Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society

by Ogyen Trinley Dorje

Life in consumer culture is characterized by dissatisfaction. This is produced through our habit of thirsting after what we lack. This habit — the habit of desire — leads us to disregard what we have already in a continual search for something newer, something shinier and more exalted. In the end, we lose our ability to feel satisfied with who we are or even notice how much we have already.

We would be far better off learning how to enjoy what we already have rather than chasing more things. Some people believe that dissatisfaction is healthy because it ensures that we will keep progressing in life. They suggest that if we allow ourselves to feel content with what we have, we will become complacent and stop all forward motion. But this is not how it works. There is no inherent conflict between feeling content and progressing in our lives.

We invest tremendous energy in making happiness unnecessarily complicated. Happiness can be much more simple and natural. Appreciation and joyful gratitude can arise spontaneously, as a natural extension of our full awareness of interdependence.

We acknowledge that all life is precious, but living as a human being is especially precious, precisely for the opportunities it offers for consciously developing our positive qualities. When our human life is endowed not only with these opportunities but also with a sincere wish to make the most of them for our own sake as well as for others, it gains tremendous value.

This is the value I hold most dear and what has given meaning to my life. In the future as well, even if I cannot benefit them in any substantial way, if I live my life holding in my heart affection and concern for others, then at least I can offer them the knowledge that they have someone who cares deeply for them. Even if I can do nothing more for them at the moment, I tell myself as long as I am alive, I will offer my support and love to them.

Once we fully embrace our connections to others, we can intentionally breathe life into them, and this can fill our lives with meaning and love.

Our global consumer culture has taught us to define ourselves in terms of our possessions and our purchasing power. We come to feel that being equal means adopting a similar lifestyle — a lifestyle that is largely constructed by corporations and promoted all over the world through social media. The global economy is fueled by the message that we are inadequate and incomplete as we are and we therefore need to acquire things to make up for that lack. The message is this: If you do not stay up to date with the latest trends in fashion and the latest version of personal electronics, you cannot consider yourself equal to those who do.

The challenge of developing wisely raises some serious issues. To start with, what do we mean by development? We need to differentiate much more carefully between wise development and mere material advancement. In many areas, the understanding of development has been broadened to include such goals as human rights, environmental conservation, and education. Yet all too often, people still believe they are witnessing “development” when they see “backward” sectors finding new opportunities to do menial jobs for low pay, so that they can buy more of the consumer goods that are the markers of success and advancement.

Our idea of equality must go deeper. Our equality is based not in what we have or how we look, but in who we are. We are equal in our shared human condition and in the latent nobility of heart that lies within each of us. When we make that the standard of our equality and our value, we all already measure up. We can find the basis for living as equals without needing to reduce equality to conformity.

One area where we seem to find it particularly difficult to accept our differences — much less value them — is religion. However, religious diversity is inevitable, given the diversity in the historical and cultural conditions that give rise to religious institutions, doctrines, and practices. What’s more, religious diversity is also necessary and positive for human society. Since human beings are diverse in terms of our predispositions and needs, we benefit greatly from having a variety of spiritual paths available to us. From a Buddhist perspective, the argument that one religion is the best while the rest are all mistaken or inferior is unsustainable and not useful. It fails to take into account our variety of human dispositions and emotional needs. If it does not suit our individual temperament or help us to free ourselves from suffering and become better people, following the “best” religion is of little use. Even if one religion were really the best or truest, I do not think that being the best and truest is the point when it comes to religion. In my view, the point is for it to suit the person and to benefit them.

There is no reason to insist that everyone follow a single religion or spiritual path, or for all religions to agree on the same beliefs and practices in order to be considered equal. In fact, religions are already equal in the most important sense. If they address us as human beings, recognizing our common wish to be free of suffering and to find lasting happiness, they are equal. They are united in a common goal, which is to alleviate suffering and help us find happiness and live meaningful lives. All religions offer us ways to achieve these aims by looking primarily within our own hearts and minds. I think when we recognize this shared purpose at the root of all religions, we will be able to see them as fundamentally equal and to respect and value the diversity we see in their branches — their particular forms and expressions.

Today our diversity is something to be shared and exchanged with others freely. Each culture and religion is no longer the property of any single community but is available to all who live on this planet to learn from. This is simply a feature of the twenty-first-century world we live in, and it is time we recognize this and adopt the attitudes appropriate to this shift in our way of sharing the world. This means learning to truly value one another and to recognize diversity as highly productive and beneficial. Previously, due to limitations in our education and outlook, we automatically privileged our own views and unthinkingly deemed others’ as inferior. This sort of judgmental approach has no rightful place in a century of sharing.

The globalization of consumer culture poses a further danger. When we encounter the knowledge and practices of other cultures online or in other circumstances where they have been disconnected from their living human context, it may seem as if they belong to no one and that we can therefore do with them what we wish. We may even feel that we are showing appreciation by doing so. But religious traditions and cultural practices are not yet another set of products to be acquired and consumed. That is a kind of spiritual materialism or cultural appropriation and not genuine human sharing.

That is to say, our valuing of diversity is grounded in an awareness of our basic equality. This recognition gives us a solid basis for not just tolerating or accepting our differences but actually cherishing them. It also lets us see that difference is in no way a threat to equality. Rather, our equality makes the presence of diversity of such great value. Our differences are comparatively superficial relative to the shared roots of human equality, and our differences in fact are necessary.

