The Dalai Lama’s perspective of humanity, purpose of life and idea happiness can be compared to the Cyrenaics’s school of philosophy which was established by Aristippus of Cyrene (435 – 356 BCE). Aristippus was a pupil of Socrates, but had adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek pleasure by adapting circumstances to oneself and by maintaining proper control over both adversity and prosperity. Aristippus’s school of thought propounded that the only good is positive pleasure, and pain is considered only evil. They postulated that all feelings are momentary so all past and future pleasures have no real existence of an individual. Dalai Lama also strongly deduced that enjoying life at the moment
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The wise person should be in control of pleasures rather than be enslaved to them, otherwise pain will result, and this requires judgement to evaluate the different pleasures of life whether it is deciding money, fame, fortune or compassion and love. Dalai Lama says it best: “For a start, it is possible to divide every kind of happiness and suffering into two main categories: mental and physical. Of the two, it is the mind that exerts the greatest influence on most of us. Unless we are either gravely ill or deprived of basic necessities, our physical condition plays a secondary role in life. If the body is content, we virtually ignore it. The mind, however, registers every event, no matter how small. Hence we should devote our most serious efforts to bringing about mental peace.” The ‘mental peace’ is considered happiness which is recieved through enojyment but, the physical needs are just factors that condtribute to our stress since those are what we work to hard to accopmlish. Dalai Lama indicates that our mental happiness is what we should place first as a priotity eince without happiness an individual cannot function properly so the secondary needs are hard to have …show more content…
By taking his theory into account as we humans can reassess the way we prioritize our lives based on our materialistic wants to our idealistic needs. People will learn the true value of a human such as loving one another and not our electronics, which is certainly considered more valuable than the people we are sitting beside. All these needs that disable us from functioning to live a rich and meaningful life to living only to become rich, literally. Us humans live our lives to work when instead we are supposed to work to live. Further, people overlook entire life but life is right here, right now, and we aren’t promised tomorrow. We alternatively we need to make every day count, rather than counting till the day. For example, people start working young including teenagers spending countless, tiring hours to be wealthy, but then don’t even enjoy what they earned all because they killed themselves and the desires causing them to work against the grind and focusing on prosperity… but for what? Only to die rich? Now that they have reached their destination, it has caused them so much anxiety, stress, and depression while worrying about it that they must waste all their effort so that they can at least be able to repair the damage caused. Once again repeating the endless loop. Only if they spent the time cherishing every
The wise person should be in control of pleasures rather than be enslaved to them, otherwise pain will result, and this requires judgement to evaluate the different pleasures of life whether it is deciding money, fame, fortune or compassion and love. Dalai Lama says it best: “For a start, it is possible to divide every kind of happiness and suffering into two main categories: mental and physical. Of the two, it is the mind that exerts the greatest influence on most of us. Unless we are either gravely ill or deprived of basic necessities, our physical condition plays a secondary role in life. If the body is content, we virtually ignore it. The mind, however, registers every event, no matter how small. Hence we should devote our most serious efforts to bringing about mental peace.” The ‘mental peace’ is considered happiness which is recieved through enojyment but, the physical needs are just factors that condtribute to our stress since those are what we work to hard to accopmlish. Dalai Lama indicates that our mental happiness is what we should place first as a priotity eince without happiness an individual cannot function properly so the secondary needs are hard to have …show more content…
By taking his theory into account as we humans can reassess the way we prioritize our lives based on our materialistic wants to our idealistic needs. People will learn the true value of a human such as loving one another and not our electronics, which is certainly considered more valuable than the people we are sitting beside. All these needs that disable us from functioning to live a rich and meaningful life to living only to become rich, literally. Us humans live our lives to work when instead we are supposed to work to live. Further, people overlook entire life but life is right here, right now, and we aren’t promised tomorrow. We alternatively we need to make every day count, rather than counting till the day. For example, people start working young including teenagers spending countless, tiring hours to be wealthy, but then don’t even enjoy what they earned all because they killed themselves and the desires causing them to work against the grind and focusing on prosperity… but for what? Only to die rich? Now that they have reached their destination, it has caused them so much anxiety, stress, and depression while worrying about it that they must waste all their effort so that they can at least be able to repair the damage caused. Once again repeating the endless loop. Only if they spent the time cherishing every