what we need to do most of all is to go  out and subdue the world; secure resources,  

found businesses, run governments,  gain fame and conquer nations. 

By contrast, the Eastern tradition has for a long  while told us something very different. In both  

its Buddhist and Hindu strands, it has insisted  that contentment requires us to learn to conquer  

not the world but the instrument through  which we view this world, namely our minds. 

It won’t matter, says the East, how lustrous and  perfect our achievements end up being - how much  

money we accumulate, how many friends we acquire - so long as our minds  

remain open to being troubled at any point by our  emotional faculties. All the benefits of a palace  

with seven reflecting pools and gardens planted  with almond and cherry trees will be wiped out  

by a depression. Chronic anxiety will  spoil the ownership of the fastest jet.  

A fortune is of no use at all so long as one is  nagged by paranoia. An unhappy relationship at  

once destroys any advantages of an esteemed name. Given this vulnerability of external goods to  

the vagaries of the mental realm, the Eastern  tradition advises us to stop spending our time  

trying to rearrange the material building  blocks of existence only then to fall foul  

of psychological ills - and to focus instead on  learning how to control and manage the inherently  

unruly and hugely complicated instrument through  which the external world reaches consciousness.  

Rather than striving to build empires, we need to  spend many years examining how we think and dream;  

we have to reflect on our families, the  economic systems we were brought up under,  

the impact of our sexual urges and the biological  and cosmological order of nature of which we are  

an infinitesimal part. We have to learn how to  breathe in such a way as to allow maximal oxygen  

to reach our frontal context and to hold our  bodies so that our organs are not crushed and  

our blood flow subtly impeded. We need to  be able to sleep a regular number of hours  

and remove all distractions and excitements  that might disturb our streams of thought. 

This is by no means an easy set of priorities;  it is indeed as much hard work as managing a  

law firm. But, the yogis and sages advise that it  delivers us a far more secure hold on the actual  

ingredients of contentment than the bank account  of a newly installed CEO with a yacht off Barbuda. 

Some of the reason why this continues  to feel unreal is that we simply can’t  

imagine that success, great wealth and a  palace wouldn’t in the end do the trick.  

And that in turn is because too few people  who have been blessed with such accoutrements  

have ever given us an honest account  of what it felt like to have them.  

Intellectual history, with its dire incantations  against a worldly life, has been written by a set  

of suspiciously poor and envious-sounding people. It is therefore highly fortuitous and extremely  

reassuring that Buddhism should have been  founded by a disgruntled former playboy,  

Siddhartha Gautama, who once had a palace and a  trust fund, fame and servants, but gave them up  

to sit under a bodhi tree and could therefore  tell us, with the benefit of lived experience,  

what material goods can really do - and  not do - for us. And without false modesty,  

he insisted that they won’t be enough. The  food may be tasty and the rooms elegant but  

such advantages cannot serve their purpose so  long as one’s mind is haunted and unsteady,  

as it invariably will be without a long emotional  education and regular spiritual practice. 

We should take the East’s warnings seriously.  However hard we strive, it is logical that we  

can only be as happy as our minds are at peace.  And given how vulnerable we are to mental  

disturbances, and how short our lives are, we  should on balance almost certainly spend a little  

more time on our psyches and a little less time on  our plans for a second home and a New York office. 

The West has produced too many unhappy playboys,  and the East too many genuinely peaceful sages,  

for us not to shift our attention away from  conquering the world towards taming our minds.