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Renaissance Unity Church Sunday Talk

Oct 19-2003

Gehlek Rimpoche

Universal Responsibility

It is very nice to be able to be here today. I have been invited to talk about universal responsibility, universal compassion.

We are all interested in a spiritual path, otherwise we wouldn’t even be here together today. We are not just interested in happiness, but something deeper, a true spiritual path. This should lead us closer to the total truth. And that includes our own personal responsibility and what His Holiness, the Dalai Lama calls Universal Responsibility. In his book ‘Ethics of the new Millennium’, he calls this ‘The foundation for human happiness regardless of religious belief.’ He says, ‘I believe our every act has a universal dimension’.

If you just hear that, without thinking, it may not mean much. But if you think more deeply, you realize that it is a big statement. It tells us a lot about the importance of our actions. Usually we go about our business, believing that what we do in our own corner is not going to affect anybody else. Perhaps our spouse or children. And some people don’t even think that far. They think what they are doing in their corner is just their business alone. But when you consider that every one of our acts has a universal dimension, it will take you out of that narrow corner. By now we know for sure, from the scientific point of view, that even the tiniest movement of a butterfly in China, 10 000 miles away from the US, can affect the weather patterns here. How interconnected we are! The simple little corner where you can just conduct your own business is no longer there. We are too interconnected. If the movement of butterfly wings on the other side of the world makes a difference here, what does that say about human actions?

We know that one single human being can make a lot of difference to the whole of human society. There are quite a few examples: Mahatma Gandhi in India, Dr. Martin Luther King in this country, Nelson Mandela in Africa, Mother Theresa who is soon going to be a saint, and HH. The Dalai Lama. These people have made and are still making a big difference to our lives. Our life today is quite different from what it was 30 years ago and this is due to these people’s efforts and sacrifices. They sacrificed even their lives. As a result we enjoy a society that has at least some respect for its people.

On the other hand we have also seen how some individuals like Hitler, Stalin or Chairman Mao can cause terrible trouble in our world. Then we may think that these are important people and that we are not important and can’t do anything. That is not true. We are all important and we all make a difference to society, because society is nothing more than a collection of people like us.

Sometimes we think that society is some entity over here and the government is another organization over there. It could almost look like the President owns the country. But that is not right. Thanks to our previous leaders, we are a democracy. At least that is what it is supposed to be. ‘By the people, for the people, right?’ Nobody owns society. It is a collection of all the people who live in it.

Today our world is not in good shape. As a matter of fact, it’s not good at all. It is very unstable, irritable and impulsive. Not only that, but we have huge, destructive weapons. When Einstein discovered nuclear energy he was thinking that his discovery could be of great service to humanity. If we had used it for the betterment of humankind, how wonderful things could be today! But we made bombs and used the nuclear energy for destruction. That is a clear lack of universal responsibility. In addition, the thinking of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ give us justification for anything we want to do, no matter how destructive it might be. The protection of our own interest is used to justify terrible violence. This is what is happening today. In the process we are also losing our individual rights in the name of security, the rights that our forefathers have put in our laps.

I am sure many of you know that I have had to escape from Tibet just about the same time as the civil rights movement was happening in the US. At that time, those great leaders were shot one after another. They sacrificed their lives to protect our rights, our civil liberties. I was born in a very remote part of the world. Tibet is known as a source of spirituality. When I came to the west in the mid-eighties, many western spiritual leaders referred to Tibet as their spiritual home. I was wondering which Tibet they were talking about. Maybe they were thinking of Shangri-la. However, it is true that Tibet has been a great source of spiritual development. The Tibetans too, have sacrificed a lot for the sake of keeping a pure spiritual development. We lost our country to the Communist Chinese, because we don’t believe in violence. In the last 20 years many younger Tibetans have blamed us, saying that because of the spiritual people being against killing, we have lost our country. And it is true, we have lost our country. But we didn’t lose our spirit. We did not lose our belief. We did not lose the gift that we can give to humanity today. This gift is love, caring, compassion, universal responsibility.

Today, in this country, in order to protect our interests, we justify any kind of violence. We confuse a tremendous amount of people into doing all kinds of horrible things. Deep inside, all human beings are seeking freedom and happiness. When I was still living in Tibet there was great admiration for America. We did not know much about America, except that there are tall buildings and wheels that run on the road, but one thing we really admired was the freedom, the liberty, the individual rights. These are so important. Most of you here are born into these freedoms and you may not realize how important they are. You may take them for granted. But without these liberties we are in danger of suffering under terrible dictatorships and fascism and communism.

Today, the civil liberties we have been enjoying are being cut from all directions. Powerful scissors are cutting into our individual rights and freedoms. Those of us who are who are born outside of America, did not admire this country for their green dollars. That is something you can gain and lose. Economies go up and down, and that is okay. But we cannot afford to lose our individual rights and our freedom. It is our responsibility to look after them.

