Kicking It With The Dalai Lama…

First off, Congratulations to John on the birth of his new baby girl.

Yesterday, I witnessed a historic event in world history. I witnessed the Dalai Lama being named as an honourary Canadian Citizen in the City of Vancouver. The event took place at GM Place in front of a sold out crowd. A joke was made about how our parliament never agrees on anyting, but when the notion of giving the Dalai Lama honorary citizenship came up, there was only unanimous approval: Something that never happens in Canadian Politics. It is a testament to the teachings of the Dalai Lama and how they have shaped and cultivated the way that peace is made in the world. If the Dalai Lama can make parliament come together, that is pretty powerful stuff.

This decision by Canada does not come without a price. Already stressed relationships with China will be even more strained by this so called defiance. China views the Dalai Lama as a political and religious leader with seperatist motives. China’s policy is “ONE CHINA” and anything that gets in the way of that is not acceptable. The Chinese embassy warned Canadian Government delegates not to support or attend this event as it would put more pressure on the fragile relationship with China. Well, no one listened and the Dalai Lama became the third person in history to receive an honorary citizenship from Canada.

Afterwards, the Dalai Lama inspired the audience with his words of wisdom on the art of “Cultivating Happiness”. This art transcends culture and religion. It doesn’t matter what your background is. That is your personal choice, as his personal choice was to become Buddhist. What he stresses is the fact that people need to respect and have love for one another, and that in order to achieve that, you must develop the inner calm within yourself to deal with the disturbances in the outside world.

The example I remember most was the one about walking down the street and being smiled at. If you have no inner peace, the person smiling at you is suspicious to you. You start to fear that person, and eventually that can become anger and hate because you don’t understand why. If you are calm from within, you just smile back, and you are at peace. Believe it or not, that actually makes sense to me.

What I took away from the whole session was that calmness of the mind promotes inner peace. Once we have inner peace, we can cultivate happiness and in turn, contentment. I was also really confused at the end because I’m having a hard time understanding how the Chinese government could be afraid of his teachings? If anything, China could learn from his teachings and solve a lot of problems by promoting peace within its country. Fear is effective, but as the Dalai Lama said, it is only a motivator for the short term. They would get a lot more done with a society that is happy and at peace since you tend to be able to affect people much more deeply if you don’t rule them with fear.

The Dalai Lama used an example of one of his teachers. When his teacher was happy, and he knew it, he would learn much more and accept lessons much more deeply. If his teacher was in a bad mood, he would accept his lessons less deeply because he would be in a state of fear, and that fear disturbs his mental calm, inner peace, and his happiness…or something like that. I get it…sort of…

I’m probably missing a few ideas, and I know that I would never be able to comprehend everything he was trying to say in a single session. However, I did get a lot out of it, and was enlightened. The Dalai Lama didn’t preach a single religious belief or a political ideal. He just wanted us all to get along and enjoy a lifetime of happiness by loving and respecting everyone as a human being first, and of course, cultivate happiness for life.