The real source of happiness is inner peace. External conditions can only make us happy if our mind is peaceful. If we integrate Buddha's teachings into our daily life, we will be able to solve all our inner problems and attain a truly peaceful mind. We need to ask ourselves, what is the most meaningful way to use our life?

Life as we know it ultimately is or leads to suffering in one way or another. Suffering is caused by craving. This is often expressed as a deluded clinging to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood, or to the things or phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness. Because we and the world are imperfect, impermanent, and not separate, we are forever clinging to things, each other, and ourselves, in a mistaken effort at permanence.

Suffering ends when craving ends which is achieved by eliminating delusion. In essence this means to eliminate our negative and deluded states of mind, and to cultivate positive, peaceful states. The first step towards changing our mind is to identify which states of mind produce happiness and which produce suffering. When our mind is under the influence of delusions we are out of touch with reality. Delusions are just bad mental habits, and like all habits they can be broken.

What is delusion? When we do not thoroughly and properly understand the phenomenon around us, we tend to be deluded and to have wrong ideas, which lead us to make mistakes. In the state of delusion, we float, confused, not seeing, not knowing, and insulated from the pain and salvation of deep experience. Instead of seeing each moment as it is, we react to each moment from our past pain and frustration; then we react to the pain and frustration; then we react to that reaction; and so on and on. In this way a special form of mental torment is created that consists of seemingly endless layers of pain, negative emotion, self-doubt and self-justification -- known in Buddhism as "samsara," the illusory world we think of as real.

Instead of experiencing life directly, we create a worldview and experience it. That worldview serves to protect us through a system of explanations; but it also makes each of us into an isolated self, separated from nature, from real experience, from spirituality, and from one another -- causing all experience to be distorted and "out of joint," and ourselves to suffer from living at one remove from life. We are nearly always, in some degree, outsiders to the world and even to our own experience.

Only through resolving superstition and delusion, can enlightenment be attained. This is the objective of Buddha's teaching. This wisdom will enable all beings to differentiate true from false, proper from improper, right from wrong, and good from bad. It can help us to establish a dynamic and caring attitude toward life and our surroundings. When we fully face, accept, and lighten the self-amplified sufferings of our lives; when we begin to experience life beyond our delusions and confusions, beyond self, beyond culture, beyond knowledge -- what we find is not a meaningless universe of alien forces, but our true home.

We can weaken our anger by familiarizing our mind with patience and love. We definitely need to make an effort to liberate ourselves from the mental prison of our deluded minds through letting go of clinging, hatred, and ignorance, and the full acceptance of imperfection, impermanence, and interconnectedness. Their boundless and all-encompassing compassion gives Buddhas the energy to work without interruption for the sake of others. If we train our mind to become peaceful we will be happy all the time, even in the most adverse conditions. It seems as if our mind is like a balloon in the wind -- blown here and there by external circumstances. Reaching this liberated state is achieved by following the path laid out by the Buddha.