In the Dali Lama’s Art of Happiness it says:

Imagine what it would be like if we went through life never encountering an enemy or any other obstacles for that matter, if from the cradle to the grave everyone we met pampered us, with funny faces and the occasional "goo-goo" noise. If from infancy we were carried around in a basket (later on, perhaps on a litter), never encountering any challenge, never tested — in short, if everyone continued to treat us like a baby. That might sound good at first. For the first few months of life it might be appropriate. But if it persisted it could only result in one becoming a sort of gelatinous mass, a monstrosity really — with the mental and emotional development of veal. It’s the very struggle of life that makes us who we are. And it is our enemies that test us, provide us with the resistance necessary for growth.*

And he is right – it is not ONLY our enemies, but enemies certainly provide a part that is needed for growth. The Chinese government are certainly giving the Tibetans plenty of time to contemplate on this one.

Pg. 181 The Art of Happiness

I find this statement by one of my favourite authors,  Pema Chodron beautiful. Imagine if we chose leaders who thought like this… or even lived our own lives like this.

One thing that has helped me is finding a way to be happy no matter what the outcome is. Basically, I go through the list of future options, and figure out what they could be… even ‘disaster’-type scenarios… and try to figure out a way where I could be happy. And, each and every time I can find it. Maybe you can try that too.

So – when the Dalai Lama said that it is best to follow our traditional religions instead of converting it gave me a mixed reaction. Firstly, I was pleased, since he could have used the audience of 30,000 people in Toronto to try to convert people to his faith, but he didn’t. He encouraged us instead to stick to our own faiths – whether it be Christian, Jewish, Muslim etc. (don’t forget, we are in Toronto here so likely just about every faith is represented ). But, I was also disappointed. What about the people who reject their own traditions or who have a tradition of rejecting traditions such as my case, where my Dad was an atheist and I am an agnostic?

Well, he said that people who are secular, actually have the freest life of them all, since we can choose any parts of any religion that we want. So – instead of thinking about having a sole supplier of religion, I can go shopping for the parts of it I believe in and parts that I don’t.

So – I thought about my different sources of spiritual inputs that I get every day. A bookshelf full of ideas on different religions and spiritual concepts; giving generously to charity; connecting with friends and family; meditation and yoga practice; personal development courses where we share our experiences. So – I guess it isn’t the simplest route in the world – but shopping for spirituality seems to be the most free option, and the one that works for me.

In the course of waiting I got lots of writing work done, invited a couple fun and hilarious friends to visit me throughout the day and even now my best friend is keeping me company in this darkened office. But – even though the day was pretty good and productive, it still has this extremely annoying overtone since the waiting for Bell part is constantly lingering in the background.

Patience is something I am working hard to develop… but sometimes it is not easy. I read this post on waiting and it reminded me that basically I am in charge of our own destiny and Bell, as annoying and wasting-of-my-time they are, cannot "make" me frustrated…

I bet Bell highlights how far we are from enlightenment for a lot of people .

Is it possible to get rid of problematic emotions completely, or is it possible only to suppress them? According to basic Buddhist insight, the mind is essentially luminous and knowing. Therefore emotional problems do not reside in the mind’s essence, such counterproductive attitudes are temporary and superficial, and can be removed. If distressing emotions such as anger were in the very nature of the mind, then from its inception the mind would always have to be angry. Obviously, this is not so. Only under certain circumstances do we become angry and when those circumstances are not present, anger is not present either. (p. 15-16)

Psychologist Carl Rogers also believed something similar (note: the article in the link is excellent). That every creature strives to do what is good for them (eg. babies knowing what food they need) but it is our social structures and conditions that are imposed on ourselves that limit us:

The entire theory is built on a single “force of life” he calls the actualizing tendency.  It can be defined as the built-in motivation present in every life-form to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible.  We’re not just talking about survival:  Rogers believes that all creatures strive to make the very best of their existence.  If they fail to do so, it is not for a lack of desire.

