Poor Richard’s Almanac

10 Questions for the Dalai Lama. October 18, 2009

Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.
Tags: 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama, spirituality
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The title of this post is also the title of a documentary film Silence Dogood and our friend Ben watched last night. The filmmaker, Rick Ray, was allowed to meet privately with the Dalai Lama and ask him ten questions, and the film, of course, followed the conversation and gave the Dalai Lama’s answers.

Silence and our friend Ben had never actually heard the Dalai Lama before, and his joyous, playful manner instantly showed us why he is beloved around the world as one of the great spiritual leaders of our day. But we weren’t really satisfied with the choice of questions. So after the film, we began talking about what ten questions we would ask a great religious leader if we had the chance. If we could talk with Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama or Saint Francis or King Solomon or Hildegard of Bingen or Rumi or Black Elk or Eknath Easwaran or Krishnamurti or any of innumerable others the world has been privileged to know, what would we ask them?

Clearly, our questions after thinking about this for six months—or even six weeks—would evolve from the ones we thought of last night. But it’s a start. Here’s what we came up with:

1. How can we care for our precious world, and preserve its beauty and wonder? This is a question Silence and I often discuss from many perspectives. We’re privileged to live in a society of abundance. So of course we’re horrified to see the landscape of Tibet completely denuded because its population has cut down every stick of wood for warmth and shelter. We’re appalled to hear of Africans killing endangered tigers to protect their cattle, or Inuits slaughtering seals for meat and fat and fur. We believe that crimes against our environment are crimes against God. But who are we to judge those whose very lives depend on what we consider unsustainable acts, we, who buy our food in a grocery and whose warmth is supplied by corporations? Unless we can create more sustainable options for these cultures, we are as culpable as they. And what of our own backyards, we who know what we do? Just this morning, a horrified Silence was reading me an article from the morning paper about a New York couple who’d generated huge hoopla—including a book deal and tour and a forthcoming documentary—by trying to live as “green”—in their case, low-input—as possible for a year. Well, hey, the year is up. And now the wife is quoted as saying that she’s looking forward to getting a dishwasher. For a family of three. Will we never learn?!!

2. How can we control our population? Like locusts, we wander the earth, sucking up its precious resources. In the past, humans had no birth control, but their populations were kept in check the way nature controls all populations: famine, disease, predation, and natural disaster. Today, we’ve learned how to manage most of these, most of the time, and our population has swelled out of control. Yet even now teenage pregnancy has become an accepted norm, families with huge numbers of children are given their own TV shows, Octomom (actually the mother of 14, not 8—so far—remember) is a celebrity, and “go forth and multiply” remains the order of the day. Our friend Ben and Silence find this state of affairs unacceptable and appalling. We also find the concept of abortion unacceptable as a means of birth control. As far as we can see, the only possible means of population control in our medically advanced times, short of forced sterility, is birth control (and we don’t mean “day-after pills,” which to us are just early abortion). We as a civilization can’t bring ourselves to stand aside and watch while our fellowmen are killed by famine, disease, and disaster. We have failed to develop an advanced technology that could send our overabundant population to colonize unpeopled planets and relieve the burden on our earth. Our current world population is a refutation of celibacy as a possible option for the average person, however noble it may seem to the spiritually minded. Yet preventive birth control per se remains widely opposed and unavailable. What are our options? How can we stop this human population explosion before we’ve reduced our beautiful, naturally diverse paradise to the equivalent of a Wal-Mart parking lot?

3. How can we separate religion from ambition and greed? Reading the words of the founders of our great religions, it always amazes our friend Ben and Silence how far removed they are from their followers’ practices. As we perceive it, a compassionate Creator has sent prophets to all parts of the world throughout history with basically the same messages: love your neighbor as yourself; love your enemies; care for the earth and all its creatures, it is the Kingdom of God, the earthly paradise God has made for you; embrace peace, beat your swords into plowshares; look for God’s voice and presence within (“Be still, and know that I am God”), then turn that peace and silence outward; do not seek the temporal power and possessions of the world, but the eternal power of peace and love; do not judge, lest ye be judged. It was these messages that drew the huge crowds of followers to all great religious figures, these messages that have caused them to live through time. But no sooner were they cold in their graves or ascended into heaven than their followers, or the followers of their followers, began to turn their messages to the very human ends of greed and power: Kill and conquer in the name of our God (and economics)! From the Crusades, slavery and the caste system to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, we continue to ignore the Founders’ messages of peace, tolerance, love and equality in the name of greed, gain, and status. Surely, our greatest achievements and worst depravities are linked to our various faiths. How can we separate them once and for all, so our base behaviors, our worst atrocities, aren’t committed in the name of our religions?

