The Book of Joy (Desmond Tutu and Dalai Lama; Summary)

Homophobic Heaven: A joke and a lesson

During a trip to US only a couple months before the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage, the Bhudhist monk had famously had said that he would refuse to go to a “homophobic” heaven.

Now a Christian Archbishop asks:

“Okay. As I was saying, do you really think that when — I didn’t say if; I said when — the Dalai Lama arrives in heaven, that God will say, ‘Oh, Dalai Lama, you’ve been so wonderful. What a pity you are not a Christian and supporter of LGBTQ community. You’ll have to go to the warmer place.’ Everybody sees just how entirely ridiculous it is.”

~ Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) is a landmark civil rights case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Contrasting happiness and joy

“Joy,” as the Archbishop said, “is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.” This state of mind—and heart—is much closer to both the Dalai Lama’s and the Archbishop’s understanding of what animates our lives and what ultimately leads to a life of satisfaction and meaning.

We are left with a paradox. If one of the fundamental secrets of joy is going beyond our own self-centeredness, then is it foolish selfishness and self-defeating to focus on our own joy and happiness?

“It’s wonderful to discover that what we want is not actually happiness. It is not actually what I would speak of. I would speak of joy. Joy subsumes happiness. Joy is the far greater thing. Think of a mother who is going to give birth. Almost all of us want to escape pain. And mothers know that they are going to have pain, the great pain of giving birth. But they accept it. And even after the most painful labor, once the baby is out, you can’t measure the mother’s joy. It is one of those incredible things that joy can come so quickly from suffering.

“A mother can be dead tired from work,” the Archbishop continued, “and all of the things that have worried her. And then her child is ill. That mother will not remember her exhaustion. She can sit at the bedside of her sick child the night through, and when the child gets better you see that joy.”

• • •

What is this thing called joy, and how is it possible that it can evoke such a wide range of feelings? 

How can the experience of joy span from those tears of joy at a birth to an irrepressible belly laugh at a joke to a serenely contented smile during meditation? Joy seems to blanket this entire emotional expanse. Paul Ekman, famed emotions researcher and longtime friend of the Dalai Lama, has written that joy is associated with feelings as varied as:

List of 15 Feelings

1. pleasure (of the five senses)

2. amusement (from a chuckle to a belly laugh)

3. contentment (a calmer kind of satisfaction)

4. excitement (in response to novelty or challenge)

5. relief (following upon another emotion, such as fear, anxiety, and even pleasure)

6. wonder (before something astonishing and admirable)

7. ecstasy or bliss (transporting us outside ourselves)

8. exultation (at having accomplished a difficult or daring task)

9. radiant pride (when our children earn a special honor)

10. unhealthy jubilation or schadenfreude (relishing in someone else’s suffering)

11. elevation (from having witnessed an act of kindness, generosity, or compassion)

12. gratitude (the appreciation of a selfless act of which one is the beneficiary)

In his book on happiness, Buddhist scholar and former scientist Matthieu Ricard has added three other more exalted states of joy:

13. rejoicing (in someone else’s happiness, what Buddhists call mudita)

14. delight or enchantment (a shining kind of contentment)

15. spiritual radiance (a serene joy born from deep well-being and benevolence)

schadenfreude /ˈʃɑːd(ə)nˌfrɔɪdə,German ˈʃɑːdənˌfrɔydə/

noun pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.
"a business that thrives on schadenfreude" 

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“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” 

Was it truly possible to experience pain, whether the pain of an injury or an exile (as in the case of Dalai Lama), without suffering? There is a Sutta, or teaching of the Buddha, called the Sallatha Sutta, that makes a similar distinction between: - our “feelings of pain” and - “the suffering that comes as a result of our response” to the pain:

“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed, ordinary person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he feels the pain of two arrows.” It seems that the Dalai Lama was suggesting that by shifting our perspective to a broader, more compassionate one, we can avoid the worry and suffering that is the second arrow.

Two Arrows

The parable of the second arrow is a Buddhist parable about dealing with suffering more skillfully. The Buddhists say that any time we suffer misfortune, two arrows fly our way. Being struck by an arrow is painful. Being struck by a second arrow is even more painful.

The Buddha explained:

“In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”

Picture yourself walking through a forest. Suddenly, you’re hit by an arrow. The first arrow is an actual bad event, which can cause pain. But it isn’t over yet. There is a second arrow. The second arrow brings more pain and suffering. Can you avoid the second one? The second arrow represents our reaction to the bad event. It’s the manner in which we choose to respond emotionally. I recently talked to a friend of mine who was at home with her sick family. She, her husband, and their two young sons were all sick with COVID and in various stages of sickness and recovery. She noticed her reaction to being ill — it felt wrong and unfair, she was a runner and shouldn’t have been stuck with this virus. Her sons, however, were playing when they had a little energy and resting when they felt unwell. They took the illness in stride and responded to how they were feeling at the time. They didn’t enjoy being sick but didn’t beat themselves up mentally with talks of what should and should not have been. They were dealing with the first arrow, not the second one.

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Nothing Beautiful Comes Without Some Suffering

Archbishop, you were talking about how the Dalai Lama has experienced great suffering in his exile. During apartheid, you and your country experienced great suffering, too. And even in your personal life, you’ve dealt with prostate cancer—you’re dealing with it now. Many people, when they get ill, don’t feel very joyful. You’ve been able to maintain that joy in the face of suffering. How have you been able to do it?”

“Well, I have certainly been helped by many other people. One of the good things is realizing that you are not a solitary cell. You are part of a wonderful community. That’s helped very greatly. As we were saying, if you are setting out to be joyful you are not going to end up being joyful. You’re going to find yourself turned in on yourself. It’s like a flower. You open, you blossom, really because of other people. And I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.

“You know, when Nelson Mandela went to jail he was young and, you could almost say, bloodthirsty. He was head of the armed wing of the African National Congress, his party. He spent twenty-seven years in jail, and many would say, Twenty-seven years, oh, what a waste. And I think people are surprised when I say no, the twenty-seven years were necessary. They were necessary to remove the dross. The suffering in prison helped him to become more magnanimous, willing to listen to the other side. To discover that the people he regarded as his enemy, they too were human beings who had fears and expectations. And they had been molded by their society. And so without the twenty-seven years I don’t think we would have seen the Nelson Mandela with the compassion, the magnanimity, the capacity to put himself in the shoes of the other.”

While the racist apartheid government in South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela and so many other political leaders, the Archbishop became the de facto ambassador of the anti-apartheid struggle. Protected by his Anglican robes and the Nobel Prize that he received in 1984, he was able to campaign for an end to the oppression of blacks and other people of color in South Africa. During that bloody struggle, he buried countless men, women, and children, and tirelessly preached peace and forgiveness at their funerals.

After the release of Nelson Mandela and his election as the first president of a free South Africa, the Archbishop was asked to create the famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission to try to find a peaceful way to confront the atrocities of apartheid and pioneer a new future without revenge and retribution.

“And, in a kind of paradoxical way,” the Archbishop continued, “it is how we face all of the things that seem to be negative in our lives that determines the kind of person we become. If we regard all of this as frustrating, we’re going to come out squeezed and tight and just angry and wishing to smash everything."

“When I spoke about mothers and childbirth, it seems to be a wonderful metaphor, actually, that nothing beautiful in the end comes without a measure of some pain, some frustration, some suffering. This is the nature of things. This is how our universe has been made up.”

Later I was amazed to hear from prenatal researcher Pathik Wadhwa that there is indeed a kind of biological law at work in these situations. Stress and opposition turn out to be exactly what initiate our development in utero. Our stem cells do not differentiate and become us if there is not enough biological stress to encourage them to do so. Without stress and opposition, complex life like ours would never have developed. We would never have come into being.

“If you want to be a good writer,” the Archbishop concluded, “you are not going to become one by always going to the movies and eating bonbons. You have to sit down and write, which can be very frustrating, and yet without that you would not get that good result.”

Here was deep truth in what the Archbishop was saying, and yet I wanted to repeat back to him what he had said to the Dalai Lama. It’s one thing to understand the value of suffering, and quite another to remember it when you are angry or frustrated, or in pain.

• • •

A recent research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that perhaps only 50 percent of our happiness is determined by immutable factors like our genes or temperament, our “set point.” The other half is determined by a combination of our circumstances, over which we may have limited control, and our attitudes and actions, over which we have a great deal of control.

According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are:

1. our ability to reframe our situation more positively,

2. our ability to experience gratitude, and

3. our choice to be kind and generous.

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Have You Renounced Pleasure?

Most religions have a strong conviction that we cannot discover lasting happiness through our senses. So while temporary enjoyment can come through our senses, it is inevitably fleeting and not the source of enduring satisfaction. There is a Buddhist saying that trying to seek happiness through sensory gratification is like trying to quench your thirst by drinking saltwater.

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Tibetan Buddhist prayer that often is said before a meal:

“Viewing this meal as a medicine, I shall enjoy it without greed or anger, not out of gluttony nor out of pride, not to fatten myself, but only to nourish my body.” 

Perhaps eating to nourish the body did not require one to deny the enjoyment and satisfaction of the experience.

When we speak of experiencing happiness, we need to know that there are actually two different kinds. The first is the enjoyment of pleasure through our senses. Here, for example, sex is one such experience. But we can also experience happiness at the deeper level through our mind, such as through:

1. love,
2. compassion, and 
3. generosity.

What characterizes happiness at this deeper level is the sense of fulfillment that you experience. While the joy of the senses is brief, the joy at this deeper level is much longer lasting. It is true joy.

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The Hedonic Treadmill

Science has a term for the unsatisfactory nature of pursuing pleasure alone: the hedonic treadmill, named for the Greek school of thought that believed pleasure to be the ultimate good. Throughout history, hedonism has had its advocates, back to the birth of written culture. In the Gilgamesh tale,
Siduri, the female divinity of fermentation (in other words, alcohol), admonishes, “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night... These things alone are the concern of men.” Even in the deeply spiritual culture of ancient India, the source of much of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan tradition, there was a hedonistic school known as Charvaka. In many ways, hedonism is the default philosophy of most people and certainly has become the dominant view of consumer “shop till you drop” culture.

Yet scientists have found that the more we experience any pleasure, the more we become numb to its effects and take its pleasures for granted. The first bowl of ice cream is sublime, the second bowl tasty, and the third causes indigestion. It is like a drug that must be taken in ever-greater quantities to produce the same high. But there does seem to be one thing in the literature that powerfully and lastingly changes our sense of well-being. It is what the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop had been advocating: our relationships, and specifically, our expression of love and generosity to others in our life.

Richard Davidson, the neuroscientist with whom I had lunch in San Francisco, has drawn together the neuroimaging research into a unified theory of the happy brain. I was so fascinated by what he was saying that I could not pay attention to my spring rolls, and those spring rolls were really good, at least on the physical level.
There are four independent brain circuits that influence our lasting wellbeing,
Davidson explained. The first is “our ability to maintain positive states.” It makes sense that the ability to maintain positive states or positive emotions would directly impact one’s ability to experience happiness. These two great spiritual leaders were saying that the fastest way to this state is to start with love and compassion.
The second circuit is responsible for “our ability to recover from negative states.” What was most fascinating to me was that these circuits were totally independent. One could be good at maintaining positive states but easily fall into an abyss of a negative state from which one had a hard time recovering.
That explained a lot in my life.
The third circuit, also independent but essential to the others, is “our ability to focus and avoid mind-wandering.” This of course was the circuit that so much of meditation exists to develop. Whether it was focusing on one’s breath, or a mantra, or the analytic meditation that the Dalai Lama did each morning, this ability to focus one’s attention was fundamental.
The fourth and final circuit is “our ability to be generous.” That was amazing to me: that we had an entire brain circuit, one of four, devoted to generosity. It is no wonder that our brains feel so good when we help others or are helped by others, or even witness others being helped, which Ekman had described as the elevation that is one dimension of joy. There was strong and compelling research that we come factory equipped for cooperation, compassion, and generosity.

John Bargh, one of the world’s leading experts on the science of the unconscious, describes it as one of three innate (and often unconscious) goals: to survive, to reproduce, and to cooperate. In lab experiments where eighteenmonth- old children were shown dolls facing each other, they were more cooperative than those who were shown dolls who were facing away from each other. This unconscious prime, which can be turned on or off, Bargh argues, is one interesting example that cooperation is a deep evolutionary drive that exists from our earliest development.

Perhaps more sobering, it has also hardwired us to cooperate with and be kind to those who look like our caregivers, who presumably kept us safe. We are more wary of others who look different: these are the unconscious roots of prejudice. Our empathy does not seem to extend to those who are outside our “group,” which is perhaps why the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama are constantly reminding us that we are, in fact, one group—humanity.
Nonetheless, the ability and desire to cooperate and to be generous to others is there in our neural circuits, and it can be harnessed personally, socially, and globally.

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Our Greatest Joy

Ubuntu

We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. I didn’t know that I was going to come so soon to the concept that we have at home, the concept of Ubuntu. It says: A person is a person through other persons.

“Ubuntu says when I have a small piece of bread, it is for my benefit that I share it with you. Because, after all, none of us came into the world on our own. We needed two people to bring us into the world."

“How do we create more friends?” he asked.

“Trust. How do you develop trust? It’s simple: You show your genuine sense of concern for their well-being. Then trust will come. But if behind an artificial smile, or a big banquet, is a self-centered attitude deep inside of you, then there will never be trust. If you are thinking how to exploit, how to take advantage of them, then you can never develop trust in others. Without trust, there is no friendship. We human beings are social animals, as we’ve said, and we need friends. Genuine friends. Friends for money, friends for power are artificial friends.”

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Research suggests that cultivating your own joy and happiness has benefits not just for you, but also for others in your life. When we are able to move beyond our own pain and suffering, we are more available to others; pain causes us to be extremely self-focused. Whether the pain is physical or mental, it seems to consume all of our focus and leave very little attention for others. In his book with the Dalai Lama, psychiatrist Howard Cutler summarized these findings: “In fact, survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative, and are able to tolerate life’s daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people.”

Morning Prayer: This day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That’s a meaningful day.”

Lunch: The Meeting of Two Mischievous People Is Wonderful

Being in the moment...

When the Dalai Lama greets you, he takes your hand and then rubs it tenderly, as a grandparent might. He looks into your eyes, feels deeply what you are feeling, and touches his forehead to yours. Whatever feeling, elation or anguish, is in your heart and reflected on your face, it is mirrored in his. But then when he meets the next person, those emotions are gone and he is wholly available for the next encounter and the next moment. Perhaps that is what it means to be fully present, available for each moment and each person we encounter, untethered by the ruminating memories of the past and not lured by the anticipatory worry about the future.

Everybody wants a happy life

“You have been a wonderful influence in the world,” the Archbishop continued. “There are many, many people that you have helped to become good people, and people of different religions, people of different faiths. They can see, they can sense—because I don’t think it is what you say, although, yes, what you say is okay... sort of acceptable. Scientists also think you are clever, but it is really who you are. I think everywhere in the world you go, people are aware that you are authentic. You’re not putting it on. You live what you teach, and you have helped very, very, very many people recover a belief in their faiths, a belief also in goodness. You are popular not just with old people but also with young people. I’ve said that you and Nelson Mandela are the only people that I can think of who are not pop stars and who could fill Central Park as you do. I mean when people know that you are going to come and speak, they come in droves. So the thing we say, about our world being a secular world and all of that, is only partly true.”

The Dalai Lama waved his hands, dismissing his rank or specialness. “I always consider myself personally one of the seven billion human beings. Nothing special. So, on that level, I have tried to make people aware that the ultimate source of happiness is simply a healthy body and a warm heart.” As he spoke, I wondered, why this is so difficult for us to believe and to act on? It should be obvious that we are the same, but often we feel separate. There is so much isolation and alienation. Certainly I had grown up feeling this way in New York City, which at the time was the most populated place in the world.

"Everybody wants a happy life—and our individual happy life depends on a happy humanity. So we have to think about humanity, discover a sense of oneness of all seven billion human beings."

Mother's Love

Archbishop replied “You were raised with a very special status in Tibet. You must have come to this recognition of oneness over time.”
“Yes, I have grown in my wisdom from study and experience. When I first went to Peking, now Beijing, to meet Chinese leaders, and also in 1956 when I came to India and met some Indian leaders, there was too much formality, so I felt nervous. So now, when I meet people, I do it on a human-to-human level, no need for formality. I really hate formality. When we are born, there is no formality. When we die, there is no formality. When we enter hospital, there is no formality. So formality is just artificial. It just creates additional barriers. So irrespective of our beliefs, we are all the same human beings. We all want a happy life.” I couldn’t help wondering if the Dalai Lama’s dislike of formality had to do with having spent his childhood in a gilded cage.
“Was it only when you went into exile,” I asked, “that the formality ended?”

