11/9/2023 0 Comments Dalai lama art of happinessThe author next moves into the concept of suffering, explaining how it is necessary for human mutability as one encounters different obstacles. He views the idealized form of love as romantic and monogamist as an illusion, believing rather that one should return in all relationships to one’s empirical evidence about oneself that stems from emotional responses. In explaining this, the Dalai Lama relies primarily on the friendship model, which Cutler supports with psychological and public health research showing that people who have close relationships are less prone to chronic and fatal disease. Intimacy is the fuel for the human quality of openness, another ingredient to a happy life. He ranks it as just as important as compassion, believing that neither one can be found solely in the individual. Next, the Dalai Lama explains the importance of intimacy. In turn, these acts give one’s life intrinsic meaning, which is key to happiness. He recommends meditation and community service as ways to strengthen one’s sense of compassion. In the process of learning how to be gentle and reject one’s aggressive impulses, he believes that people also learn the value of distributing compassion equally to others. He mentions the concept of “Buddha nature,” the Buddhist doctrine that advocates for gentleness, but also says that one can trace gentleness from sources outside religion to the events of everyday life. The Dalai Lama provides an overview of how to reclaim the innate state of happiness that thrives in the soul of every human. As the first step for finding self-worth, he says that one should start with a desire to learn from one’s thoughts and emotions, breaking them down into the level of happiness (or unhappiness) they induce. The real core condition for happiness, he argues, is self-worth, which he defines as an innate sense of purpose and dignity. The Dalai Lama endorses a rejection of comparing oneself to others using the metrics of income and success, believing that it actually engenders unhappiness. He offers the example of a man who was infected with HIV after an initial loss of happiness, he learned to appreciate each day even more than before, and his baseline quality of life actually increased. Once again, he contests Westernized models of happiness, explaining that they rely on capitalist and consumerist notions of value and personal achievement. Next, the Dalai Lama elucidates different sources of happiness. He argues that one can train oneself to be happy through goal setting. He contrasts the common Westernized conception of happiness, which thinks of it as lucky or random, with his own conception informed by Buddhist belief, which conceives of it as readily available in any moment of life. He asserts that happiness is the central index with which one should measure human progress on a global and individual scale. The Dalai Lama begins with a meditation on the right to happiness. As such, it is a comprehensive meditation on human existence meant to serve as a general guide for all humans to think about and improve their relationships with themselves and the people they meet. Split into three parts, it offers the Dalai Lama’s general thoughts on the purpose of life, the necessity for human warmth and compassion, and the usefulness of suffering in improving human ordeals over time. Cutler, a doctor who worked closely with him. The Art of Happiness is a 1998 self-help novel written by the Dalai Lama as interpreted by Howard C.
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