The Dalai Lama's Cat and The Four Paws of Spiritual Success (The Dalai Lama's Cat #4)

by David Michie

And how renunciation meant turning away from these true causes of unhappiness. The first paw of spiritual success.

“In Buddhism, we define love as the wish to give happiness to others. It is a universal truth that if we wish for happiness ourselves, we should seek ways to give it to others. In giving we receive.”

May this act of kindness be a cause for me to attain complete and perfect enlightenment for the sake of all living beings.

“Apart from concept,” he confirmed, “there is no self. It is just an idea. A notion. A thing that comes and goes. A story we tell ourselves about our experience of reality that’s changing the whole time, sometimes up, sometimes down. Depending on who we’ve just been speaking to, and what we’ve been eating and drinking, our ideas and feelings about our self change, which just goes to show that there’s nothing permanent there. It’s just a thought.”

“What you need to understand is that there is a true “I” and a false “I”. The true “I” is the label you apply to all this,” he wiggled his index finger while scanning down Conrad’s body. “It is your body, your history, your likes and dislikes, the collection of things that go to make up the idea of Conrad. What Buddhists call “the conventionally-accepted I”. “The other is the false “I”. It is the idea that there is an independent self that exists somehow separately from body and mind, some inherently existing being that has qualities such as being guilty or successful or depressed or popular. Such a being doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. It never has existed. It’s just a tale we are making up.” “So why do we feel it so strongly?” asked Conrad. “Habit,” said Franc. “From the youngest age, we learn to identify with this invisible self. We have ideas about it. We try to project it out into the world in a particular way. But other people don’t have the same ideas about our self that we do. If I called ten people who know you, I would get ten slightly different accounts of Conrad.

“We all wish to give and receive love.”

What I instantly understood in that moment, however, was that the version of the beings we saw in the world around us was as much a reflection of our own mind, as it was of them. And that the more our mind was filled with thoughts of self and our own needs and wishes, the less space and compassion there was for others—and the less happy we would be.

“One by one, all is letting go. If we wish to be happy, we let go of our delusions—renunciation. If we wish to fulfill our true purpose, to experience ultimate wellbeing, we let go of our preoccupation with ourselves—bodhicitta. And if we wish to act in accordance with reality, we let go of illusions about the way that things exist—sunyata.”