The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

by Dalai Lama XIV

Because in one series of meetings in Dharamsala a while back, we were discussing acts of evil and violence, and we had traced the cause of this to its roots in the negative, destructive emotions. Well, in those discussions we spent some time on the specific negative emotion of fear, but we didn’t get to a deeper discussion of how to deal with the others, or the negative emotions in general. I wanted to return to that topic, so today it would be great to have a little general review of overcoming the negative emotions! It never hurts to do a little review of important topics,” I argued. “And besides, in the past we discussed this only in the context of personal development, but now we are discussing these issues in a different context, within a wider framework or awareness of societal factors, too.”