By Tsering Dorjee
With countless prostrations from my body, speech and mind, today I attempt to THANK personally His Holiness The Dalai Lama who has touched and affected my life at deepest levels from the day I was born in this world.
As the leader of Tibet, His Holiness has kept the issue of Tibet on the spot light for the last fifty one years. Although the issue of Tibet still remains unsolved despite his offering genuine hands of reconciliations, friendship, understanding and support to Beijing’s core interests, yet the flame of hope for Tibetans both inside and outside shines alive because of his tireless efforts. He has made so many noble efforts to such a degree and length that no opponents have ever thought of trying even in their dreams to the boundary of what he has tried. The combination of his level of transparency in personal thoughts, understanding and concern for the core interest of China, tolerance to paranoid and suspicions of Beijing is beyond the reach of an ordinary mind. For many on this planet, they might not have received such level of understanding and concern for their wellbeing even from their friends and family. And for this, including myself, the people of Tibet can never thank Him enough as he continues to speak for Tibetan people. However, I have one more special reason to Thank His Holiness today. I want to thank His Holiness today, not as the leader of my country, but for affecting my life as an educator. I want to thank him from the bottom of my heart for what he has taught me as an educator to transform my daily sufferings into happiness. Knowing oneself properly is one of the hardest in life and he has educated me about myself to a level I could never myself. His education to dispel ignorance about truths, about noble truths, about the realities of life and the world has helped me to cultivate a more correct view and observations to see beings and things as raw as they are. His education has given me the ability to accept things and phenomena as they are and understand things as they are and these wisdoms have now become a guiding light in my life. They assist me daily to get on with my life much easier than I could have ever done otherwise.
Looking at myself, I can divide myself into two main parts: my body and my mind which I need to keep happy every day. Generally speaking we all have to keep them happy simultaneously. We try this from the day we were born and it continues until we die. It is hard to say whether animals make similar efforts, however, they do struggle to overcome sufferings whenever one of the two is out of balance. Depending upon beliefs, culture, traditions, education, religion, family and friends, humans make daily efforts to maintain their body and mind happy. Has this been easy for us? No, it is not easy, it is very difficult. In fact, for most of us, it is the hardest in life and this is where help is needed constantly. Since different people have different mental dispositions, therefore, it seems all the different traditions, culture, religion and so forth have come into existence but their goal is universal: to bring comfort to the body and peace to the mind. Therefore, I am now going to share how His Holiness The Dalai Lama has helped me to keep my body and mind simultaneously happier.
Whatever we do and whoever we become, ultimately to be successful in life boils down to have more happiness or less suffering: both physical and mental. Therefore, now I will explain here how I make improvements in my life by using what I learnt from His Holiness. The first thing I learnt from His Holiness is that there are three types of sufferings which I have never understood properly before from anyone in my life.
The general sufferings: This type of suffering includes usual sufferings like physical pain and mental fear. It is countless to see and countless to experience this type of suffering. Physical pain can be like extreme summer heat and extreme cold winter winds. Summer and winter come every year and like them or not, we all have to go through them every single year, from birth to death. Then we have other severe general sufferings like cancer, aids, diarrhoea, malaria, polio, kidney failure, heart failure, eyesight loss, hearing loss, nerve defects, toe loss, finger loss, diabetes, hunger and countless to name. When we experience any of the above physical sufferings, the mind also suffers simultaneously. From all of them, the mind suffers fear or worry. However, most of the general type of sufferings can be detected and identified from their symptoms.