“Yes, that’s right. So sometimes I say, Since I became a refugee, I have been liberated from the prison of formality. So I became much closer to reality. That’s much better. I often tease my Japanese friends that there is too much formality in their cultural etiquette. Sometimes when we discuss something, they always respond like this.” The Dalai Lama vigorously nodded his head. “So whether they agree or disagree, I cannot tell. The worst thing is the formal lunches. I always tease them that the meal looks like decoration, not like food. Everything is very beautiful, but very small portions! I don’t care about formality, so I ask them, more rice, more rice. Too much formality, then you are left with a very little portion, which is maybe good for a bird.” He was scooping up the last bits of dessert.
“Everybody may want to be happy,” I offered, “but the challenge is a lot of people don’t know how. You were talking about the importance of being warmhearted, but a lot of people are shy or have a hard time opening up to other people. They get scared. They’re afraid of rejection. You’ve spoken about when you approach people with trust, then it inspires trust in them as well.”
“That’s right. Genuine friendship is entirely based on trust,” the Dalai Lama explained. “If you really feel a sense of concern for the well-being of others, then trust will come. That’s the basis of friendship. We are social animals. We need friends. I think, from the time of our birth till our death, friends are very important.
“Scientists have found that we need love to survive. Our mothers show tremendous love and affection to us when we are born. Many scientists say that after birth, there are a number of weeks when the mother’s physical touch is the key factor to developing the brain properly. After birth, if the child is isolated without the mother or physical touch, it can be very harmful. This is nothing to do with religion. This is biology. We need love.”
The Dalai Lama had first heard about this research in the 1980s from the late biologist Robert Livingston, who later became his biology “tutor.” Child neurologist and neuroscientist Tallie Baram has conducted one of the more recent examples of this important field of research. She found that a mother’s caress triggers activity that improves cognition and resilience to stress in a baby’s developing brain. The mother’s touch could literally prevent the release of stress hormones that have been shown to lead to the disintegration of dendritic spines, branchlike structures on the neurons that are important to the sending and receiving of messages and the encoding of memory.

“The people who go around becoming bullies are people who have a massive sense of insecurity, who want to prove that they are somebody, often because they did not get enough love.”

“Circumstances, environment, education all matter. Especially today; there is not much focus on inner values in education. Then, instead of inner values, we become self-centered—always thinking: I, I, I. A self-centered attitude brings a sense of insecurity and fear.
Distrust. Too much fear brings frustration. Too much frustration brings anger.
So that’s the psychology, the system of mind, of emotion, which creates a chain reaction. With a self-centered attitude, you become distanced from others, then distrust, then feel insecure, then fear, then anxiety, then frustration, then anger, then violence.” 

Days 2 and 3
The Obstacles to Joy You Are a Masterpiece in the Making

It is very simple,” the Dalai Lama began. “Everyone knows that physical pain is bad and tries to avoid it. We do this not only by curing diseases, but also by trying to prevent them and by trying to keep our physical immunity strong. Mental pain is equally bad, so we should try to alleviate it as well. The way to do this is to develop mental immunity.”

“Mental immunity,” the Dalai Lama explained, “is just learning to avoid the destructive emotions and to develop the positive ones. First, we must understand the mind—there are so many different states of mind—the diverse thoughts and emotions we experience on a daily basis. Some of these thoughts and emotions are harmful, even toxic, while others are healthy and healing.
The former disturb our mind and cause much mental pain. The latter bring us true joyfulness.
“When we understand this reality, it is much easier to deal with the mind and to take preventive measures. This is how we develop mental immunity.
And just as a healthy immune system and healthy constitution protects your body against potentially hazardous viruses and bacteria, mental immunity creates a healthy disposition of the mind so that it will be less susceptible to negative thoughts and feelings.

“Think about it this way. If your health is strong, when viruses come they will not make you sick. If your overall health is weak, even small viruses will be very dangerous for you. Similarly, if your mental health is sound, then when disturbances come, you will have some distress but quickly recover. If your mental health is not good, then small disturbances, small problems will cause you much pain and suffering. You will have much fear and worry, much sadness and despair, and much anger and aggravation.

“People would like to be able to take a pill that makes their fear and anxiety go away and makes them immediately feel peaceful. This is impossible. One must develop the mind over time and cultivate mental immunity. Often people ask me for the quickest and best solution to a problem. Again, this is impossible. You can have quickest or you can have best solution, but not both. The best solution to our suffering is mental immunity, but it takes time to develop."

“One time I was talking with Al Gore, the American vice president. He said that he had lots of problems, lots of difficulties that were causing him a great deal of anxiety. I said to him that we human beings have the ability to make a distinction between the rational level and the emotional level. At the rational level, we accept that this is a serious problem that we have to deal with, but at the deeper, emotional level, we are able to keep calm. Like the ocean has many waves on the surface but deep down it is quite calm. This is possible if we know how to develop mental immunity.”

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“Yes, you have answered very well. You always answer well, but you have done this one quite well. The only thing I think is that people sometimes get quite annoyed with themselves unnecessarily, especially when they have thoughts and feelings that are really quite natural."

“Basically,” the Archbishop continued, “I think we’ve got to accept ourselves as we are. And then hope to grow in much the way the Dalai Lama described. I mean getting to know what the things are that trigger us. These are things that you can train, you can change, but we ought not to be ashamed of ourselves. We are human, and sometimes it is a good thing that we recognize that we have human emotions. Now the thing is being able to say, when is it appropriate?”

Throughout the week of dialogues, the Archbishop said many times that we should not berate ourselves for our negative thoughts and emotions, that they are natural and unavoidable. They are only made more intense, he argued, by the glue of guilt and shame when we think we should not have them. The Dalai Lama agreed that human emotions are natural, but he did argue about whether they are unavoidable. Mental immunity, he explained, is the way to avoid them.

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The first step to alleviate negative thoughts is to accept the reality of suffering. The Buddha is supposed to have said, “I have taught one thing and one thing only: suffering and the cessation of suffering.” The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is filled with suffering. The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha (not to be confused with the nutty and very tasty Egyptian condiment dukka).
Dukkha can be translated as “stress,” “anxiety,” “suffering,” or “dissatisfaction.” It is often described as the mental and physical suffering that occurs in life, illness, and aging. It is also described as the stress and anxiety that arise from the attempt to control what is fundamentally impermanent and unable to be controlled. We try to control the moment, which results in our feeling that what is happening should not be happening.
So much of what causes heartache is our wanting things to be different than they are. “I think, in many cases,” the Dalai Lama explained, “you develop some sort of unhappiness, some discontent, which leads to frustration and anger.”

While stress and frustration may sound like superficial problems or complaints, the Buddha identified them as the core of so much of our unnecessary, or created, suffering. I was reminded of what the Dalai Lama had said on our first day: We cannot end natural disasters or the suffering they cause, but so much of the rest of our suffering we can.

Dukkha, or suffering, is the opposite of sukha, which means happiness, ease, or comfort. Both words are said to have originated from the ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India. These Aryans were a nomadic people who traveled by horse- or ox-drawn carts, and the words literally mean “having a bad (or good) axle.” Was it a bumpy ride (dukkha), or a smooth ride (sukha)? Not a bad metaphor for life. What is suffering but a bumpy ride? Every life is rutted and no one can avoid some inevitable bumps, but so much is determined by our own perception of the ride. Our mind is the axle that often determines whether we experience the ride as bumpy or smooth.

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'Emotions' and 'Perceptions about our experience'

“We have perceptions about our experience, and we judge them: ‘This is good.’ ‘This is bad.’ ‘This is neutral,’” the Dalai Lama explained. “Then we have responses: fear, frustration, anger. We realize that these are just different aspects of mind. They are not the actual reality. Similarly, fearlessness, kindness, love, and forgiveness are also aspects of mind. It is very useful to know the system of emotion and to understand how our mind works.
“When a fear or frustration comes, we have to think, what is causing it? In most cases, fear is simply a mental projection. When I was young and living in the Potala, there was an area that was very dark, and there were stories about ghosts there. So when I was passing through this area, I would feel something. This was completely a mental projection.”

The Dalai Lama said, “When a mad dog approaches, barking and gnashing its teeth, then you need fear. That’s not a mental projection. So you have to analyze the causes of the fear. With frustration, often you see someone, and you have a mental projection even when his or her face is neutral. Similarly, when you see someone’s actions, you have a mental projection even when their behavior is neutral. So you have to ask yourself if your frustration is based on something real. Even if someone criticizes you or attacks you, then you have to think: Why did this happen? This person is not your enemy from birth. Certain circumstances caused the person to be negative toward you. There may be many causes, but usually your own attitude is an important contributing factor that cannot be ignored. You realize that this happened because you have done something in the past that this person didn’t like. So then when you realize your own part in the other person’s criticizing or attacking you, the intensity of your frustration and anger automatically reduces. Then you also realize that basic human nature is good, is compassionate, and that the person does not want to harm you. So therefore you see their emotion is due to some misunderstanding or misinformation. You see that this person’s actions are due to their own destructive emotions. You can develop a sense of concern, compassion, even feel sorry for their pain and suffering: How sad that this person is out of control, or having such a negative feeling. Instead of frustration and anger you feel sorry for the other person and concern for them.”
I nodded my head and said, “But sometimes our frustration is not dependent on other people but on circumstances beyond our control. For example, we can’t control canceled flights.”

You are a masterpiece in the making.

“At times, we get very angry with ourselves. We think we ought to be supermen and superwomen from the start. The Dalai Lama’s serenity didn’t come fully formed. It was through the practice of prayer and meditation that the gentleness, the compassion grew, his being patient and accepting—within reasonable limits. Accepting circumstances as they are, because if there are circumstances that you cannot change, then it’s no use beating your head against a brick wall; that just gives you a headache. This is a vale of growth and development.”
I was struck by the phrase “a vale of growth and development,” which seemed to echo the famous Christian notion that life is a vale, or valley, of tears, from which we are freed only when we enter heaven. This expression is often said to be based on Psalm 84:6, which has the beautiful wording: “Who passing through the vale of tears makes it a well.” Indeed, we can use our tears, our stress and frustration, as a well from which we can draw the lifegiving waters of our emotional and spiritual growth.
“It’s similar to how we learn how to be a parent,” the Archbishop said as he concluded our discussion. “You learn how to react to a child who is really frustrating you. You are better with your third child than you were with your first child. And so I would say to everyone: You are made for perfection, but you are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.”

Fear, Stress, and Anxiety: I Would Be Very Nervous

We all have fears,” the Archbishop explained. “Fear and anxiety are mechanisms that have helped us to survive. You know, if you did not feel fear when you saw a lion over there and you just walked merrily by, in next to no time there would be no you. God has given us these things because God knew that we needed them. Otherwise, we would be fearless, but then we’d also be very stupid, and we would not be around very long. The problem is when the fear is exaggerated or when it is provoked by something that is really quite insignificant.”

We so rarely hear about the doubts, fears, and worries of leaders, as leadership itself seems to require an air of confidence that rarely allows the admission of weakness or vulnerability. I was once told an amazing story by former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel, who had worked with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela was flying in a small propeller plane with his bodyguard, Mike. The great leader was hidden behind the morning paper when he noticed that one propeller was not working. He leaned over and calmly told Mike, who informed the pilots. They were well aware of the problem and explained that emergency landing procedures were in place. When Mike explained the situation to Mandela, he nodded calmly and went back to reading his paper. Apparently, Mike, a tough guy, was trembling with fear but only calmed by the image of Mandela, who looked unbothered by the fact that they might at any moment fall out of the sky. When they had gotten into the back of the bulletproof BMW that met them at the airport, Stengel asked him about the flight. To which, Mandela leaned in, eyes wide, and said, “Man, I was terrified up there.” Even if leadership requires a show of strength during moments of crisis, our humanity is defined equally, or perhaps even more, by our weakness and vulnerability, a fact that the Archbishop often says reminds us of our need for one another.
One of my favorite quotes that we included in Mandela’s book Notes to the Future was on courage: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Archbishop Tutu said something very similar when we were working on God Has a Dream. He said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.” The English word courage comes from the French word coeur, or heart; courage is indeed the triumph of our heart’s love and commitment over our mind’s reasonable murmurings to keep us safe.

What is too much ambition?

“Stress and anxiety often come from too much expectation and too much ambition,” the Dalai Lama said. “Then when we don’t fulfill that expectation or achieve that ambition, we experience frustration. Right from the beginning, it is a self-centered attitude. I want this. I want that. Often we are not being realistic about our own ability or about objective reality. When we have a clear picture about our own capacity, we can be realistic about our effort.
Then there is a much greater chance of achieving our goals. But unrealistic effort only brings disaster. So in many cases our stress is caused by our expectations and our ambition.”

What is too much ambition? I wondered. For someone raised in America, where ambition is a virtue in and of itself, the marriage of initiative and persistence, I was struck by his answer. Could it be that all of the getting and grasping that we see as our major ambition in modern life might be misguided? And perhaps the belief that more is better might be a recipe for stress and frustration, and ultimately dissatisfaction? Perhaps it is a question of priorities. What is it that is really worth pursuing? What is it we truly need? According to the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama, when we see how little we really need—love and connection— then all the getting and grasping that we thought was so essential to our wellbeing takes its rightful place and no longer becomes the focus or the obsession of our lives. We must try to be conscious about how we live and not get swept away by the modern trance, the relentless march, the anxious accelerator. The Dalai Lama was urging us to be more realistic so we can come to some sense of inner peace now, rather than always chasing after our expectations and ambition for the next.

Symptoms of chronic stress are feelings of fragmentation and of chasing after time—of not being able to be present. What we are looking for is a settled, joyful state of being, and we need to give this state space. The Archbishop once told me that people often think he needs time to pray and reflect because he is a religious leader. He said those who must live in the marketplace—business-people, professionals, and workers—need it even more.

Biology of Stress

Psychologist Elissa Epel is one of the leading researchers on stress, and she explained to me how stress is supposed to work. Our stress response evolved to save us from attack or danger, like a hungry lion or a falling avalanche. Cortisol and adrenalin course into our blood. This causes our pupils to dilate so we can see more clearly, our heart and breathing to speed up so we can respond faster, and the blood to divert from our organs to our large muscles so we can fight or flee. This stress response evolved as a rare and temporary experience, but for many in our modern world, it is constantly activated. Epel and her colleague, Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, have found that constant stress actually wears down our telomeres, the caps on our DNA that protect our cells from illness and aging.
It is not just stress but our thought patterns in general that impact our telomeres, which has led Epel and Blackburn to conclude that our cells are actually “listening to our thoughts.”
The problem is not the existence of stressors, which cannot be avoided; stress is simply the brain’s way of signaling that something is important. The problem—or perhaps the opportunity—is how we respond to this stress.
Epel and Blackburn explain that it is not the stress alone that damages our telomeres. It is our response to the stress that is most important. They encourage us to develop stress resilience. This involves turning what is called “threat stress,” or the perception that a stressful event is a threat that will harm us, into what is called “challenge stress,” or the perception that a stressful event is a challenge that will help us grow. The remedy they offer is quite straightforward. One simply notices the fight-or-flight stress response in one’s body—the beating heart, the pulsing blood or tingling feeling in our hands and face, the rapid breathing—then remembers that these are natural responses to stress and that our body is just preparing to rise to the challenge.

Connection and Separation

What determines whether we see something or someone as a threat? The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama were saying that so much of our stress is dependent on seeing ourselves as separate from others, which perhaps returns to the loss of our sense of communal connection, of Ubuntu. I had once asked the Archbishop how he handled worry and insomnia, and he said that he thought about people all around the world who also were awake and unable to sleep. Thinking about others and remembering that he was not alone lessened his distress and his worries, as he would say a prayer for them.
“I would give teachings when I was young,” the Dalai Lama explained, describing one of the experiences that would cause him to experience stress and anxiety. “I would be very nervous because I did not see myself as the same as the people in the audience. Then after 1959, when I left Tibet, I started thinking, These people are just like me, same human being. If we think we are something special or not special enough, then fear, nervousness, stress, and anxiety arise. We are the same.”

“What the Dalai Lama and I are offering,” the Archbishop added, “is a way of handling your worries: thinking about others. You can think about others who are in a similar situation or perhaps even in a worse situation, but who have survived, even thrived. It does help quite a lot to see yourself as part of a greater whole.” Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face—together.

