The best way to multiply happiness is to share it with others. –Unknown

The World's Happiest Man on Altruism

--by Oliver Haenlein, syndicated from wearesalt.org, Feb 20, 2016

Matthieu Ricard, also known as ‘the world’s happiest man’, spent the best part of 25 years in the Himalayas with barely any contact with the Western world he was born into. At 26-years-old he left behind his molecular biology studies and settled into a life of serenity and spiritual training under his Buddhist teachers, high up in the heavens on the other side of the world.

However, he is now very much back on the Western scene. When I ask Ricard why he returned, he sighs and says: “When I was in my hermitage I thought, if I can do something useful, maybe I should come down for a bit”. He seems to long for the mountains, but the continued success of his projects since abandoning his Himalayan retreat seem to have anchored him to the ground. The “something useful” the 69-year-old modestly refers to is a series of spectacular humanitarian and academic achievements.

He has set about trying to teach the world how to be happy, and how to show empathy, kindness and compassion to one another. He has done this, to name a few examples, through a range of books, including the recent compendium ‘Altruism’; through talks and conferences including presentations for TED that have a combined view count of over six million; through advisory work with the Mind & Life Institute, a non-profit chaired by the Dalai Lama; through studies with neuroscientists to highlight the transformative effect meditation has on the brain; and through an amazing 150 humanitarian projects in 15 years.

Ricard tells me his charitable foundation, Karuna Shechen, aided more than 200,000 people in 500 villages after the recent devastating earthquake that shook Nepal. He has helped treat hundreds of thousands of patients, and put tens of thousands of children in schools. It seems then, that the world is a better place since he swapped the peace of the Himalayas for his new hectic schedule of engagements.

Altruism

His latest book, Altruism, provides a complex look at a remarkably simple approach to solving the ills of the world. Ricard’s work has always revolved around positive transformation, and now he has published an 800-page guide to using one of the traits most inherent to human nature to overcome the challenges of the 21st century.

Listening to Matthieu make a case for altruism and its plethora of positive consequences, it all seems so obvious. And is it a coincidence that the person who has helped so many humans on this planet is also known as ‘the world’s happiest man’?

The book took him five years to write, and contains an impressive 1,600 scientific references, providing a convincing argument on how important the widespread adoption of genuine concern for the wellbeing of others could be for changing the world.

He takes a three-pronged look at the world’s main challenges: the economy in the short-term, life satisfaction in the mid-term, and the environment in the long-term.

The last thing one might expect from a Buddhist monk is a deep and nuanced knowledge of modern economics, but this is just what Ricard possesses. Our conversation sees him talk in-depth on how the traditional model could be adapted to a more caring form of economics for the benefit of everyone. The issue of climate change is also covered in great detail in Altruism, with compassion presented as the solution to the growing catastrophe.

A global book

Ricard summarises his work: “The book is really the culminating point of all life between the east and west, modern science and traditional science, and mind science, or Buddhism let’s say; but mostly it’s not about Buddhism at all. It’s really a global book of a human being who happens to be a Buddhist monk. I used everything I could learn through 70 years, and I researched for five years to point out that altruism is not a luxury or utopia, but the only answer to the challenges of our times.

Positive change

He has an indomitable belief in the goodness of the human spirit, but explains a new methodology is needed to create positive change: “Except for a few greedy psychopaths in suits who only want to make money at the cost of others, basically you can assume that people wish for a better world.

“But unless they have a concept with which to build a better world together, then they’re just lost, groping in the dark. So the idea of having more consideration for others is the only concept that works, there’s really no other.

“I’m not saying that I found something extraordinary. I didn’t find anything, it just occurred to me when talking to all these wonderful people from different disciplines that this was the unifying concept; it’s not a big discovery, it just seems obvious tome.”

At the heart of Ricard’s belief in the potential of widespread altruism is his confidence in human nature. But it’s not just that he’s an optimist; he says science is also on his side.

Basically good

“People are basically good. If you look at evolution, one of the difficult points was how evolution can explain altruism; now you see all the great evolutionists like Martin Nowak with ideas that actually say cooperation has been much more creative to evolution than competition. Those are not just eccentric guys; they are the core of the science.

