What is True for Us is Also True for Others

Everyone wants to be happy all the time, but so few people actually are. Many of us may not even believe that lasting happiness is possible.

According to Buddha, we each possess an extraordinary potential for enlightenment – a state of limitless peace, happiness, love and wisdom through which we can be of immeasurable benefit to others and to our world.

Buddha revealed that every single living being has the seed of enlightenment. Everyone. That includes, you, your best friend, your worst enemy, and all the animals and insects you’ve ever come across or can imagine. How incredible to think that each and every one of us has the internal infrastructure to one day become an actual Buddha – a being who only experiences profound peace, happiness, joy and even bliss, and exists purely to bring benefit to others.

Actualizing Our Potential for True Inner Peace and Happiness

The first step in awakening our potential is to learn to identify with our own Buddha nature, and in so doing gradually increase our capacity for positive states of mind through contemplation and meditation.

The process is very simple. What’s key is that we learn to practice it regularly.

First, we establish a connection to our peaceful heart and allow ourself to absorb into that experience. This is how we step out of our ordinary mind which is often stressed and tense and caught up in negative states such as anger and frustration. In Buddhism, we call this peaceful mind our “pure nature” because the experience of peace arises naturally when we stop thinking about all the things that drive us crazy.

We then abide in this experience of peace. We relax into it and allow it to pervade our being.

We recognize “This is my pure nature. This is who I really am. I’m not that crazy person who gets caught up in anger, frustration, stress and anxiety. This is my limitless potential, my Buddha nature. And if my mind can be a little bit more peaceful, then that peace can grow, and so can my experience of happiness and joy.”

This is how we gradually work our way towards becoming a Buddha. When we’re in a peaceful state of mind, we’re not in our limiting self identification. Instead, we’re pervaded by a spacious, expansive sense of who we are and what is possible. The more we do this, the more we identify ourself as that person.

This is the truth of who we are. When we’re in this state, we’re in the truth.

In the end, enlightenment is the full expression of truth. Abiding in this state we experience a world that is completely pure, joyful, and blissful.

Finally, this is ours and others greatest potential.