“When I meet someone,” the Dalai Lama said, returning to what was becoming an important theme, “I always try to relate to the person on the basic human level. On that level, I know that, just like me, he or she wishes to find happiness, to have fewer problems and less difficulty in their life.
Whether I am speaking with one person, or whether I am giving a talk to a large group of people, I always see myself first and foremost as just another fellow human. That way, there is in fact no need for introduction.
If, on the other hand, I relate to others from the perspective of myself as someone different—a Buddhist, a Tibetan, and so on—I will then create walls to keep me apart from others. And if I relate to others, thinking that I am the Dalai Lama, I will create the basis for my own separation and loneliness.
After all, there is only one Dalai Lama in the entire world. In contrast, if I see myself primarily in terms of myself as a fellow human, I will then have more than seven billion people who I can feel deep connection with. And this is wonderful, isn’t it? What do you need to fear or worry about when you have seven billion other people who are with you?”

Frustration and Anger: I Would Shout

More than a decade before coming to Dharamsala, I was driving with the Archbishop in Jacksonville, Florida—in traffic. You could say that this was, in fact, one of my major motivations for wanting to work with him. To understand: How does a deeply spiritual and moral leader drive in traffic? We had left the house, where we had earlier recorded an interview sitting by the alligator pond, dangling our feet precariously close to the hungry water. We stopped off at the Boston Market restaurant chain for a quick lunch, where he had gone out of his way to greet and say hello to all of the employees, who were in awe of their celebrity customer who was ordering chicken and mashed potatoes. We were on our way to the university where he was a guest lecturer, and I was interviewing him as we drove, trying to use every precious moment of our time together to gather his pearls of wisdom.
We were talking about many high-minded philosophies and theologies, but what I really wanted to know was how all his spiritual practice and beliefs affected his day-to-day interactions, like driving in traffic.
All of a sudden a car cut across the lanes in front of us and the Archbishop had to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting the other car. “There are some truly amazing drivers on the road!” the Archbishop said with exasperation and a head-shaking chuckle.
I asked him what went through his head at moments like this, and he said that perhaps the driver was on his way to the hospital because his wife was giving birth, or a relative was sick.
There it was. He reacted with the inevitable and uncontrollable surprise, which is one of our instinctual responses, but then instead of taking the low road of anger, he took the high road of humor, acceptance, and even compassion. And it was gone: no fuming, no lingering frustration, no raised blood pressure.

- - -
 # We often think of fear and anger as two quite separate emotions, so I was surprised to hear the Dalai Lama connect them. “Where there is fear, frustration will come. Frustration brings anger. So, you see, fear and anger are very close.” The Dalai Lama’s perspective, I later learned, is supported by our basic biology. Fear and anger are two poles of our natural response, as we prepare to flee (fear) or to fight (anger).

# Neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains that when we get very angry, we can “flip our lid,” so to speak, losing the benefit of our critical-thinking cortex. As a result, the prefrontal cortex, which is important for emotion regulation and moral judgment, loses its ability to control our emotional limbic system. 

- - -

Anger is a secondary emotion

The Dalai Lama made the subtle and profound connection between fear and anger, explaining how fear underlies anger. Typically frustration and anger come from being hurt. The driver hitting his head was an obvious example. In addition to physical pain, we can also experience emotional pain, which may be even more common. We want something that we did not get, like respect or kindness, or we get something that we did not want, like disrespect or criticism. Underlying this anger, the Dalai Lama was saying, is a fear that we will not get what we need, that we are not loved, that we are not respected, that we will not be included.
One way out of anger, then, is to ask, What is the hurt that has caused our anger, what is the fear that we have? Psychologists often call anger a secondary emotion, because it comes as a defense to feeling threatened. When we can acknowledge and express the fear—how we are feeling threatened— then we are often able to soothe the anger.
But we need to be willing to admit our vulnerability. We are often ashamed of these fears and hurts, thinking that if we were invulnerable, we would never experience pain, but this, as the Archbishop said, is not the nature of being human. If we can have compassion for ourselves, and acknowledge how we feel afraid, hurt, or threatened, we can have compassion for others—possibly even for those who have evoked our anger.

...

“One time I was in Jerusalem,” the Dalai Lama said, “and I met with a teacher who used to tell his students, When you are irritated or angry with someone, you should remember that they are made in the image of God.
Some of the students in the class were Palestinians, and they had to cross through Israeli checkpoints. They told him that when they would get nervous and irritated, they would think that these soldiers were made in the image of God, and they would relax and feel better. At the physical level one has to act accordingly, but at the mental level one can remain calm and relaxed. This is how you train the mind.”

- - -

Paul Ekman's story as a “rage-aholic”

Paul Ekman told me an astonishing story over dinner one night about how the Dalai Lama had healed him of his anger issues. Ekman is not a Buddhist and was not that interested in meeting the Dalai Lama, but his daughter was a fan, and when Ekman heard that scientists invited to the biannual Mind and Life conference with the Dalai Lama could bring a guest, he agreed to attend.
Ekman explained that he used to be a very timid and quiet child but became what is popularly called a “rage-aholic” after experiencing his father’s belligerence and abuse and his mother’s suicide. Ekman would have what he and other emotion clinicians call “regrettable incidents,” flying into a rage several times a week. When he went to see the Dalai Lama, something very strange happened.

The Dalai Lama took Ekman’s hands, looked into his eyes lovingly, and suddenly, Ekman said, it felt like all the anger drained out of his body. He did not have another regrettable incident for over six months, and although they did return, they were much less frequent. Ekman does not know what happened to him, but said that perhaps the Dalai Lama’s deep compassion helped heal some lingering hurt and reactivity. The Dalai Lama has asked Ekman to map the emotional landscape, to help others avoid the rocky terrain of negative emotions and find their way more easily to the promised land of compassion and contentment.

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CH: Sadness and Grief: The Hard Times Knit Us More Closely Together

Sadness is seemingly the most direct challenge to joy, but it often leads us most directly to empathy and compassion and to recognizing our need for one another.
Sadness is a very powerful and enduring emotion. In one study it was found that sadness lasted many times longer than more fleeting emotions like fear and anger: While fear lasted on average thirty minutes, sadness often lasted up to a hundred and twenty hours, or almost five days. While the evolutionary value of our fight (anger) and flight (fear) responses are clear, the value of sadness seems harder to understand.
New studies conducted by psychology researcher Joseph Forgas show that mild sadness can actually have a number of benefits that could reflect its value. In his experiments, people who were in a sad mood had better judgment and memory, and were more motivated, more sensitive to social norms, and more generous than the happier control group. People who are in a so-called negative state of sadness were more discerning about their situation, better able to remember details, and more motivated to change their situation.
What is particularly interesting is that brief sadness might generate more empathy or generosity. Participants in the study played a game, part of which involved deciding how much money to give themselves and how much to give others. The sad participants gave significantly more to the other participants.

While depression certainly collapses our circle of concern inward, the periodic feeling of sadness might widen it. Forgas concluded that sadness may have some benefit in our lives, which may be why people are drawn to music, art, and literature that makes them feel sad. He urges us to embrace all of our emotions, because they no doubt play a necessary role in our lives.

Sadness is in many ways the emotion that causes us to reach out to one another in support and solidarity. The Archbishop expressed it quite wonderfully when he explained, “We don’t really get close to others if our relationship is made up of unending hunky-dory-ness. It is the hard times, the painful times, the sadness and the grief that knit us more closely together.” A funeral is perhaps the most obvious example of this weaving of our relationships and community together, but even tears are a signal to others that we need comfort and kindness, that we are vulnerable and need help.
We try so hard to separate joy and sorrow into their own boxes, but the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama tell us that they are inevitably fastened together. Neither advocate the kind of fleeting happiness, often called hedonic happiness, that requires only positive states and banishes feelings like sadness to emotional exile. The kind of happiness that they describe is often called eudemonic happiness and is characterized by self-understanding, meaning, growth, and acceptance, including life’s inevitable suffering, sadness, and grief.

...

I often receive questions,” the Dalai Lama said, “from those whose dear friend, or parent, or even child has passed away. They ask me, ‘What should I do?’
“I share with them from my own experience. My beloved main teacher, who gave me my monk’s ordination, died, and I was really grief-stricken.
While he was alive I always felt like he was a solid rock behind me that I could lean on. I really felt very, very sad and full of grief when he passed away.
“The way through the sadness and grief that comes from great loss is to use it as motivation and to generate a deeper sense of purpose. When my teacher passed away, I used to think that now I have even more responsibility to fulfill his wishes, so my sadness translated into more enthusiasm, more determination. I have told those who had lost their dear friend or family member, It is very sad, but this sadness should translate into more determination to fulfill their wishes. If the one you have lost could see you, and you are determined and full of hope, they would be happy. With the great sadness of the loss, one can live an even more meaningful life.
“Sadness and grief are, of course, natural human responses to loss, but if your focus remains on the loved one you have just lost, the experience is less likely to lead to despair. In contrast, if your focus while grieving remains mostly on yourself—‘What am I going to do now? How can I cope?’—then there is a greater danger of going down the path of despair and depression.
So, again, so much depends on how we respond to our experience of loss and sadness.”

The Dalai Lama mentioned the famous Buddhist story of the woman who had lost her child and was inconsolable in her grief, carrying her dead child throughout the land, begging for someone to help heal her child. When she came to the Buddha, she begged him to help her. He told her he could help her if she would collect mustard seeds for the medicine. She eagerly agreed, but then the Buddha explained that the mustard seeds needed to come from a house that had not been touched by death. When the woman visited each house in search of the mustard seeds that might heal her son, she discovered that there was no house that had not suffered the loss of a parent, or a spouse, or a child. Seeing that her suffering was not unique, she was able to bury her child in the forest and release her grief.

My friend Gordon Wheeler, who is a psychologist, explains that grief is the reminder of the depth of our love. Without love, there is no grief. So when we feel our grief, uncomfortable and aching as it may be, it is actually a reminder of the beauty of that love, now lost. I’ll never forget calling Gordon while I was traveling, and hearing him say that he was out to dinner by himself after the loss of a dear friend “so he could feel his grief.” He knew that in the blinking and buzzing world of our lives, it is so easy to delete the past and move on to the next moment. To linger in the longing, the loss, the yearning is a way of feeling the rich and embroidered texture of life, the torn cloth of our world that is endlessly being ripped and rewoven.

CH: Despair: The World Is in Such Turmoil

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

“Perhaps here I may mention something from my own experience,” the Dalai Lama said. “March 10, 2008.” Every year, the Tibetan exile community commemorates March 10 as Tibetan Uprising Day, remembering the 1959 protest against Chinese occupation that ultimately led to the crackdown against the Tibetan freedom movement and the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile.
In 2008, leading up to the Beijing Olympics, that day had turned violent, starting in the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa and then spreading throughout Tibet and cities around the world.
“As usual we had a gathering to commemorate the tenth of March. After the meeting was over, I received a message from Lhasa that some of the local people had started demonstrations. When I heard this I was very concerned and quite anxious. I could not do anything. I felt helpless. I knew if they really carried out demonstrations, it would actually result only in more suffering, more problems. And this is exactly what happened, with the violent crackdown and the death and imprisonment of so many Tibetans who had participated in the protests. Over the next few days, during my meditation, I actually visualized some of those Chinese local authorities and did one of our practices, called tonglen, literally meaning ‘giving and taking.’ I tried to take on their fear, anger, suspicion, and to give them my love, my forgiveness. Of course, this would have no physical effect on the ground. It would not change the situation. But you see, mentally it was very, very helpful to keep a calm mind. It was a good opportunity to practice forgiveness and compassion. So I think that every person has this same sort of opportunity, this same capacity.”

- - -

“There was a family whose daughter had been killed, brutally killed, who came and said they supported the granting of amnesty to those who had killed their daughter so gruesomely. The parents had even opened a nonprofit to help people in the township where their daughter had been murdered, and they had even employed the men who had killed their daughter and whose amnesty they had supported.
“We’ve always got to be recognizing that despite the aberrations, the fundamental thing about humanity, about humankind, about people, is that they are good, they were made good, and they really want to be good.
“Yes, there are many, many things that can depress us. But there also are very many things that are fantastic about our world. Unfortunately the media do not report on these because they are not seen as news.”
“I think you are right,” the Dalai Lama said. “When bad things happen they become news, and it is easy to feel like our basic human nature is to kill or to rape or to be corrupt. Then we can feel that there is not much hope for our future.
“All these things happen, but they are unusual, which is why they become news. There are millions and millions of children who are loved by their parents every day. Then in school their teachers care for them. Okay, maybe there are some bad teachers, but most of them really are kind and caring.
Then in the hospital, every day millions of people receive immense caring.
But this is so common that none of it becomes news. We take it for granted.

- - -

Difference between Hope and Optimism

“Hope is quite different from optimism, which is more superficial and liable to become pessimism when the circumstances change. Hope is something much deeper.
“I mentioned earlier about Chris Hani, whose assassination occurred at a very critical point in the negotiations for a new, democratic South Africa. We were on the edge of a precipice. It was so serious that the then president, the white president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, asked Nelson Mandela to address the nation.
“That incident could have caused the collapse of the negotiations, but it didn’t, in fact. We were fortunate that we had someone like Nelson Mandela.
“Now, if you had been an optimist, you would have said, Well, the assassination of Chris Hani is really the end of everything. What made people want to go on going on—holding on by the skin of their teeth—was not optimism but hope—dogged, inextinguishable hope.
“I say to people that I’m not an optimist, because that, in a sense, is something that depends on feelings more than the actual reality. We feel optimistic, or we feel pessimistic. Now, hope is different in that it is based not on the ephemerality of feelings but on the firm ground of conviction. I believe with a steadfast faith that there can never be a situation that is utterly, totally hopeless. Hope is deeper and very, very close to unshakable. It’s in the pit of your tummy. It’s not in your head. It’s all here,” he said, pointing to his abdomen.
“Despair can come from deep grief, but it can also be a defense against the risks of bitter disappointment and shattering heartbreak. Resignation and cynicism are easier, more self-soothing postures that do not require the raw vulnerability and tragic risk of hope. To choose hope is to step firmly forward into the howling wind, baring one’s chest to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass.”
As the Archbishop was explaining, hope is the antidote to despair. Yet hope requires faith, even if that faith is in nothing more than human nature or the very persistence of life to find a way. Hope is also nurtured by relationship, by community, whether that community is a literal one or one fashioned from the long memory of human striving whose membership includes Gandhi, King, Mandela, and countless others. Despair turns us inward. Hope sends us into the arms of others.

Loneliness: No Need for Introduction

Throughout society today people feel great loneliness.

We were talking about loneliness and alienation and some troubling recent statistics. A study by sociologist Lynn Smith-Lovin had found that the number of close friends people report having has reduced from three to two. While we might have hundreds of Facebook friends, our true, close friends are decreasing. Perhaps most concerning of all, one in ten people said they had no close friendships at all.

“Actually, in America and in India also people in the big cities are very busy, and although they may see each other’s faces or even know each other for several years, they have practically no human connection. So when something happens, people feel lonely because they have no one they can turn to for help or support.”

...

“Our whole society has a materialistic culture,” the Dalai Lama said. “In the materialistic way of life, there’s no concept of friendship, no concept of love, just work, twenty-four hours a day, like a machine. So in modern society, we eventually also become part of that large moving machine.”
The Dalai Lama was naming a deep pain in the chest of modern life, but one that was so common we had forgotten that it was not normal. I thought of what the Archbishop had said of Ubuntu, how we are who we are through one another, how our humanity is bound up in one another.

The Dalai Lama had explained that in Buddhism there is the recognition of our interdependence on every level—socially, personally, subatomically. The Dalai Lama had often emphasized that we are born and die totally dependent on others, and that the independence that we think we experience in between is a myth.
“If we stress secondary level of differences—my nation, my religion, my color—then we notice the differences. Like this moment now in Africa, there is too much emphasis on this nation or that nation. They should think that we are same Africans. Furthermore, we are same human beings. Same with religion: Shiite and Sunni, or Christian and Muslim. We are same human beings. These differences between religions are personal matters. When we relate to others from the place of compassion it goes to the first level, the human level, not the secondary level of difference. Then you can even have compassion for your enemy.

“So, we all have the same potential for affection. And now scientists are discovering that our basic human nature is compassionate. The problem is that children go to schools where they are not taught to nurture these deeper human values, so their basic human potential becomes dormant.”
“Perhaps our synagogues, our temples, and our churches,” Archbishop Tutu added, “are not as welcoming as they should be. I really think that we do need for these fellowships to do a great deal more to have those who are lonely come and share. Not in an aggressive way, or in order, as it were, to increase their records or their ranks, but really just keenly interested in one person who comes and gets what they did not have before—warmth and fellowship. There are programs that set out to break down that loneliness.”