The book’s chapter ‘The Banality of Good’ asserts that many have the wrong impression about humanity: “Everyday good does not make much commotion and people rarely pay attention to it; it doesn’t make the headlines in the media like an arson, a horrible crime, or the sexual habits of a politician.”

Kindness

However Ricard believes inspiring kindness is all around us: “There’s this vast exaggeration of the negative aspect of human activities. When you tell people that violence has constantly declined over the last five centuries people say ‘it’s impossible, it’s not true’. But violence has steadily decreased – it’s about 100 times less than five centuries ago all over the world.

“Look at NGOs; the rise of the NGO is the true revolution of the 20th century. There are millions of NGOs and people who spend their time trying to do something for others, so why do we not give more attention to that?”

This vision means, Ricard believes, that we are perfectly placed to start tapping into what is already a part of us, to create something better: happier societies, a more compas- sionate business environment, and a less damaging approach to the environment.

Environment

While he had not initially planned to include the environment in his work, Ricard tells me that the book took a whole lot longer since the importance of altruism to the planet’s future became all too apparent.

“Professor Lord Stern from the London School of Economics did a calculation that there might be 200 million climate refugees within 30 years. Compared to that, Lampedusa is just nothing”, he says, referring to the Italian island currently at the heart of a refugee crisis.

“Around 30 per cent of all species could disappear by 2050. Everything is interdependent, it’s not just about losing a few frogs in the Amazonian forest, everyone will be affected; not only humans, our whole biosphere will be completely different. That’s the sixth major extinction of species since life appeared on earth. It’s not about some apocalypse doomsday scenario, it’s just what’s happening.”

The problem, he tells me, is short-sightedness: “We are equipped to react to immediate danger. If a rhinoceros comes in your kitchen, you run. If someone tells you that it’s coming in 30 years, you say ‘oh, we’ll see’.”

Since we need to look beyond our emotional reaction, he calls for a ‘cognitive altruism’ when looking at climate change: “It’s not that we don’t care, but it’s about thinking carefully about what’s going to happen; cognitive altruism, cognitive compassion, cognitive empathy.

“I hope there will be a million people in the streets in Paris before the United Nations Climate Change Conference to say ‘that’s our planet, don’t mess it up, that’s our children, our grandchildren’.”

Application

So the idea is all well and good, but how can we practically and actively start applying altruism to society and business?

Ricard explains that education and working with children is immensely important, “knowing that the potential is there

in children and knowing their tendency, their propensity to be cooperative and so forth”.

In business, he believes a practical application is, for example, simply increasing cooperation within a workplace, to boost morale, efficiency and the flow of information.

He believes we are already starting to see encouraging signs: “The most vibrant part of the economy is the positive economy: crowdfunding, impact investing, socially and environmentally responsible investment, cooperative banking, microcredit with business people like Mohammed Yunus, and so forth.

“Although it’s just seven per cent of the world economy, it’s the fastest-growing and it also fares best through crisis because people are more motivated. When something is meaningful, if there’s a component of benefiting others, then you are more likely to stick with it.”

Optimism

Unsurprisingly, the happiest man in the world is optimistic about the future of ‘caring economics’. “There are many encouraging signs”, he says. “At the World Economic Forum, what you could call the sum of the capitalist world, Klaus Schwab (founder and executive chairman) said, ‘let’s place this week under the sign of care and compassion’. These might be just words, but they are significant words in a place where usually they say more about consumption or the euro crisis. Action might not follow immediately, but 10 years ago this was definitely not happening.”

Matthieu’s achievements are surely seminal in creating a happier, more compassionate, more peaceful, and more sustainable world. The tremors of his work could be felt for years to come. If business leaders, politicians, or even the everyday person on the street can embrace the principles laid out in Altruism, Ricard, who has touched so many lives already, could just help to save us all.

Maybe he’ll now let himself return to a more peaceful existence in the Himalayas. “I’m 70 next year,” he says, “I think it’s a good time now to slow down a little bit”.

---

Republished with permission. This article originally appeared on Salt. Salt is a platform for Positive Change Agents. Its goal is to make the world a better place by promoting compassionate business practices. 