The second type of suffering is called the “Sufferings of change” which is hard to detect at a glance and comes either suddenly or silently. It can either be physical or mental and when this happens, it is almost impossible to handle or overcome. An example of this type of suffering is when whether changes abruptly and the change in weather brings flood and wipes away everything you have earned throughout your life including your house and family. Severe sufferings of change will follow after a deadly earthquake. Road gets changed, prices for commodities get increased, sometimes the entire infrastructure of one’s place gets changed and as a result uncountable number of sufferings ensue thereafter. A nightmare of sufferings of change comes when you change jobs, country or place to live. Sufferings come silently in such situations. From a small action like buying a car can bring you a lot of sufferings of change. For instance, one day the car suddenly fails to start. Then instead of loving the car, one might kick the car hardest. The deadliest suffering of change comes when people you trust have changed. For example your friends or spouse has changed suddenly and has stopped showing you proper care and concern. There is no control over such sufferings. The general sufferings can be curbed to some extent from hospitals if it were a physical suffering. However, the suffering of change that comes from change in the person himself/herself is unthinkably difficult to overcome. Therefore, our lives, including animals remain constantly dominated by these two types of sufferings right from the day we were born.
Finally there is called the pervaded suffering, the one that becomes the basis for the previous two types of sufferings. The pervaded suffering is the root causes of the first two sufferings. Because of this suffering, the first two sufferings are inevitable in our lives. Pervaded suffering itself can be at least divided into two types: Physical and mental pervaded sufferings. Physical pervaded suffering is the very nature of our body. Its very nature of vulnerability and susceptibility to change brings all types of physical pain and mental fear. Our body is like a giant magnet to attract immeasurable number of sufferings at all places under all circumstances. Because of this body, all types of illnesses that were mentioned above come into existence. Mental fear is born from attachment to the body. It chains our mind frequently to the fear of death and countless number of stress and anxiety. Without this body, there will be no cancer, no aids, no malaria and so forth. There is no fixed or known timing for when this body will bring sufferings. Someone who is free from cancer today has the full potential to get cancer in future because of this body. Therefore, this body is like a lifetime time bomb of suffering in our life. As such, all types of sufferings in our life are originated and pervaded through this body. Let us consider old age. When we become old, the body shows it true nature. It becomes the biggest and the heaviest burden in our life. Eventually it will take away one’s self confidence and deliver us to grave yard.
The second pervaded suffering is the mental pervaded suffering. This is the worst of all and it comes directly from our own mind. This is worst of all because it is extremely powerful and it is invisible. What is this? This is the negative biological habits of our mind. We are born with the following negative biological habits that bind us permanently with sufferings. There are twenty eight of them and they are: selfishness, shamelessness, anger, arrogance, doubt, concealment, lack of self respect, excitement, jealousy, laziness, the habit of constant distraction, vengefulness, forgetfulness, clinging to permanence, lack of faith, belligerence, spite, avarice, pretence, dissimulation, self satisfaction, cruelty, mental dullness, lack of conscientiousness, lack of introspection, ignorance of grasping at the concept of an unsearchable self or „I‟ or „Me‟, afflictive desire especially attachment to self, and finally wrong view upon cause and effect law. These habits reside permanently inside our mind and then bring unthinkable sufferings in our life. They control our life and influence our decisions almost every day. There is no enemy greater than them and they are constantly supported by our ignorance. Our body also support them. How? Our body will wake up anger immediately even when someone accidently hit us gently. Let us look at some of them individually and see how they bring pain and sufferings in our life.
Selfishness, it is the king of all the negative biological habits. At gross level, selfishness creates indifference to other’s pain, even to one’s children, family and friends. At subtle level, it binds us constantly to fear. It is the root of all types of fear in our lives. It is also the ultimate root of loneliness in this world for an individual. It creates loneliness to both self and others.
Anger has only one goal and that is to offer maximum harm to the opponent. What gives rise to anger in us is attachment. Attachment sows the seed for anger and anger turns even our loved ones into enemies. Doubt divides our mind about the truth or reality. It can divide our mind into three states, one towards the truth, one against the truth and one in between. Doubt is like a smelly utensil in which a good food will be ruined if you use that utensil. It can damage our trust in others and rust our self confidence.