• • •

We often are alone without feeling lonely and feel lonely when we are not alone, as when we are in a crowd of strangers or at a party of people we do not know. Clearly the psychological experience of loneliness is quite different from the physical experience of being alone. We can feel joy when we are alone but not when we are lonely.

Monks spend a lot of time alone. So what is the difference between being alone and being lonely?”
The Dalai Lama turned to the Archbishop to see if he wanted to answer.
“No, I’ve not been a monk, man. You start.”
“Monks separate themselves from the material world, not just physically but mentally. According to his religion,” he said, pointing to the Archbishop,
“Christian monks are always thinking they’re in the light of God, dedicated to serving God. We cannot touch God directly, so the only way is serving God’s children, humanity. So we are never really lonely.
“Much depends on your attitude. If you are filled with negative judgment and anger, then you will feel separate from other people. You will feel lonely.
But if you have an open heart and are filled with trust and friendship, even if you are physically alone, even living a hermit’s life, you will never feel lonely.”

“It is ironic, isn’t it?” I offered, remembering Lama Tenzin, who told us, while we bought doughnuts on our way to Dharamsala, that he had a desire to live in a cave for the traditional length of over three years. “You can spend three years, three months, and three days in a cave and not be lonely, but you can be lonely in the middle of a crowd.”
“That’s right,” the Dalai Lama replied. “There are at least seven billion people and the number of sentient beings is limitless. If you are always thinking about the seven billion human beings, you will never experience loneliness.
“The only thing that will bring happiness is affection and warmheartedness. This really brings inner strength and self-confidence, reduces fear, develops trust, and trust brings friendship. We are social animals, and cooperation is necessary for our survival, but cooperation is entirely based on trust. When there is trust, people are brought together— whole nations are brought together. When you have a more compassionate mind and cultivate warmheartedness, the whole atmosphere around you becomes more positive and friendlier. You see friends everywhere. If you feel fear and distrust, then other people will distance themselves. They will also feel cautious, suspicious, and distrustful. Then comes the feeling of loneliness.

“When someone is warmhearted, they are always completely relaxed. If you live with fear and consider yourself as something special, then automatically, emotionally, you are distanced from others. You then create the basis for feelings of alienation from others and loneliness. So, I never consider, even when giving a talk to a large crowd, that I am something special, I am ‘His Holiness the Dalai Lama,’” he said, mocking his venerated status. “I always emphasize that when I meet people, we are all the same human beings. A thousand people—same human being. Ten thousand or a hundred thousand—same human being—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Then, you see, no barrier. Then my mind remains completely calm and relaxed. If too much emphasis on myself, and I start to think I’m something special, then more anxiety, more nervousness.

“The paradox is that although the drive behind excessive self-focus is to seek greater happiness for yourself, it ends up doing exactly the opposite.
When you focus too much on yourself, you become disconnected and alienated from others. In the end, you also become alienated from yourself, since the need for connection with others is such a fundamental part of who we are as human beings.

“This excessive self-focus is also bad for your health. Too much fear and distrust, too much focus on yourself leads to stress and high blood pressure.
Many years ago, I was at a gathering of medical scientists and researchers at Columbia University in New York. One of the medical scientists said in his presentation that those people who disproportionately use the first-person pronouns—I, I, I, me, me, me, and mine, mine, mine—have a significantly greater risk of having a heart attack. He didn’t explain why, but I felt this must be true. This is a deep insight. With too much self-focus your vision becomes narrow, and with this even a small problem appears out of proportion and unbearable.

“Also, fear and distrust come from too much focus on yourself. This will cause you to always remain separate from your human brothers and sisters.
This brings loneliness and difficulty communicating with other people. After all, you are part of the community, so you have to deal with them. Your interests and your future depend on other people. If you isolate yourself from them, how can you be a happy person? You just have more worry and more stress. Sometimes I say that too much self-centeredness closes our inner door, and it becomes hard to communicate with other people. When we are concerned with the well-being of other human beings, that inner door opens, and we are able to communicate very easily with other people.”
The Dalai Lama was saying that when one is thinking about others with kindness and compassion, one is never lonely. Openheartedness— warmheartedness—is the antidote to loneliness. It has often amazed me that one day I can walk down the street feeling judgmental and critical of others, and I will feel separate and lonely, and the next day I can walk down the same street with more openhearted acceptance and compassion and suddenly everyone seems warm and friendly. It is almost as if my inner state of mind and heart changes the physical and social world around me completely.

This focus on the importance of warmheartedness echoes the research of social psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Shira Gabriel, who have found that when people are feeling lonely or socially rejected, they literally seek warmth, like sipping hot soup. What the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were saying is that we can generate that warmth simply by opening our hearts and turning our attention and our concern to other people.

“Archbishop, did you want to add anything? I know you haven’t been a monastic, but you do spend a lot of time in prayer and meditation on your own.”
“Certainly in our sort of prayer,” the Archbishop explained, “it is never the alone speaking to the alone. Our concept of God is of a God who is one, but who is a fellowship, a community, the Trinity. And we are made in the image of this God. When you become a Christian, you are incorporated into a fellowship. So even when you go into retreat, you are not alone.”
“It’s similar to what the Dalai Lama is saying,” I said. “If you connect, even if that fellowship is seven billion people, then you don’t feel lonely.”
“Yes, yes,” the Archbishop replied. “It’s something of an oxymoron to be lonely. But I can very well understand when you feel alienated, when you are not on the same wavelength, as it were. And one wants to enter into that sense of being in solidarity. I don’t think we help people by making them feel guilty.
We want to try to be as welcoming as we possibly can and say that the experience they have is something that many other people also have. Feeling lonely is not something that we do deliberately. I don’t think you set out to say, I want to feel lonely. It’s just there. It happens and for very many reasons.
“You want to make the person feel really as they are, special. And accepted as they are and help to open them. I can very well understand the incredible anguish and pain that someone must feel who is cooped up in a room because they are scared of going out and being rejected. And you just hope and pray that they will find a fellowship of people who will embrace and welcome them. It’s wonderful to see people who were closed down open up like a beautiful flower in the warmth and acceptance of those around them.”

Envy: That Guy Goes Past Yet Again in His Mercedes-Benz

Comparison is indeed human—even beyond human; it is natural throughout the animal world. As the Dalai Lama would point out, even dogs that are eating together peacefully can suddenly start comparing the size of their portion to another’s, and a fight can break out with barking and the gnashing of teeth. But it is for humans that envy can become a source of great dissatisfaction. There is a Tibetan Buddhist teaching that says what causes suffering in life is a general pattern of how we relate to others: 
"Envy toward the above, competitiveness toward the equal, and contempt toward the lower.”

The Monkey and The Grape

Fairness seems to be hardwired into our genes, and so we are very uncomfortable with inequality of any sort. Primatologist Frans de Waal has a video of an experiment with capuchin monkeys, our distant relatives who are often used in psychological tests as proxies for humans. In the video, which has gone wildly viral, one of the small-headed, long-limbed gray monkeys gives the experimenter a rock and then receives a cucumber slice as payment.
The monkey is quite happy to do this over and over, until he sees his neighbor perform the same rock-giving task but receive a grape. In the world of capuchin monkeys, a grape is a better, sweeter food than a cucumber. Perhaps for humans, too. After the first monkey sees his neighbor getting a grape, he performs the rock-giving task yet again, although even more eagerly this time, his head now perking up in expectation at his grape reward. However, as required in this experiment of social comparisons, the experimenter gives the first monkey another cucumber instead of a grape.
The capuchin looks at the cucumber in his hand, pulling his head back in seeming disbelief, and then throws the cucumber back at the experimenter. In uncontrollable rage, the monkey grabs the bars of the cage and shakes them.
This video became popular during the time of the Wall Street protests in the United States because it so succinctly and poignantly revealed how our fundamental instincts for fairness work and why inequality is stressful and damaging to a society.

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Usually, we don’t actually compare ourselves to the hedge fund billionaire or to the genius scientist or to the supermodel. We tend to compare ourselves to those who are in our social circle. As the old saying goes: 
“If you want to be poor, find some rich friends. If you want to be rich, find some poor friends.” 
 Keeping up with the Joneses happens within a peer group.

According to the happiness research, “upward comparisons” are particularly corrosive to our well-being. Envy doesn’t leave room for joy. The Tibetan word for envy is trakdok, which means “heavy or constricted shoulders,” and indeed the feeling of envy leaves one with a pinched feeling of discontent and resentment, tinged with guilt. Buddhism sees envy as so corrosive that it compares it to a venomous snake that poisons us. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the Ten Commandments forbids “coveting” thy neighbor’s house.

Remedy for Envy #1: Gratitude
 The Archbishop offers a powerful remedy for envy: gratitude. “I think that one of the best ways you can begin to counter it is that old one of counting your blessings. That might sound very old, old, old, old, old, grandfather-style, but yes, it does help. You know you might not have as big a house as that person, but you know what? You’re not living in a shack.
So being thankful for the things that you do in fact have can help.”

Remedy for Envy #2: Motivation
 And then he offered another remedy: motivation. “Certainly with envy, it can also be a spur, you know? It can help you say, I haven’t got a car or a house like that guy, so why don’t I aim to work to try and get something like that?” As the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama had said, these external goals will not bring us true joy or lasting happiness, but motivation to improve our situation is certainly better than envy of someone else’s.

Remedy for Envy #3: Reframing
 And then the Archbishop offered his final and most effective remedy: reframing. “The very best is being able to ask yourself, ‘Why do I want to have a house that has seven rooms when there are only two or three of us? Why do I want to have it?’ And you can turn it on its head and look at how we are in such a mess with climate change because of our galloping consumption, which for the environment has been nothing less than disastrous. So you buy the small electric car instead, and you say, no I don’t need or want that big luxury car. So instead of it being your enemy, now it’s your ally.”

Remedy for Envy #4: Compassion
 “Often envy comes because we are too focused on material possessions and not on our true inner values. When we focus on experience or knowledge, there is much less envy. But most important is to develop a sense of concern for others’ well-being. If you have genuine kindness or compassion, then when someone gets something or has more success you are able to rejoice in their good fortune. For a person who is committed to compassion practice and a genuine sense of concern for others’ well-being, then you will rejoice in others’ good fortune because you will be happy that what that person aspires for is being obtained.”

Remedy for Envy #5: Sympathetic Joy
 The Dalai Lama was describing the Buddhist concept of mudita, which is often translated as “sympathetic joy” and described as the antidote to envy.
Mudita is so important in Buddhism that it is considered one of the Four Immeasurables, qualities we can cultivate infinitely. The other three are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity.

Jinpa had explained how mudita works: If someone has something that we want, say, a bigger house, we can consciously take joy in their good fortune by telling ourselves: “Good for him. Just like me, he, too, wants to be happy.
He, too, wants to be successful. He, too, wants to support his family. May he be happy. I congratulate him and want him to have more success.” Mudita recognizes that life is not a zero-sum game, that there is not just one slice of cake in which someone else’s taking more means we get less. Mudita sees joy as limitless.

- - -

"It is important to cultivate any emotion that brings joyfulness and peace of mind. Any sort of emotion that disturbs this happiness and peace of mind, we must learn to avoid right from the beginning."

Mudita and Schadenfreude

Mudita is also the opposite feeling to schadenfreude, the German word for the feeling of satisfaction or pleasure in hearing of others’ misfortune. Schadenfreude sees us in a constant struggle of one against all others, and if someone else succeeds or accomplishes something, then we are somehow diminished, less successful, less acceptable, less lovable. Schadenfreude is a natural outgrowth of envy. Mudita is a natural outgrowth of compassion.

Mudita is based on the recognition of our interdependence, or Ubuntu. The Archbishop explains that in African villages, one would ask in greeting,
“How are we?” This understanding sees that someone else’s achievements or happiness is in a very real way our own. The Archbishop frequently marvels at the extraordinary beauty and talent that we humans have. “Look how beautiful you all are,” he will say to a gathered crowd. Unfortunately, however, most of us want to cut others down to our self-perceived size, and we see ourselves as so terribly small and weak. When we remember our interdependence, we discover we are so incredibly large and strong.

The Buddha, The King, The Beggar and The Mudita

“There is an old story from the time of the Buddha,” the Dalai Lama said.
“One day a king invited the Buddha and his monks for lunch. On his way to the palace, the Buddha passed by a beggar who was praising the king and smiling as he spoke of the beauty of the palace. After the king’s servants served a long meal, with many courses, to the Buddha and his gathering of monks, the time came for making the dedication. The Buddha chanted a prayer to dedicate the merit, or the good karma, of the meal. However, instead of dedicating the merit of the host, the king who made the generous offering of the meal to the Buddha and his assembly, which was the custom, the Buddha chose the beggar standing outside. Shocked, one of his senior monks asked the Buddha why he chose the beggar for his dedication prayer. The Buddha replied that the king was filled with pride in showing off his kingdom, while the beggar, who had nothing, was able to rejoice in the king’s good fortune. For this reason the beggar had created more merit than the king.
Even today in Thailand they maintain this tradition of dedicating the merit of the offering of a meal.

During my visit to Thailand in the early 1970s I had the honor to participate in one such lunch, where one of the senior monks said prayers and offered the dedication. So rejoicing in others’ good fortune really brings a lot of positive benefits.”

How do people cultivate mudita?

“Firstly, we should recognize our shared humanity. These are our human brothers and sisters, who have the same right and the same desire to have a happy life. This is not a spiritual thing. It is simply common sense. We are part of the same society. We are part of the same humanity. When humanity is happy, we will be happy. When humanity is peaceful, our own lives are peaceful. Just like if your family is happy, you are better off.
“If we have a strong sense of ‘I and they,’ it is hard to practice mudita. We must develop the sense of ‘we.’ Once you’re able to develop that sense of common humanity and the oneness of humanity, then naturally you will want all others to be free from suffering and enjoy happiness. The desire for happiness is a natural instinct shared by everyone. It is simply a sense of concern once again for others’ well-being.”
“Obviously, envy is not a virtue,” the Archbishop said, cautious once again that our self-development might lead to self-reproach. “Yet I would hope we would not make someone feel guilty, at least initially, about something that springs up spontaneously. You can’t do very much about that feeling, but you can counter it.”
“Like physical illness,” the Dalai Lama insisted. “Preventive measures are the best way. Yes, if some disease has already developed, then there’s no other choice but to take medicine. So similarly, once a person develops a strong negative emotion, like anger or jealousy, it is very difficult to counter it at that moment. So the best thing is to cultivate your mind through practice so that you can learn to prevent it from arising in the first place. For example, the major source of anger is frustration and dissatisfaction. At the moment when an emotion like anger is full-blown, even if we try to use our experience and our knowledge to reduce it, we will find it is very difficult to stop. At that point it is like a flood. During monsoon season, it is too late to stop the flooding. We need to start early in the spring and investigate what is causing the flooding and try to build flood walls to prevent disaster.
“Similarly, for our mental health also, the earlier we start practicing preventive measures, the easier and more effective they are. When we are already sick it is hard to remember our doctor’s advice. I think no doctor would say, If you have more anger, you will be healthier. Does your doctor say that?”
“No,” the Archbishop agreed.
“Doctors always advise us to relax. Relax means calm mind. Not too much agitation, which will destroy your relaxation. Also, too much attachment will destroy your peace of mind,” the Dalai Lama said, returning again to envy and jealousy. “You can have a nice house with a nice bedroom and a nice bath, and play relaxing music, but if you are full of anger, full of jealousy, full of attachment, you will never be able to relax. In contrast, you may be sitting on a rock with nothing, but if your mind is completely peaceful, then you can be relaxed.”

Jinpa told me that there is a memorable verse in a well-known Tibetan text by the first Panchen Lama. This is a beautiful prayer that Jinpa uses to cultivate mudita: As for suffering I do not wish even the slightest; as for happiness I am never satisfied.
In this, there is no difference between others and me.
Bless me so I may take joy in others’ happiness.

Suffering and Adversity: Passing through Difficulties

Contrasting good times and bad times

Dalai Lama said to Archbishop: “When you got your freedom, you really felt joyous. Now the new generation, who are born after, they don’t know the true joy of freedom, and complain more.”
I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.
“I think in Europe, too,” the Dalai Lama continued, “the older generation really went through great hardships. They were hardened and strengthened by those painful experiences. So this shows that the Tibetan saying is really true.
The suffering is what makes you appreciate the joy.”

