The Dalai Lama, an amazing person.

Among 12,000 there to hear the Dalai Lama at SDSU, I sensed that none were disappointed with what he had to say.  The most repeated message I heard was that we are among 8 Billion people, all the same physically and emotionally, and we all come equipped with the seeds of compassion.   That compassion can be nurtured with love and a sense of self, or destroyed through fear, anger and suspicion.  The Dalai Lama was talking about how we raise our children around the planet, and apparently we haven’t been doing so well given the polarization of peoples and cultures.  His solution is that we work on nurturing compassion with out children, and then the future can be bright.

The second message that rang true to me was that we need to embrace secular ethics, over religious ethics.  Religious ethics are too narrow and focused on promoting fear and anger.  He did not say that people need to reject their religions, but to accept secular thought and ethics as the way to promote compassion and peace among all people.  He also recommended that the religious among us embrace and engage in dialogue with the secular population, rejecting the fear that somehow they will be corrupted.  He was hard on religion, saying that they often promote injustice and discrimination.

He spoke about the rich/poor gap as morally wrong and a new disease, a global cancer called corruption.  He spoke of secularists as sometimes being more religious than the church goers, because they can have honest compassion for the needy.  He told us that all of us need to open our minds and hearts to people that we have been taught to fear, and then life will get better.

He focused on what it takes to raise a child that has a true sense of altruism, and that promoting a strong sense of self-worth was important along with the genuine affection of a mother.  Without self-worth and love, the basic values become dormant in a child, and then surpassed by unnatural competition, the winner takes all mentality.  Promoting all positive things, in contrast to the fear, suspicion and jealousness that kill compassion in our youth.

The Dalai Lama told us what we already knew in many ways, that we need to open our minds and hearts to others, before we can begin to live in harmony without turmoil and war. Our future is in the hands of our children, and if we raise them to fear and mistrust others, we are handing them a sword, rather than a plowshare.  What shall we do?