of seeing reality.

Remind yourself how attachment works. You perceive an object that pleases you, a delicious treat the touch of someone’s body, some status in the world, and then your mind externalizes that pleasure. You start to believe you can’t be happy without it.

You must get it now and keep getting it. If you don’t, you can’t be happy.

Attachment exaggerates the capacity of people, objects, and experiences to bring you lasting happiness.

So, ask yourself, when you get the object of your attachment, do you feel completely satisfied?

Even if you do, does that feeling last?

Watch your state of mind when you get the object of your attachment.

So could it be that the reason you feel good is not because you satisfied your craving for some short time, but because you are just for a moment free from attachment.

Anger is the opposite of attachment. You feel unhappy with an object or situation that displeases you, but anger takes you beyond the unpleasant situation. It causes you to project exaggerated negative qualities onto the thing itself with people, this often causes you to exaggerate so badly that you fail to see any good at all in the person you’re angry with.

So think of someone you’re angry with right now to see if this is true.

Notice how exaggerated your state of mind is. The person you’re angry with probably isn’t harming you or thinking about you right now. That person may even be caring for family or friends or doing some good in the world, but still you’re feeling angry.

Is your view that this person only does harm? Accurate? The root delusion of ignorance is seeing an exaggerated distinction between yourself and others through ignorance. You fail to see the interdependent changing nature of reality.

Instead creating the illusion of strong opposites, good and bad, delicious and disgusting. Me and you.

This ignorance turns into self-centeredness as you start absurdly to think that you’re a little bit more important or less important than everyone else in the universe, It’s almost funny when you realize it. I actually think I’m at the center of the universe.

Ask yourself if your exaggerated sense of independence and autonomy might be at the root of all your other forms of suffering,

And try to see through this delusion to how you truly are interdependent with the world around you.

One among equals in a world of constantly changing interconnected bodies matter and minds.

Renunciation

So in letting go of the causes of suffering, do you need to renounce sensual pleasures relationships? Even the invigorating conflicts that our delusions respond to is that the path to happiness. So true renunciation doesn’t mean giving up small pleasures like ice cream or hikes in the woods, or even giving up big ones, like making love to your partner or the joys of family and friends.

Renunciation isn’t rejecting the beautiful, pleasurable, meaningful parts of life. It’s letting go of the delusions.

Renunciation isn’t rejecting the beautiful, pleasurable, meaningful parts of life. It’s letting go of the delusions.

You wrap around pleasant and difficult experiences. Those delusions are the attachment, anger, and self centeredness that keep you from genuinely enjoying life’s fleeting pleasures, and weathering life’s inevitable pains. So are anger and attachment intrinsic to who you are, imagine letting go of them.

Then, free from craving might everything in fact feel better? And without neediness and resentment, wouldn’t your relationships be healthier and deeper?

Is your feeling of separateness essential to your nature?

Imagine letting go of a self-centered way of viewing the world.

Imagine seeing things as changing and impermanent from multiple perspectives with the long view that a happy, stable mind is more important than being right or wrong, winning or losing.

You renounce your self centered delusions, it’s natural that your heart softens and your concern for others grows.

You can expand these feelings with the practices of equanimity, love, compassion, and rejoicing.

Equanimity

So first practice equanimity to equalize your bias. Think of a friend, enemy and stranger, side by side in front of you. See how your labels of friend, enemy or stranger come from seeing only through your own perspective. From their side, each of them wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like you.

And then look at them from the perspective of others to some. Each of them is a dear friend to others, an enemy, and to many more a stranger. Relationships also change.

Remember friends who’ve turned into enemies or strangers. Remember enemies who’ve turned into friends.

And remember how your friends and enemies were all once strangers.

What would the world look like if we treated each other equally?

By realizing that relationships impermanent, may my actions help to create a more equitable world where everyone is treated fairly.

Love, compassion, and joy

Now, once you’ve established the foundation of equanimity, it’s possible to go further, to wish everyone, not only their basic dignities, but everything good that anyone could wish for.

So imagine the people you care about gathered beside and behind you. Family, friends, colleagues, heroes, wish them happiness and the causes of happiness.

May they have the material things they need, money, shelter, safety, may they be loved.

And then imagine your enemies gathered in front of you, specific ones from your life and ones from the greater world. They want to be happy too.

If it’s hard for you to accept this, remember that even from your own selfish perspective, if your enemies were truly happy, they’d probably stop harming you and the people you care about. Your enemies only cause harm because of their delusions.

Believing that hurting others will somehow make them happy. Wish your enemies happiness and even that you might be a cause of their happiness.