As the Dalai Lama was speaking, I could not help thinking of how we try so hard, with our natural parental instinct, to save our children from pain and suffering, but when we do, we rob them of their ability to grow and learn from adversity. I recalled psychologist and Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger saying that the spoiled, pampered children were the first to die at Auschwitz. They kept waiting for others to come save them, and when no one came, they gave up. They had not learned how to save themselves.
“Many people think of suffering as a problem,” the Dalai Lama said.
“Actually, it is an opportunity destiny has given to you. In spite of difficulties and suffering, you can remain firm and maintain your composure.”

- - -

Jinpa mentioned that in the Tibetan spiritual teaching known as the Seven-Point Mind Training, three categories of people are identified as being special objects of focus because these are the most challenging: your family members, your teachers, and your enemies. “Three objects, three poisons, and three roots of virtue.” Jinpa explained the meaning of this cryptic and intriguing phrase: “Often it is our day-to-day interaction with these three objects that give rise to the three poisons of attachment, anger, and delusion, which are at the heart of so much suffering. Through spiritual training we have the opportunity to transform our engagement with our family, teachers, and adversaries into the development of the three roots of virtue: nonattachment, compassion, and wisdom.”

- - -

“Many Tibetans,” the Dalai Lama said, “spent years in Chinese gulags, work camps where they were tortured and forced to do hard labor. This, some of them told me, was a good time to test the real person, and their inner strength. Some lost hope; some kept going. Education had very little to do with who survived. In the end, it was their inner spirit, or warmheartedness, that made the real difference.”

We say that you will be surprised by the joy the minute you stop being too self-regarding. Of course, you have to be somewhat self-regarding, because the Lord that I follow said —taking it from the scripture—‘love thy neighbor as—’”
“‘You,’” the Dalai Lama said, finishing the famous teaching.
“Yes,” the Archbishop said. “Thyself. Love others as you love yourself.”
“Yes, yes.” The Dalai Lama was nodding his head in agreement.
The Archbishop translated the scripture into contemporary phrasing. “You must long for the best for that other as you would want the best for you.”

Dalai Lama's Remembers His Time During Chinese Invasion

“When I was sixteen, I lost my freedom in two senses. The previous Dalai Lama had not taken on political responsibility until he was eighteen, but in my case, the people asked me to become head of the government early because the situation was very serious, as the Chinese military had already invaded the eastern part of Tibet. When the Chinese authorities reached Lhasa, things became even more delicate, and I lost my freedom in a second way, as they severely restricted my actions.
“This political responsibility also greatly damaged my studies. As I carried out my geshe examinations at the major monastic universities around Lhasa in central Tibet, the Tibetan soldiers had to stand guard on the mountainside nearby. Then my final examination was to be in the courtyard of the central temple in Lhasa. There were some worries about the Chinese military, and some Tibetan officials wanted to change the location because they thought it was too dangerous, but I said I did not think it was necessary. But during the debate I had a lot of anxiety and worry, not just for my safety but also for that of my people.
“So then at age twenty-four, when I escaped to India in March 1959, I lost my own country. In one way, this made me very sad, particularly when I think of the serious question of whether the Tibetan nation, with its unique cultural heritage, will actually survive or not. The Tibetan civilization has existed for ten thousand years, and in some areas of the Tibetan plateau, human habitation existed for as many as thirty thousand years. And today’s situation of Tibet is the most serious crisis in the entire history of the nation. During the Cultural Revolution, some Chinese officials made a pledge that within fifteen years the Tibetan language must be eliminated. So they burned books, such as the three-hundred-volume Tibetan canon of scriptures translated from India, as well as several thousand volumes written by Tibetans themselves. I was told that the books would burn for one or two weeks. Our statues and our monasteries were being destroyed. So it was a very, very serious situation.
“And when we came to India as refugees in 1959, we were strangers in a new place. As the Tibetan saying goes: ‘The only things that were familiar to us were the sky and the earth.’ But we received immense help from the Indian government and some international organizations, including some Christian organizations, who rebuilt the Tibetan community so that we could keep our culture, our language, and our knowledge alive. So a lot of difficulties, a lot of problems, but when you carry out the work, and the more difficulties you encounter, then when you see some results, the greater the joy. Isn’t it?”

- - -

Good times and bad times change with your perception and time itself

This is the famous Chinese story about the farmer whose horse runs away. His neighbors are quick to comment on his bad luck. The farmer responds that no one can know what is good and what is bad. When the horse comes back with a wild stallion, the neighbors are quick to comment, this time talking about the farmer’s good luck. Again, the farmer replies that no one can know what is good and what is bad. When the farmer’s son breaks his leg trying to tame the wild stallion, the neighbors now are certain of the farmer’s bad luck. Again, the farmer says that no one knows. When war breaks out, all the able-bodied young men are conscripted into battle except the farmer’s son, who was spared because of his broken leg.

- - -

Story of Nelson Mandela

Think of Nelson Mandela. As we said, Nelson Mandela, when he went to prison, was a very angry young man, or youngish man. He was the commander in chief of the military wing of the ANC, as we said. He believed firmly that the enemy had to be decimated, and he and his comrades had been found guilty in a travesty of justice. That is the guy who went in, aggressive and angry. He comes onto Robben Island and is mistreated, as most of them were. Today when people go and they see his cell, there’s a bed. They didn’t have a bed. They were sleeping on the floor, no mattress, just a thin little thing.” The Archbishop was pinching his thumb and forefinger to emphasize the discomfort, the pain, and the suffering that he endured, even in sleep.
“These were sophisticated, educated people. What do they do? What are they made to do? They are made to go and dig in a quarry. And they are wearing very inadequate clothing. Nelson Mandela and all of them wore shorts, even in winter. They were made to do almost senseless work, breaking rocks and sewing post office bags. He was a highly qualified lawyer. There he’s sitting and sewing.”
During a visit to Robben Island with Ahmed Kathrada, one of Mandela’s colleagues and fellow prisoners, he showed us in the cafeteria the different rations that were given to the prisoners—based on their race—a daily reminder of the obsessive racial fascism that they were fighting: “Six ounces of meat for coloreds/Asiatics and five ounces for Bantus (blacks); one ounce of jam or syrup for coloreds/Asiatics and none for Bantus.”
“I mean, it must have frustrated him to no end, made him very, very angry.
God was good and said, You’re going to stay here twenty-seven years. And after those twenty-seven years he emerges on the other side as someone of immense magnanimity, because in an extraordinary way his suffering helped to grow him. Where they thought it was going to break him, it helped him. It helped him to see the point of view of the other. Twenty-seven years later, he comes out kind, caring, ready to trust his erstwhile enemy.”

Dalai Lama speaks of his father

My father fell down a flight of stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury. The doctors explained that with a broken bone, we know exactly how long it will take to heal, but with the brain we never know how it will heal and if it will heal completely. For more than a month he was in the intensive care unit and neuro rehab, in varying states of delirium, as we worried whether he would ever return to his former self, to his great mind and heart. I will never forget the first telephone call I received from him from the hospital, since we did not know if he would ever be able to communicate consciously again. When my brother was visiting with my dad, he said, “I’m so sorry you’ve had this terrible experience.” My father replied,
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s all part of my curriculum.”

Illness and Fear of Death: I Prefer to Go to Hell

Archbishop made a powerful distinction between healing and curing: Curing involves the resolution of the illness but was not always possible. Healing, he said, was coming to wholeness and could happen whether or not the illness was curable.

- - -

“As a Buddhist practitioner,” the Dalai Lama said, “I take seriously the contemplation of the Buddha’s first teaching, about the inevitability of suffering and the transient nature of our existence. Also, the Buddha’s last teaching at the time of his death ends with the truth of impermanence, reminding us how it is the nature of all things that come into existence to have an end. The Buddha said nothing lasts.
“So it is important that in our daily meditation practice we continue to think about our own mortality. There are two levels of impermanence. At the grosser level, life keeps changing and things cease to exist, including us. At the more subtle level, in every single moment everything is changing, something science is able to show us happening, even at the atomic and subatomic level. Our body is constantly changing, as is our mind. Everything is in a constant state of change—nothing remains static, and nothing remains permanent. In fact, as the Buddha reminds us, the very causes that have given rise to something, such as our life, have created the mechanism, or the seed, for that thing’s eventual end. Recognizing this truth is an important part of the contemplation on impermanence.

- - -

Jinpa explained that there is a profound teaching by an ancient Tibetan master: The true measure of spiritual development is how one confronts one’s own mortality. The best way is when one is able to approach death with joy; next best way is without fear; third best way is at least not to have regrets.
“So earlier I was explaining about the night that we fled from Norbulingka,” the Dalai Lama said, now turning to his own experiences of facing the fear of death. “For me, that was the most frightening night of my life, the night of the 17th of March, 1959. At that time, my life really was in danger. I still remember the alertness of mind I felt as I stepped out of the Norbulingka Palace in disguise, dressed in a Tibetan layman’s clothes. All my efforts to calm down the situation in Lhasa had failed. A huge crowd of Tibetans had gathered outside the Norbulingka Palace, wanting to block any attempts on the part of the Chinese military to take me away. I had tried my best, but both sides, the Chinese and the Tibetans, were deeply entrenched in their positions. Of course, the Tibetan side was deeply devout and was trying to protect me.” The Dalai Lama paused and looked reflective as he recalled the devotion of his people and their self-sacrifice for his safety.
This spontaneous gathering of Tibetans outside Norbulingka Palace was the culmination of days of uprising against the Communist Chinese occupation by the Tibetan people that first began on March 10, 1959. This time, the public had come to prevent the Chinese authorities from taking the Dalai Lama away from Norbulingka Palace, supposedly for his own personal safety. Something had to happen. The situation was explosive and the Dalai Lama knew that it could only lead to a massacre.
“So that night, the 17th of March 1959, the plan for my escape was executed. We went at night and in disguise along a road that followed a river.
On the other side of the river was the Chinese military barracks. We could see the guards. No one in our party was allowed to use flashlights, and we tried to minimize the sound of the horses’ hoofs. But still there was danger. If they saw us and opened fire, we were finished.
“Yet as a Buddhist practitioner, I thought of Shantideva’s somewhat stern advice: If there is a way to overcome the situation, then instead of feeling too much sadness, too much fear, or too much anger, make an effort to change the situation. If there’s nothing you can do to overcome the situation, then there is no need for fear or sadness or anger. So I told myself, at that moment, that even if something were to happen to me, it would still be okay.
“You face the facts, the reality. And making an attempt to escape was the best response in the face of that reality. Actually, fear is part of human nature; it’s a natural response that arises in the face of a danger. But with courage, when in fact real dangers come, you can be more fearless, more realistic. On the other hand, if you let your imagination run wild, then you exacerbate the situation further and then bring more fear.
“Many people on this planet worry about going to hell, but this is not much use. There is no need to be afraid. While we remain on the earth worrying about hell, about death, about all the things that could go wrong, we will have lots of anxiety, and we will never find joy and happiness. If you are truly afraid of hell, you need to live your life with some purpose, especially through helping others.

Meditation: Now I’ll Tell You a Secret Thing

Douglas: At first my mind started racing, and I was having a hard time staying focused, thinking about the questions I would ask, the video camera that was filming, the other people in the room, and if everything was as it should be and everyone had what they needed. Then as I watched the Dalai Lama’s face, my own mirror neuron system seemed to resonate with the mind-state that I was witnessing. Mirror neurons allow us to imitate others and experience their internal states, and therefore may play an important role in empathy. I started to experience a tingling in my forehead and then a sharpening of focus as various parts of my brain started to quiet and calm, as if the activity began to center on what spiritual adepts have called the third eye, or what neuroscientists call the middle prefrontal cortex.
Daniel Siegel had explained to me that the neural integration created by this crucial area of the brain links many disparate areas and is the locus of everything from emotional regulation to morality. Meditation, he and other scientists have proposed, helps with these processes. He explained that the integrative fibers of the discerning middle prefrontal cortex seem to reach out and soothe the more reactive emotional structures of the brain. We inherited the reactivity of this part of our brain, and particularly the sensitive amygdala, from our skittish fight-or-flight ancestors. Yet so much of the inner journey means freeing ourselves from this evolutionary response so that we do not flip our lid or lose our higher reasoning when facing stressful situations.
The real secret of freedom may simply be extending this brief space between stimulus and response. Meditation seems to elongate this pause and help expand our ability to choose our response. For example, can we expand the momentary pause between our spouse’s annoyed words and our angry or hurt reaction? Can we change the channel on the mental broadcasting system from self-righteous indignation—how dare she or he speak to me like that—to compassionate understanding—she or he must be very tired. I will never forget seeing the Archbishop do exactly this—pause and choose his response —during a pointed challenge I had made some years ago.

In the land of Gandhi that we were in, I thought of his totemic words when asked if he was a Hindu: “Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a Jew.”

Days 4 and 5: The Eight Pillars of Joy
 
1. Perspective: There Are Many Different Angles

We had discussed the topic of mental immunity in reducing fear and anger and other obstacles to joy, but the Dalai Lama had explained that mental immunity was also about filling our mind and heart with positive thoughts and feelings. As our dialogue progressed, we converged on eight pillars of joy.

Four were qualities of the mind: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance.

Four were qualities of the heart: forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.

The factors that psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has found to have the greatest influence on our happiness supported a number of the eight pillars. The first concerned our perspective toward life, or, as Lyubomirsky described it, our ability to reframe our situation more positively. Our capacity to experience gratitude and our choice to be kind and generous were the others.
A healthy perspective really is the foundation of joy and happiness, because the way we see the world is the way we experience the world.
Changing the way we see the world in turn changes the way we feel and the way we act, which changes the world itself. Or, as the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, “With our mind we create our own world.”

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Edith Eva Eger tells the story of visiting two soldiers on the same day at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss. Both were paraplegics who had lost the use of their legs in combat. They had the same diagnosis and the same prognosis. The first veteran, Tom, was lying on his bed knotted into a fetal position, railing against life and decrying his fate. The second, Chuck, was out of bed in his wheelchair, explaining that he felt as if he had been given a second chance in life. As he was wheeled through the garden, he had realized that he was closer to the flowers and could look right into his children’s eyes.
Eger often quotes fellow Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who said that our perspective toward life is our final and ultimate freedom. She explains that our perspective literally has the power to keep us alive or to cause our death. One of her fellow inmates at Auschwitz was terribly ill and weak, and others in her bunk asked her how she was holding on to life. The prisoner said that she had heard that they were going to be liberated by Christmas. The woman lived against all odds, but she died on Christmas Day when they were not liberated. It’s no wonder that during the week the Dalai Lama had called some thoughts and feelings toxic, even poisonous.

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The Dalai Lama used the terms wider perspective and larger perspective.
They involve stepping back, within our own mind, to look at the bigger picture and to move beyond our limited self-awareness and our limited selfinterest.
Every situation we confront in life comes from the convergence of many contributing factors. The Dalai Lama had explained, “We must look at any given situation or problem from the front and from the back, from the sides, and from the top and the bottom, so from at least six different angles.
This allows us to take a more complete and holistic view of reality, and if we do, our response will be more constructive.”

We suffer from a perspectival myopia. As a result, we are left nearsighted, unable to see our experience in a larger way. When we confront a challenge, we often react to the situation with fear and anger. The stress can make it hard for us to step back and see other perspectives and other solutions. This is natural, the Archbishop emphasized throughout the week. But if we try, we can become less fixated, or attached, to use the Buddhist term, to one outcome and can use more skillful means to handle the situation. We see that in the most seemingly limiting circumstance we have choice and freedom, even if that freedom is ultimately the attitude we will take. How can a trauma lead to growth and transformation? How can a negative event actually become positive? We were being invited to see the blessing in the curse, the joy in the sorrow. Jinpa offered a silver-lining thought experiment to take us out of our limited perspective: Take something bad that happened in the past and then consider all the good that came out of it.

