Happiness Is Prior to the Content of Experience

The perennial understanding found in all the great spiritual traditions is that peace and happiness are the very nature of our being. If we understand this and lead a life consistent with its implications, no further teaching or practice is necessary. Our essential nature, happiness, lies behind the mind, prior to the content of experience and independent of it. We not need to be liberated or made peaceful through effort or practice but simply to recognise our self as that. To effect this recognition, all we need do is come back to our self from the adventure of experience and come to rest in our essential being. It is in this self-abiding that suffering is dissolved. First we recognise our innate peace in the background of experience, and in time, experience loses its capacity to veil this peace. It shines in the midst of our experience.