The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries

Every life is a journey through the unknown. Along the way, however, we tend to encounter the same perplexing questions again and again. Some are cosmic enigmas that have always tested the human mind: What is my purpose in life? What happens after I die? Others are puzzles presented by daily life in modern society: What, if anything, justifies assisted suicide? What is my personal responsibility to the homeless? According to Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost Western Buddhist scholars and teachers, the more we seek to resolve these mysteries, the more fully we live. Along with his own personal beliefs, the author presents a variety of thoughtful points of view representing different schools of Buddhism, other religions, spirituality in general, and pragmatism. "The Big Questions" challenges readers in the most stimulating and thoughtful way to formulate individual, authentic responses to life's big questions.

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Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.

--HELEN KELLER

The time to be happy is now,

The place to be happy is here,

The way to be happy is to make others so.

--ROBERT INGERSOLL, 1842-1910

What Is Happiness and Where Can It Be Found?

In the early 1970s, thousands of spiritual pilgrims gathered to hear the Dalai Lama. He spoke in Bodh Gaya, India, near the Bodhi Tree where the historical Buddha experienced enlightenment 2,500 years ago. I was among them--a 21-year-old hippie who had taken the Overland Route from Europe through Turkey and Iran to Nepal. At the end of the Dalai Lama's talk, another longhaired American traveler asked him, "What is the meaning of life?" The Dalai Lama instantly responded, "To be happy and to make others happy."

Frankly, I was disappointed. My college philosophy courses had led me to expect something more intellectual, recondite, or at least poetic. Wasn't that answer too facile? And isn't mere happiness a hedonistic, shallow, self-centered concern? After years of pondering that answer, I fully appreciated how profound it actually was. Yes, it sounds simple--just be happy and make others happy--but that doesn't mean it's easy to put into practice. How consistently are we able to think and act in ways that genuinely make us happy and that also make others happy? How is it even possible to have that kind of contentment, satisfaction, and mastery over our lives?

I'm not talking about maintaining surface-level happiness, like always wearing a smile or being a people-pleaser by constantly doing whatever others ask us to do. What I'm referring to goes much, much deeper. How often do we look for happiness by trying to escape from responsibility, by pursuing sensory gratification, or even by cultivating numbness (as in "feeling no pain")? In fact, these very endeavors wind up causing us grief in the end. I think of happiness as a deeply felt sense of joy and well- being, flourishing within a balanced, stable, integrated heart and mind. Aristotle called happiness "the only goal we choose for its own sake and never as a means to something else." Happiness may generally be thought of as a good feeling, but it also evolves from an attitude or way of choosing-- consciously or unconsciously--how we view, interpret, and thus experience the world.

A wise elder I know said that happiness is love--loving all of life, just as it is, while working to tweak it just a bit as needed. I have often said that happiness is contentment and acceptance, which is perhaps a little one- sided. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the classic The Little Prince, said, "True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new."

A Tibetan lama once told me that the main problem with worldly people is that they are constantly seeking happiness and fulfillment outside themselves, where it cannot be found. Epicurus thought that a beautiful, righteous, and wise life was both the cause and the product of happiness. Plato famously said that the happiest man was the one who had no malice in his soul. Buddha himself further outlined what he called the five kinds of happiness:

. The happiness of the sense of pleasure

. The happiness from giving and sharing, including both external virtuous acts and inner mental states and attitudes

. The happiness, inner peace, and bliss arising from intensely concentrated states of meditative consciousness concomitant with purity of mind

. The happiness and fulfillment coming from insightful wisdom and profound understanding

. Nirvanic happiness, everlasting bliss and contentment, serenity, beatitude, and oneness

According to Buddhist positive psychology, happiness is part of our natural state, only obscured by attachments that veil our radiant, innate nature and limit our potential. The Hevajra Tantra teaches, "We are all Buddhas by nature; it is only adventitious obscurations which veil that fact." What we seek, we are. It is all within. This is the Buddha's secret.

Research in the emerging field of positive psychology--focusing on one's inner strengths and potential rather than on one's outer failures and problems--has shown that learned optimism and flexibility contribute a great deal to resetting happiness levels that have been compromised by genetic inheritance, personal biochemistry, social conditioning, and individual life experiences. This finding conflicts with what many scientists previously thought and confirms what yogis and other serious meditators have always known: We have an innate capacity to be happy that is independent from what happens to us.

The so-called happiness quotient (satisfaction level) and the genetic and socialized set-point for our mood carburetor (or emotional thermostat) can apparently be reset. When mood is positively shifted through intentional mental training, usually associated with mindfulness, compassion- development, and concentration exercises, the brain's left neo-cortex, involved in positive emotion, is boosted.

Part of the Buddhist practice of meditation is to awaken the mind to the fresh immediacy and preciousness of each moment. I know this can sound rather mystical and impractical to people who have never tried meditation, but recent scientific studies have also proved that, yes, meditators do tend to be happier people. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin studied the brainwaves of regular Buddhist meditators and found an unusual amount of electromagnetic activity in the prefrontal lobe areas linked to positive mind states. Researcher Fleet Maul, founder and president of Prison Dharma Network said, "Usually when we use the word 'happiness,' it refers to how we feel when things appear to be going our way. This kind of happiness is superficial and ultimately unsatisfying. During the 14 years I served in a maximum-security federal prison, it was clear that things did not appear to be going my way. Practicing the Buddhist path, grounded in meditation, study, precepts, practice, and service, I discovered an abiding cheerfulness and joy. This kind of happiness is worth pursuing."

My old friend Matthieu Ricard writes in his book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill, "I have come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love." I have often heard the Dalai Lama speak about altruism as the answer to our ills, because so much of the world's suffering and misery--both at the individual and collective levels--can be traced to greed, hatred, fear, and other negative qualities stemming from egotism and selfishness. Once he said, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Dalai Lama and the psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler, M.D. In this book, they maintain that happy people are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, creative, successful in mating, and better parents, able to tolerate life's daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people.

