No material object, no matter how beautiful or precious it is, can give us the feeling of being loved, because our deeper identity, our true character, is rooted in the subjective nature of the mind.
Every human action becomes dangerous when it is deprived of human feeling. When they are performed with feeling and respect for human values, all activities become constructive.
When I speak of kindness and compassion, I am not expressing myself as a Buddhist, or as the Dalai Lama, or as a Tibetan, but rather as a human being. And I hope that you also consider yourselves as human beings, rather than as Americans, Westerners, or members of one group or another. Such distinctions are secondary. When we speak as human beings, we can touch the essential thing.
Each person's happiness can make a profound, effective contribution that can improve the entire human community.
Real compassion is not just an emotional response; it is a firm, thought-out commitment. Therefore, an authentic attitude of compassion does not change, even faced with another person's negative behavior.
True compassion is impartial and bears with it a feeling of responsibility for the welfare and happiness of others.
An outburst of anger is in infallible sign of weakness.
You must understand that even if your adversaries seem to be harming you, in the end their destructive activity will turn against them. To rein in your selfish impulse to retaliate, remember your desire to practice compassion and your responsibility to help others avoid suffering the consequences of their own actions.
We must devote our efforts to developing peace of mind. According to my own experience, the highest level of inner calm comes from the development of love and compassion. The more concerned we are with the happiness of others, the more we increase or our own well-being.
In Tibetan monasticism, there are 253 rules for monks and 364 for nuns. By observing them as scrupulously as possible, I free myself from useless distractions and everyday concerns.
As a Buddhist, I accept death as a normal process of life. I accept it as a reality that will occur for as long as I remain in samsara. Knowing that I cannot escape it, I don't see the point of worrying about it. I think that dying is a little like leaving behind used old clothing. It is not an end in itself.
We all want to avoid suffering and be happy. We have an intimate experiential knowledge of both happiness and suffering that is common to all sentient beings.
I believe the purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts.
Transforming the mind involves first learning to know it, then identifying how it functions so as to eliminate the three main mental poisons, which are ignorance, desire, and hatred.
By developing altruism, love, tenderness, and compassion, we reduce hatred, desire, and pride.
The Buddha is called the Bhagavan -- in Tibetan, "One who has destroyed the four Maras," which are death, distractions, pride, and the emotional obscurations.
Aryadeva tells us: "In the beginning, we must abandon all negative actions; in the middle, all attachment to ego; and in the end, all extremes, opinions or concepts."
"If we haven't transformed ourselves, how will we help others transform themselves?" asks the Tibetan saint Tsongkhapa.
Medical studies have shown that people who, in the language of everyday life, use the words "I," "me," or "mine" the most are more subject than others to cardiac diseases.
We can do without religion, but not without spirituality.
Religion implies a system of beliefs based on metaphysical foundations, along with the teaching of dogmas, rituals, or prayers. Spirituality, however, corresponds to the development of human qualities such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, or a sense of responsibility.
Human beings have constitutions, elaborate legal systems and police forces, religions, remarkable intelligence, and hearts endowed with the ability to love. But despite these extraordinary qualities, in actual practice we lag behind the smallest of insects.
In the present circumstance, no one should assume that someone else will solve his problems. Everyone must assume his own share of universal responsibility.
The practice of nonviolence applies not just to human beings but to all sentient beings. Everything that is animate possesses consciousness. Wherever there is consciousness, there are feelings like pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient being wants to suffer. On the contrary, all beings search for happiness.
It is not reprehensible for humans to use natural resources to serve their needs, but we should not exploit nature beyond what it strictly necessary.
A clean environment is a human right like any other.
In order to transform the situation outside, we must transform ourselves from within. If you want a beautiful garden, you must first sketch it out in your imagination and have a vision of it. Then the idea can be made concrete, and the external garden will materialize.
Destruction of natural resources results from ignorance, from a lack of respect for the living things of the Earth, and from greed.
When one is motivated solely by a selfish wish and cannot get what one wants through logic, one resorts to force. Even in the framework of a simple family argument or friendly disagreement, if you support yourself with valid reasoning, you will tirelessly defend your position, point by point. If you lack reasonable motives, however, you are soon overcome with anger, which is never a sign of strength, but of weakness.
Without global solutions that include aspirations of the peoples most directly concerned, half-measures or expedients will only create additional problems.
I have always forbidden my people to resort to violence in their efforts to put an end to their sufferings. I do believe, however, that a people has every moral right to protest against injustice.
It was from him (dad) -- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of water paints (and artist's paycheck) -- from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends.
My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it's stupid to let money be the reason you don't do something.
That is my favorite kind of integrated person. Some of each thing and not too much of any one.
Iannis, without wasting a moment on that awkward and tedious conversation that will unhappily precede so many hundreds and hundreds of future restaurant meals in all of our lives -- whether to share or not to share and whether or not there are food phobias and dietary restrictions among us -- simply ordered food for the table without even consulting a menu, and so set the standard for me for all time of excellent hospitality: Just take care of everything.
"There are no accidents," [mom would] say, sternly looking down at the eight-year-old offender (me) with the two broken pieces of some dish in her soapy hands. "Only carelessness."