But is this simply being Pollyanna? Are we seeing the world less clearly when we view it through these rose-colored glasses? I do not think anyone would accuse the Dalai Lama or Archbishop Tutu of not seeing the struggles they have faced or the horrors of our world with keen and unflinching vision.
What they are reminding us is that often what we think is reality is only part of the picture. We look at one of the calamities in our world, as the Archbishop suggested, and then we look again, and we see all those who are helping to heal those who have been harmed. This is the ability to reframe life more positively based on a broader, richer, more nuanced perspective.
With a wider perspective, we can see our situation and all those involved in a larger context and from a more neutral position. By seeing the many conditions and circumstances that have led to this event, we can recognize that our limited perspective is not the truth. As the Dalai Lama said, we can even see our own role in any conflict or misunderstanding.
By stepping back we can also see the long view, and have a clearer understanding of our actions and our problems in the larger frame of our life.
This allows us to see that even though our situation may seem challenging now, from the vantage point of a month or a year or a decade these challenges will seem much more manageable. When the Archbishop was awarded the Templeton Prize in London, I had the opportunity to meet the astronomer royal of the United Kingdom, Sir Martin Rees, who explained to me that our Earth will exist for an equivalent amount of time as it has taken us to go from one-celled organisms to human beings—in other words, we are only halfway through our evolution on this planet. Thinking of our world’s problems in this long sweep of planetary history really is the long view. It puts our daily concerns into a much broader perspective.
This wider perspective also leads us beyond our own self-regard. Selfcenteredness is most of our default perspective. It comes quite understandably from the fact that we are at the center of our world. But as the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop demonstrate so powerfully, we also have the ability to take on the perspectives of others.
I remembered the Archbishop wondering if the person who had cut him off in traffic might be rushing to the hospital because his wife was giving birth or because a loved one was dying. “I have sometimes said to people,” the Archbishop said, “when you are stuck in a traffic jam, you can deal with it in one of two ways. You can let the frustration really eat you up. Or you can look around at the other drivers and see that one might have a wife who has pancreatic cancer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly what they might have, but you know they are all suffering with worries and fears because they are human. And you can lift them up and bless them. You can say, Please,
God, give each one of them what they need.
“The very fact of not thinking about your own frustration and pain does something. I don’t know why. But it will make you feel much better. And I think it has therapeutic consequences for your own health, physical and spiritual. But what does frustration help? I mean, you feel it in the pit of your tummy, the anger. I mean, you just get more angry, and after a while you are going to develop ulcers in the stomach from the fact that you got annoyed at sitting in a traffic jam.”
Taking a “God’s-eye perspective,” as the Archbishop might say, allows us to transcend our limited identity and limited self-interest. One does not have to believe in God to experience this mind-altering shift in perspective. The famous Overview Effect is perhaps the most profound example. Many astronauts have reported that once they glimpsed Earth from space—a small blue ball floating in the vast expanse, lacking our human-made borders—they never looked at their personal or national interests in quite the same way again. They saw the oneness of terrestrial life and the preciousness of our planetary home.
Fundamentally, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were trying to shift our perspective from focusing on I and me and mine to we and us and ours.
Earlier in the week the Dalai Lama had referenced a classic study that suggested the constant use of personal pronouns leads to a greater risk of heart attack. In a multicenter prospective study of coronary heart disease, health researcher Larry Scherwitz found that people who more frequently said I, me, or mine had a higher risk of having a heart attack and had a higher risk of their heart attack being fatal. Scherwitz found that this so-called “selfinvolvement” was a better predictor of death than smoking, high cholesterol levels, or high blood pressure. A more recent study conducted by researcher Johannes Zimmerman found that people who more often use first-person singular words—I and me—are more likely to be depressed than people who more often use first-person plural—we and us. This was interesting evidence that being too self-regarding really does make us unhappy.
When we have a wider perspective, we are also less likely to spend our time lost in self-referential thoughts, ruminating. Jinpa offered another thought experiment designed to take us out of our self-absorption, one that the Archbishop described using when he was in the hospital being treated for prostate cancer, and that the Dalai Lama used when he was doubled over in pain from a gallbladder infection: Think about where you are suffering in your life and then think about all the other people who are going through a similar situation. This perhaps is quite literally the birth of compassion, which means “suffering with.” The incredible thing, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop pointed out, was that this “suffering with” others reminds us that we are not alone, and actually lessens our own pain. This recognition of our interdependence begins to soften our rigid sense of self, the boundaries that separate us from others. The Dalai Lama had said earlier in the week, “If, on the other hand, I relate to others from the perspective of myself as someone different—a Buddhist, a Tibetan, and so on—I will then create walls to keep me apart from others.”

2. Humility: I Tried to Look Humble and Modest

The Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were uninterested in status and superiority. The Dalai Lama began to tell a story that was a poignant reminder that not all shared their view in the religious world.
“You have said I am a mischievous person,” he said, pointing at the Archbishop. “One day, at a big interfaith meeting in Delhi, one Indian spiritual leader sat there next to me like this.” The Dalai Lama sat up stiffly and made a rigid, scowling face. “He said that his seat should be higher than the others. What do you call this?” the Dalai Lama asked, tapping the base of his chair.
“The legs,” the Archbishop offered.
“Yes, the legs were not long enough, so the organizers had to bring some extra bricks to make this spiritual leader’s chair higher. The whole time I sat next to him, he remained immobile like a statue. Then I thought, If one of the bricks were to move, and he fell over, then we would see what would happen —”
“Did you move the brick?” the Archbishop asked.
“If I had...”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Maybe you will see some mysterious force move the brick because I will pray to God, ‘Please, just topple that chair.’ Then that spiritual leader will act like a real human being.”
The Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were cackling.

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Dalai Lama: “When I was very young, in Lhasa, I used to receive copies of the American magazine called Life. One issue had a picture of Princess Elizabeth, the future queen, at some very big official function. The princess was reading a message with Prince Philip by her side. The wind had blown Her Majesty’s skirt like that.” The Dalai Lama was puffing his robes out. “Both Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip pretended like nothing had happened, but an American photographer took the picture. When I saw that picture I laughed. I really thought it was very funny. Sometimes, especially in formal occasions, people act as if they are different and special. But we all know that we are all the same, ordinary human beings.”

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“There is a Tibetan prayer,” the Dalai Lama said, “which is part of the mind-training teachings. A Tibetan master says, ‘Whenever I see someone, may I never feel superior. From the depth of my heart, may I be able to really appreciate the other person in front of me.’” And then he turned to the Archbishop and said, “Sometimes you tell me to act . . .”
“Like a holy man,” the Archbishop finished.
“Yes, like a holy man,” the Dalai Lama said, laughing as if his being a holy man was the funniest thing he had ever heard.
“Yes, yes,” the Archbishop said. “I mean, people expect that you would have a presence and behave properly. Not take my cap and put it on your own head. I mean, people don’t expect that from a holy man.”
“But if you think you are just a normal person—one human being out of seven billion—you see there’s no reason to be surprised or to feel like I should be something special. So whenever I’m with queens or kings or presidents or prime ministers or beggars I always remember that we are all the same.”
“So when people treat you as His Holiness with such deference,” I said,
“does that make it difficult to maintain your humility?”
“No, I don’t care about formality or protocol. These are artificial. Really.
Bishop, you were born the same human way. There is no special way that bishops are born. And I think, when the end comes, also you will die as a normal human being.”

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The Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were both insistent that humility is essential to any possibility of joy. When we have a wider perspective, we have a natural understanding of our place in the great sweep of all that was, is, and will be. This naturally leads to humility and the recognition that as human beings we can’t solve everything or control all aspects of life. We need others.
The Archbishop has poignantly said that our vulnerabilities, our frailties, and our limitations are a reminder that we need one another: We are not created for independence or self-sufficiency, but for interdependence and mutual support. The Dalai Lama was saying that we are all born and all die in the same way, and at these moments we are totally dependent on others, whether we are a Dalai Lama or a beggar, whether we are an Archbishop or a refugee.
With the keen insight of a longtime friend and collaborator, Daniel Goleman characterized the Dalai Lama’s attitude toward life: “The Dalai Lama seems amused by everything that is going on around him, taking pleasure in whatever is going on, but not taking anything too personally, and not worrying or taking offense at anything that is happening.” The Dalai Lama was reminding us throughout the week not to get caught up in roles, and indeed arrogance is the confusion between our temporary roles and our fundamental identity. When Juan, our sound technician, wired up his remote microphone, the Dalai Lama playfully pulled on Juan’s Don Quixote beard, which would start everyone giggling, most of all the Dalai Lama. He was saying: Today you are the sound technician and I am the Dalai Lama, next time maybe the roles will be reversed. Next time might be another year or another life, as the idea of reincarnation does remind us that all of our roles are temporary.

None of us are immune to the all-too-human traits of pride or ego, but true arrogance really comes from insecurity. Needing to feel that we are bigger than others comes from a nagging fear that we are smaller. Whenever the Dalai Lama senses this danger, he looks at a bug or some other creature and reminds himself that, in some ways, this creature is better than we are, because it is innocent and free of malice. “When we realize that we are all children of God,” the Archbishop has explained, “and of equal and intrinsic value, then we don’t have to feel better or worse than others.” The Archbishop was adamant: “No one is a divine accident.” While we may not be special, we are essential. No one can fulfill our role but us in the divine plan or karmic unfolding.
“Sometimes we confuse humility with timidity,” the Archbishop explained. “This gives little glory to the one who has given us our gifts.
Humility is the recognition that your gifts are from God, and this lets you sit relatively loosely to those gifts. Humility allows us to celebrate the gifts of others, but it does not mean you have to deny your own gifts or shrink from using them. God uses each of us in our own way, and even if you are not the best one, you may be the one who is needed or the one who is there.”

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“We should also realize that the recognition of our own limitations and weaknesses can be very positive. This can be wisdom. If you realize that you are inadequate in some way, then you develop effort. If you think, everything is fine and I’m okay just as I am, then you will not try to develop further. There is a Tibetan saying that wisdom is like rainwater—both gather in the low places. There is another saying that when the spring bloom comes, where does it start? Does it start on the hilltops or down in the valleys first? Growth begins first in the low places. So similarly if you remain humble, then there is the possibility to keep learning. So I often tell people that although I’m eighty years old, I still consider myself a student.”

3. Humor: Laughter, Joking Is Much Better

“It is much better when there is not too much seriousness,” the Dalai Lama responded. “Laughter, joking is much better. Then we can be completely relaxed. I met some scientists in Japan, and they explained that wholehearted laughter—not artificial laughter—is very good for your heart and your health in general.” When he said “artificial laughter,” he pretended to smile and forced a chuckle. He was making a connection between wholehearted laughter and a warm heart, which he had already said was the key to happiness.

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“People were really angry and you’d have the police standing not far away —and it was an explosive situation. Anything could have gone wrong. My weaponry, if you can call it that, was almost always to use humor, and especially self-denigrating humor, where you are laughing at yourself.
“We came to a township just outside of Johannesburg, where the apartheid forces had provided weapons to one group, and they had killed quite a number of people. We were having a meeting of bishops close by, and I was part of those leading the funeral of the victims of that massacre. The people were obviously extremely angry, and I remembered a story that had been told about how at the beginning of creation, God molded us out of clay and then put us into a kiln, like you do with bricks. God put one lot in and then got busy with other things and forgot about those he had put into the kiln. And after a while he remembered and rushed to the kiln, where the whole lot was burned to cinders. They say this is how we black people came about.
Everyone laughed a little. And then I said, ‘Next, God put in a second lot, and this time he was overanxious and opened the oven too quickly, and this second lot that came out was underdone. And that’s how white people came about.’” The Archbishop finished with a little laugh and then that cackle that climbs up the flagpole and back down.

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Archbishop: “I have been helped by my wife, Leah, who was very—is very—good at keeping me humble. Once, we were driving, and I noticed that she was a little smugger than she normally is. And then when I looked again at the car in front of us, I saw a bumper sticker that said: ‘Any woman who wants to be equal to a man has no ambition.’”

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“I don’t think I woke up and presto I was funny. I think it is something that you can cultivate. Like anything else, it is a skill. Yes, it does help if you have the inclination, and especially if you can laugh at yourself, so learn to laugh at yourself. It’s really the easiest place to begin. It’s about humility. Laugh at yourself and don’t be so pompous and serious. If you start looking for the humor in life, you will find it. You will stop asking, Why me? and start recognizing that life happens to all of us. It makes everything easier, including your ability to accept others and accept all that life will bring.”

4. Acceptance: The Only Place Where Change Can Begin

“Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied? And what is the use of being unhappy if it cannot be remedied?” In this short teaching is the profound essence of the Dalai Lama’s approach to life.

Acceptance, it must be pointed out, is the opposite of resignation and defeat. The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama are two of the most tireless activists for creating a better world for all of its inhabitants, but their activism comes from a deep acceptance of what is. The Archbishop did not accept the inevitability of apartheid, but he did accept its reality.
“We are meant to live in joy,” the Archbishop explained. “This does not mean that life will be easy or painless. It means that we can turn our faces to the wind and accept that this is the storm we must pass through. We cannot succeed by denying what exists. The acceptance of reality is the only place from which change can begin.” The Archbishop had said that when one grows in the spiritual life, “You are able to accept anything that happens to you.”
You accept the inevitable frustrations and hardships as part of the warp and woof of life. The question, he had said, is not: How do we escape it? The question is: How can we use this as something positive?

Acceptance—whether we believe in God or not—allows us to move into the fullness of joy. It allows us to engage with life on its own terms rather than rail against the fact that life is not as we would wish. It allows us not to struggle against the day-to-day current. The Dalai Lama had told us that stress and anxiety come from our expectations of how life should be. When we are able to accept that life is how it is, not as we think it should be, we are able to ease the ride, to go from that bumpy axle (dukkha), with all its suffering, stress, anxiety, and dissatisfaction, to the smooth axle (sukha), with its greater ease, comfort, and happiness.
So many of the causes of suffering come from our reacting to the people, places, things, and circumstances in our lives, rather than accepting them.
When we react, we stay locked in judgment and criticism, anxiety and despair, even denial and addiction. It is impossible to experience joy when we are stuck this way. Acceptance is the sword that cuts through all of this resistance, allowing us to relax, to see clearly, and to respond appropriately.
Much of traditional Buddhist practice is directed toward the ability to see life accurately, beyond all the expectations, projections, and distortions that we typically bring to it. Meditative practice allows us to quiet the distracting thoughts and feelings so that we can perceive reality, and respond to it more skillfully. The ability to be present in each moment is nothing more and nothing less than the ability to accept the vulnerability, discomfort, and anxiety of everyday life.
“With a deeper understanding of reality,” the Dalai Lama has explained,
“you can go beyond appearances and relate to the world in a much more appropriate, effective, and realistic manner. I often give the example of how we should relate to our neighbors. Imagine that you are living next to a difficult neighbor. You can judge and criticize them. You can live in anxiety and despair that you will never have a good relationship with them. You can deny the problem or pretend that you do not have a difficult relationship with your neighbor. None of these is very helpful.
“Instead, you can accept that your relationship with your neighbor is difficult and that you would like to improve it. You may or may not succeed, but all you can do is try. You cannot control your neighbor, but you do have some control over your thoughts and feelings. Instead of anger, instead of hatred, instead of fear, you can cultivate compassion for them, you can cultivate kindness toward them, you can cultivate warmheartedness toward them. This is the only chance to improve the relationship. In time, maybe they will become less difficult. Maybe not. This you cannot control, but you will have your peace of mind. You will be able to be joyful and happy whether your neighbor becomes less difficult or not.”

I thought of the Archbishop’s comment that it takes time to build our spiritual capacity. “It’s like muscles that have to be exercised in order for them to be strengthened. Sometimes we get too angry with ourselves, thinking that we ought to be perfect from the word go. But this being on Earth is a time for us to learn to be good, to learn to be more loving, to learn to be more compassionate. And you learn, not theoretically. You learn when something happens that tests you.”
Life is constantly unpredictable, uncontrollable, and often quite challenging. Edith Eva Eger explained that life in a concentration camp was an endless selection line where one never knew whether one would live or die. The only thing that kept a person alive was the acceptance of the reality of one’s existence and the attempt to respond as best one could. Curiosity about what would happen next, even when she was left for dead in a pile of bodies, was often all she had to pull herself forward to the next breath. When we accept what is happening now, we can be curious about what might happen next.
Acceptance was the final pillar of the mind, and it led us to the first pillar of the heart: forgiveness. When we accept the present, we can forgive and release the desire for a different past.

