Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Official Report 863KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, and our leader today is Larry Blance from the Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Centre for World Peace and Health.

Good afternoon. I would like to talk today about what seems from a Buddhist perspective to be a crazy way of life.

There are many human beings in the world who apparently have everything—a job, money, a partner, material comfort—but who are mentally very poor. They cannot share their wealth with others and are unable to appreciate what they have. A person who completely forgets what they already have and who always focuses on what they still need to get in order to be happy is not only an unfortunate human being, but is actually mentally very poor.

The way the capitalist system is built is very clever, because people get the feeling that the harder they work and the more commitments they make, the greater will be the rewards that they get—be it money, a bigger car or a better house. However, in my opinion that is precisely the moment when they have sold themselves out. It is the moment when they have lost their dignity; they can no longer be themselves and are enslaved by what they want.

The unrestrained greed that drives so many people shows their lack of wisdom and their inability to appreciate what they have. Many people already have more than they could ever need, but although they have everything materially, they have no inner peace—they have no happiness. Some wealthy people do not even have time to eat a proper meal or to be with their children and husband or wife to share some kindness, warmth and happiness with them. They have big beautiful homes, but find only loneliness when they return home. The warmth that they really want cannot come from electricity or central heating; it can come only from love and compassion.

The world nowadays is very challenging for every one of us. We feel that we need to do well for ourselves, and when we try to do that our needs and wants seem to take over our lives to such an extreme that we feel stressed and sometimes even physically sick because of the never-ending expectation and challenge.

According to the Buddha’s teachings, the most effective way of achieving anything, or of having meaning in our lives, is to develop a very stable and positive mind. It is considered selfish to think only about our own needs and wants, which just causes us suffering and stress. As Buddhists, we are asked to respect other people, other beliefs and other races, and to be self-reliant and never to be judgmental of others who seem to be different from ourselves. We learn to be responsible for our own happiness rather than to depend on other people or things.

The more positive and engaging our way of thinking, and the more we think about everyone else’s wants and needs, the happier we will all be.