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Thoughts on Compassion and the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is the Tibetan leader and a philosopher. His main activity is concentrated on such issues as compassion, human existence, non-violence, dignity and other common to all human beings topics. In his Brilliant Book The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living an outstanding thinker of the present gives his vision on such aspects as hatred, love, patience and other sides of the human life. All his speculations are based on the Buddhism with its non violence philosophy. The core suggestion of the Dalai Lamas works is non violence and self improvement.
According to him a man needs to train his mind to take the reality better than it is. The state of reality very much depends upon the way we perceive the reality. The category of happiness depends upon the reality we exist in. A man according to the Dalai Lama should train his mind to perceive the reality in the optimistic way. Happiness can be achieved through training the mind for a new attitude, new outlook, new approach to living, identifying and eliminating the factors that lead to suffering and cultivating the factors which lead to happiness. 1 In our everyday life we put ourselves into the deadlock situation just because the negative factors prevail over the positive ones. We think about the negative consequence instead of searching for the positive solutions.
Sometimes we try to find a good excuse for a situation we got by comparison ourselves with other people who are not in such situation thus humiliating ourselves and causing the envy. The desires lead to envy instead of appreciating what we have 2. The Dalai Lama suggests appreciating not what we want but what we have. A man should think of the world community and all the values belonging to the world community are shared within the community. The Dalai Lama says the happiness based on the physical pleasure is unstable.
Physical pleaser can come and leave, but the man should be happy as long as possible. It is very difficult to understand for the ordinary people. When we see monks who limited their physical pleasures to the maximum how can we understand them? Maybe we did not reach their level of the world perception. In our everyday life we all the time face a difficult choice between the physical values and spiritual ones.
It seems to be the core of happiness is in the balance between the spiritual values and the material ones. But still, the physical benefits are coming as a result of our spiritual, mental activity and they need to support our further spiritual development. If someone overestimates the physical values he lacks the spiritual ones, those which identify us as human beings. We must become determined to cherish, develop, and increase our positive emotions no matter how difficult that is 3. The people need to cultivate their positive mental states. According to the Dalai Lama cultivating positive mental states like kindness and compassion leads to health and happiness. 4 It is true, because positive feeling like stated above are constructive, but negative ones like hatred, anger etc.
are destructive. When we are annoyed with someone we can not help thinking of it. We can not concentrate on something positive because we harbor a grudge against someone. Our mind is occupied by this only and we can not feel happy in such a state. Another way can be explained allegorically as a physics law that each action causes the counteraction. The destroying action can not be stopped by the destroying counteraction that may lead to the sequence of the counteractions from all sides.
The proof of this can be found in the history. No war in the world was ended unless by negotiations. The violence all the time gave rise to counter violence. Compassion is a mental attitude based on the wish for others to be free of their suffering.
It is nonviolent, no harming, and no aggressive. The genuine compassion is based on the feeling that people have the desire to be happy and not to experience pain. It is easier to understand this if put oneself on the other persons position. Something like treat people in the way you would like to be treated. The Dalai Lama defines that the ordinary compassion is tinged with attachment the feeling of controlling someone, or loving someone so that person will love you back. A relationship based on that alone is unstable, because when a disagreement results in anger, your concept of my friend is no longer there and the emotional attachment evaporates leaving a feeling of hatred instead of love and concern. 5.
The genuine compassion should be accompanied by the ordinary compassion. If it is alone, there is some kind of hypocrisy in it. I love the person only because Im waiting the love back. In Ghana, Africa, there is even a judicial term the conditional present.
It very much resembles ordinary compassion described above. This means that if a man gives a woman a present which is not cheap there should be some agreement between them either to do certain things or not to do certain things. Say, if a man presented a ring to woman he agrees with her that she will never come to night clubs alone. If the man meets her in a night club he may report to police and withdraw the present. This is exaggerated ordinary compassion that is false if exists without the genuine one.
The compassion should be based on the feeling and not only on the pure aspiration for benefits. When a person thinks of the benefits he is supposed to gain of his compassion it is a just a deal and nothing more. Though it is very difficult to take some actions without thinking of the personal benefits and Dalai Lama urges to the genuine compassion. Compassion means sharing with another person a certain amount of his suffering 5. It may be painful, but still there is a great moral benefit of it. One of such compassion can be observed in the peoples volunteer activity.
What moves the volunteers? It is the sincere desire, of course to assist, but still people gain the great moral benefits of their activity. Sometimes people trend to generate blames for their misfortunes. They may ether be aimed to somebody, circumstances or to oneself.
If such blame is aimed to somebody it may cause nothing constructive but the anger or the feeling of the inferiority complex. If such blame is aimed to oneself people poison their lives thinking of their destiny as of the losers. Assigning blame leaves you with persistent feelings of anger, frustration, and resentment. But suffering is not an abnormal condition to be feared, avoided, and rejected. 6 When someone is in trouble it is the easiest way to assign a blame for the troubles either on oneself or on somebody else instead of finding the right solution. A person while assigning the blame on somebody justifies his own weakness and finds a good excuse. He finds the external reasons for his failures instead of looking inside himself.
Bibliography The Art of Happiness A Handbook for Living By the Dali Lama & Howard C. Cutler, M. D. , 1998 Citation: A Handbook for Living By the Dali Lama & Howard C. Cutler, M. D. , 1998 The Art of Happiness, p 13 - 15 Ibid, p 28 - 31. Ibid, p. 37 - 38 Ibid p. 39 - 40 Ibid, p 117 Ibid, p 147 - 148
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