More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No dark fate determines the future. We do. Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet. This is the power we wield.
Every day is a new opportunity to begin again. Every day is your birthday.
“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say,” the Archbishop added, as we began our descent, “save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather
than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”
We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.”
to know that there is a reservoir of affection from which we all drink as funny and flawed
Research conducted at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow suggests that there are really only four fundamental emotions, three of which are so-called negative emotions: fear, anger, and sadness. The only positive one is joy or happiness. Exploring joy is nothing less than exploring what makes human experience satisfying.
This recognition that we are all connected—whether Tibetan Buddhists or Hui Muslims—is the birth of empathy and compassion.
‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.’”
as you grow in the spiritual life, whether as a Buddhist or a Christian or any other tradition, you are able to accept anything that happens to you. You accept it not as the result of your being sinful, that you are blameworthy because of what has happened—it’s part of the warp and woof of life. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. There are going to be frustrations in life. The question is not: How do I escape? It is: How can I use this as something positive?
According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.
a well-known Tibetan Buddhist prayer that often is said before a meal: “Viewing this meal as a medicine, I shall enjoy it without greed or anger, not out of gluttony nor out of pride, not to fatten myself, but only to nourish my body.”
There are four independent brain circuits that influence our lasting well-being, Davidson explained. The first is “our ability to maintain positive states.”
These two great spiritual leaders were saying that the fastest way to this state is to start with love and compassion. The second circuit is responsible for “our ability to recover from negative states.”
What was most fascinating to me was that these circuits were totally independent.
The third circuit, also independent but essential to the others, is “our ability to focus and avoid mind-wandering.”
This of course was the circuit that so much of meditation exists to develop.
The fourth and final circuit is “our ability to be generous.” That was amazing to me: that we had an entire brain circuit, one of four, devoted to generosity.
There was strong and compelling research that we come factory equipped for cooperation, compassion, and generosity.
“We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. I didn’t know that I was going to come so soon to the concept that we have at home, the concept of Ubuntu. It says: A person is a person through other persons.
“Nice guys finish last” is a phrase that speaks to our deep ambivalence about kindness and compassion in the West. Success in our society is measured by money, power, fame, and influence.
“How do we create more friends?”
“Trust. How do you develop trust? It’s simple: You show your genuine sense of concern for their well-being. Then trust will
come. But if behind an artificial smile, or a big banquet, is a self-centered attitude deep inside of you, then there will never be trust. If you are thinking how to exploit, how to take advantage of them, then you can never de...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In his book with the Dalai Lama, psychiatrist Howard Cutler summarized these findings: “In fact, survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative, and are 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.”
What does our happiness have to do with addressing the suffering of the world? In short, the more we heal our own pain, the more we can turn to the pain of others. But in a surprising way, what the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama were saying is that the way we heal our own pain is actually by turning to the pain of others. It is a virtuous cycle.
“I think if you are an intensely religious believer, as soon as you wake up, you thank God for another day. And you try to do God’s will. For a nontheist like myself, but who is a Buddhist, as soon as I wake up, I remember Buddha’s teaching: the importance of kindness and compassion, wishing something good for others, or at least to reduce their suffering. Then I remember that
everything is interrelated, the teaching of interdependence. So then I set my intention for the day: that this day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That’s a meaningful day.”
“There’s no other choice but for followers of the world’s religions to accept the reality of other faiths. We have to live together. In order to live happily, we must respect each other’s traditions.
This echos Gandhi:
"I hold that it is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is our sacred duty."
“I always consider myself personally one of the seven billion human beings. Nothing special. So, on that level, I have tried to make people aware that the ultimate source of happiness is simply a healthy body and a warm heart.”
Genuine friendship is entirely based on trust,”
This is biology. We need love.”
With a self-centered attitude, you become distanced from others, then distrust, then feel insecure, then fear, then anxiety, then frustration, then anger, then violence.”
“Mental immunity,” the Dalai Lama explained, “is just learning to avoid the destructive emotions and to develop the positive ones.
“People would like to be able to take a pill that makes their fear and anxiety go away and makes them immediately feel peaceful. This is impossible. One must develop the mind over time and cultivate mental immunity.
The first step is to accept the reality of suffering. The Buddha is supposed to have said, “I have taught one thing and one thing only: suffering and the cessation of suffering.” The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is filled with suffering.
What is suffering but a bumpy ride?
There may be many causes, but usually your own attitude is an important contributing factor
You see that this person’s actions are due to their own destructive emotions.
You are made for perfection, but you are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.”
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act despite it.”
I had once asked the Archbishop how he handled worry and insomnia, and he said that he thought about people all around the world who also were awake and unable to sleep. Thinking about others and remembering that he was not alone lessened his
distress and his worries, as he would say a prayer for them.
There it was. He reacted with the inevitable and uncontrollable surprise, which is one of our instinctual responses, but then instead of taking the low road of anger, he took the high road of humor, acceptance, and even compassion. And it was gone: no fuming, no lingering frustration, no raised blood pressure.
One way out of anger, then, is to ask, What is the hurt that has caused our anger, what is the fear that we have?
The Dalai Lama had said earlier that if we can discover our role in creating the situations that upset us, we are able to reduce our feelings of frustration and anger. Also, when we are able to recognize that the other person has their own fears and hurts, their own fragile and human perspective, then we have a chance of escaping from the normal reflex of anger.
this also shows how much depends on your own perception and your limited subjective view.”
Neither advocate the kind of fleeting happiness, often called hedonic happiness, that requires only positive states and banishes feelings like sadness to emotional exile.
Pop Culture and "PMA"
