Love the best habit

We redifined the meaning of happiness: Away from the normal persuit after sensory pleasure, excitments, fame, power and even away from normal ordinary relationships.

We established happiness to be a peaceful mind because the increase of peaceful mind never turns into disturbed mind while the increase of all the happinesses we experience from sensory pleasure or from power or from reputation or even from ordinary relationships eventually will turn into pain.

So happy people are people whose mind is peacefull.

There are different levels of peace of mind which is why there are different kinds of people who have happiness.

We are looking at the habits of these kinds of happy people.

What deferintiates people who know how to develop and keep a peaceful mind at all time from people who's peace of mind is dependent on external things such as drink drugs etc is the ability to have a different understanding of what they see.

They have the ability to interprut what they see in a way that will pacify their mind.

When we introduce ideas like happiness is a state of mind, uncertainty or what we started looking at last week - grasping, we are introducing you to ideas that are to be introduced into your daily way of thinking.

Initially it is only theoretical but in time you begin to realize how it manifests in your life, you begin to see uncertanity in action you begin to see disturbed mind in action and if you begin to have a meditation practice you begin to see the meaning of peaceful mind in action.

The more you engage the theory the more you try to first remember it during you day to day life and then begin to re interprut the events of life through it (remembering that you wantn to be happy - meaning peaceful- all the time and that this is the most important thing) the more you will change and the more happy you will become.

The core of all our distrubed states of mind is a grasping at who we are who other people are and what situations are as if we see an objective truly existent reality - a reality beyond the mere perception of the reality that we see.

The buddhist teachings we teach argues for non-objectively existent reality.

This is very techinchal and difficult to accept but it is most important for the peace of our mind and even more improtant still when we move to learn to love.

For if we hold that we exist objectively we will natuarlly hold other people as existing objectively as they appear - and since they often appear to exist as bad people we believe they are bad people.

And even if we accept that love(I haven't explaind it yet) is worthwhile - we will finally come to a person who not only does not deserve our love but deserve our hatred or deserves to be harmed.

This for Buddhist is unacceptable (although it is the highest level of practice to love so called evil people) those who can do that have the most peaceful and noble mind of all.

This is based on the understanding that what something is depends totally on the mind that understand that thing.

Why do Buddhist believe it is possible to love everyone?

Since people do not exist as objectively as we believe they do it is possible to come to understand them in a manner that is conducive to us loving them.

We can become convinced in this by taking simple examples - once we agree with simple examples we can take it to more complex examples.

We need to remember why we do this - why we choose to re unedrstand people - because we want to be happy by keeping a peaceful mind.