As we said right at the beginning, joy is a by-product,” the Archbishop began. “If you set out and say, I want to be happy, clenching your teeth with determination, this is the quickest way of missing the bus.” So if joy and happiness are by-products, what exactly are they by-products of? It was time to delve deeper into the qualities of mind and heart that we needed to cultivate to catch that bus.
“We have now covered the nature of true joy and the obstacles to joy,” I said as we began our fourth day of dialogues. “Now we are ready to move on to the positive qualities that allow us to experience more joy.”
We had discussed the topic of mental immunity in reducing fear and anger and other obstacles to joy, but the Dalai Lama had explained that mental immunity was also about filling our mind and heart with positive thoughts and feelings. As our dialogue progressed, we converged on eight pillars of joy. Four were qualities of the mind: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance. Four were qualities of the heart: forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.
On the first day, the Archbishop had touched the fingers of his right hand to his heart to emphasize its centrality. We would end up, ultimately, at compassion and generosity, and indeed both men would insist that these two qualities were perhaps most pivotal to any lasting happiness. Yet we needed to begin with some fundamental qualities of the mind that would allow us to turn more easily and frequently to the compassionate and generous response to life. As the Dalai Lama had said at the start of our dialogues, we create most of our suffering, so we should be able to create more joy. The key, he had explained, was our perspective and the thoughts, feelings, and actions that come as a result.
Scientific research consistently supported so much of the dialogue that was unfolding over the week. The factors that psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has found to have the greatest influence on our happiness supported a number of the eight pillars. The first concerned our perspective toward life, or, as Lyubomirsky described it, our ability to reframe our situation more positively. Our capacity to experience gratitude and our choice to be kind and generous were the others.
A healthy perspective really is the foundation of joy and happiness, because the way we see the world is the way we experience the world. Changing the way we see the world in turn changes the way we feel and the way we act, which changes the world itself. Or, as the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, “With our mind we create our own world.”
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For every event in life,” the Dalai Lama said, “there are many different angles. When you look at the same event from a wider perspective, your sense of worry and anxiety reduces, and you have greater joy.” The Dalai Lama had discussed the importance of a wider perspective when he was telling us about how he was able to see the calamity of his losing his country as an opportunity. It was jaw-dropping to hear him “reframe more positively” the last half century of exile. He had been able to see not only what he had lost but also what he had gained: wider contact and new relationships, less formality and more freedom to discover the world and learn from others. He had concluded, “So therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, Oh, how bad, how sad. But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that it gives me new opportunities.”
Edith Eva Eger tells the story of visiting two soldiers on the same day at William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss. Both were paraplegics who had lost the use of their legs in combat. They had the same diagnosis and the same prognosis. The first veteran, Tom, was lying on his bed knotted into a fetal position, railing against life and decrying his fate. The second, Chuck, was out of bed in his wheelchair, explaining that he felt as if he had been given a second chance in life. As he was wheeled through the garden, he had realized that he was closer to the flowers and could look right into his children’s eyes.
Eger often quotes fellow Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who said that our perspective toward life is our final and ultimate freedom. She explains that our perspective literally has the power to keep us alive or to cause our death. One of her fellow inmates at Auschwitz was terribly ill and weak, and others in her bunk asked her how she was holding on to life. The prisoner said that she had heard that they were going to be liberated by Christmas. The woman lived against all odds, but she died on Christmas Day when they were not liberated. It’s no wonder that during the week the Dalai Lama had called some thoughts and feelings toxic, even poisonous.
Jinpa explained that while changing our emotions is quite hard, changing our perspective is actually relatively easy. It is a part of our mind, over which we have influence. The way you see the world, the meaning you give to what you witness, changes the way you feel. It can be the first step of “a spiritual and neural journey that results in more and more equanimity and of our default state being increasingly more joyful,” as psychologist and writer Daniel Goleman poetically put it on a pretrip call. Perspective, Jinpa argued, is nothing less than the skull key that opens all of the locks that imprison our happiness. What is this perspective shift that has such power? What is the healthy perspective that the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop bring to life, that allows them to greet life with so much joy in the face of so much sorrow?
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The Dalai Lama used the terms wider perspective and larger perspective. They involve stepping back, within our own mind, to look at the bigger picture and to move beyond our limited self-awareness and our limited self-interest. Every situation we confront in life comes from the convergence of many contributing factors. The Dalai Lama had explained, “We must look at any given situation or problem from the front and from the back, from the sides, and from the top and the bottom, so from at least six different angles. This allows us to take a more complete and holistic view of reality, and if we do, our response will be more constructive.”
We suffer from a perspectival myopia. As a result, we are left nearsighted, unable to see our experience in a larger way. When we confront a challenge, we often react to the situation with fear and anger. The stress can make it hard for us to step back and see other perspectives and other solutions. This is natural, the Archbishop emphasized throughout the week. But if we try, we can become less fixated, or attached, to use the Buddhist term, to one outcome and can use more skillful means to handle the situation. We see that in the most seemingly limiting circumstance we have choice and freedom, even if that freedom is ultimately the attitude we will take. How can a trauma lead to growth and transformation? How can a negative event actually become positive? We were being invited to see the blessing in the curse, the joy in the sorrow. Jinpa offered a silver-lining thought experiment to take us out of our limited perspective: Take something bad that happened in the past and then consider all the good that came out of it.
