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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
Genre : Inspirational
This is an inspirational and encouraging read. I first started listening to is, and had to buy the book because there was so much I wanted to underline. The Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu are two of the great spiritual masters of our time, and they are also moral leaders who transcend their own traditions and speak from a concern for humanity as a whole.
To celebrate one of their special birthdays, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu met for a week to enjoy their friendship and to create something they hoped would be a gift to others.They have survived more than fifty years of exile and the violence of oppression. Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet. In this book they expire the nature of true joy and the obstacles of joy—fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. Their dialogue continued as they discussed the eight pillars of joy. Four are qualities of the mind: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance. Four are qualities of the heart: forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. In the midst of this they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.
“Discovering more joy does not, I’m sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, and yet we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken. The ultimate source of happiness is within us.”
“Sadly, many of the things that undermine our joy and happiness we create ourselves. Often it comes from the negative tendencies of the mind, emotional reactivity, or from our inability to appreciate and utilize the resources that exist within us. . . This is not a denial of pain and suffering, but a shift in perspective—from oneself and toward others, from anguish to compassion—seeing that others are suffering also. The Dalai Lama is not contrasting his situation with others, but uniting how situation with others. This recognition that we are all connected is the birth of empathy and compassion.”
” As the dialogue progressed, we converged on eight pillars of joy. Four were qualities of the mind: perspective, humility, humor, and acceptance. Four were qualities of the heart: forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity.”
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