5. Forgiveness: Freeing Ourselves from the Past

I have seen remarkable instances of forgiveness carried out by people we would not have thought could possibly do it,” the Archbishop began. “In one instance during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we had mothers of some young people who had been lured by those working with the apartheid system into a booby trap where they were killed. One of the mothers said she switched on her television set and saw the body of her son being dragged. And apart from her anguish at the death of her son, there was a deep, deep anger at his body being treated as if it were the carcass of an animal.
“You know, when these mothers came to the Commission they were quite amazing, really, because no one demanded that they should forgive these people—they called them askaris—who were formerly members of the African National Congress who then turned and supported the government forces. The one who betrayed these young people came and appeared in front of these mothers and asked for their forgiveness.
“When the mother of the young man who had been dragged through the street saw the traitor, she took off her shoe and threw it at him,” the Archbishop said, laughing and pretending to throw a shoe with his left hand.
“We had to adjourn for a little while, but then during the break came a totally fantastic moment as they sat there, and their spokesperson said . . .” The Archbishop closed his eyes, remembering the unbelievable power of her words, “‘My child’—she said ‘my child’ to this one who had been responsible for the death of their children. She said, ‘My child, we forgive you.’
“When we asked her about the granting of amnesty, she said, ‘What is it going to help us if he were to go to prison? It won’t bring back our children.’
And there is an incredible kind of nobility and strength. Yes, it’s difficult, but it has happened. We talked about Nelson Mandela, but there were these mothers, and many others who were not household names, who had this magnanimity.

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“Just recently I got a message about a white woman named Beth, who was badly maimed in a bomb attack by one of the liberation movements and still had shrapnel in her body. Many of her friends were killed and many were also maimed. She had to be helped by her children to eat, to be bathed. Beth was just . . . I’m overcome . . .” The Archbishop had to pause for a moment. “Beth said . . . Beth said . . . about the perpetrator . . . I forgive him, and I hope he forgives me.”

Then the Archbishop told the well-known story about one of my college classmates, Amy Biehl, who had gone down to South Africa after graduating from university to try to help. She was brutally killed while dropping off one of her friends in a township. “Her parents came all the way from California to South Africa to support the granting of amnesty to the perpetrators who had been sentenced to heavy terms of imprisonment. They said, ‘We want to be part of the process of healing in South Africa. We are sure that our daughter would support us in saying we want amnesty to be granted to the murderers.’
And more than this, they set up a foundation in their daughter’s name and employed these men, who had murdered their daughter, in the project to help the people of that township.
“Now I don’t pretend that comes easily, but we do have a nobility of spirit.
We’ve spoken of Nelson Mandela as an amazing icon of forgiveness,” the Archbishop said, “but you and you and you and you have the potential to be instruments of incredible compassion and forgiveness. We cannot say of anyone at all that they are totally unable to forgive. I think that all of us have the latent potential, as His Holiness is pointing out, to be sorry for these others who are disfiguring their humanity in this way. Indeed, no one is incapable of forgiving and no one is unforgivable.”

“I want to mention,” the Dalai Lama said, “one of my friends from northern Ireland, Richard Moore. His story is very, very touching. He was age nine or ten during the troubles in northern Ireland, when a British soldier shot him with a rubber bullet as he was on his way to school.” The Dalai Lama was pointing directly between the eyes where the rubber bullet had hit. “He fainted, and when he recovered he was at the hospital, having lost both of his eyes. He realized that he would no longer be able to see his mother’s face.
“He continued studying and eventually he got married and had two girls.
Then he found the British soldier who shot him in the head so he could communicate his forgiveness. They became very good friends, and on one occasion, at my personal invitation, they both came to Dharamsala. I wanted Richard to share his deeply moving story of forgiveness with Tibetans, especially the students at the Tibetan Children’s Village. In introducing Richard Moore to the students and teachers there, I mentioned that he is my hero.
“Then Richard invited me to visit northern Ireland, and when I saw him with his family there, I teased him. ‘Your wife is very beautiful. Your two daughters are also very beautiful. But you can’t see. I can, so I can enjoy seeing their beauty.’ I describe him as my real hero. That’s really a human being.”

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“Forgiveness,” the Dalai Lama continued, “does not mean we forget. You should remember the negative thing, but because there is a possibility to develop hatred, we mustn’t allow ourselves to be led in that direction—we choose forgiveness.” The Archbishop was also clear about this: Forgiveness does not mean you forget what someone has done, contrary to the saying “Forgive and forget.” Not reacting with negativity, or giving in to the negative emotions, does not mean you do not respond to the acts or that you allow yourself to be harmed again. Forgiveness does not mean that you do not seek justice or that the perpetrator is not punished.

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“I would like to add,” the Dalai Lama said, “that there is an important distinction between forgiveness and simply allowing others’ wrongdoing.
Sometimes people misunderstand and think forgiveness means you accept or approve of wrongdoing. No, this is not the case. We must make an important distinction.” The Dalai Lama was speaking emphatically, striking one hand against the other. “The actor and action, or the person and what he has done.
Where the wrong action is concerned, it may be necessary to take appropriate counteraction to stop it. Toward the actor, or the person, however, you can choose not to develop anger and hatred. This is where the power of forgiveness lies—not losing sight of the humanity of the person while responding to the wrong with clarity and firmness.
“We stand firm against the wrong not only to protect those who are being harmed but also to protect the person who is harming others, because eventually they, too, will suffer. So it’s out of a sense of concern for their own long-term well-being that we stop their wrongdoing. This is exactly what we are doing. We do not let anger and negative feelings develop toward the Chinese hard-liners, but in the meantime we strongly oppose their actions.”
“Forgiveness,” the Archbishop added, “is the only way to heal ourselves and to be free from the past.” As he and Mpho explained in The Book of Forgiving, “Without forgiveness, we remain tethered to the person who harmed us. We are bound to the chains of bitterness, tied together, trapped.
Until we can forgive the person who harmed us, that person will hold the keys to our happiness, that person will be our jailor. When we forgive, we take back control of our own fate and our feelings. We become our own liberator.”
“So what do you say to people,” I asked the Dalai Lama, “who say that forgiveness seems like weakness, and revenge seems like strength?”
“There are certain people who act out of the animal mind. When someone hits them, they want to hit back, retaliate.” The Dalai Lama made a fist and pretended to hit himself. “With our human brain, we can think, If I hit back, what use will it be in the short-term or in the long-term?

“We can also realize that obviously nobody was born to be cruel, to harm us, but because of certain circumstances, now he or she dislikes me, so hits me. Perhaps my behavior, or attitude, or even my facial expression contributed to this person becoming my enemy. So I was also involved. Who is to blame? So sitting and thinking of the different causes and conditions, then you see that if we are really angry we must be angry toward the causes and conditions—ultimately their anger, their ignorance, their shortsightedness, their narrow-mindedness. So that brings a sense of concern, and we can feel sorry for these people.
“So it is totally wrong,” he said emphatically, cutting his hand sharply through the air, “to say that practice of tolerance and practice of forgiveness are signs of weakness. Totally wrong. Hundred percent wrong. Thousand percent wrong. Forgiveness is a sign of strength. Isn’t it?” the Dalai Lama said, turning to the Archbishop.

“Absolutely, yes,” the Archbishop said with a laugh. “I was just going to say that those who say forgiving is a sign of weakness haven’t tried it.
“The natural response when someone hits you,” the Archbishop said, “is wanting to hit back. But why do we admire people who don’t choose revenge? It is our recognition of the fact that, yes, there are those who think an eye for an eye is going to satisfy you. But in the end you discover that an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. We have an instinct for revenge but also for forgiveness.”
Indeed, it seems like humans evolved with both impulses and both capacities, for revenge and for forgiveness. When psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson studied sixty different cultures around the world, they found that 95 percent had some form of blood revenge. When psychologist Michael McCullough looked at the same cultures, he found that 93 percent of them also displayed some examples of forgiveness or reconciliation.
Forgiveness may actually be so common that it is taken for granted in the other 7 percent.

Primatologist Frans de Waal believes that such peace-making activities are extremely common in the animal kingdom. Chimps kiss and make up, and it seems that many other species do as well. Not only apes like us but also sheep, goats, hyenas, and dolphins. Of the species that have been studied, only domestic cats have failed to show behavior that reconciles relationships after conflict. (This finding will not surprise anyone who has cats.) In The Book of Forgiving, the Archbishop and Mpho outline two cycles: the cycle of revenge and the cycle of forgiveness. When a hurt or harm happens, we can choose to hurt back or to heal. If we choose to retaliate, or pay back, the cycle of revenge and harm continues endlessly, but if we choose to forgive, we break the cycle and we can heal, renewing or releasing the relationship.

Unforgiveness

Unforgiveness leads to ongoing feelings of resentment, anger, hostility, and hatred that can be extremely destructive. Even short bursts of it can have significant physical effects. In one study, psychologist Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet asked people to think about someone who had hurt, mistreated, or offended them. She monitored their heart rate, facial muscles, and sweat glands.
When people remembered their grudges, they had a stress response—their blood pressure and heart rate increased and they began to sweat. They felt sad, angry, intense, and less in control. When they were asked to empathize with their offenders and to imagine forgiving them, their stress responses returned to normal. As social animals, it is very stressful for us, and for the whole group, when there is rupture in the relationships that bind us together.
In a review of the research on forgiveness and health, Everett L.
Worthington Jr. and Michael Scherer found that unforgiveness seems to compromise the immune system in a number of ways, including disrupting the production of important hormones and the way that our cells fight off infections.

6. Gratitude: I Am Fortunate to Be Alive

Every day, think as you wake up, ‘I am fortunate to be alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it,’” the Dalai Lama has often said. The topic was gratitude, and it was fascinating to see how often the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama stopped to express their gratitude for each other, for all who were making their time together possible, and for each and every thing that they were witnessing. I had noticed how the Archbishop greets almost every new experience with the word wonderful, and it is indeed that ability to see wonder, surprise, possibility in each experience and each encounter that is a core aspect of joy.
“You can be helped to look at the world and see a different perspective,” the Archbishop said. “Where some people see a half-empty cup, you can see it as half-full. Perhaps people will be moved to see that there are very, very, very many people in the world today who will not have had the kind of breakfast that you had. Many, many millions in the world today are hungry.
It’s not your fault, but you woke up from a warm bed, you were able to have a shower, you put on clean clothes, and you were in a home that is warm in the winter. Now just think of the many who are refugees who wake up in the morning, and there’s not very much protection for them against the rain that is pelting down. Perhaps there is no warmth or food or even just water. It is to say in a way, yes, it is to say really, you do want to count your blessings.”

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Gratitude is the elevation of enjoyment, the ennobling of enjoyment.
Gratitude is one of the key dimensions that Ekman lists in his definition of joy.
Gratitude is the recognition of all that holds us in the web of life and all that has made it possible to have the life that we have and the moment that we are experiencing. Thanksgiving is a natural response to life and may be the only way to savor it. Both Christian and Buddhist traditions, perhaps all spiritual traditions, recognize the importance of gratefulness. It allows us to shift our perspective, as the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop counseled, toward all we have been given and all that we have. It moves us away from the narrow-minded focus on fault and lack and to the wider perspective of benefit and abundance.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk and scholar who spent a great deal of time in Christian–Buddhist interfaith dialogue, has explained, “It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy. Every moment is a gift. There is no certainty that you will have another moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. The gift within every gift is the opportunity it offers us. Most often it is the opportunity to enjoy it, but sometimes a difficult gift is given to us and that can be an opportunity to rise to the challenge.”

The Dalai Lama’s ability to be grateful for the opportunities that exist even in exile was a profound shift in perspective, allowing him not only to accept the reality of his circumstances but also to see the opportunity in every experience. Acceptance means not fighting reality. Gratitude means embracing reality. It means moving from counting your burdens to counting your blessings, as the Archbishop had recommended, both as an antidote to envy and a recipe for appreciating our own lives.
“I have been able to meet many spiritual leaders like you,” the Dalai Lama said, when the Archbishop had been awed by his ability to find gratitude even in fifty years of loss for himself and his people. “It is much more enriching, much more useful. Even suffering helps you to develop empathy and compassion for others.
“Exile really has brought me closer to reality. When you are in difficult situations, there is no room for pretense. In adversity or tragedy, you must confront reality as it is. When you are refugee, when you have lost your land, you cannot pretend or hide behind your role. When you are confronted with the reality of suffering, all of life is laid bare. Even a king when he is suffering cannot pretend to be something special. He is just one human being, suffering, like all other people.”
In Buddhism, one can be grateful even for one’s enemies, “our most precious spiritual teachers,” as they are often called, because they help us develop our spiritual practice and to cultivate equanimity even in the face of adversity.

Anthony Ray Hinton

Anthony Ray Hinton spent thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit. He was working in a locked factory at the time of the crime that he was being accused of. When he was arrested in the state of Alabama in the United States, he was told by the police officers that he would be going to jail because he was black. He spent thirty years in a five-by-seven-foot cell in solitary confinement, allowed out only one hour a day. During his time on death row, Hinton became a counselor and friend not only to the other inmates, fifty-four of whom were put to death, but to the death row guards, many of whom begged Hinton’s attorney to get him out.
When a unanimous Supreme Court ruling ordered his release, he was finally able to walk free. “One does not know the value of freedom until one has it taken away,” he told me. “People run out of the rain. I run into the rain.
How can anything that falls from heaven not be precious? Having missed the rain for so many years, I am so grateful for every drop. Just to feel it on my face.”
When Hinton was interviewed on the American television show 60
Minutes, the interviewer asked whether he was angry at those who had put him in jail. He responded that he had forgiven all the people who had sent him to jail. The interviewer incredulously asked, “But they took thirty years of your life—how can you not be angry?”
Hinton responded, “If I’m angry and unforgiving, they will have taken the rest of my life.”
Unforgiveness robs us of our ability to enjoy and appreciate our life, because we are trapped in a past filled with anger and bitterness. Forgiveness allows us to move beyond the past and appreciate the present, including the drops of rain falling on our face.
“Whatever life gives to you,” Brother Steindl-Rast explains, “you can respond with joy. Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens.
It is the grateful response to the opportunity that life offers you at this moment.”
Hinton is a powerful example of the ability to respond with joy despite the most horrendous circumstances. As we were driving in a taxi in New York, he told me, “The world didn’t give you your joy, and the world can’t take it away. You can let people come into your life and destroy it, but I refused to let anyone take my joy. I get up in the morning, and I don’t need anyone to make me laugh. I am going to laugh on my own, because I have been blessed to see another day, and when you are blessed to see another day that should automatically give you joy.
“I don’t walk around saying, ‘Man, I ain’t got a dollar in my pocket.’ I don’t care about having a dollar in my pocket, what I care about is that I have been blessed to see the sun rise. Do you know how many people had money but didn’t get up this morning? So, which is better—to have a billion dollars and not wake up, or to be broke and wake up? I’ll take being broke and waking up any day of the week. I told the CNN interviewer in June that I had three dollars and fifty cents in my pocket and for some reason that day I was just the happiest I have ever been. She said, ‘With three dollars and fifty cents?’ I said, ‘You know, my mom never raised us to get out there and make as much money as we can. My mom told us about true happiness. She told us that when you are happy, then when folks hang around you they become happy.’
“I just look at all the people who have so much but they are not happy.
Yes, I did thirty long years, day for day, in a five by seven, and you have got some people that have never been to prison, never spent one day or one hour or one minute, but they are not happy. I ask myself, ‘Why is that?’ I can’t tell you why they are not happy, but I can tell you that I’m happy because I choose to be happy.”

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When you are grateful,” Brother Steindl-Rast explained, “you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.”
Gratitude connects us all. When we are grateful for a meal, we can be grateful for the food that we are eating and for all of those who have made the meal possible—the farmers, the grocers, and the cooks. When the Archbishop gives thanks, we are often taken on a journey of Ubuntu, acknowledging all of the connections that bind us together and on which we are all dependent. The Eucharist that the Archbishop gave to the Dalai Lama literally comes from the Greek word thanksgiving, and saying grace or giving thanks for what we have been given is an important practice in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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UC Davis Professor Robert Emmons has been studying gratitude for over a decade. In one study with his colleagues Michael McCullough and Jo-Ann Tsang, they found that grateful people do not seem to ignore or deny the negative aspects of life; they simply choose to appreciate what is positive as well: “People with a strong disposition toward gratitude have the capacity to be empathic and to take the perspective of others. They are rated as more generous and more helpful by people in their social networks.” They are also more likely to have helped someone with a personal problem or to have offered emotional support to others.
Emmons and McCullough have also found that people who focus on gratitude, by keeping a list of what they were grateful for, exercised more often, had fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives, and were more positive about the week ahead compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events. Similarly, those who focused on gratitude were more likely to have made progress toward their important personal goals. So it seems gratitude is motivating, not demotivating. Grateful people report more positive emotions, more vitality and optimism, and greater life satisfaction as well as lower levels of stress and depression.
Gratitude may stimulate the hypothalamus, which is involved in regulating stress in the brain, as well as the ventral tegmental region, which is part of the reward circuits that produce pleasure in the brain. Research has shown that the simple act of smiling for as little as twenty seconds can trigger positive emotions, jump-starting joy and happiness. Smiling stimulates the release of neuropeptides that work toward fighting off stress and unleashes a feel-good cocktail of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins.
Serotonin acts as a natural antidepressant, dopamine stimulates the reward centers of the brain, and endorphins are natural painkillers. Smiling also seems to reward the brains of those who see us smiling making them feel better, too. Smiling is contagious, stimulating unconscious smiling in others, which in turn spreads the positive effects. Did the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop smile because they were happy, or were they happy because they smiled? It sounded a little like a Zen koan. Likely, both were true. Whether we frown in displeasure or smile in appreciation, we have enormous power over our emotions and our experience of life.
Impermanence, the Dalai Lama reminds us, is the nature of life. All things are slipping away, and there is a real danger of wasting our precious human life. Gratitude helps us catalog, celebrate, and rejoice in each day and each moment before they slip through the vanishing hourglass of experience.
Perhaps it was no surprise to Sonja Lyubomirsky that gratitude is a factor that seems to influence happiness along with our ability to reframe negative events into positive ones. The final factor she found was our ability to be kind and generous toward others, which the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop saw as two separate but related pillars: compassion and generosity. When we recognize all that we have been given, it is our natural response to want to care for and give to others.