But is this simply being Pollyanna? Are we seeing the world less clearly when we view it through these rose-colored glasses? I do not think anyone would accuse the Dalai Lama or Archbishop Tutu of not seeing the struggles they have faced or the horrors of our world with keen and unflinching vision. What they are reminding us is that often what we think is reality is only part of the picture. We look at one of the calamities in our world, as the Archbishop suggested, and then we look again, and we see all those who are helping to heal those who have been harmed. This is the ability to reframe life more positively based on a broader, richer, more nuanced perspective.
With a wider perspective, we can see our situation and all those involved in a larger context and from a more neutral position. By seeing the many conditions and circumstances that have led to this event, we can recognize that our limited perspective is not the truth. As the Dalai Lama said, we can even see our own role in any conflict or misunderstanding.
By stepping back we can also see the long view, and have a clearer understanding of our actions and our problems in the larger frame of our life. This allows us to see that even though our situation may seem challenging now, from the vantage point of a month or a year or a decade these challenges will seem much more manageable. When the Archbishop was awarded the Templeton Prize in London, I had the opportunity to meet the astronomer royal of the United Kingdom, Sir Martin Rees, who explained to me that our Earth will exist for an equivalent amount of time as it has taken us to go from one-celled organisms to human beings—in other words, we are only halfway through our evolution on this planet. Thinking of our world’s problems in this long sweep of planetary history really is the long view. It puts our daily concerns into a much broader perspective.
This wider perspective also leads us beyond our own self-regard. Self-centeredness is most of our default perspective. It comes quite understandably from the fact that we are at the center of our world. But as the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop demonstrate so powerfully, we also have the ability to take on the perspectives of others.
I remembered the Archbishop wondering if the person who had cut him off in traffic might be rushing to the hospital because his wife was giving birth or because a loved one was dying. “I have sometimes said to people,” the Archbishop said, “when you are stuck in a traffic jam, you can deal with it in one of two ways. You can let the frustration really eat you up. Or you can look around at the other drivers and see that one might have a wife who has pancreatic cancer. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly what they might have, but you know they are all suffering with worries and fears because they are human. And you can lift them up and bless them. You can say, Please, God, give each one of them what they need.
“The very fact of not thinking about your own frustration and pain does something. I don’t know why. But it will make you feel much better. And I think it has therapeutic consequences for your own health, physical and spiritual. But what does frustration help? I mean, you feel it in the pit of your tummy, the anger. I mean, you just get more angry, and after a while you are going to develop ulcers in the stomach from the fact that you got annoyed at sitting in a traffic jam.”
Taking a “God’s-eye perspective,” as the Archbishop might say, allows us to transcend our limited identity and limited self-interest. One does not have to believe in God to experience this mind-altering shift in perspective. The famous Overview Effect is perhaps the most profound example. Many astronauts have reported that once they glimpsed Earth from space—a small blue ball floating in the vast expanse, lacking our human-made borders—they never looked at their personal or national interests in quite the same way again. They saw the oneness of terrestrial life and the preciousness of our planetary home.
Fundamentally, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were trying to shift our perspective from focusing on I and me and mine to we and us and ours. Earlier in the week the Dalai Lama had referenced a classic study that suggested the constant use of personal pronouns leads to a greater risk of heart attack. In a multicenter prospective study of coronary heart disease, health researcher Larry Scherwitz found that people who more frequently said I, me, or mine had a higher risk of having a heart attack and had a higher risk of their heart attack being fatal. Scherwitz found that this so-called “self-involvement” was a better predictor of death than smoking, high cholesterol levels, or high blood pressure. A more recent study conducted by researcher Johannes Zimmerman found that people who more often use first-person singular words—I and me—are more likely to be depressed than people who more often use first-person plural—we and us. This was interesting evidence that being too self-regarding really does make us unhappy.
When we have a wider perspective, we are also less likely to spend our time lost in self-referential thoughts, ruminating. Jinpa offered another thought experiment designed to take us out of our self-absorption, one that the Archbishop described using when he was in the hospital being treated for prostate cancer, and that the Dalai Lama used when he was doubled over in pain from a gallbladder infection: Think about where you are suffering in your life and then think about all the other people who are going through a similar situation. This perhaps is quite literally the birth of compassion, which means “suffering with.” The incredible thing, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop pointed out, was that this “suffering with” others reminds us that we are not alone, and actually lessens our own pain. This recognition of our interdependence begins to soften our rigid sense of self, the boundaries that separate us from others. The Dalai Lama had said earlier in the week, “If, on the other hand, I relate to others from the perspective of myself as someone different—a Buddhist, a Tibetan, and so on—I will then create walls to keep me apart from others.”
We were back at the conversation that began the week, when we had just gotten off the airplane and were sitting in the lounge of the airport. The Dalai Lama had asked, “Where is Bishop Tutu’s self? We can’t find it.” The Dalai Lama, in a traditional twist of Buddhist reasoning, said, “This is his body, but not himself. This is his mind, but not himself.” Buddhists follow this line of inquiry to reduce our attachment to our identity, recognizing that the less attached we are, the less defensive and reactive we will be and the more effective and skillful we can be.
As the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop explained, the wider perspective leads to serenity and equanimity. It does not mean we don’t have the strength to confront a problem, but we can confront it with creativity and compassion rather than rigidity and reactivity. When we take the perspective of others, we can empathize with them. One starts to see the interdependence that envelops us all, which reveals that how we treat others is ultimately how we treat ourselves. We also are able to recognize that we do not control all aspects of any situation. This leads to a greater sense of humility, humor, and acceptance.