Spiritual people have even greater responsibilities in that regard than politicians. Spirituality really means caring and loving people, including ourselves and our future generation, our own children. If we don’t protect them, who else will? So, don’t think that protection of our rights is just a matter of politics and the politicians should sort it out and we don’t care. If we do this we will lose.

Universal responsibility comes from feeling respect for ourselves and others. Without that we cannot have universal responsibility, let alone universal compassion. How can you have compassion, if you don’t even respect the other person? Thinking that we can stay in our own corner and it has nothing to do with anybody else is disrespectful to others. The understanding that everything depends on people’s respect for each others allowed people like Dr. Martin Luther King to go all out and defend the civil rights of the people in the United States. Gandhi was able to fight against the whole British Empire. He was strong enough to go to jail, get beaten by soldiers and still maintain ahimsa, non-violence. Gandhi was resisting the British government, not because they were British but because they didn’t respect the rights of the individual. That was the main reason. It did not necessarily matter to him whether people were British or Indian, as long as they enjoyed individual respect and freedom. He went to jail for that. Many of his colleagues were also badly beaten and even killed. Yet he stood unshakably firm against the imperialistic power of Britain. He finally succeeded in bringing freedom to India. Sadly, he lost a large part of the country that became Pakistan. He was himself willing to fight against that arrangement, which Nehru and the Indian cabinet had already resigned themselves to. He was looking for freedom and unity and individual rights for all human beings. He was able to do all this because of his understanding of universal respect and responsibility for all people.

Nelson Mandela walked a similar path. Not too long ago there was still apartheid in South Africa. Today the situation is much better. This has only been possible through people having respect for each other. That’s why this is the first thing we have to develop. And it begins with ourselves. The good old American saying ‘Charity begins at home’ is definitely true. When our President now wants to spend billions of dollars on dangerous ventures elsewhere in the world we would like to remind him, ‘Charity begins at home’.

Earlier this year I went to India and was invited to participate in a conference. It was entitled ‘Compassion as Antidote to Terrorism’. At that time, I must admit I was a little surprised to see that title for the conference. I just came fresh from America, where war propaganda was raining down on us day in and day out. You would turn on the radio or the TV and everything was just about war and nothing else. The headlines really were ‘War as Antidote to Terrorism’. And we are still going on with this. Lives are being lost every day in this war. I have my radio tuned to wake me in the morning with the news on NPR. Every morning it says things like, ‘Good morning. This is NPR news. Today another three American soldiers were killed in Iraq.’ That is the ‘Good Morning’ I get every day. What is the matter with us? We are thinking wrongly that war can be an antidote to terrorism. That is the problem. During that conference in India, there were a great number of Indian thinkers, people who had been followers of Gandhi or had been associated with him. One after another they would get up and speak and they said that compassion is what makes the difference, not war. It was so good to hear this. And it is really true. You can only make the change in people’s hearts. Sure, you can twist their arms and put a gun to their heads and force them to say yes or no. But this has never worked and will never work. Forcing people to obey out of fear, or using violence to remove people from human society never works. It only creates more fear and anger among the people. In their hearts the hatred will grow, until it comes out as revenge. That is what is happening today. We are throwing tremendous amounts of dollars at war-related projects, as though it has no value whatsoever, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It occurs to me that this money does not come out of the pockets of our leaders who make such decisions. It is our money that we pay through taxes. We have to pay tax because otherwise the IRS will get us. It is our money, the people’s money. They are simply throwing it around, as though it has no value, mostly to manipulate and gain more control. That doesn’t make people in these countries happy either. They will wait for revenge. Compassion alone can make the change for the better. That change has to come from within people. You can neither force people to have respect nor buy it from them. It won’t last. It never has. Change will only be lasting if it comes voluntarily from within the people. When we develop compassion in ourselves and when compassion grows in them, then this compassion will lead to positive changes. It is not just turning the cheek and get beaten on the other cheek. That is great but it is not the only way compassion works. Compassion from both sides will bring positive change. And every human being has the capacity to develop this compassion. We all have the seed within us.

A few years ago, HH the Dalai Lama was visiting Israel. He talked about human nature and the good quality of the human being. One clever journalist got up and asked, ‘You are talking about good human qualities. Do you think Hitler had that too?’ That was in Jerusalem, mind you. The Dalai Lama said, ‘Oh yes, of course he had good qualities too.’ Well, it is true. He just did not use his good qualities, but instead developed his bad ones. Therefore, what we have to do is bring out the good qualities in the human beings and we can only do that through communication, through dialogue, through exchange of views, not through pointing a gun at their head.

If you boil down to its essence the 2600 years of wisdom that is Buddha’s teaching, you would have to say that it is the wisdom that brings out the compassion in people. It is about how to develop caring, loving, about avoiding to kill. I have very little knowledge about the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it seems to me that the basic principle is almost the same. Take the ten commandments. Buddhism has the ten non-virtues and the opposite to it, the ten virtues. I don’t think Buddha had the time or opportunity to phone Jesus at that time to work out and agree on those ten points. Every great religious tradition carries that same message. There must a reason. It can’t be coincidence. It must be true. That truth is showing us the way. We can follow the great founders of these traditions and do what they did. The great spiritual masters’ biographies are the guide for the future followers. We can follow their example.

