Dalai Lama - The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

INTRODUCTION

A while back, I was invited to Australia to deliver the opening keynote address at an international conference on human happiness. This was an unusually large event, which brought together fifty leading experts from around the world to speak about happiness, thousands of attendees, and even the Dalai Lama, who appeared on the second day as the featured speaker.

With so many professional colleagues gathered in one spot, there was plenty of lively discussion on a wide range of topics. During a lunch break, I overheard several colleagues arguing about the merits of some recent articles in the Australian newspapers, touching on a debate going on in positive psychology circles. Positive psychology is a new branch of psychology often referred to as the science of human happiness. The question being debated was: If the goal is to increase human happiness, which is the better approachto focus on inner development or social welfare? In other words, should efforts be devoted primarily to developing techniques that individuals can practice to increase personal happiness, or should we focus on improving social conditions, creating conditions that allow the members of a society to thrive and result in greater happiness for the population as a whole?

It seemed that the debate could be quite contentious at times. Some championing the social approach were characterizing positive psychology, which largely focused on finding effective methods of increasing personal happiness, as little more than another self-indulgent pop-psychology fad, concerned only with a self-centered pursuit of personal gratification. Of course the positive psychology camp had some powerful arguments in rebuttal. While not denying that having ones survival needs met was a prerequisite for happiness, they went on to point out that since happiness is a subjective state, involving an individuals attitudes, perceptions, emotions, and so on, ultimately it was necessary to focus on a persons inner state, on an individual level, to increase happiness. In addition, addressing the claims that working on increasing personal happiness is a self-absorbed, selfish pursuit, they pointed to studies showing that increasing personal happiness makes an individual more charitable, more giving, more willing to reach out and help others, and it is unhappy people who are more self-focused and selfish.

Until that moment I had been unaware of the extent of this debate, which in a way could be boiled down to a fundamental question of ones basic orientation: Me or We? So when I first heard people debating this issue, I was riveted. As it turned out, the Dalai Lama and I had spoken about that very same issue during the course of some recent discussions we were having about the relationship between the individual, the greater society, and human happiness, seeking to answer questions such as: What is the effect of society on an individuals happiness? If societal problems undermine our happiness, what can we do about it? What is an individuals responsibility to try to bring about social change? And how much can a single individual do, anyway?

Those discussions, which include some of the conversations chronicled in this book, were part of an ongoing dialogue about human happiness that we originally began in 1993. In order to put these conversations in the proper context, I think it will be helpful to step back and briefly review the history of the Art of Happiness book series, and the radical changes that have taken place within both the scientific community and the general public with regard to our perception and understanding of happiness.

It was the beginning of the 1990s when I first began to think about collaborating with the Dalai Lama on a book about happiness. The Dalai Lama had already written three dozen books by that time, but since they appealed primarily to students or practitioners of Buddhism, his books had failed to find a wide readership among a general Western audience. I had known the Dalai Lama for about a decade by then, enough time to realize that he had much wisdom to offer non-Buddhists as well as Buddhists. So, I began to envision a book written for a general Western audience, distilling the essential principles that had enabled him to achieve happiness. By focusing on the practical application of his ideas in daily life and by framing his views within the context of Western science and psychology, I hoped to ultimately come up with an effective approach to finding happiness that combined the best of East and West. The Dalai Lama readily agreed to my proposal, and we eventually began work on the project in 1993, during his first visit to my home state of Arizona.

Inspired and excited by the project, I decided to temporarily give up practicing psychiatry in order to devote my full attention to writing the book. I estimated that it would take six months to complete the book, and with the Dalai Lama as a coauthor, I was certain Id have my choice of the top publishing companies.

I miscalculated. Five years later I was still working on the book and still adding to the thick, demoralizing, ever-growing stack of rejection letters on my deskletters from literary agents and publishers who were uniformly convinced that there was no mainstream audience for books by the Dalai Lama, no market for a collaboration between him and a Western psychiatrist, and no public interest in the subject of happiness. With my financial resources depleted, it seemed I had few options left, and I was just on the verge of self-publishing a few copies of the book and returning to the practice of psychiatry when I had a stroke of luck at last. It was right at that point that an offhand remark made by the mother of a close friend to a stranger on a New York subwaya stranger who turned out to be in the publishing industryinitiated an unlikely series of connections that finally led to securing an agent and mainstream publisher. And so it was in 1998, with a small first printing and modest expectations,