In the world of today where strife and violence are the norm, people are searching for something and possibly someone they can pin their hopes and thoughts on; someone who will rescue them from the all-pervasive negativeness. There is so much movement and relocation in the world, mainly out of necessity, that people are searching for an identity; something to act as a compass and an anchor. Explosion of knowledge is not allowing for blind and accepting faith; questions are being asked about the relevance of ritualistic religion; hypocrisy is making people uncomfortable, and at the same time there is so much confusion about religion, spirituality.
Consider now the Dalai Lama’s teachings. How relevant and valid what the Dalai Lama says is. He stresses on spirituality and his definition of spirituality is the only thing that makes absolute sense. According to him:
Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit--such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, which bring happiness to both self and others.
Going on, the Dalai Lama in his wisdom tells people to create their world within themselves; build their temples within themselves; create their homes within themselves. This is the only place where their world, temples and homes will be indestructible, and from where no one can take it away. His Holiness teaches that freedom means freedom from fear; wealth means inner resources; power means self-sovereignty. If we can strive to achieve this, we should be able to live lives of great equanimity, and inner peace and calm strength.
Another powerful thought is that we need to believe in and lay emphasis on the inner teachings of all cultures and not on the outer trappings. Instead of teaching our children to preserve the outer forms of culture, we need to teach them to be compassionate, thoughtful, serving, tolerant, just, and kind people; we need to be aware of and responsible for our environment. We need to believe in and teach our children to believe in the theory and practice of cause and effect. Instead of looking at the superficialities of nations, we need to speak to the heart of all men, because all men are striving for the same human goals. The only principles we need to live by are selflessness, and compassion and the only thing we need to practice, is humanity. We are all different, and need to celebrate these differences of colour, and creed, but in the essence of spirituality, there is no difference. There we are all the same. We have the same shared human hopes and human aspirations. As Pico Iyer so succinctly puts it, ‘the nature of globalism, as of anything, is to be a reflection of human longing, in all its many forms.’ We go on and on about globalism and global villages etc not having stopped to think what the term really means. This is it – it is a human longing to be interconnected. We share our knowledge, and we share our thoughts; we can access the whole world from our keyboard and because of this, we are all in one way or another interdependent, and therefore responsible for the human-ness of each other.
(Pico Iyer’s style is so fluid and simple, it brings the Dalai Lama to us, ordinary beings, as never before).