Meditation, your spiritual practice should not just be a way to reduce stress, which it can,

but your spiritual practice should also lead you to a state of greater contentment, getting from your life what you want from your life?

Up until the 1970s, most of the clinical research that went into subjective well-being was pretty much into negative

emotions and negative pathologies, which meant they studied incidents of depression, suicidal ideation, despair, addictions,

but there wasn't a lot of studies into what made people happy and content.

And in...

So in the late 1970s,

Martin Seligman and the positive psychologist started developing

what they call baseline happiness tests that were set up to research and establish what are the underlying factors of human happiness.

And one of the first things these surveys and tests started to establish is what's called the

Hedonic treadmill, which is essentially that unlike what people tend to believe,

happiness is not a matter of accumulating wealth. It's not a matter of accumulating extreme amounts of goods, accumulating material objects.

the hodonic treadmill pretty much establishes that once you get

your most basic needs met just for the foreseeable future, not for the rest of your life,

but just for the foreseeable future.

If you have shelter, clothing enough to combat the cold, food, enough nutrition

to keep the body going, and medicine for when you're sick. If you've got those four things, what the Buddha called the requisites,

then accumulating wealth, objects, fame, recognition, beyond those basic requisites will not, I repeat,

will not make you any happier.

Wonderful study they did of people who won the lottery

and this study was repeated a couple of times.

And they found that after people addressed

...