During a recent dialogue with North American academics, I mentioned that training the mind through meditation helps people experience difficult situations in a different way and develop inner resources to deal with the ups and downs of life.
Some of them argued that promoting such an adaptation was a very dangerous thing to do; that it would tell slaves toiling in galleys and other oppressed people that all they needed to do was to meditate and learn to be content, rather than call for justice and freedom from oppression; it would encourage anyone who is abused by others to cultivate passive resignation.
Obviously there was a significant misunderstanding between us.
Gaining the inner capacity to face both favorable and unfavorable circumstances of life with strength, confidence, and some degree of equanimity is a great asset. By no means is this tantamount to helpless resignation or to condoning injustice. Rather, it avoids becoming a slave twice: a slave of others and a slave of our own mind.
Of course, we should work tirelessly toward overcoming iniquity, oppression and neglect, and strive to achieve outer freedom for one’s self and others. At the same time, it is also vital to gain inner freedom from afflictive mental states. Inner strength, as opposed to vulnerability, is the best way to develop an unflinching determination to also change outer circumstances, whenever that is possible.
Someone who is constantly at the mercy of his or her own mind is likely to be easily overwhelmed by both outer and inner trials. Whatever the outer circumstances may be it is the mind that translates these circumstances into happiness or misery. To avoid being devastated by undesirable events is not synonymous with resignation. Well understood, this attitude does not encourage anyone to cultivate passivity: it simply spares us a double dose of suffering.

When our meal was served on a recent international flight my neighbor, a young man, asked me with a touch of surprise:
-- Are you vegetarian?
-- Yes, I am.
-- Do you feel that meat is dirty?
-- Not at all, but I do not want to cause harm through eating.
-- But all animals eat each other. This is natural.
-- It might well be, but I don’t eat them.
-- If one of these animals would be here, he might eat you!
--Sure, but that does not seems a sufficient reason for me to eat him. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.”
-- Oh, animals are your friends.
-- Yes, they are.
-- That’s interesting.

To imagine happiness as the achievement of all our desires and passions, is to confuse the legitimate aspiration to inner fulfillment with an utopia that inevitably leads to frustration.
Among all the clumsy, blind, and extreme ways we go about building happiness, the most sterile is selfishness.
Even if we display every outward sign of happiness, we can never be truly happy if we dissociate ourselves from the happiness of others.

In Buddhism the word reality connotes the true nature of things, unmodified by mental constructs superimposed upon them. Fabricated concepts open up a gap between our perception and reality, and create a never-ending conflict with the world. “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. We take for permanent that which is ephemeral and for happiness that which is but a source of suffering: the desire for wealth, for power, for fame, and for deceptive pleasures.
Understanding reality is a characteristic of wisdom. The latter does not entail mastering masses of information, but an understanding of the true nature of things. Out of habit, we perceive the outer world as a collection of distinct, autonomous entities to which we attribute characteristics that we believe belong inherently to them. Our day-to-day experience tells us that things are good or bad, desirable or undesirable. The “self” that perceives them seems to be equally concrete and real. This error, which Buddhism calls ignorance, gives rise to powerful impulses of attraction and aversion that eventually lead to suffering.