Dalai Lama Quote of the Week - The Quality of Our Life

A nice quote this week by the Dalai Lama, from Snow Lion Publications.

Dalai Lama Quote of the Week



If the first true fact is that life in general is not easy, we should certainly not expect that seeing the nature of our mind will be simple. The actual nature of mind, on any level, is not very obvious. Even to identify and recognize correctly what is mind is extremely difficult. Just to start to try to see it, we need strong motivation. We need to be clear about why we would like to see the nature of our mind.

The foundation for any level of spiritual motivation is to take ourselves and the quality of our life seriously. Most people get up in the morning and either have to go to work or school, or stay home and take care of the house and children. At the end of the day, they are tired and try to relax by maybe having a beer and watching television. Eventually they go to sleep, and the next day get up and repeat the sequence. They spend their whole lives trying to make money, raise a family and catch whatever fun and pleasure they can.

Although most people cannot alter the structure of their lives, they feel they also cannot change the quality of their experience of this structure. Life has its ups, but also lots of downs, and it is all very stressful. They feel they are a tiny part of some solid, giant mechanism they can do nothing about. They therefore go through life in a mechanical, passive manner, like a passenger on a life-long speeding roller coaster going up and down and round and round, assuming that not only the track, but also the tension and stress experienced while circling on it are an inevitable part of the never-ending ride.

Since such experience of one's life, despite its pleasures, can be very depressing, it is vitally essential to do something about it. Just drinking ourselves into oblivion each night, or seeking constant entertainment and distraction by having music or television on all the time or incessantly playing computer games so that we never have to think about our life, is not going to eliminate the problem. We must take ourselves seriously. This means to have respect for ourselves as human beings. We are not just pieces of machinery or helpless passengers on the fixed ride of life that is sometimes smooth, but all too often bumpy. We need, therefore, to look more closely at what we are experiencing each day. And if we see that we are stressed by the tension of our city, household or office, we should not just accept this as something inevitable.

Our living, work and home environments, including the attitudes and behavior of others in them, merely provide the circumstances in which we live out our lives. The quality of our life, however--what we ourselves, not anybody else, are experiencing right now--is the direct result of our own attitudes and the behavior they generate, not anybody else's.

~ From The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra by H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, published by Snow Lion Publications.

Tags: The Gelug/Kagyu Tradition of Mahamudra, Dalai Lama, Alexander Berzin, Snow Lion Publications, Buddhism, mind, life