30 Mar A self-centered attitude is the source of the problem (DALAI LAMA, DESMOND TUTU, DOUGLAS ABRAMS)
The Dalai Lama jumped in to affirm the truth of what the Archbishop was saying. “Too much selfcentered thinking is the source of suffering. A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness. I do not have as much experience with physical pain as you have. Yet one day I was in Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha achieved enlightenment, to begin a series of important Buddhist teachings. Bodh Gaya is the holiest pilgrimage place for Buddhists.
“There were around one hundred thousand people who had come to attend the teachings, but suddenly I had intense pain in my abdomen. They did not know then that it was my gallbladder, but I was told I needed to go to the hospital urgently. When bouts of pain struck, it was so intense that I was sweating. We had to drive to the hospital in Patna, the capital city of the state of Bihar, which was two hours away. As we were driving, along the road we passed a lot of poverty. Bihar is one of the poorest states in India. I could see out the window that the children had no shoes, and I knew that they were not getting a proper education. Then as we approached Patna, under a hut I saw an old man lying on the ground. His hair was disheveled, his clothes were dirty, and he looked sick. He had no one to take care of him. Really, he looked as if he were dying. All the way to the hospital, I was thinking of this man and felt his suffering, and I completely forgot about my own pain. By simply shifting my focus to another person, which is what compassion does, my own pain was much less intense. This is how compassion works even at the physical level.
“So as you rightly mentioned, a self-centered attitude is the source of the problem. We have to take care of ourselves without selfishly taking care of ourselves. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we cannot survive. We need to do that. We should have wise selfishness rather than foolish selfishness. Foolish selfishness means you just think only of yourself, don’t care about others, bully others, exploit others. In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life. So that is what I call wise selfishness.” “You are wise,” the Archbishop said. “I wouldn’t just say wise selfish. You are wise.”
The Buddhist practice of mind training, called lojong in Tibetan, is an important part of the Dalai Lama’s tradition. One of the fundamental messages in the original twelfth-century lojong text echoes what the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were saying about looking away from oneself: “All dharma teachings agree on one point—lessening one’s self-absorption.” The text clarifies that when we focus on our ourselves we are destined to be unhappy: “Contemplate that, as long as you are too focused on your self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will experience suffering. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.” The text includes the admonition: “Always maintain only a joyful mind.” So what, then, is this joyful mind? Jinpa, who wrote a translation and commentary on this revered text, explained as we were preparing for the trip that joy is our essential nature, something everyone can realize. We could say that our desire for happiness is, in a way, an attempt to rediscover our original state of mind. It seems that Buddhists believe that joy is the natural state but that the ability to experience joy can also be cultivated as a skill. As we were hearing, so much depends on where we put our attention: on our own suffering or that of others, on our own perceived separation or on our indivisible connection. Our ability to cultivate joy has not been scientifically studied as thoroughly as our ability to cultivate happiness. In 1978, psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published a landmark study that found that lottery winners were not significantly happier than those who had been paralyzed in an accident. From this and subsequent work came the idea that people have a “set point” that determines their happiness over the course of their life. In other words, we get accustomed to any new situation and inevitably return to our general state of happiness.
However, more 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 our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous. These were exactly the attitudes and actions that the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop had already mentioned and to which they would return as central pillars of joy.
The book of joy
DALAI LAMA
DESMOND TUTU
DOUGLAS ABRAMS