Be The Change: Choose one cause that moves you and commit to supporting it in some way every week, whether with your time, energy, resources, or even your positive thoughts.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Giving Up Is Different From Letting Someone Down

Giving Up is Different From Letting Someone Down - Brother David Steindl-Rast

This inner gesture of letting go from moment to moment is what is so terribly difficult for us; and it can be applied to almost any area of experience. We mentioned time, for instance: there is the whole problem of “free time,” as we call it, of leisure. We think of leisure as the privilege of those who can afford to take time (this endless taking!)-when in reality it isn’t a privilege at all. Leisure is a virtue, and one that anyone can acquire. It is not a matter of taking but of giving time. Leisure is the virtue of those who give time to whatever it is that takes time-give as much time to it as it takes. That is the reason why leisure is almost inaccessible to us. We are so preoccupied with taking, with appropriating. Hence, there is more and more free time, and less and less leisure. In former centuries when there was much less free time for anybody, and vacations, for instance, were unheard of, people were leisurely while working; now they work hard at being leisurely. You find people who work from nine to five with this attitude of “Let’s get it done, let’s take things in hand,” totally purpose oriented, and when five o’clock comes they are exhausted and have no time for real leisure either. If you don’t work leisurely, you won’t be able to play leisurely. So they collapse, or else they pick up their tennis racket or their golf clubs and continue working, giving themselves a workout as they say.

We can laugh about it, but it goes deep. The letting go is a real death, a real dying; it costs us an enormous amount of energy, the price, as it were, which life exacts from us over and over again for being truly alive. For this seems to be one of the basic laws of life; we have only what we give up. We all have had the experience of a friend admiring something we owned, when for a moment we had an impulse to give that thing away. If we follow this impulse -- and something may be at stake that we really like, and it pains for a moment -- then for ever and ever we will have this thing; it is really ours; in our memory it is something we have and can never lose.

It is all the more so with personal relationships. If we are truly friends with someone, we have to give up that friend all the time, we have to give freedom to that friend -- like a mother who gives up her child continually. If the mother hangs on to the child, first of all it will never be born; it will die in the womb. But even after it is born physically it has to be set free and let go over and over again. So many difficulties that we have with our mothers, and that mothers have with their children, spring exactly from this, that they can’t let go; and apparently it is much more difficult for a mother to give birth to a teenager than to a baby. But this giving up is not restricted to mothers; we must all mother each other, whether we are men or women. I think mothering is just like dying, in this respect; it is something that we must do all through life. And whenever we do give up a person or a thing or a position, when we truly give it up, we die-yes, but we die into greater aliveness. We die into a real oneness with life. Not to die, not to give up, means to exclude ourselves from that free flow of life.

But giving up is very different from letting someone down; in fact, the two are exact opposites. It is an upward gesture, not a downward one. Giving up the child, the mother upholds and supports him, as friends must support one another. We cannot let down responsibilities that are given to us, but we must be ready to give them up, and this is the risk of living, the risk of the give and take. There is a tremendous risk involved, because when you really give up, you don’t know what is going to happen to the thing or to the child. If you knew, the sting would be taken out of it, but it wouldn’t be a real giving up. When you hand over responsibility, you have to trust. That trust in life, that faith, is the courage to take upon yourself the risk of living, and dying -- because the two are inseparable.

About the Author: Brother David Steindl Rast is a Bendictine monk. You can learn more about his life in this profile, and on gratefulness.org The excerpt above is from an essay published in 1977 issue of Parabola. 

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. --Howard Thurman

What Role Were You Born to Play in Social Change?

--by George Lakey, syndicated from opendemocracy.net, Jun 27, 2016

 

Bill Moyer was a streetwise, working class white boy from row-house Philadelphia, who — in the turbulence of the 1960s — went to Chicago to work for an anti-racist housing campaign. He wound up joining Martin Luther King Jr.’s national staff as an organizer.

I played tag football more than once with Moyer, catching his grin as he mercilessly overwhelmed his opponents through daring and smarts. He might have been the most joyfully aggressive Quaker I’ve known. By the time he died in 2002, Moyer had given significant leadership on multiple political issues, including the national anti-nuclear movement.

In California, Moyer went to graduate school to study social movement theory and indulge his love of analytical thinking. He became best known for identifying eight stages of successful social movements, which he named the Movement Action Plan, or MAP. I found activists using MAP as far away as Taiwan, where they had already read it in translation before I got there.

