Happiness - Matthieu Ricard - Book Summary & Review

Happiness

A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

Matthieu Ricard

A book on Happiness by the ‘Happiest Man’ in the world. In his book, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard shows that happiness is not just an emotion, but a skill that can be developed. Free of jargon, Happiness contains simple exercises that will train the mind to recognize and pursue happiness by concentrating on the fundamental things in life, and in doing so change the way we view the world.

Main Ideas of the Book

Banish negativity and suffering from your mind forever.

We all want to have the key to happiness. But, it is not the external things like success or wealth which makes us happy. It’s only by looking inside ourselves that we can find real joy.

Real happiness is a long-term mental state we have to consciously work toward. There’s a wide gap between the Western concept of happiness and the Buddhist ideology of true, long-lasting happiness. Many Westerners think of happiness as a temporary, fleeting feeling. The intensity and period depend on situations outside their control.

 
Happiness, however, isn’t limited to such fleeting moments. Real, profound happiness comes with having a healthy state of mind. This means cultivating a mental state free of memories and future plans. The only thing that matters is the present. The key to happiness and fulfilling life is being at peace with the present.

The Buddhist thought holds that one can attain a state of profound and sustained well-being when freed of negative emotions. Buddhists denote this state with a Sanskrit word: sukha. We have a lot of power over our happiness. Happiness is a matter of interpretation. We cannot change the world, but we can change our way of interception. 

Happiness is not the same thing as pleasure. To achieve true happiness, we have to understand what it is – and then identify what really encourage sit. But many people end up confusing happiness with pleasure.

Pleasure might seem like the fastest and easiest road to happiness, but it is not it. Pleasure is momentary by nature: it occurs under certain circumstances at a certain time. A pleasurable experience can quickly become neutral or unpleasant because pleasure is unstable and fleeting.

Long-lasting happiness shouldn’t be confused with pleasure. Pleasure only offers short-term satisfaction and don’t have much influence on your well-being.

We focus on external pleasures because we’re too scared to turn our attention towards our inner world. But if we lose this connection, life becomes meaningless. Western countries have high depression rates because of this.

The ego is the true source of suffering and conflicted emotion. Most people put themselves before all else. Buddhism sees such egotism as a source of misery.
The ego causes a conflict with personal identity. Buddhism distinguishes between two “I”s: the natural, instinctive “I” and the conceptual “I” we imagine but that doesn’t actually exist.

The second “I” slowly becomes the core of a person’s personality. They’ll turn away from anything they think threatens it, and lean towards anything that flatters it.

Our egos randomly assign certain qualities to the people and things around us. It leads us to put label on people and things. And once we put a label on something it becomes hard to think of it in any other way.

Trouble arises as the gap between the real world and the ego’s conceptions widen. The ego will reach a point where it will falter and shatter, taking your self-confidence with it and leaving you with only frustration and suffering.

Free yourself from your own ego. The concepts of identity and status are closely connected to unhappiness. That’s why it’s important to disengage from your ego. A person who clings to a specific self-image will do anything to make sure that that image is accepted. They often devote all their time and energy seeking validation.

According to Buddhism, real confidence and inner peace is achieved through egolessness. Ego is too fragile to be a reliable foundation. Detaching from our ego from ourselves makes us less vulnerable and gives us inner strength, putting us on the path toward true happiness.

Humility is another source of happiness and inner freedom. Being humble, we won’t need validation from others, it prevents much distress and disappointment.

Your thoughts and emotions can be your worst enemies. Thoughts and emotions can be your best friends – but they can also be your worst enemies.

The main sources of pain in our lives aren’t often what we think they are. When you feel like life is falling apart and everything in the world is against you. Any little thought or perception can become a source of suffering.

We get consumed by negative thoughts during difficult times, but those thoughts are often far away from reality. Negative emotions can get out of control when we dwell on them.

It’s important to identify your triggers. Overcoming your triggers is an important part of the journey toward inner peace.

If we don’t control our emotions, they might end up controlling us. How can we prevent this? Buddhism holds that opposite emotions cannot arise at the same instant. It’s impossible to feel two emotions at the same time.

We can gradually eliminate negative emotions by familiarizing ourselves with more kindness and positive emotions. Positive thoughts work as an antidote to the negativity. They’re the true source of long-lasting well-being.

We need to acknowledge the existence of these negative thoughts so they don’t consume us. Negative emotions resurface even when we try to suppress, this can lead to unhappiness.

Negative emotions can be overcome, and once they are, they disappear without leaving a trace. We can only understand our negative thoughts by analyzing them and their root cause. We need to think of them as a temporary state of suffering. This kind of thinking allows us to detach ourselves and prevents us from succumbing to it.  

Ruchika Verma

 You can purchase this wonderful book from Amazon