The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Hello and welcome to this fourth of four talks on the truths of happiness,

and maybe it's a bit bold to put those two words together,

the four truths of happiness.

But I hopefully allowed to do it as a continuation

or building on the central Buddhist teaching

on the four noble truths of suffering.

Suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering,

and the path of practice leading to end of suffering.

And so the path leading to end of suffering doesn't just lead us to an end, a dead end.

You know, it just leads us to happiness.

And the Buddha was said to be the happy one.

The people who practiced with him were noted for being happy and smiling.

And happiness and peace is probably the most common emotional characteristic

of someone who's attained awakening in this early

through this Buddhist tradition. And so what can we say about happiness? And so I've offered

these things that as a complement to the four noble truths of suffering, I don't want to call it

noble, but the four truths of happiness.

And so there is happiness that we can avail ourselves of, the first truth. The second is,

there are the conditions for the arising of it.

We don't cause it, but we allow certain conditions to bring it about.

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