Arrogance is an unreasonable feeling of superior to others, even to those who are better than us in many ways. It is the greatest obstruction to knowledge. Because of arrogance, we don’t pay attention to what is good for our life. Arrogance will force one to claim having knowledge thousand times more than one has and hence keeps the ignorance in the brain always at constant level. Not only that, it also instigates us to become rude and belittle others including our loved ones. Jealousy is feeling of ill will to others‟ success. It is the loss of appreciation to others‟ success because one feels that one has received something less than the other. This unbearable feeling of unhappiness towards others‟ success can even occur to our loved ones and ruin our relationship with them. Laziness: physical laziness and mental laziness. Physical laziness is strong resistance to working hard due to lack of self respect and enthusiasm for success whereas mental laziness is mental attraction to not very important things and it is more difficult to overcome. Both are thieves of time. Laziness can destroy both wealth and relationship and will eventually lead to complete poverty. The habit of constant distraction is the inability of the mind being able to focus on a particular object or task. Root causes are ignorance and attachment to external world. It corrupts the quality of one’s work. Vengefulness has only one outcome. It shuns compassion of our mind and throws us into worthless risks. Suffering for both self and others. Shamelessness is the pillar support of selfishness. It is due to lack of self respect. It will mistreat both self and others and can cause immense suffering for both self and others. Because of one’s shamelessness, even the loved ones could be thrown into serious troubles.
Clinging to permanence, this is a feeling which makes us feel that things won’t change. It hardens paranoid about anything. The feeling of clinging to permanence has a serious power to exaggerate both success and failure in life. All phenomena are impermanent in nature, however, because of the habit of clinging to permanence, when we are successful we will become over confident and rude and ignores preparation for misfortune. It exaggerates failure by making us feel that things will never change. Bad will always remain bad, it will never change and become good and hence throws us into complete hopelessness. It can increase serious amount of stress and worry in life. Worst, it will deny opportunities for those who genuinely want to change to become better. Clinging to permanence can increase other negative habits like doubt and hatred. Therefore, it brings unthinkable sufferings in our life. These are very brief explanations about negative habits of the mind and now imagine what would happen if all of these negative biological habits became active in everyone’s head in the world? This planet will become a living hell.
Does this mean that we are never born with positive biological habits like compassion? This is not so because we are born with at least twelve positive biological habits like compassion, self respect, shame, perseverance, conscientiousness, harmlessness, equanimity, suppleness, lack of ignorance, detachment, non-hatred, and faith in truth. However, these habits are very weak because they are not naturally as active as negative habits. Sadly, for most of us, during a crisis or conflict, the positive biological habits are so feeble that they could be easily squashed and flattened by any of the negative biological habits. In fact the negative habits will overwhelm our minds and conflicts will grow bigger. The positive habits become more active mostly towards our loved ones and when these values grow between two individuals or sides, love and happiness blossom immediately and miraculously. The lesser they become, the more the two sides will lose happiness. In the past people cared a lot for these values. Religious institutions have also played some roles to promote these values but that has now diminished more than ever because of many reasons and our modern schools are more focussed on modern education alone. Therefore, the biggest source of developing strength for these positive biological habits is our family: our parents. If both parents have these habits strong in their way of life, children of such parents can receive an automatic support to grow strength in positive habits. The correction of their habits from their parents will become in some way a kind of mind training towards positivity right from the beginning of their life. Those children whose parents did not possess these positive habits strong enough or are single parents where the parent even does not get enough time to spend with the children will become less fortunate to develop these habits. In reality, although the education at schools and universities influence our way of life more than anything in the world, however, the influence of our mental biological habits are so strong that they can change the course of our life anytime anywhere in the world.
Let us look at the effects of positive biological habits. Consider self-respect. A person with high self respect will never indulge in any kind of shameless activity. His own self respect will make him do his work on time. Therefore, it prevents laziness. It will also prevent him from becoming a thief and telling lies. A person with strong positive habit of self respect has the lowest chance of ever becoming a criminal in his life. Because of self respect, he will work hard which will also prevent poverty in his life. At minimum, he will keep his room tidy wherever he lives. Therefore, we can now see the tremendous capabilities and contributions of one active positive biological habit in an individual’s happiness. Now imagine the benefit if an individual gets constant support early in his/her life to grow strength for all of the various positive biological habits. That individual will not only make his life happy, but will bring substantial contribution to others‟ life thus making enormous service to the society. Therefore, it can be now seen clearly how essential it is to give support for strong growth of positive biological habits in our life in order to lay down the very foundation of our happiness. If the mind is unsettled, it affects our health as well and can bring physical pain like headache and backache. Our physical system easily gets affected by the conditions of our mind. The conditions of our mind even affect our daily facial expressions. Therefore, cultivating positive habits and making them strong and bold against negative habits are indispensible for our happiness.