I loathe the way he offers this line of reasoning -- triple the pay and hardly any work! -- to me, to me who has thrived her whole life on triple the work for hardly any pay, obliviously expecting it to be the salient point that cements my opinion of him as a decent guy who -- as if fatally -- has an opportunity that cannot be resisted.
The staff does not want to see you fall apart. It unnerves them. You can let it go in the privacy of your office, you can weep in the walk-in, but at the bench, you must pick up your knife and finish boning out those chickens.
Somewhere between kid number one and kid number two and chef and owner and nursing and prepping and line cooking and worker's comp and commercial refrigeration, I learned to re-envision the amount of time I have available to sleep as an excellent nap instead of a paltry night's worth.
Put your head down and do your job and let the recognition end of things sort itself out.
Usually on the third shelf toward the bottom there are a couple of platters of room temperature food, cooked, if lucky, that morning, but not uncommonly the day before, and even -- I've seen it -- the day before that. The fried peppers and eggplant and potatoes that rest there have never seen refrigeration, which is on one hand kind of unsettling but also helps me see how hyper we Americans are about refrigeration. In Alda's house [in Italy], the refrigerators themselves hardly make fifty degrees and prepared foods rests for days in the cabinet and also in the turned-off oven. Everyone in the family eats this stuff and hasn't died from it yet.
Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangle of our days. Across many domains, the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health.
The typical worker reaches the most unproductive moment of the day at 2:55 p.m. When we enter this region of the day, we often lose our bearings.
As the doctors at the University of Michigan demonstrate, inserting regular mandatory vigilance breaks into tasks helps us regain the focus needed to proceed with challenging work that must be done in the afternoon.
If you happen to appear before a parole board just before a break rather than just after one, you'll likely spend a few more years in jail -- not because of the facts of the case but because of the time of the day.
DeskTime claims to have discovered a golden ratio of work and rest. High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.
While naps between thirty and ninety minutes can produce some long-term benefits, they come with steep costs. The ideal naps -- those that combine effectiveness with efficiency -- are far shorter, usually between ten and twenty minutes.
Lisa Kahn's discovery: Those who entered the job market in weak economies earned less at the beginning of their careers than those who started in strong economies -- no big surprise. But this early disadvantage didn't fade. It persisted for as long as twenty years.
We should recognize that having a lot of people earning too little or struggling to make their way affects all of us -- in the form of fewer customers for what we're selling and higher taxes to deal with the consequences of limited opportunities.
Four situations when you should go first:
On a ballot.
If you're not the default choice.
If there are relatively few competitors.
If you're interviewing for a job and you're up against several strong candidates.
Four tips for making a fast start in a new job:
Begin before you begin.
Let your results do the talking.
Stockpile your motivation.
Sustain your morale with small wins.
The "uh-oh" effect: When we reach a midpoint, sometimes we slump, but other times we jump. A mental siren alerts us that we've squandered half of our time. That injects a healthy dose of stress that revives our motivation and reshapes our energy.
The best hope for turning a slump into a spark involves three steps. First, be aware of midpoints. Don't let them remain invisible. Second, use them to wake up rather than roll over. Third, at the midpoint, imagine that you're behind -- but only by a little.
Five ways to reawaken your motivation during a midpoint slump:
Set interim goals.
Publicly commit to these goals.
Stop your sentence midway through.
Don't break the chain. (the Seinfeld technique)
Picture one person your work will help.
Closings, conclusions, and culminations reveal something essential about the human condition: In the end, we seek meaning.
Groups that depend on synchronization for success -- choirs, rowing teams, and Mumbai dabbawalas -- abide by three principles of group timing. An external standard sets the pace. A sense of belonging helps individuals cohere. And synchronization both requires and heightens well-being. Put another way, groups must synchronize on three levels -- to the boss, to the tribe, and to the heart.
The two critical pillars of the dabbawala creed are that "work is worship" and that the "customer is god."
To maintain a well-timed group you should regularly -- once a week or at least once a month -- ask these three questions:
Do we have a clear boss?
Are we fostering a sense of belonging?
Are we activating the uplift -- feeling good and doing good?
Strong-future languages such as English, Italian, and Korean require speakers to make sharp distinctions between the present and the future. Weak-future languages such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian draw little or often no contrast at all.
The path to a life of meaning and significance isn't to "live in the present" as so many spiritual gurus have advised. It is to integrate our perspectives on time into a coherent whole, one that helps us comprehend who we are and why we're here.
The challenge of the human condition is to bring the past, present, and future together.
I used to believe in ignoring the waves of the day. Now I believe in surfing them. I used to believe that lunch breaks, naps, and taking walks were niceties. Now I believe they're necessities. I used to believe that the best way to overcome a bad start at work, at school, or at home was to shake it off and move on. Now I believe the better approach is to start again or start together. I used to believe that midpoints didn't matter -- mostly because I was oblivious to their very existence. Now I believe that midpoints illustrate something fundamental about how people behave and how the world works. I used to believe in the value of happy endings. Now I believe that the power of endings rests not in their unmitigated sunniness but in their poignancy and meaning. I used to believe that synchronizing with others was merely a mechanical process. Now I believe that it requires a sense of belonging, rewards a sense of purpose, and reveals a part of our nature. I used to believe that timing was everything. Now I believe that everything is timing.