4. How can we encourage tolerance? Why is it that we’re so threatened by beliefs that are not our own? Why does it matter if one Amish buggy has battery-powered lights and another has no lights, or one farm implement has steel wheels and another has rubber, or one group wears buttons on their clothes and another uses straight pins as fasteners? This example isn’t meant to pick on the Amish, who are having enough trouble adjusting to the invasion of the modern world as it is; it’s simply an indicator of how very slight differences—patterned versus plain cloth, for example—can be enough to divide a whole religious order. Conformity overrules compassion; “they versus us” overwhelms the inherent understanding that “we’re all us.” With so many world religions, and very many divisions within each of those religions, how can we finally acknowledge that we all came from the same source; we all long for the same source; we all share the same resources. Our survival as a species, our very world’s survival depends on our ability to recognize the different cultures, customs, and approaches of others while still loving them as ourselves. How can we overcome so many millennia of hatred and intolerance and achieve this before we blow ourselves and our world to kingdom come?

5. How can we end the hate? This is something that disturbs our friend Ben and Silence no end. We ourselves cross the entire political spectrum—our morals are conservative, our approach to government Libertarian (we don’t want anyone, ever, telling us what to do), and our ethics liberal, insofar as we believe that the more we have, the more obligated we are to our society and to the less fortunate to share—so we have no inherent beef with any political faction. What we do have enormous problems with is the rhetoric of hatred that seems to dominate conservative politics today. Why is it not possible to disagree without vilifying, to express an opposing opinion, or, much better, a workable alternative solution, instead of demonizing those who take a view that differs from yours? As the Catholic Church so wisely says, hate the sin, not the sinner. And again, in the words of Jesus, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” We’re all in this together, however differently we approach the human condition.

6. What’s the best thing a human being can do?

7. When the day comes that we’re approached by or approach life from other planets, what should we do? It’s impossible for us to believe that God Creator limited His unlimited resourcefulness to a single planet. Surely His creativity extends across all of time and all of space. But we humans seem incapable of approaching even our fellow men peacefully and reasonably. So how will we manage when some alien life form arrives?!

8. Do you think there will ever be just one religion? Our friend Ben and Silence believe that, through human history, God has repeatedly approached peoples with a message couched in terms they could understand given their culture and state of development. But as the world becomes smaller, we wonder if a single message might in time reach all humanity, giving us a unified vision while still allowing us to approach it in our own way. 

9. What do we have to fear? We live in a culture of fear, where real and imagined atrocities dominate the world news and popular entertainment, where genocide is still practiced and children can’t trick-or-treat on Hallowe’en for fear of finding razor blades in their apples. Silence and I would like to know what, if anything, is really worth fearing, and how we should handle that fear and still move on with our lives.

10. What is enlightenment? Over the years, Silence and our friend Ben have read so many definitions of enlightenment, from separating one’s self from the world to living fully in the now (in the moment, the present) to merging with God to being omniscient to transcending the limitations of time and space. In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi’s classic guide to Samurai enlightenment, the fifth “ring,” The Book of the Void, is quite short: “In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.” This may sound like a condemnation of spirit, but “nothingness” is one definition of enlightenment, the absence of individual thought, striving, and ego, the merging into the collective totality, the One, the eternal now, in this case described as the void. Is this in fact enlightenment, the emerging from the caterpillar chrysalis of separation into the butterfly world of the whole? We’d certainly like to know.

If you could ask your favorite saint or spiritual leader ten questions, what would they be?