My Spiritual Journey by Dalai Lama (good books for 8th graders txt) 📕

our ability to overcome difficulty. In fact, with this attitude, every new obstacle will be regarded as a good opportunity to improve our state of mind!

That is how we can gradually strive for more compassion—by cultivating both real sympathy when faced with the suffering of others and a desire to help them free themselves of it. In this way our own serenity and inner strength will increase.

I love the smile, unique to humans

IF WE ARE CONTENT just to think that compassion, rationality, and patience are good, that is not actually enough to develop these qualities. Difficulties provide the occasion to put them into practice. Who can make such occasions arise? Certainly not our friends, but rather our enemies, for they are the ones who pose the most problems. So that if we truly want to progress on the path, we must regard our enemies as our best teachers.

For whoever holds love and compassion in high esteem, the practice of tolerance is essential, and it requires an enemy. We must be grateful to our enemies, then, because they help us best engender a serene mind! Anger and hatred are the real enemies that we must confront and defeat, not the “enemies” who appear from time to time in our lives.

Of course it is natural and right that we all want to have friends. I often say jokingly that a truly selfish person must be altruistic! You have to take care of others, of their well-being, by helping them and serving them, to have even more friends and make more smiles blossom. The result? When you yourself need help, you will find all you need! On the other hand, if you neglect others’ happiness, you will be the loser in the long run. Is friendship born of arguments, anger, jealousy, and unbridled competition? I don’t think so. Only affection produces authentic friends.

In contemporary materialistic society, if you have money and power, you have the impression of having a lot of friends. But they aren’t your friends; they are the friends of your money and power. If you lose your wealth and influence, you will have trouble finding those people again.

Unfortunately, so long as things are going well, we think we can get along all by ourselves. However, as our situation and health decline, we soon realize how wrong we were. That is when we understand who really helps us. To prepare ourselves for such a time, by making true friends who are useful when we need them most, we must cultivate altruism.

As for me, I always want more friends. I love smiles, and my wish is to see more smiles, real smiles, for there are many kinds—sarcastic, artificial, or diplomatic. Some smiles don’t arouse any satisfaction, and some even engender suspicion or fear. An authentic smile, though, arouses an authentic feeling of freshness, and I think the smile belongs only to human beings. If we want those smiles, we must create the reasons that make them appear.

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My Lives Without Beginning or End

In Dharamsala, among the Tibetans in exile, we go to meet this human being, so fully human that just approaching him can change our lives. That is the experience related by the renowned psychologist Paul Ekman: as he shook the Dalai Lama’s hand, he says he had the feeling he was “touching” compassion. He discovered that kindness can be “palpable,” and his life was transformed by this experience.5 Ekman’s personal history, marked by the suffering of a difficult childhood, equipped him with feelings of anger and resentment. After meeting the Dalai Lama, he found the strength to forgive and never to give way to anger again. Having become another man, he wondered about this metamorphosis. He came to the conclusion that the Dalai Lama could make others better because in the course of his daily meditations he had so completely bathed his mind in love and compassion that he was able to transmit these qualities directly to another person.

To meet Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, we go to the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Called also “the Land of the Gods,” this region in northwest India stretches to the foot of the Himalayan barrier, whose snow-covered peaks rise in stages above the Kangra plain. Kangra was once a city of maharajas and a crossroads of Indian cultures—Moghul, Sikh, then British, and finally Tibetan.

Geographically we are in India, but spiritually we are in Tibetan territory. At regular intervals, the valley resounds with the deep call of Tibetan ritual instruments: radongs, gyalings, and kanglings. From these instruments, which used to be made from the bones of a young Brahman, the monks of the Roof of the World draw grave, haunting sounds that open the mind to the dimension of the sacred. Prayer is omnipresent, murmured by the pilgrims fingering their rosaries, engraved on the walls of houses, printed in black ink on squares of cloth dyed the colors of the four elements and tied to poles. The wind blows through the holy syllables and carries them far and wide, spreading their blessings over all beings it touches.

The Dalai Lama’s residence is built atop a hill overlooking McLeod Ganj. This hill station, named after a Scottish governor of the Punjab, used to be the summer lodgings for officers of the British Raj; today it has become “little Lhasa.” It is home to about ten thousand people—one-quarter of them monks and nuns—who live in monasteries that are painted ochre or burgundy and stacked on the high foothills of the Dhauladhar range. Many hotels dot the area, since people from all over the world come to visit this hamlet with its steep little streets; they come for the teachings that the Dalai Lama gives during the Great Monlam, the festival of aspiration prayers that begins in Lhasa in the first month of the Tibetan year. The tradition has continued in exile, attracting not just visitors