I have been a fan of Rogers for over a decade and have recently become interested in Buddhism. But, sometimes seeing people for the best that they are is misleading. The reason? It doesn’t always help you interact with the real world. In Reveille For Radicals Saul Alinsky quotes an old community leader discussing the difference between an effective organizer and an ineffective one:

There was another young feller who came to this town about thirty of more years ago. He tried to sell me just about the same bill of goods that you are giving me. His name was – let me see – it was – oh, yes, a feller by the name of Lincoln Steffens. I turned him down, but I’m gonna play ball with you and I’ll tell you why. This feller, Lincoln Steffens, figured that every man was real good and all you had to do was give him a chance to be better. But you, you young man you believe every man and woman has got a little bit of larceny in their hearts and you’re using that larceny to make them better in spite of themselves and you’re damn right! Go ahead! (p. 128)

I think that this is the best characterization of people. I really think that to see people as their conflicted selves is a better, and probably more compassionate way of seeing them. So – perhaps two out of three of these quotes are not at odds. Because Buddhists see the "diamond mind" as an ideal, rather than the norm. So – it is really Roger’s "fully functioning person" that I disagree with. I think that even a person that grows up and lives in ideal circumstances… would still have some larceny in them .

The editions I am referring to are in the links: How to Expand Love by the Dali Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins and Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. 

Pema Chodron on impermanence (follow link for full article, sorry about the formatting):

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.  To seek for some lasting security is futile.  To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions.  Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone "out there" is to blame for our pain – one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking.  One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction.  Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there ís anywhere to hide.

More:

We’re all addicted to hope – hope that the doubt and mystery will go away.  This addiction has a painful effect on society:   a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

Thanks Pema… So – I was reminded of this with my little brush with crime tonight. Goodnight.

The show went to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (with the very cool URL of www.elephants.com) a 2,700 acre sanctuary dedicated to caring for old, sick and needy elephants. There are currently 19 living there. Some of the elephants have killed humans, a crime that would usually be punishable by death, but the sanctuary accepts elephants as the social, emotional animals that they are, with long memories and ability to recover from their stress through therapy.

A New York Times Magazine article posted on their site by Charles Siebert writes thoroughly on the subject:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem.

Even in India, where elephants were considered a deity, a headline of a newspaper warns “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.”  Why is this happening?

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

Why is the network weakening?

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats.

What happens when they lose that network?

The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings.

Wow. It is hard to ignore the similarities between elephant society and human society – animal researchers strive to avoid anthropomorphism in order to stay objective, but I can see how it is hard to resist. After the show ended, I had that feeling of helplessness and discouragement that comes from watching a show like that in Toronto, where there is extremely little I can do any time soon to help. I had a stressful day to worry about at work and I have bills to pay. Now I am also worried about the human race causing an animal crisis… I am only 1 in 6 billion…

I got off of the treadmill and went to lift some weights and started thinking more about elephants. The Bronx Zoo in New York City is no longer holding elephants in captivity because of the harm that it causes them. Awareness is good. The woman who founded the Elephant Sanctuary used to manage elephants for entertainment and now she has dedicated her life to providing awareness about the elephant crisis. That is an inspiration. I choose to replace that helpless and worried feeling with compassion. And one day, who knows, maybe I can do something.

Yesterday I was listening to the radio and a news report came on about a tragic car accident that killed five high-school students from the same school. The grief councilor came on the air to say "it is especially sad because these kids were so popular". What would happen if the students were unpopular or were part of a small group of tight-knit friends? Would that make a fatal car crash less sad? Of course not.

I thought the same as I read about the horrifying Robert Pickton case. Pickton, a BC pig farmer, confessed to killing over 49 women. Anti-poverty advocates are asking the media to stop focusing on the fact that the women were in the sex trade and refer to them as "women" instead of "prostitutes". Also, police were slow to respond to the missing women because of their status and neighborhood. Is one family’s tragedy less sad than another’s because of the deceased’s lifestyle? To me… it isn’t.

In a totally different context, I thought this as I saw the silly fight between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump on YouTube. Trump says he is worth several-billion dollars while O’Donnell is "chubby". When he says he is worth several-billion dollars, it sounds like it means more to him than an accountant’s balance sheet calculation, it sounds like he is measuring his self-worth.

Once we start measuring our worth in terms of popularity, profession, wealth or appearance we are playing a losing game. What does popularity mean when you move to a new city? What does your profession mean if you are suddenly unable to work, after an injury or a downsizing? What does money mean if you get stranded on a desert island? All of these things can be lost or they lose meaning in different contexts.

The concept is simple – it is espoused by most religions and psychologists and the majority of us understand it on some level… but somehow reporters and news-makers keep trying to portray one person as more valuable than another based on external things. The problem is, propagating that view of one’s worth makes us forget that we are all valuable, regardless of popularity, profession or wealth.