Their unanimous message is that we must gain respect for every human being, to each other and to ourselves as well. That is important. We often ignore ourselves. The moment we think about compassion we already look at other people. That is not right. If you do that you won’t be able to help anybody, because you don’t know how to help yourself in the first place. If I don’t know how to help myself, how can I tell you how you can help yourself? A spiritual person or spiritual teacher can only really share what they know, and not as knowledge alone, but as a quality that they have developed in themselves. I have to know how to deal with myself, with my own negative emotions. I have to know how to handle my anger, my hatred, my obsession, my jealousy and especially how to handle my ego.

That is really the key, my friends: how to handle our own ego. That is the key that decides whether we are going up or down. All the Allmighties everywhere are trying to bless us and tell us how we can get away from ego. But we are addicted to our ego and submit to its control all the time. Ego is the combination of confusion, fear and misunderstanding. When I say that we have to have compassion for ourselves, I don’t mean that we should have compassion for our ego. I mean compassion for ourselves. We don’t function well, because our ego has complete control over us. Our ego causes us to make divisions between me and mine and you and yours. It works on all levels. We have our own individual ego and we have a big, country-wide ego, a presidential ego. That causes big problems. In short, whether it is individual or collective, we are pushed around badly by ego. It is high time for us to stand against this ego. If we don’t do it, who else will? You have to eradicate your own ego, no one else can. And that is our responsibility. That is universal responsibility. That to me is spiritual practice.

Ego pushes all the other negative emotions, like anger, hatred and obsession. They all come from ego. We think that they are protecting ourselves, but in reality they hurt us. The spiritual path goes against these negative habits. We have to overcome those negative emotions and therefore violence is bad and non-violence is good. Hatred is bad, compassion is good. Therefore love is great and obsession is not that good. As spiritual practitioners we have to know what hurts us and what helps us. It is very hard to make the distinction between virtue and non-virtue, honestly. I am telling you from my own 60 years of experience. The easiest way to figure it out is to check whether any of our actions are hurting anybody, including ourselves. If they do, they are non-virtuous. If they help they are virtuous. And if you are unable to help, at least don’t hurt anybody.

The essence of Buddha’s message is: Go and help as much as you can. If you cannot help, recognize that you have no right to hurt anyone, including yourself. Now is the time that we have to make a difference to ourselves, to our families, to our fellow citizens and to the world. Today we have the opportunity. For many life times we never had the chance. Today we do. We cannot waste this wonderful and precious life and the extraordinary mind that comes with it. This mind that you and I have today, whether you are male or female, old or young, has limitless capacity. Really, the sky is the limit. It is a beautiful mind and we all have it. The scientists have been telling us for a while that we are not using our brain to full capacity. Apparently we are only using a very small percentage. Our mind has the capacity but we haven’t found out how make it work. We cannot manage. It is amazing what our mind can do and it is also amazing how people can destroy it. I have a friend, a brilliant person. That person has some mental difficulties. The doctors couldn’t find an effective treatment. They said, ‘His IQ is way beyond what we can imagine. So let’s do a lobotomy.’ That’s not the way to treat a human being.

In short, all or our minds have limitless potential and capacity. Now is the time to make use of it. If we can’t do it now, it will be more difficult later. We are all on the spiritual journey together. Until we reach the destination we are all traveling. On that journey we have to achieve our goal once and for all. We can use many tools to help us, particularly meditation on compassion. Recently I attended a conference on Buddhism and Neuro Science. The Dalai Lama was there too. It was at MIT in Boston. One thousand professors and graduate students attended and another twelve hundred were on the waiting list and couldn’t even get in. At that conference research was presented that found that meditation makes a difference to the meditator which can be measured in terms of brain activity. There is increase and movement of brain activity between the left and right sides of the brain. In particular meditation on compassion has discernable effects. As we have these great tools available, and as each and every one of us has such a magnificent brain and mind, we have to make use of it.

The best way to train and use the mind is through meditation. Praying and worship to me are also part of meditation. Meditation does not just mean sitting still and not breathing much. We all do that in the morning anyway, when we sit on the throne, don’t we?

Actually, there are two main types of meditation. Most people really think that meditation just means to sit down and don’t move and keep the mind still. That, however, is only one type of meditation. The other, even more important meditation is the analytical meditation. You analyze the subject that you choose to meditate on. For example, you can meditate on compassion. There is a little prayer called ‘Four Immeasurables’.

May all beings have happiness

May they be free from suffering.

May they find the joy that has never known suffering.

May they be free from attachment and hatred.

When you read or say these words you have to really think about it and analyze this. Get some understanding and then focus on it. The focusing on the result of your analytical meditation is concentrated meditation.

In closing, I would like to say that I was happy to be able to make this presentation and hope that you can take something home with you, something that will be helpful to yourself, to your family and thereby to the country and the whole world, so that we don’t have to live in violence.

Thank you.