It is very simple,” the Dalai Lama began. “Everyone knows that physical pain is bad and tries to avoid it. We do this not only by curing diseases, but also by trying to prevent them and by trying to keep our physical immunity strong. Mental pain is equally bad, so we should try to alleviate it as well. The way to do this is to develop mental immunity.”
We had started our second day of dialogues and were turning to the obstacles to joy. The subject of the dialogues was how to discover joy in the face of suffering, and we knew we’d need two full days to discuss all of the ways that we suffer. As the Dalai Lama had said the day before, so much of our unhappiness originates within our own mind and heart—in how we react to events in our life.
“Mental immunity,” the Dalai Lama explained, “is just learning to avoid the destructive emotions and to develop the positive ones. First, we must understand the mind—there are so many different states of mind—the diverse thoughts and emotions we experience on a daily basis. Some of these thoughts and emotions are harmful, even toxic, while others are healthy and healing. The former disturb our mind and cause much mental pain. The latter bring us true joyfulness.
“When we understand this reality, it is much easier to deal with the mind and to take preventive measures. This is how we develop mental immunity. And just as a healthy immune system and healthy constitution protects your body against potentially hazardous viruses and bacteria, mental immunity creates a healthy disposition of the mind so that it will be less susceptible to negative thoughts and feelings.
“Think about it this way. If your health is strong, when viruses come they will not make you sick. If your overall health is weak, even small viruses will be very dangerous for you. Similarly, if your mental health is sound, then when disturbances come, you will have some distress but quickly recover. If your mental health is not good, then small disturbances, small problems will cause you much pain and suffering. You will have much fear and worry, much sadness and despair, and much anger and aggravation.
“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. Often people ask me for the quickest and best solution to a problem. Again, this is impossible. You can have quickest or you can have best solution, but not both. The best solution to our suffering is mental immunity, but it takes time to develop.
“One time I was talking with Al Gore, the American vice president. He said that he had lots of problems, lots of difficulties that were causing him a great deal of anxiety. I said to him that we human beings have the ability to make a distinction between the rational level and the emotional level. At the rational level, we accept that this is a serious problem that we have to deal with, but at the deeper, emotional level, we are able to keep calm. Like the ocean has many waves on the surface but deep down it is quite calm. This is possible if we know how to develop mental immunity.”
“Yes,” the Archbishop replied, “you have answered very well. You always answer well, but you have done this one quite well. The only thing I think is that people sometimes get quite annoyed with themselves unnecessarily, especially when they have thoughts and feelings that are really quite natural.
“Basically,” the Archbishop continued, “I think we’ve got to accept ourselves as we are. And then hope to grow in much the way the Dalai Lama described. I mean getting to know what the things are that trigger us. These are things that you can train, you can change, but we ought not to be ashamed of ourselves. We are human, and sometimes it is a good thing that we recognize that we have human emotions. Now the thing is being able to say, when is it appropriate?”
Throughout the week of dialogues, the Archbishop said many times that we should not berate ourselves for our negative thoughts and emotions, that they are natural and unavoidable. They are only made more intense, he argued, by the glue of guilt and shame when we think we should not have them. The Dalai Lama agreed that human emotions are natural, but he did argue about whether they are unavoidable. Mental immunity, he explained, is the way to avoid them.
For months after our time in Dharamsala I wrestled with this seeming disagreement: Is it possible to truly prevent negative thoughts and emotions, to develop what the Dalai Lama was calling “mental immunity”? Or are these thoughts and emotions inevitable, and should we, as the Archbishop was suggesting, just accept them and forgive ourselves for having them?
Finally, after many discussions with psychological experts, it became clear that each position was valid and simply reflected a different stage in the cycle of emotional life. Through self-inquiry and meditation, we can discover the nature of our mind and learn to soothe our emotional reactivity. This will leave us less vulnerable to the destructive emotions and thought patterns that cause us so much suffering. This is the process of developing mental immunity.
The Archbishop was simply reminding us that even with this immunity, there will be times when we will have negative or destructive emotions, and when this does happen, the last thing we want to do is judge ourselves harshly.
In other words, the Dalai Lama was saying that if we eat healthy, take our vitamins, and get enough rest, we can stay healthy, and the Archbishop was saying, “Yes, even so, there will be times when we will catch a cold, and we should not make it worse by beating up on ourselves.”
