Lama Zopa Rinpoche says that the vast majority of human beings on this planet have absolutely no idea that what goes on in their mind plays any role at all in their lives. That’s pretty shocking, isn’t it?
What does Rinpoche mean? He means that when it comes to happiness and suffering, we totally believe that our mind plays no role at all; that the outside world is the only cause.
This, of course, is the philosophy of attachment. The second we wake up till the moment we go to sleep, what is our attention focused on? The outside world. We spend our entire lives trying to find the things and people and events that we believe will cause happiness and avoid the things that we believe will cause suffering.
The outside world does play a role, of course it does. But for the Buddha it’s not the main source of happiness and suffering. The mind is.
These are easy words, but the meaning is hard to grasp.
What I find fascinating is that we actually know this when it comes to becoming a musician or a cook. We know with certainty that what goes on in our mind totally plays a role – that it’s the main thing! If you want to turn yourself into a musician you have to program your mind with all the complicated theories about music. And you have to be exact, precise – we know that you can’t just think any old thought. Every tiny thought about music counts.
And then you start to experience the reality of the music when you play the piano.
In other words, very simply, we know that we create the musician, and it starts with the mind, the thoughts, the theories.
But when it comes to becoming a happy person or a suffering person we really do not realize that we create that person: we think the outside world creates the happy person, the suffering person. That’s like saying that the main reason you’re a good musician is because of the composer, because of the piano, because of your piano teacher – “No, I don’t play any role at all!” That’s pretty weird! It shows how we are so utterly disconnected from ourselves.
So how are we the main cause of our own happiness and our own suffering?
If we spend our day being angry, being jealous, having l0w self-esteem, having attachment, we are very simply creating an unhappy person. Check out how you feel when you feel these things! How bizarre to think they don’t play a role!
And we think they don’t because we’re so fixated on the external causes.
Forget about karma, forget about future and past lives – it’s a revelation to realize that what we think (and then, of course, what we do and say) right now, each day, produces the person we become. Practicing anger and jealousy and anxiety every day produces the unhappy person we become. Practicing patience and kindness and compassion every day produces the happy person we become. Practicing piano every day produces the musician we become.
It’s hardly rocket science!
I always use the example of my friend Sunny who spent seventeen years in prison in Florida, much of it on death row. She and her husband were accused of murdering two policemen. She spent years in solitary confinement with nothing but the bible they gave her. She lost her kids. Her parents were killed in a car accident. And when her husband was executed, his head burst into flames.
Talk about suffering! She knew she couldn’t change the things out there – the police, the judge, the jury, the prison environment – so she decided, “I had to take responsibility for what was in my mind.” And what was in her mind? Hopelessness, despair, rage, unbearable pain. Can you imagine!
But she had the astonishing wisdom to know that what went on in her mind played the main role in her happiness and suffering. So she worked on herself for years, in that cell. She used her yoga, created her own methods, and gradually transformed her own mind into the mind of a happy, fulfilled person. At the beginning she said she’d give herself permission to be raging angry for five minutes, and then stop and go back to her inner work.
She wasn’t a Buddhist, had no particular spiritual path. Just incredible emotional intelligence. I never fail to be amazed at her!
And this is all Buddha is telling us. That’s his method for how to stop suffering and get happiness: change our mind from neurotic, painful, deluded thoughts to virtuous, useful, wise thoughts.