Like the Dalai Lama and the Buddha himself, many modern scientists and philosophers agree that serving others is the secret to happiness, fulfillment, and a good and beautiful life. Others, however, posit that selfishness is a biological, evolutionary imperative, part and parcel of our survival mechanism. They say that altruism offers no added value or demonstrable advantages to our state as human beings, but is merely a faith- based practice. Whom shall we believe? Can we not find out for ourselves, in the inner laboratory of our own hearts and minds, through close scrutiny, trial and error, and our own experience? What I have noticed over the years is that the fewer selfish preoccupations I have and the more connected and thus less separate or boundaried I feel, the better things seem to go for me and the more I find in common with others.

One lama I know was recently dubbed the "happiest person in the world" by our trustworthy media, due to his outstanding performance on neuroscience tests (at the Mayo Clinic research labs), where he performed 700 to 800 percent higher on the scale than the average person--or even the average meditator--when it came to intentionally producing good feelings through deliberate mental meditative concentrations revolving around common Tibetan Buddhist compassion and altruistic loving-kindness practices. The Bodhisattva exemplar of India, the 8th-century PeaceMaster Shantideva, said, "Happiness in this world comes from thinking less about ourselves and more about the well-being of others. Unhappiness comes from being preoccupied with the self." For millennia this age-old altruistic thought has been a Buddhist touchstone in the quest for happiness and satisfaction.

Some of us look at our possessions as sources of happiness. By possessions, I mean not only our material wealth but also our role in life, our status, and our public self-image. Our consumer society fuels and feeds on this kind of misplaced value system. It manipulates us to desire ever more wealth and popularity. Ubiquitous commercials even supply us with happiness behavior modeling: actors who demonstrate the joyful mannerisms we are supposed to display when we use a certain product or attain a particular status. What they don't show is all the unhappiness that can so easily come when we adopt these fantasy images as serious goals and they fail to deliver. We often hear this kind of unhappiness jokingly referred to as an illness: "Oh, she's got a bad case of affluenza!" or "I'm afraid he's suffering from hipatitis--you know, the terminal desire to be cool." The nervous laughter, however, masks a deep inner concern: Why aren't more people happy with these things? Why can't I be happy with these things? If these things don't bring happiness, then what does? Henny Youngman, an old- school Catskills comedian, said: "What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money." Happiness can't be bought, but the fact that statistics reveal that shopping is America's favorite pastime seems to indicate that we mistakenly believe it can be.

We may think that getting what we want or having things go our way is the answer, but that does not necessarily turn out to be the case, either. My student Shana, for example, admits that she associates happiness, in part, with not having to work. When she takes a day or even a week off from her public relations job, she feels relieved and enjoys, at least intermittently, the novelty of the experience, the absence of specific pressures from her workload, colleagues, and clients, and the greater freedom she experiences with no appointment schedule. Meanwhile, she also feels slightly disoriented and still somewhat anxious about what's going on in her work world, although she usually manages to discount these feelings. She has committed herself to the point of view that a vacation is essentially a way to be happy, and her work, although financially necessary and occasionally rewarding in other ways, is essentially not a source of happiness. As a result, her vacation life is never quite as much fun as she'd expected and leaves her ultimately unsatisfied, because she dreads going back to the office again afterwards. Meanwhile, her work life becomes even more identified as a problem and even less able to give her a sense of accomplishment.

Shana's situation illustrates that we are not really very good at predicting what will make us happy or unhappy in any definite way. Instead, we seem to wander around searching, inevitably reliving the same old dualistic dramas: pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and shame, praise and criticism. Buddhists call them the Eight Worldly Pitfalls. It is not exactly that we can't or shouldn't enjoy things in the outside world. It's more a question of how attached we become to the world's impermanent, unreliable, and dreamlike phenomena. The more we associate them with happiness, the more they're bound to make us unhappy sooner or later. Samuel Johnson wrote: "The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove."

Although research reports that most people say they are happy most of the time, annual antidepressant sales top 80 billion dollars in the United States. Meanwhile, in a Buddhist counterpoint: The tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan has placed happiness at the top of the agenda, with the king announcing that prosperity is measured in Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product.

According to the World Database of Happiness in Nations Rank Report 2004, the most satisfied nations on Earth are, from the top: Switzerland, Malta, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, and the USA. Feelings of happiness and satisfaction are more prevalent in countries with greater resources and basic necessities, personal freedoms, security, peace, education, social involvement, and so forth. According to researchers, if you want to raise your level of happiness by changing the external circumstances of your life, you should do the following: live in a wealthy democracy, get married, avoid negative events and negative emotions, acquire a rich social network, and get religion. Making more money, staying healthy, getting as much education as possible, changing your race through subterfuge or intermarriage, or moving to a sunnier climate have no overall statistical beneficial effect. People who cohabitate with others are more likely to report happiness than those who live alone, as are children in intact families and adults with health, paying work, and active lives. Often enough, retirement does not seem to bring people the happiness and contentment they once imagined. Little statistical correlation has been shown--ten to fifteen percent--between wealth, health, beauty, and happiness.

Some people become attached to a particular method of finding happiness because it once brought them a special kind of ecstatic (literally, "standing outside") pleasure. This is how hardcore addictions are built: The happiness-junkie returns again and again to the food, drink, dope, gambling habit, mindless TV viewing, reckless behavior, or abusive lover that once seemed to deliver exactly what he or she wanted. After habituation, the same satisfaction no longer comes, but the junkie can't stop thinking that it just might the next time. Sadly, the odds are woefully not in his or her favor.