Everyone wants happiness yet few of us seem to find it. When our desire is satisfied, the next desire will appear, we are deeply caught up in the situation of satisfying one desire after another. In other words, happiness is always short-lived, and it is difficult to last forever.

According to Buddhism, there is lasting, stable happiness, and everyone has the potential to experience it. The causes of happiness lie within our own mind, and methods for achieving it can be practiced by anyone, anywhere, in any lifestyle—living in the city, working an eight-hour job, raising a family, playing on weekends.

By practicing meditation, we can learn to be happy at any time, in any situation, even difficult and painful ones. Eventually, we can free ourselves of problems like dissatisfaction, anger, and anxiety, finally, by realizing the actual way that things exist, we will eliminate completely the very source of all disturbing states of mind so that they will never arise again.

In our search for happiness, we go from one relationship to another, one job to another, one country to another. We study knowledge and skill, we work and make money, we leisure and entertainment, just about everything we do is an attempt to find real happiness and avoid suffering. There is nothing wrong with wanting happiness; there is nothing wrong with any of these attempts to find it. The problem is that we see things like relationships, possessions, and adventures as having some intrinsic ability to satisfy us, as being the cause of happiness. We do experience happiness with things outside ourselves, but it doesn’t truly satisfy us or free us from our problems. It is poor-quality happiness, unreliable and short-lived.

At the root of our problems is our fundamentally mistaken view of reality. We believe instinctively that people and things exist in and of themselves, from their own side; that they have an inherent nature, an inherent thing-ness. These qualities seem to be out there, in the objects themselves, quite independent of our viewpoint and everything else. We think, for example, that chocolate is inherently delicious or that success is inherently satisfying. But surely, if they were, they would never fail to give pleasure or to satisfy, and everyone would experience them in the same way.

Our mistaken idea is deeply ingrained and habitual, it colors all our relationships and dealings with the world. We probably rarely question whether the way we see things is the way they actually exist, but once we do it will be obvious that our picture of reality is exaggerated and one-sided. That's mean the good and bad qualities we see in things are actually created and projected by our own minds.