So how do we deal with these obstacles to joy—the inevitable sources of suffering, both internal and external—that cause so much pain and anguish in our lives, when they do arise? These range from the everyday troubles of stress, frustration, and worry to the life-defining experiences of adversity, illness, and ultimately having to face death. We cannot control the inevitability of these occurrences, but both men agreed that we could influence their effect in our life by adjusting the attitude we take toward them.
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. The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha (not to be confused with the nutty and very tasty Egyptian condiment dukka).
Dukkha can be translated as “stress,” “anxiety,” “suffering,” or “dissatisfaction.” It is often described as the mental and physical suffering that occurs in life, illness, and aging. It is also described as the stress and anxiety that arise from the attempt to control what is fundamentally impermanent and unable to be controlled. We try to control the moment, which results in our feeling that what is happening should not be happening. So much of what causes heartache is our wanting things to be different than they are. “I think, in many cases,” the Dalai Lama explained, “you develop some sort of unhappiness, some discontent, which leads to frustration and anger.”
While stress and frustration may sound like superficial problems or complaints, the Buddha identified them as the core of so much of our unnecessary, or created, suffering. I was reminded of what the Dalai Lama had said on our first day: We cannot end natural disasters or the suffering they cause, but so much of the rest of our suffering we can.
Dukkha, or suffering, is the opposite of sukha, which means happiness, ease, or comfort. Both words are said to have originated from the ancient Aryans who brought the Sanskrit language to India. These Aryans were a nomadic people who traveled by horse- or ox-drawn carts, and the words literally mean “having a bad (or good) axle.” Was it a bumpy ride (dukkha), or a smooth ride (sukha)? Not a bad metaphor for life. What is suffering but a bumpy ride? Every life is rutted and no one can avoid some inevitable bumps, but so much is determined by our own perception of the ride. Our mind is the axle that often determines whether we experience the ride as bumpy or smooth.
This point was brought home to me in a rather literal way when I went to Dharamsala in January, several months before the dialogues, with Peggy Callahan. Peggy was responsible for filming the week in Dharamsala, and we went to prepare for the April visit. Our return flight from the cloud-covered Dharamsala airport was canceled, so we embarked on a bumpy and winding expedition to the nearest airport, holding tightly to the hand straps in the car as we bounced up and down and were tossed from side to side. We tried hard not to get carsick, and distracted ourselves by telling each other humorous stories from our travels—stretching each story as long as possible during the bone-shaking six-hour journey.
“We have perceptions about our experience, and we judge them: ‘This is good.’ ‘This is bad.’ ‘This is neutral,’” the Dalai Lama explained. “Then we have responses: fear, frustration, anger. We realize that these are just different aspects of mind. They are not the actual reality. Similarly, fearlessness, kindness, love, and forgiveness are also aspects of mind. It is very useful to know the system of emotion and to understand how our mind works.
“When a fear or frustration comes, we have to think, what is causing it? In most cases, fear is simply a mental projection. When I was young and living in the Potala, there was an area that was very dark, and there were stories about ghosts there. So when I was passing through this area, I would feel something. This was completely a mental projection.”
“No,” the Archbishop said with a frightened face. “There were ghosts there, man.”
The Dalai Lama laughed and said, “When a mad dog approaches, barking and gnashing its teeth, then you need fear. That’s not a mental projection. So you have to analyze the causes of the fear. With frustration, often you see someone, and you have a mental projection even when his or her face is neutral. Similarly, when you see someone’s actions, you have a mental projection even when their behavior is neutral. So you have to ask yourself if your frustration is based on something real. Even if someone criticizes you or attacks you, then you have to think: Why did this happen? This person is not your enemy from birth. Certain circumstances caused the person to be negative toward you. There may be many causes, but usually your own attitude is an important contributing factor that cannot be ignored. You realize that this happened because you have done something in the past that this person didn’t like. So then when you realize your own part in the other person’s criticizing or attacking you, the intensity of your frustration and anger automatically reduces. Then you also realize that basic human nature is good, is compassionate, and that the person does not want to harm you. So therefore you see their emotion is due to some misunderstanding or misinformation. You see that this person’s actions are due to their own destructive emotions. You can develop a sense of concern, compassion, even feel sorry for their pain and suffering: How sad that this person is out of control, or having such a negative feeling. Instead of frustration and anger you feel sorry for the other person and concern for them.”
