Then we will all experience unhappiness in the long run, for when there is no place for justice and honesty in people’s hearts, the weak are the first to suffer.
The more we pursue material improvement, ignoring the contentment that comes of inner growth, the faster ethical values will disappear from our communities. In consonance with Adam Gopnik’s insight into the essential nonreligious value of the Bible, the Dalai Lama echoes Martin Luther King’s assertion that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” and writes: The purpose of spirituality in a secular world, he argues, is that of a moral compass that tempers the destructive emotions that so often accompany our modern materialism. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s stunning drawings of the brain.
Calyces of Held - synapses made by axons carrying auditory information and contacting neurons in a brainstem structure called the trapezoid body. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions. What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. However, a clear distinction should be made between what is not found by science and what is found to be nonexistent by science. If upon investigation we find that there is reason and proof for a point, then we should accept it. We should always adopt a view that accords with the facts.
I have often said that if science proves facts that conflict with Buddhist understanding, Buddhism must change accordingly.
#DALAI LAMA QUOTES LIFE FREE#
Art by Oliver Jeffers for Love Letter Americaįour millennia after the Buddha laid down his tenets of critical thinking, known as The Charter of Free Inquiry, the Dalai Lama points to the scientific method as our mightiest tool in the pursuit of truth, but also insists on applying it to science itself: While the purposes of science may differ from those of Buddhism, both ways of searching for truth expand our knowledge and understanding. In Buddhist training, it is essential to investigate reality, and science offers its own ways to go about this investigation. With an eye to the complementarity between Buddhism, which has been exploring the human mind for millennia, and Western science, whose neuroscience and psychology are barely a century and a half old, the Dalai Lama writes in the preface to the book:īuddhism and science are not conflicting perspectives on the world, but rather differing approaches to the same end: seeking the truth. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (Photograph: Tenzin Choejor) The wide-ranging conversation, the synthesis of which was later published as Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama ( public library), aimed to bridge ancient spiritual practices and modern findings in biology, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience in an effort to reveal the human mind’s capacity to transcend its own fundamental flaws. In the early 1990s, shortly after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama sat down for a five-day dialogue with a group of ten Western scientists and one philosopher of mind, seeking a scientific perspective on what Buddhism calls the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion - the primary classes of emotion that cause us to harm ourselves and those around us. “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both,” Carl Sagan wrote in his final book nearly four centuries after Galileo made the same point in his famous letter defending his life.Ī recent Pioneer Works conversation about science and spirituality with physicist Alan Lightman, based on his immensely insightful and poetic book on the subject, reminded me of a different, older conversation contemplating the relationship between these two hallmarks of the human experience.