Then imagine how everyone else on the planet also deserves to be happy. Deserves the dignities of food, shelter, health security deserves to be loved. Imagine that everyone is given everything they need and aspire that you may become a cause of their happiness.

Now, just as everyone wants to be happy, no one wants to suffer think about your friends, family, colleagues, and all they suffer through. Picture them beside and behind you and wish for them to be free of their suffering.

Then imagine the hundreds of millions who also suffer from similar problems with health, money, grief, conflict, injustice, or mental illness. Wish for them to be free from their problems too.

Extend your compassion further to include the many people worldwide who face the severe difficulties of poverty, violence, racism, political oppression, being enslaved or sexually exploited. Think of all the suffering, the awful suffering around the world and wish for everyone to be free of it.

Then bring to mind your enemies who also don’t want to suffer. They also face problems with their mind, health, material conditions, wish for your enemies to be free from suffering too. So now recall all the kindness all the good that your family, friends, and colleagues accomplished in the past 24 hours. Think of all the good things that happened to the people close to you.

They heard kind words. They were hugged and held. They ate delicious, nourishing meals. They received wealth recognition, success. They felt loved and appreciated. So rejoice in all the good. They enjoyed and feel that they deserved it. And then in the same way think about people you don’t know but admire religious leaders, compassionate politicians.

Humanitarians activists, caregivers take a moment to rejoice in the great things they accomplished today that you either know of or can easily imagine, and all the good they experienced too. And then this is harder but without feeling jealous or spiteful, try to also see the good in your enemies, the praise they received, their achievements, wealth, relationships, whatever good they did today, if it’s possible.

And now examine who you are with intelligent curiosity. Try to remember a time you were criticized or felt strong anger or craving. This activates the exaggerated sense of I who feels separate and self-centered.

The interdependent nature of reality

Move through the parts of your body like you did earlier while meditating on impermanence. But now, as you imagine your body’s organs, cells, molecules, and particles for each part ask yourself if you find that separate self in any of them, you can stop longer at the brain if you find yourself there. Search through its neurons, dendrites, axons, one side of the brain or the other.

Do you find yourself in any of those parts?

Ask these questions openly without needing to find any answer. Then look for yourself in the pleasant, unpleasant, and indifferent feelings you have in response to your senses and thoughts.

Do you find yourself in these emotional reactions? Search for yourself in the bundled sensory impulses and thoughts that your mind labels as objects, people, and ideas. Are you this mental factor of perception that labels and organizes inner and outer reality, or are you urge, the mental factor that drives you to action?

Now search for yourself in the space of your mind, the place where other mental factors appear. Is this space expansive or confined, bright or dark? Are you the entire space or only some part of it? The mind can appear as moments of consciousness that grow, abide, diminish, and disappear.

Are you any one of those moments?

Are you the sum of past moments?

Do you find yourself only in the present moment diving forward into each new moment of awareness?

If you don’t find yourself let your mind relax into this non finding, self is only a label placed on changing mental experience, Not finding that self doesn’t negate your existence.

But it simply reveals that the way you exist is much richer, more interdependent, and changing than it ordinarily seems. A comeback from ultimate reality to conventional reality.

Things do exist, but only as labels applied by your mind to collections of parts. Everything comes together through endless chains of causes and effects, including you who don’t exist in the solid, unchanging, separate way that makes you feel lonely, needy, and unsatisfied.

The interdependent nature of reality means that you’re alive, changing, interconnected with everything and everyone else in the universe. You can feel and express love and compassion, and your smallest, harmful, or beneficial acts have lasting impacts on the world. And your mind feel that we’ve accomplished so much good in this meditation and in this retreat simply by imagining the heroic arc of these stages of the path, each of us has increased the strength of beneficial neural pathways.

Dedication

To create the causes of a happier, more meaningful, connected life. May all the good from this meditation manifest in helpful, skillful actions and interactions as we go through the rest of our day to make the world a kinder, more compassionate, just, and joyful place.

You can come out of the meditation.

End of the meditation

Does anyone notice how the path seems to be filled with paradoxes? How meditating on suffering is a cause of happiness or how you use intellectual thoughts to arrive at non conceptual realization of ultimate nature of reality. What, each of the seeming contradictions really demonstrates is non duality is binary, polarized ways of thinking. They’re not only inaccurate, but they’re also harmful, to our well being and to the well being of society, the environment, like Democrat and Republican for example, or nature and civilization to think of that these are polar opposites.

That’s why Buddhism’s Middle Way is so aptly named because it encourages us to find, sustainable, joyful way of living that lies between extremes, in particular the extremes of craving and despair or alienation and attachment, or apathy and panic, so there’s something in between.

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