The Art of Happiness Read Online Free PDF

him to achieve this. Although he is a Buddhist monk with a lifetime of Buddhist training and study, I began to wonder if one could identify a set of his beliefs or practices that could be utilized by non-Buddhists as well—practices that could be directly applied to our lives to simply help us become happier, stronger, perhaps less afraid.
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    Eventually, I had an opportunity to explore his views in greater depth, meeting with him daily during his stay in Arizona and following up these discussions with more extensive conversations at his home in India. As we conversed, I soon discovered that we had some hurdles to overcome as we struggled to reconcile our different perspectives: his as a Buddhist monk, and mine as a Western psychiatrist. I began one of our first sessions, for example, by posing to him certain common human problems, illustrating with several lengthy case histories. Having described a woman who persisted in self-destructive behaviors despite the tremendous negative impact on her life, I asked him if he had an explanation for this behavior and what advice he could offer. I was taken aback when after a long pause and reflection, he simply said, “I don’t know,” and shrugging his shoulders, laughed good-naturedly.
    Noting my look of surprise and disappointment at not receiving a more concrete response, the Dalai Lama said, “Sometimes it’s very difficult to explain why people do the things they do ... You’ll often find that there are no simple explanations. If we were to go into the details of individual lives, since a human being’s mind is so complex, it would be quite difficult to understand what is going on, what exactly is taking place.”
    I thought that he was being evasive. “But as a psychotherapist, my task is to find out why people do the things that they do ...”
    Once again, he broke into the laugh that many people find so extraordinary—a laugh saturated with humor and goodwill, unaffected, unembarrassed, beginning with a deep resonance and effortlessly climbing several octaves to end in a high pitch of delight.
    â€œI think that it would be extremely difficult to try and figure out how the minds of five billion people work,” he said, still laughing. “It would be an impossible task! From the Buddhist viewpoint, there are many factors contributing to any given event or situation ... There can be so many factors at play, in fact, that sometimes you may never have a full explanation of what’s going on, at least not in conventional terms.”
    Sensing some discomfort on my part, he observed, “In trying to determine the source of one’s problems, it seems that the Western approach differs in some respects from the Buddhist approach. Underlying all Western modes of analysis is a very strong rationalistic tendency—an assumption that everything can be accounted for. And on top of that, there are constraints created by certain premises that are taken for granted. For example, recently I met with some doctors at a university medical school. They were talking about the brain and stated that thoughts and feelings were the result of different chemical reactions and changes in the brain. So, I raised the question: Is it possible to conceive the reverse sequence, where the thought gives rise to the sequence of chemical events in the brain? However, the part that I found most interesting was the answer that the scientist gave. He said, ‘We start from the premise that all thoughts are products or functions of chemical reactions in the brain.’ So it is simply a kind of rigidity, a decision not to challenge their own way of thinking.”
    He was silent for a moment, then went on: “I think that in modern Western society, there seems to be a powerful cultural conditioning that is based on science. But in some instances, the basic premises and parameters set up by Western science can limit your ability to deal with