Looking at the world today, we might easily forget that the main purpose of our life - you could call it the heart of being human - is to be happy. All of us share the same wish, and the same right, to seek happiness and avoid suffering. Even following a spiritual path, or the religious life, is a quest for happiness.

In the Buddhist approach, life and death are seen as one whole, where death is the beginning of another chapter of life. Death is the mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.

This world can seem marvellously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear.

Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.

We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now, that's what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change. This is why it is so absolutely important to use this lifetime to purify our mindstream, and so our basic being and character, while we can.

There is only one way of attaining liberation and of obtaining the omniscience of enlightenment: following an authentic spiritual master.