If we analyze this confusion whereby we take projections and appearances to be reality, and we ask ourselves how we became so caught up in labels and identities, we can trace the problem back to a basic problem of selfishness. We cling to our judgments and impressions simply because they are our own. This is a form of arrogance. We feel that what appears to us must be reality and what appears to others, if it is different, must be mistaken. Underneath this, our self-centered biases and myopic and distorted perspectives are busy at work filtering appearances and selecting what we notice and take as important. Humility can help us recognize that appearances show us only a part of what we need to see. Rather than simply taking our limited views as the truth, we could ask how things appear to others. There is great value in seeing through the eyes of others as well as our own.

In the end, our efforts to extend equal rights to all in our global society will succeed or fail based on whether or not we can connect with the real ground of our equality. When we lose sight of that common ground, our differences are all too often treated as matters of higher or lower. When this happens, diversity looks like an obstacle to real equality. Interdependence offers a way to see instead the great value in diversity and to recognize that equality does not require uniformity. But in order for our equality to be a value we live by, and not an abstract principle we are willing to endorse only verbally, we also need to learn new habits of connecting from the heart across differences. To that end, our basic capacity for empathy is a powerful resource we can develop to connect on that deeper level.

We are generally much more aware of the impact our outer circumstances have on our inner states and tend to grossly underestimate the effect of our inner world on the outer world. The world inside our hearts and minds is made of different “material” than the physical world. Perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and intentions form part of the composition of our inner world, and so do all our other affective and cognitive capacities. These capacities are not physical, but they have the power to reshape the world.

Empathy enables us to reach across differences and connect as equals. It does so by cutting straight through the walls that we build up around us and allowing us to touch the core of our equality: the ability to experience pain and joy. More than just our own personal happiness and wisdom is at stake. In order to sustain the long-term action needed to cure the social inequities we have created in the world today, we need to be able to root ourselves firmly in the common ground of our equality as sentient beings. Empathy takes us along a direct route to that ground. It lets us actually feel what equality has told us to be true: that we are all equal in terms of our search for happiness and to avoid suffering, even as the particulars of our experience vary at any given moment.

Empathy allows us to become aware of others’ situations and problems on an emotional level. There have been important debates for quite some time about whether human beings are naturally empathetic. Previously many people believed that empathy was not natural to us but rather was a product of nurture. However, more recently, studies of interaction among infants and very small children have shown that humans respond empathetically to others’ suffering from the very start of our lives.

Empathy impairment is a particularly dangerous disease in leaders who are in a position to make a difference in social policy or practices. The US president Barack Obama has spoken of the urgent need for empathy in society, and points out how harmful it is to the entire country when its government is lacking in this essential quality. I think the public should make this one of the main qualifications that they require of any politician seeking their vote.

We place far too much weight on our limited impressions of others and so are much too quick to judge. We only ever see part of the picture, and generally not the most important part. If life were a movie, much of the time we would just be watching the closing moments of the movie. We would not have seen entire series of events that led to the final scene appearing before us. This is why having an open mind is so important. When our mind and heart are open, we can better listen to what our empathy tells us. This helps us understand what is going on inside others, motivating them to act as they do.

We need to distinguish the person from their actions. We can condemn their behavior, but we should not dismiss the person. We should not judge the person as a whole by their behavior in any given moment but take into account all the factors affecting them over time. There is more to a person than just the particular action that we are witnessing and disliking. If we are willing to look, we can always find another aspect of them that we are able to connect to and work with.

Happiness is boundless. If wealthy people approach their pursuit of happiness as if it were something to acquire in parcels, they will never get enough. The resources that we all have in abundance are our inner resources, and these are what we can develop boundlessly to yield the happiness we yearn for. When we are focusing solely on material resources as a means of securing happiness, chances are we will not actually experience happiness but will feel we are in competition for limited resources.

As I have said, empathy does not require you to condone what others do or excuse it. It just gives you some understanding of what they are undergoing. With empathy, there can remain a certain sense of separation, where the other person is over there, and from where you are, you recognize what they feel or are experiencing. Subject and object are distinct or even distant. By contrast, compassion brings you closer. Compassion goes deeper than empathy and involves you further.

Compassion is therefore more engaged and much more active than empathy alone. The emotional understanding that empathy gives us is certainly important, but with compassion you enter into the situation with body, speech, heart, and mind. You might pass someone on the street and feel some empathy, but compassion stops you in your tracks. It draws you in and much more readily translates into action.

Although empathy can give us the awareness or understanding of what the other is undergoing, the other somehow remains other. Compassion enters straight into your heart. There is not much sense of subject and object, and little separation. We are almost one person with them.

For those of us still at the level of spectator compassion — which hardly deserves the name compassion — it is more like looking at a photograph. It is a kind of knowing without really feeling. But for the people actually feeling compassion, it is profoundly moving. Real compassion connects with the living experience and wants to move with the person, to bring them out of suffering and up to the final goal of happiness.

I think if your empathy with someone you see suffering overwhelms you with suffering yourself, this is a sign that you have not fully come over to the other’s place. You are still a spectator of someone else’s pain. Your empathy has not gone far enough. You see a hungry person begging for food. As a spectator, you can always look away or walk away. But the truly compassionate person cannot leave the other there suffering. They feel they must carry them if necessary until they find food. They cannot walk away from their hunger.

Courage is the root of compassion. With compassion, you need to be able to envision the end goal — the happiness that you want the other to attain. It is not the case that when you feel compassion you only see suffering and pain and cannot see anything beyond that. Rather, you have the imagination to see the other as free and happy, and you keep that aim in mind. With compassion, the result — happiness — is present before you, like a finish line. In a race, you might be tired physically, but you are sustained by your determination not to stop until you have reached your final goal. You are sustained by joy at the prospect of attaining that goal.