. . . to about five thousand people when speaking at Stanford.
I thought I'd type out my notes while I can still read them. In case you are interested, here's the essence of what he said:
1) He builds from the fundamental tenet that all people have a right to happiness and that our lives are best lived if they are directed towards increasing happiness, both for ourselves and others.
2) Happiness comes from working with and for others. To be able to work with and for others requires compassion.
3) There are three routes to becoming a compassionate person:
- through religion. By giving yourself to a higher power you learn selflessness.
- through a spiritual practice, like Buddhism, that doesn't require a creator, but where instead you are the creator. Thus you create both your own suffering and your own capacity for joy.
- through the practice of secular, ethical humanism.
4) So, it is possible to be compassionate without religion.
5) We know this for three reasons:
- we only survive as children through the care of others
- a compassionate person, family or community is always happier than one governed by anger, envy, jealousy or fear, whether they are religious or not.
- science shows us that negative emotions affect us physiologically and that calm and compassion enhance our physical well being.
6) The rise of science has challenged religion but not the value of compassion.
7) For 4,000 years organized religion has given us hope, but not always material comfort.
8) The science revolutions of the last 200+ years have give us a new, secular kind of hope.
9) But even people with great material comforts, like many Americans, still feel lacking in something.
10) Scientists feel it themselves.
11) Science now better understands how emotional states affect physical health and how minds trained to be compassionate experience less depression and more fulfillment.
12) Material solutions to the lack of fulfillment that we feel (drugs, alcohol etc., becoming rich for its own sake) don't work.
13) The alternative is to follow a practice (mental and physical) that increases our capacity for compassion.
14) That will help us individually and socially.
15) People who value inner peace are compassionate and able to empathize. They will be able to communicate successfully with others and find lasting, fair solutions to the conflicts that inevitably arise between us.
16) The only route to real social peace is through inner peace.
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In the question and answer session the Dalai Lama was asked whether modern scientific research into the brain threatens his ideas. I didn't follow everything he said in reply, but in essence his answer was that as science advances it appears only to be proving him right about why compassion should be at the center of our lives.
Four other ideas that I took from the Q&A:
a) to dissemble to others or even to oneself, is to do a kind of violence. True non-violence extends to the ways in which we treat each other in our day-to-day lives. What's needed is honesty, integrity and, of course, compassion.
b) it used to be that religious institutions and parents taught ethical behavior. Today, both do that less. So it's now important that our schools and universities teach ethical behavior and the value of compassion -- something it is possible to do in an entirely secular way.
c) to teach the value of compassion will require new curricula. He hopes that the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education will help develop such curricula.
d) education, not force, is the best and only lasting way to change minds. Then, while always maintaining respect for those in disagreement with us, we can embark on a century of dialog that will take us away from the last century's time of wars to a new century of lasting peace.