7. Compassion: Something We Want to Become

Too much self-centered thinking is the source of suffering. A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness.

“On this planet, over the last three thousand years, different religious traditions developed. All these traditions carry the same message: the message of love. So the purpose of these different traditions is to promote and strengthen the value of love, compassion. So different medicine, but same aim: to cure our pain, our illness. As we mentioned, even scientists now say basic human nature is compassionate.” Both he and the Archbishop had emphasized that this compassionate concern for others is instinctual and that we are hardwired to connect and to care. However, as the Archbishop explained earlier in the week, “It takes time. We are growing and learning how to be compassionate, how to be caring, how to be human.” The Buddha supposedly said, “What is that one thing, which when you possess, you have all other virtues? It is compassion.”

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“Compassion is a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved.” He adds,
“Compassion is what connects the feeling of empathy to acts of kindness, generosity, and other expressions of altruistic tendencies.” The Biblical Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, comes from the root word for womb, rechem, and the Dalai Lama often says that it is from our mother’s nurturing that we learn compassion. He also says that his mother was his first teacher of compassion. It is from being nurtured, and in turn nurturing our own children, that we discover the nature of compassion. Compassion is in many ways expanding this maternal instinct that was so pivotal to the survival of our species.

The word compassion, as we have said, literally means ‘suffering with.’

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“Even other social animals have this same concern for each other. I think the other day I also mentioned how scientists have found that when two mice are together, if one is injured, the other will lick it. The injured mouse that is being licked by another mouse will heal much faster than a mouse that is alone.
“This concern for others is something very precious. We humans have a special brain, but this brain causes a lot of suffering because it is always thinking me, me, me, me. The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience. The incredible thing is that when we think of alleviating other people’s suffering, our own suffering is reduced.
This is the true secret to happiness. So this is a very practical thing. In fact, it is common sense.”
“So will the mouse that does the licking benefit as well?” I asked.
The Dalai Lama spoke in Tibetan, and Jinpa translated: “One could argue that the mouse doing the licking is better off, and is also in a calmer state of mind.”

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“And then I want to say,” the Dalai Lama now added, passionate and wanting to convince the skeptics, “look at Stalin’s picture or Hitler’s picture and compare it to the face of Mahatma Gandhi, and also the face of this person.” He was pointing to the Archbishop. “You can see that the person who has all the power, but who lacks compassion, who only thinks about control,” the Dalai Lama said as he ground one hand into the other, “can never be happy. I think during the night they do not have sound sleep. They always have fear. Many dictators sleep in a different place every night.
“So what creates that kind of fear is their own way of thinking, their own mind. Mahatma Gandhi’s face was always smiling. And to some extent I think Nelson Mandela, also; because he followed the path of nonviolence, and because he was not obsessed with power, millions of people remember him. If he had become a dictator, then nobody would have mourned his death. So that’s my view. Quite simple.”

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The modern world is suspicious of compassion because we have accepted the belief that nature is “red in tooth and claw” and that we are fundamentally competing against everyone and everything. According to this perspective, in our lives of getting and spending, compassion is at best a luxury, or at worst a self-defeating folly of the weak. Yet evolutionary science has come to see cooperation, and its core emotions of empathy, compassion, and generosity, as fundamental to our species’ survival. What the Dalai Lama was describing—explaining that compassion is in our self-interest— evolutionary biologists have called “reciprocal altruism.” I scratch your back today, and you scratch my back tomorrow.
This arrangement was so fundamental to our survival that children as young as six months have been shown to have a clear preference for toys that reflect helping rather than hindering. When we help others, we often experience what has been called the “helper’s high,” as endorphins are released in our brain, leading to a euphoric state. The same reward centers of the brain seem to light up when we are doing something compassionate as when we think of chocolate. The warm feeling we get from helping others comes from the release of oxytocin, the same hormone that is released by lactating mothers. This hormone seems to have health benefits, including the reduction of inflammation in the cardiovascular system. Compassion literally makes our heart healthy and happy.
Compassion also seems to be contagious. When we see others being compassionate, we are more likely to be compassionate. This results in a feeling called “moral elevation,” and that is one of the aspects of joy that Paul Ekman had identified. Recent research by social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler suggests that this ripple effect can extend out to two and three degrees of separation. In other words, experiments with large numbers of people show that if you are kind and compassionate, your friends, your friends’ friends, and even your friends’ friends’ friends are more likely to become kind and compassionate.

We fear compassion because we’re afraid of experiencing the suffering, the vulnerability, and the helplessness that can come with having an open heart. Psychologist Paul Gilbert found that many people are afraid that if they are compassionate they will be taken advantage of, that others will become dependent on them, and that they won’t be able to handle others’ distress.
One of the differences between empathy and compassion is that while empathy is simply experiencing another’s emotion, compassion is a more empowered state where we want what is best for the other person. As the Dalai Lama has described it, if we see a person who is being crushed by a rock, the goal is not to get under the rock and feel what they are feeling; it is to help to remove the rock. Many people are also afraid of receiving compassion from others because they are afraid that others will want something in return or that they will at least feel indebted. Finally, many people are even afraid of being selfcompassionate because they are afraid they will become weak, that they will not work as hard, or that they will be overcome with sadness and grief.
Gilbert says, “Compassion can flow naturally when we understand and work to remove our fears, our blocks, and our resistances to it. Compassion is one of the most difficult and courageous of all our motivations, but is also the most healing and elevating.”

Self-compassion

Self-compassion is closely connected to self-acceptance, which we discussed in an earlier chapter, but it is even more than the acceptance of ourselves. It is actually having compassion for our human frailties and recognizing that we are vulnerable and limited like all people. As a result, it is a fundamental basis for developing compassion for others. It’s hard to love others as you love yourself, as both men pointed out, if you don’t love yourself.
The Dalai Lama had mentioned during the week how he was shocked to hear from Western psychologists about how many of their patients wrestled with issues of self-hatred. Self-preservation, self-love, and self-care, he had assumed, are fundamental to our nature. This assumption is fundamental to Buddhist practice, so it was shocking to hear that people had to learn to express compassion not only to others but also to themselves.
Modern culture makes it hard for us to have compassion for ourselves. We spend so much of our lives climbing a pyramid of achievement where we are constantly being evaluated and judged, and often found to be not making the grade. We internalize these other voices of parents, teachers, and society at large. As a result, sometimes people are not very compassionate with themselves. People don’t rest when they are tired, and neglect their basic needs for sleep, food, and exercise as they drive themselves harder and harder.
As the Dalai Lama said, they treat themselves as if they are part of the machine. People tend to feel anxious and depressed because they expect themselves to have more, be more, achieve more. Even when people are successful and grab all the brass rings, they often feel like failures or frauds, just waiting to fall off the merry-go-round. Jinpa explains, “Lack of selfcompassion manifests in a harsh and judgmental relationship with ourselves.
Many people believe that unless they are critical and demanding, they will be failures, unworthy of recognition and undeserving of love.”
Psychologist Kristin Neff has identified ways to express self-compassion: When we treat ourselves with compassion, we accept that there are parts of our personality that we may not be satisfied with, but we do not berate ourselves as we try to address them. When we go through a difficult time, we are caring and kind to ourselves, as we would be to a friend or relative. When we feel inadequate in some way, we remind ourselves that all people have these feelings or limitations. When things are hard, we recognize that all people go through similar challenges. And finally when we are feeling down, we try to understand this feeling with curiosity and acceptance rather than rejection or self-judgment.

Anthony Ray Hinton
 When Anthony Ray Hinton went to death row after a trial that can only be called a travesty of justice, he was understandably angry and heartbroken at how the American justice system had failed him. “When no one believes a word you say, eventually you stop saying anything. I did not say good morning. I did not say good evening. I did not say a how-do-you-do to anyone. If the guards needed some information from me, I wrote it down on a piece of paper. I was angry. But going into the fourth year, I heard a man in the cell next to mine crying. The love and compassion I had received from my mother spoke through me and asked him what was wrong. He said he had just found out that his mother had passed away. I told him, ‘Look at it this way.
Now you have someone in heaven who’s going to argue your case before God.’ And then I told him a joke, and he laughed. Suddenly my voice and my sense of humor were back. For twenty-six long years after that night, I tried to focus on other people’s problems, and every day I did, I would get to the end of the day and realize that I had not focused on my own.” Hinton was able to bring love and compassion to a loveless place, and in doing so he was able to hold on to his joy in one of the most joyless places on the planet.
While he was in prison, he watched fifty-four people, fifty-three men and one woman, walk by his cell on their way to the execution chamber. He got his fellow inmates to start banging their bars at five minutes before the execution. “I discovered on death row that the other inmates had not had the unconditional love that I had had from my mother. We became a family, and we did not know if they had any other family and friends there, so we were banging the bars to say to those who were being put to death, ‘We’re with you, we still love you right up to the end.’”

8. Generosity: We Are Filled with Joy

The Dead Sea in the Middle East receives fresh water, but it has no outlet, so it doesn’t pass the water out. It receives beautiful water from the rivers, and the water goes dank. I mean, it just goes bad. And that’s why it is the Dead Sea. It receives and does not give.
And we are made much that way, too. I mean, we receive and we must give.
In the end generosity is the best way of becoming more, more, and more joyful.

We had come to the eighth and final pillar of joy.

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Generosity is often a natural outgrowth of compassion, though the line between the two can be hard to distinguish. As Jinpa pointed out, we don’t need to wait until the feelings of compassion arise before we choose to be generous. Generosity is often something that we learn to enjoy by doing. It is probably for this reason that charity is prescribed by almost every religious tradition. It is one of the five pillars of Islam, called zakat. In Judaism, it is called tzedakah, which literally means “justice.” In Hinduism and Buddhism, it is called dana. And in Christianity, it is charity.
Generosity is so important in all of the world’s religions because it no doubt expresses a fundamental aspect of our interdependence and our need for one another. Generosity was so important for our survival that the reward centers of our brain light up as strongly when we give as when we receive, sometimes even more so. As mentioned earlier, Richard Davidson and his colleagues have identified that generosity is one of the four fundamental brain circuits that map with long-term well-being. In the 2015 World Happiness Report, Davidson and Brianna Schuyler explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships.
Generous, pro-social behavior seems to strengthen these relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit, just thinking about it “significantly increases the protective antibody salivary immunoglobulin A, a protein used by the immune system.”
So it seems that money can buy happiness, if we spend it on other people.
Researcher Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues found that people experience greater happiness when they spend money on others than when they spend it on themselves. Dunn also found that older adults with hypertension have decreased blood pressure when they are assigned to spend money on others rather than themselves. As the Archbishop had explained, we receive when we give.
I had heard an amazing story that supported what the Archbishop was saying. When I met James Doty, he was the founder and director of the Center of Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford and the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Jim also worked as a full-time neurosurgeon. Years earlier, he had made a fortune as a medical technology entrepreneur and had pledged stock worth $30 million to charity. At the time his net worth was over $75 million. However, when the stock market crashed, he lost everything and discovered that he was bankrupt. All he had left was the stock that he had pledged to charity. His lawyers told him that he could get out of his charitable contributions and that everyone would understand that his circumstances had changed. “One of the persistent myths in our society,” Jim explained, “is that money will make you happy. Growing up poor, I thought that money would give me everything I did not have: control, power, love. When I finally had all the money I had ever dreamed of, I discovered that it had not made me happy. And when I lost it all, all of my false friends disappeared.” Jim decided to go through with his contribution.

“At that moment I realized that the only way that money can bring happiness is to give it away.”

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There are ways to give even beyond our time and our money. Jinpa explained that in Buddhist teachings there are three kinds of generosity: material giving, giving freedom from fear (which can involve protection, counseling, or solace), and spiritual giving, which can involve giving your wisdom, moral and ethical teachings, and helping people to be more selfsufficient and happier. This was of course what the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were giving all week long.
“It’s there in front of our eyes,” the Archbishop said. “We have seen it.
The people we admire are those who have been other-regarding. Who even in the midst of a lot of hard work and so on, when you want to speak with them, they have a way of making you feel that, at that precise moment, you are the most important thing they have to deal with.
“We don’t have to bring in religion. I mean it’s a secular thing. Companies that are caring of their workers are more successful. Now they could say,
‘Well, we pay them so much and that’s the end of our concern for them.’ Yes, well, okay. Do that. And your workers will be workers who say, ‘I work my shift from a certain time to a certain time, and I finish.’ But when they have experienced that you care about them as people—you know, you ask after them, you ask after their families or at least have someone in your company whose business is looking after their welfare, as people—it does increase productivity. I don’t know what other evidence we want that would tell us that the caring corporation, the caring person, almost always are the ones who do well. In fact do very, very well. And the opposite is true as well.”

“Very true, very true,” the Dalai Lama added. “It’s quite obvious. Many Japanese companies are very successful because of the relationship between the employee and employer. The employees have the feeling that ‘this is my company.’ So they work wholeheartedly. So with the employer that just cares about the profits, the employees will always be thinking about the lunch break or the teatime, never thinking about the company. If you build the real concept of working together, and the profit is shared together, then real harmony develops. This is what we really need now. Harmony among the seven billion human beings.” The Dalai Lama was weaving his hands together, as if he could will the harmony of the world’s population with his delicate fingers.

As Martin Luther King Jr., said, ‘We must learn to live together as sisters and brothers, or we will perish together as fools.’

The generosity of the spirit

The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama were describing a special kind of generosity: the generosity of the spirit. The quality they both have, perhaps more than any other, is this generosity of the spirit. They are bighearted, magnanimous, tolerant, broad-minded, patient, forgiving, and kind.
Maybe this generosity of the spirit is the truest expression of spiritual development, of what the Archbishop had said it takes time to become.
The Archbishop had used a beautiful phrase to describe this way of being in the world: “becoming an oasis of peace, a pool of serenity that ripples out to all of those around us.” When we have a generous spirit, we are easy to be with and fun to be with. We radiate happiness, and our very company can bring joy to others. This no doubt goes hand in hand with the ability, as the Archbishop had pointed out repeatedly, to be less self-centered, less selfregarding, and more self-forgetful. Then we are less burdened by our selfagenda: We do not have anything to prove. We do not need to be seen in a particular way. We can have less pretension and more openness, more honesty. This naturally brings ease to those around us, too; as we have accepted ourselves, our vulnerabilities, and our humanity, we can accept the humanity of others. We can have compassion for our faults and have compassion for those of others. We can be generous and give our joy to others. In many ways, it is like the Buddhist practice of tonglen, which the Dalai Lama had used on the day he found out about the uprising and brutal crackdown in Tibet. We can take in the suffering of others and give them back our joy.
When we practice a generosity of spirit, we are in many ways practicing all the other pillars of joy. In generosity, there is a wider perspective, in which we see our connection to all others. There is a humility that recognizes our place in the world and acknowledges that at another time we could be the one in need, whether that need is material, emotional, or spiritual. There is a sense of humor and an ability to laugh at ourselves so that we do not take ourselves too seriously. There is an acceptance of life, in which we do not force life to be other than what it is. There is a forgiveness of others and a release of what might otherwise have been. There is a gratitude for all that we have been given. Finally, we see others with a deep compassion and a desire to help those who are in need. And from this comes a generosity that is “wise selfish,” a generosity that recognizes helping others as helping ourselves. As the Dalai Lama put it, “In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life.”

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