Everyone has something special to offer the world. If you find that you are not reaching your full potential it’s not because you’re an exception to the rule. It’s because something’s holding you back. In order to be happy, we have to find out what that something is and neutralize it. In Buddhist terms we refer to that something as the defilements of the mind, namely greed, anger and delusion.
Unfortunately, the English terms we have for these concepts do not properly explain their meaning. By greed we mean any kind of craving for an experience beyond what we need to survive comfortably. This is not the a typical definition for the word greed so we need to be careful when passing judgement about ourselves if we have these desires which are, of course, almost universal. When we use the word anger in this context, we mean craving for our current experience to cease. For example, this can include even mild dislike such as when we get a whiff of an unpleasant odor. Again, aversion to various sense experiences is the norm rather than the exception. Finally, by delusion, we are referring to many different kinds of mind states that all have in common a basis in ignorance of the true nature of the mental and material world. An easy way to think of delusion is to understand it as the view that this present moment is not good enough. So, delusion is the underlying basis for craving. Nobody should pretend that it’s easy to be free from delusion — such a person would be very rare in this world. All of these negative mind states operate to cloud our judgement especially when they arise in more extreme forms and it is this obscuring of wisdom that holds us back from happiness.
Now that we know what we’re up against, we can discuss what can be done to solve the problem. Thankfully the Buddha devised a method for gradually reducing and eventually eliminating the defilements from the mind. This method is based not on theory but on the actual workings of mental phenomena. When craving arises in the mind and we fail to observe the state of our mind in the present moment one of two things will happen. Either, we will take action to try to satisfy the craving or we will suppress it by trying to ignore it or by focusing on something else. If we try to satisfy the craving, we will often be successful but only in the short term. Later, the craving will come back except this time it will be strengthened. The second potential is that we suppress the craving. This too can seem to have positive results in the short term but in the long run it will just result in craving rearing its head in a very intense fashion.
The Buddha’s method was to direct our attention at the craving and become aware of it until it dissipates on its own. This approach has more long-term effects because it begins to break the cycle of habit that has formed in the mind. If we practice this method on a regular basis, the results are very positive because we can eventually eliminate those pesky defilements that have been holding us back all these years.