Everyone around us is searching: searching for a way to make this life meaningful, searching for a way to be happy. Every single move we ever make is done for this one goal. But nothing we ever do to try and make ourselves happy ever brings us happiness. We try so many things-meeting the right person, landing the right job-but none of them seem to work. Hasn't anyone figured it out yet? If you want to be happy yourself, learn to live your life for others. We can even change the world by just sitting down in one place, closing our eyes, and working on fixing our mind because everything we see in our outer world is simply an echo of what's inside.
Once upon a time, there was a man walking in the woods up on the mountains and he saw a group of students and their teacher sitting underneath a tree. There was such a sweet atmosphere around them that he wanted to get near them. He approached them, they welcomed him, and he sat down. The teacher continued teaching. The teacher was talking about kindness and the subtlety of existence. The man was excited to hear these words of the teacher. He felt that it was the most important thing that he had ever heard. He felt that the teacher's words were good words. He knew everything the teacher was saying, but somehow he had forgotten it. By hearing the teacher speak about kindness, he could feel it within himself. He felt such relief. He asked himself, "How did I know to walk this way today, and come upon this beautiful teaching?"
This type of relief is called samadhi. It is a special state of mind where we remember what is most important. It's sometimes called an awakening, since it suggests that before we experienced samadhi we were sleeping.