Whether the conflict is between boyfriend and girlfriend, between wife and husband, whether it is parents killing their own children, or children dumping their parents in old age, neighbours going without speaking to each other for decades, communities clashing with violence, or religious clashes or a war between two nations, whether it is the criminality of a prisoner, the immediate cause to stir the conflict may be a petty material or natural reaction, but the main culprits are always the negative biological habits, from individual to global level. During a crisis, these negative biological habits always aggravate our problems to unthinkable levels and they still get daily places to reside in our mind. Sadly, removing them from our mind immediately is not easy because when it is so difficult to overcome non-biological habits like smoking, drinking alcohol, addiction to drugs and gambling, then what need is there to mention the difficulties in overcoming these negative habits. The older a habit gets, the harder it is to quit and the negative biological habits are the oldest habits in our life because they have been with us since birth. Therefore, removing them from our mind is as difficult as trying to crush a mountain with our hands and yet it does not appear like an impossible task.
Since we all are born with these three types of sufferings, therefore we all are immersed deep in sufferings. Our life remains always tied to general sufferings and the sufferings of change because of the pervaded sufferings, especially the mental pervaded sufferings. As such, what can be done? There is nothing we can do to change the very nature of our body. We have and been trying our best about how to keep the body happy through science. This must continue and all those who engage in such progress must be remembered and thanked from the bottom of our hearts. However, there is immense we can do to tackle the negative biological habits if serious efforts could be commenced from early childhood. Therefore, today I appeal to all the schools and universities around the world to take serious efforts to research on how to eliminate these harmful negative biological habits from the mind while we make progress in other modern academic subjects.
If we made a one small effort at a time to eliminate these negative biological habits right from our early childhood by enhancing our positive biological habits, then it seemed guaranteed that happiness would increase dramatically forever in our lives provided we also made good effort in modern education. And if we all had these negative biological habits eliminated or at least minimised from our brain, and filled up our brain and hearts with positive biological habits combined with modern education, then the world would never face the tragedies of another war or any kind of man made conflicts and sufferings during the entire life of this planet. There would be very little conflicts between two individuals as well as two nations or communities and the occurrence of such a phenomenon would be the greatest wonder of all the wonders of past, present and future of this planet. Such a phenomenon will bring a guaranteed world peace.
These are what I have learnt from His Holiness The Dalai Lama and I believe who spend daily time with His Holiness have learnt thousand times more than me. I have also learnt from His Holiness to some degree how to cultivate the positive biological habits. I am not going to discuss them here because it will exhaust the reader. Also, I am not here to write a book.
With this, today, from the bottom of my heart, I thank His Holiness The Dalai Lama for what he has taught me to enhance the quality of my life. Today, I make a full pledge on His 76th BIRTHDAY that not only I will continue my effort to live by what I have learnt from Him, but will also try to learn and practice more throughout my life. Abandoning negativity and cultivating positivity has been the toughest journey in my life. Therefore, undoubtedly, His education has been the greatest treasure of my life because it has given daily protection to my mind by changing the direction of the mind from negativity to positivity, which in turn gives daily protection to my life. As such, He remains the greatest educator in my life. Thank You His Holiness, THANK YOU SO MUCH!
May sentient beings be always born free of ignorance and negativity in the mind and those who are born with negativity and ignorance like me, may they also have the fortune to meet a kind and skilful teacher like His Holiness The Dalai Lama: the one whose heart is always moistened with compassion and its wisdom to help and protect others.
With deepest gratitude and heartfelt prayers for the long life of His Holiness, Tsering Dorjee United Kingdom.
The author is a graduate of master of engineering in electronics with space science and technology from the University of Bath.
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