I nodded my head and said, “But sometimes our frustration is not dependent on other people but on circumstances beyond our control. For example, we can’t control canceled flights.”
“When I was young and very eager to go do something,” the Dalai Lama said, “then they would announce that there was a delay or cancellation of the flight, I would feel angry and sometimes angry toward the pilot or toward the airline.
“Before there was air service from Dharamsala to Delhi, I would go to the city of Jammu, about four hours’ drive, to fly. So one morning, all the passengers were on the airplane when they announced that the flight had been canceled and that everyone should please leave the airplane. Later I was told that the pilot did not come because he was drinking too much the night before. So everyone was complaining, and I felt frustrated, too.
“Now when an announcement comes that my flight is canceled or postponed, which does happen quite a lot here, I take it as a good opportunity to sit and do my practice, to sit and meditate. So now I feel less frustration.”
I was reminded of a flight that I had been on with Rachel; our then two-year-old son, Jesse; and my mother to Hawaii. We did not have very much money and had booked seats on the cheapest airline we could find. They had only two planes that they would shuttle back and forth to Hawaii and other holiday destinations. We were almost halfway over the Pacific from California to Oahu when I felt a sudden jerk, like someone had shoved the plane from the side. Then the plane made a sweeping turn and sometime later the crew made an announcement that we were heading back to San Francisco. I remember being very angry and frustrated.
We had to spend the whole day waiting for another plane, so we tried to begin our vacation in California, taking Jesse to the zoo. It was fun, but I felt angry that our Hawaiian holiday was being cut short. When we finally returned to the airport and got ready to board, I overheard the pilot reveal to another member of the crew the reason for turning around.
Apparently one of the bolts had come loose in one of the engines. The pilot casually mentioned, in the way of people who are used to calmly handling high-risk situations, that if they had not shut off the engine at the moment that they did, it would have sheared off and the airplane would have crashed into the ocean. Suddenly a delayed flight and a day at the zoo didn’t sound so bad after all.
“I used to feel very frustrated and angry,” the Archbishop said, “when we would be rushing to a very important meeting, and we would be stuck in traffic because there was an accident up ahead. You were grinding your teeth and looking for somebody to kick. But growing older I said, well, this is an opportunity for being quiet. And then you would try to uphold all the people that were involved. I mean there’s not very much you can do, so grinding your teeth and getting heated up doesn’t help. So why not use the old things that they tell you? Count to ten. One, two, three . . . ah!” The Archbishop pretended to lose his temper despite his trying to count to ten.
“I think it takes time to learn to be laid-back,” he continued. “You know, it’s not something that just comes ready-made for you. No one ought to feel annoyed with themselves. It just adds to the frustration. I mean, we are human beings, fallible human beings. And as the Dalai Lama points out, there was a time . . . I mean, we see him serene and calm. Yet there were times when he, too, felt annoyed and perhaps there still are. It’s like muscles that have to be exercised to be strong. Sometimes we get too angry with ourselves thinking that we ought to be perfect from the word go. But this being on earth is a time for us to learn to be good, to learn to be more loving, to learn to be more compassionate. And you learn, not theoretically.” The Archbishop was pointing his index fingers at his head. “You learn when something happens that tests you.” And then he was pretending to be speaking as God might. “‘Hello, you said you wanted to be more compassionate.’ ‘Hello, you wanted to be a little more laid-back.’
“We get very angry with ourselves. We think we ought to be supermen and superwomen from the start. The Dalai Lama’s serenity didn’t come fully formed. It was through the practice of prayer and meditation that the gentleness, the compassion grew, his being patient and accepting—within reasonable limits. Accepting circumstances as they are, because if there are circumstances that you cannot change, then it’s no use beating your head against a brick wall; that just gives you a headache. This is a vale of growth and development.”
I was struck by the phrase “a vale of growth and development,” which seemed to echo the famous Christian notion that life is a vale, or valley, of tears, from which we are freed only when we enter heaven. This expression is often said to be based on Psalm 84:6, which has the beautiful wording: “Who passing through the vale of tears makes it a well.” Indeed, we can use our tears, our stress and frustration, as a well from which we can draw the life-giving waters of our emotional and spiritual growth.
“It’s similar to how we learn how to be a parent,” the Archbishop said as he concluded our discussion. “You learn how to react to a child who is really frustrating you. You are better with your third child than you were with your first child. And so I would say to everyone: You are made for perfection, but you are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.”