Inner Happiness

Attended a talk by Alan Wallace the other evening. He's the Director of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies and an interpreter for the Dalai Lama. Western technology has achieved great things in the external world he said, but failed to conduct the same level of empiricism on the internal world. Psychology, the study of the mind, still can't define consciousness. Three things are needed for inner happiness:
1. Ethics - for social and environmental flourishing.
2. Cultivating the mind - for psychological flourishing.
3. Wisdom - to know reality as it really is.

I asked him what he thought of the field of Appreciative Inquiry in the context of organisational change. "Yes", he said. "Encouraging what works best rather than focusing on the deficiencies would seem useful for avoiding cognitive fusion (with the problem)."