The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living
by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler
May 7, 2021 [10:40 PM — 11:59 PM]
Los Angeles, CA
I've always been interested in the science and art behind the mental and emotional state of happiness, reading about different approaches and perspectives to understanding happiness. I've admired the Dalai Lama's character and his long line of work in shaping and leading the Tibetan nation, the greater Buddhist community, and the world; and I've been interested in Buddhism (Theravada Buddhism to be precise, it’s what I studied for a short while and got first-hand experience of when I was in Cambodia (though Tibetan Buddhism which the Dalai Lama teaches is part of the Mahayana branch)). This book was interesting, it’s conversations between the two authors, with a Western psychiatrists asking one of the globe’s highest spiritual leaders questions, providing reflections and similarities. It covers the different aspects of the human experience and outlook, promoting us to think and train our perception of life to reach the proposed purpose of life: happiness. I found this book to be interesting as it truly shift’s one’s perspective on life and how we conduct ourselves, providing a reasoning for why we feel our emotions and believe in our thoughts with an emphasis on how that impacts our well-being and mentality. It provides a whole unique perspective on universal compassion and how it extends beyond people, debates and challenges the concept of Love as we learned it from Western ideology, is brutally honest and realistic when it discusses global human suffering and provides a different approach on dealing with it as part of human nature, and to replace our anger and hatred with patience and tolerance (which made me think of my long tension with Saudis). What I liked most about this book is that it provides a common ground for all faiths and the book elevates the belief that religion and spirituality can complement each other rather than replace one another. It’s a good book to read especially as this world is facing challenging times that are leading to higher stress levels and the state of unhappiness is increasing.
Broken down into five parts, it covers the purpose of life (the right to happiness, it's sources, how to train the mind, and reclaim our innate state of happiness), human warmth and compassion (providing a new model for intimacy, deepening our connection to others, and understanding the value and benefits of compassion), transforming the suffering (facing suffering, understand the suffering we create for ourselves, and finding meaning in pain and suffering), overcoming obstacles (bringing about change, dealing with anger and hatred, dealing with anxiety and building self-esteem), and closes the book with reflections on living a spiritual life while providing the basic values.
One of the main discussions that stood out to me the most are debunking the concept of independence and self-reliance that we emphasize on and promote in Western nations, when we realize that this world is very interdependent and we depend on many sources to hold our personal material possessions. The example of a shirt is provided: “I began to think about how many people were involved in making my shirt. I started imagining the farmer who grew the cotton. Next, the salesperson who sold the farmer the tractor to plow the field. Then, for that matter, the hundreds or even thousands of people involved in manufacturing that tractor, including the people that mined the ore to make the metal for each part of the tractor. ...And all the designers of the tractor. Then, of course, the people who processed the cotton, the people who wove the cloth, and the people who cut, dyed, and sewed that cloth. The cargo workers and truck drivers who delivered the shirt to the store and the salesperson who sold the shirt to me. It occurred to me that virtually every aspect of my life came about as the result of others' efforts. My precious self-reliance was a complete illusion, a fantasy.”
Another discussion was on finding meaning in pain and suffering, relating it compassion and making us rethink about how we interact with others. It is our suffering that is the most basic element that we share with others, the factor that unifies us with all living creatures. It follows the Tong-Len practice for “giving and receiving,” it is to feel the pain of others, not because they’re close to you, but because you understand what it’s like to feel pain and wouldn’t want others to feel what you can feel. To the extent that he mentions an example of a fish with a hook in its mouth, and a person feeling empathy for a fish because they can imagine how painful it would be to them. However, the Dalai Lama puts it out firmly that suffering is part of our life and that the world is unfair, he’s not complaining about it though, he’s saying this is the way it’s meant to be. It’s part of our nature, complaining about it is useless, but going around it and it figuring out solutions is part of the reason we live.
The last part that caught my attention and I underlined it because I could resonate with it a lot, is how we look at people we love and hate, we see people’s beauty based on their souls. “This person who you feel close to, who you like, the very sight of whom gave you pleasure in the past, now turns into this ugly person, even physically speaking. The reason why I think you should visualize this happening to someone else is because it is easier to see the faults of others than to see your own faults.” I can think of a few people I loved and respected, who I saw as golden, and now I see them as trash when I’ve seen their true side.