If you would spend some time to research into the life of the third world countries, you might start to shed some tears after a while. Their living conditions are just dreadful. Diseases are raging everywhere, people are dying every day. Compare this to the living condition in developed countries, and this will be a real eye-opener if you have never been thinking about this before.

I have to say that I’m a bit disappointed with ourselves. While we enjoy probably the best living condition, technologies, food, and health, we are still longing for something else. Something that is so elusive that we are willing to be unhappy in our pursuit of it. Nobody really knows what we actually want and need to be completely happy. Even when we are totally healthy and don't have any financial difficulty, most of us still feels that we lack something inside, that some part of us is still missing.

What I am going to say next might sound illogical, but it can illuminate your mind if you are willing to spend some time to ponder upon it. The reason you are unhappy is because you can afford the luxury to be unhappy. Let’s take a journey back to the time of our ancestors, the time when they have to hunt for their food and protect themselves from preying animals at night. Do you think they would have time to feel unhappy about their situation? No! Survival was a priority. Would you worry about happiness if you don’t know whether you would be alive or not tomorrow? I don’t think so.

Let’s observe this fact closer. When we are faced with a great challenge of fulfilling our basic needs such as food and shelter, we are focused on doing that only, and by “we” I mean “our mind”. As time went by, things changed and it becomes much easier to find food and shelter. As food is no longer a concern for us, our mind is free to wander about, to find the next thing we can tackle and conquer. This in turn gave birth to various technological advances in all areas of our life. As our life was getting better and better, the focus of our mind keeps changing. And we have now arrived at this point where happiness (or the lack thereof) is the focus of our mind.

It should be obvious by now that unhappiness boils down to the way our mind looks at things. It rarely has anything to do with our living condition or any outer circumstances. Our mind tends to look at things up close that it disregards the big picture of things. We need to zoom out. We need to understand that when we look at things up close, we lose the sense of oneness with anything else in life. We become unhappy.

I hope you will contemplate upon this and try to comprehend the true nature of the mind. Fortunately, with practice, we can gradually learn to control our mind, to direct the flow of our thoughts to benefit us. Don’t expect this to happen overnight though. It’s easy to fall into bad habit, but it’s so hard to form a good habit. I believe though that with enough perseverance nothing is impossible.

Tony Yao