The Big Questions: How To Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries: A Buddhist Response to Life's Most Challenging Mysteries - Hardcover

Das, Lama Sunya

 
9781594862083: The Big Questions: How To Find Your Own Answers to Life's Essential Mysteries: A Buddhist Response to Life's Most Challenging Mysteries
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594862087 ISBN 13: 9781594862083
Verlag: Rodale Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

A leading Western Buddhist scholar and author of Awakening the Buddha offers a series of reflections and insights that challenge readers to develop individual, authentic responses to some of life's most provocative questions, from What is my purpose in life? to What happens after I die?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAMA SURYA DAS, born Jeffrey Miller and raised on Long Island, New York, is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. For more than 30 years he has studied and practiced with the great spiritual masters of Tibet and India. He is the founder of the Dzogchen Meditation Centers and author of the best-selling trilogy: Awakening the Buddha Within, Awakening to the Sacred, and Awakening the Buddhist Heart.

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1

Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.

--HELEN KELLER

The time to be happy is now,

The place to be happy is here,

The way to be happy is to make others so.

--ROBERT INGERSOLL, 1842-1910

What Is Happiness and Where Can It Be Found?

In the early 1970s, thousands of spiritual pilgrims gathered to hear the Dalai Lama. He spoke in Bodh Gaya, India, near the Bodhi Tree where the historical Buddha experienced enlightenment 2,500 years ago. I was among them--a 21-year-old hippie who had taken the Overland Route from Europe through Turkey and Iran to Nepal. At the end of the Dalai Lama's talk, another longhaired American traveler asked him, "What is the meaning of life?" The Dalai Lama instantly responded, "To be happy and to make others happy."

Frankly, I was disappointed. My college philosophy courses had led me to expect something more intellectual, recondite, or at least poetic. Wasn't that answer too facile? And isn't mere happiness a hedonistic, shallow, self-centered concern? After years of pondering that answer, I fully appreciated how profound it actually was. Yes, it sounds simple--just be happy and make others happy--but that doesn't mean it's easy to put into practice. How consistently are we able to think and act in ways that genuinely make us happy and that also make others happy? How is it even possible to have that kind of contentment, satisfaction, and mastery over our lives?

I'm not talking about maintaining surface-level happiness, like always wearing a smile or being a people-pleaser by constantly doing whatever others ask us to do. What I'm referring to goes much, much deeper. How often do we look for happiness by trying to escape from responsibility, by pursuing sensory gratification, or even by cultivating numbness (as in "feeling no pain")? In fact, these very endeavors wind up causing us grief in the end. I think of happiness as a deeply felt sense of joy and well- being, flourishing within a balanced, stable, integrated heart and mind. Aristotle called happiness "the only goal we choose for its own sake and never as a means to something else." Happiness may generally be thought of as a good feeling, but it also evolves from an attitude or way of choosing-- consciously or unconsciously--how we view, interpret, and thus experience the world.

A wise elder I know said that happiness is love--loving all of life, just as it is, while working to tweak it just a bit as needed. I have often said that happiness is contentment and acceptance, which is perhaps a little one- sided. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the classic The Little Prince, said, "True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new."

A Tibetan lama once told me that the main problem with worldly people is that they are constantly seeking happiness and fulfillment outside themselves, where it cannot be found. Epicurus thought that a beautiful, righteous, and wise life was both the cause and the product of happiness. Plato famously said that the happiest man was the one who had no malice in his soul. Buddha himself further outlined what he called the five kinds of happiness:

. The happiness of the sense of pleasure

. The happiness from giving and sharing, including both external virtuous acts and inner mental states and attitudes

. The happiness, inner peace, and bliss arising from intensely concentrated states of meditative consciousness concomitant with purity of mind

. The happiness and fulfillment coming from insightful wisdom and profound understanding

. Nirvanic happiness, everlasting bliss and contentment, serenity, beatitude, and oneness

According to Buddhist positive psychology, happiness is part of our natural state, only obscured by attachments that veil our radiant, innate nature and limit our potential. The Hevajra Tantra teaches, "We are all Buddhas by nature; it is only adventitious obscurations which veil that fact." What we seek, we are. It is all within. This is the Buddha's secret.

Research in the emerging field of positive psychology--focusing on one's inner strengths and potential rather than on one's outer failures and problems--has shown that learned optimism and flexibility contribute a great deal to resetting happiness levels that have been compromised by genetic inheritance, personal biochemistry, social conditioning, and individual life experiences. This finding conflicts with what many scientists previously thought and confirms what yogis and other serious meditators have always known: We have an innate capacity to be happy that is independent from what happens to us.

The so-called happiness quotient (satisfaction level) and the genetic and socialized set-point for our mood carburetor (or emotional thermostat) can apparently be reset. When mood is positively shifted through intentional mental training, usually associated with mindfulness, compassion- development, and concentration exercises, the brain's left neo-cortex, involved in positive emotion, is boosted.

Part of the Buddhist practice of meditation is to awaken the mind to the fresh immediacy and preciousness of each moment. I know this can sound rather mystical and impractical to people who have never tried meditation, but recent scientific studies have also proved that, yes, meditators do tend to be happier people. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin studied the brainwaves of regular Buddhist meditators and found an unusual amount of electromagnetic activity in the prefrontal lobe areas linked to positive mind states. Researcher Fleet Maul, founder and president of Prison Dharma Network said, "Usually when we use the word 'happiness,' it refers to how we feel when things appear to be going our way. This kind of happiness is superficial and ultimately unsatisfying. During the 14 years I served in a maximum-security federal prison, it was clear that things did not appear to be going my way. Practicing the Buddhist path, grounded in meditation, study, precepts, practice, and service, I discovered an abiding cheerfulness and joy. This kind of happiness is worth pursuing."

My old friend Matthieu Ricard writes in his book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill, "I have come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love." I have often heard the Dalai Lama speak about altruism as the answer to our ills, because so much of the world's suffering and misery--both at the individual and collective levels--can be traced to greed, hatred, fear, and other negative qualities stemming from egotism and selfishness. Once he said, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living was a groundbreaking collaboration between the Dalai Lama and the psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler, M.D. In this book, they maintain that happy people are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, creative, successful in mating, and better parents, 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.

Like the Dalai Lama and the Buddha himself, many modern scientists and philosophers agree that serving others is the secret to happiness, fulfillment, and a good and beautiful life. Others, however, posit that...

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Verlag
Rodale Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594862087
ISBN 13 
9781594862083
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
247
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Verantwortliche Person
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