Moyer also invented a powerful tool that clarifies how we work for change on two levels: individually and organizationally. Four Roles of Social Activism, he called it, and right now the tool is helping environmentalist organizations in the Philadelphia area clarify their relationships to the new campaign Power Local Green Jobs. The tool also empowers individuals to become more effective. In this column I’ll describe the four roles so you can notice their resonance personally for you and also for your group.

With Moyer’s permission, I tweaked the names of three of the four roles, making the differences sharper; you’ll get both names here.  I call the roles advocate, helper, organizer, and rebel.

The advocate role

The advocate focuses on communication with what Moyer called “the powerholders,” who can change a policy or practice. Think of the civil liberties lawyer suing the city for stop-and-frisk that profiles people of color, or the lobby group urging city council to change that policy. Moyer calls this role the “reformer,” while acknowledging that an advocate might urge changes that are radical in content.

In workshops, I invite people to scan their childhoods to recall whether they usually turned to an authority to correct what they felt was an injustice or problem. Maybe they went to the teacher after class to report bullying on the playground, or told a parent that little sister was upset. I’ve found that many adults who prefer to play the advocate role in social movements expressed that preference early, often developing some skill and confidence.

The helper role

The helper is drawn to direct service, personally doing what they can to remedy the situation. They address gender and racial discrimination in jobs by teaching how to write resumes or initiating job training. They attack carbon pollution by weatherizing houses or starting solar installation co-ops. Because much of mainstream community life is marked by service, Moyer’s name for this role is “citizen.”

When adults known for playing helper roles look back on their childhood they sometimes remember their own intervention to stop the bully, or their being the first one to bring a band-aid when little brother falls off the bike.

The organizer role

While the advocate and helper who want to make a bigger difference may themselves need to organize — by starting a nonprofit, for example — the organizing part is not the most satisfying for them. The advocate is happiest when convincing the judge that equal marriage is constitutional. The helper loves to witness the graduating class that includes more people of color.

The organizer, on the other hand, experiences joy from collecting people who may not even know each other and turning them into a well-oiled team, or tripling the attendance at the union local’s monthly meetings. Organizers often believe that the sheer power of numbers will make change because powerholders are afraid of alternative sources of power and may concede something to head off further growth.

When organizers were children they may have been the ones who revived the celebration of Martin Luther King Day at school, or boosted the flagging morale of the drill team. Moyer calls them “change agents,” and he himself was certainly that.

The rebel role

The rebel who sees a problem or injustice prefers to make a commotion of some kind to force powerholders to make a change. Martin Luther King Jr. explained that a campaign must create a crisis. Gandhi made so much trouble that he made India ungovernable by the British. True, some famous rebels needed organizing skills to scale up their commotion to the crisis point.

But rebels look at numbers not for their own sake but to determine “how many people will it take to create what degree of crisis?” Alice Paul left the mass movement for woman suffrage in order to lead a smaller band of rebels willing to make the nonviolent trouble that forced U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to give in to justice.

Roles can be played positively or negatively

While some activists dismiss one or more of these roles as uncool — “the nonprofit-industrial complex” or “sellout lobbyists” or “infantile protesters” — Moyer found the record clear: Successful social movements include all four roles.

He acknowledged, though, that any of these roles can either assist or undermine a movement, depending on how people play the role. Advocates, for example, can — through communication with powerholders — find ways of framing demands that make it more likely that the movement will take a large step forward. On the other hand, they can get co-opted by the powerholders and undermine a campaign’s clarity so it settles for less.

Rebels can either generate drama that motivates the undecided to take the issue more seriously and to side with the movement, or it can choose tactics that are so self-marginalizing that the undecided lend their support to the powerholders.

Helpers can empower people who are feeling helpless by giving them skills and assisting them to see that they can only get what they really want through solidarity with others. Or the helpers can adopt the false belief that society changes through individuals enhancing their lives one-by-one.

In his book “Doing Democracy,” Moyer describes a number of positive and negative ways each role can be played. Looking fearlessly at his analysis helps our learning curve.

How do you play your role?

I’ve personally performed a lot of voluntary service, started and led new organizations, and lobbied elected officials. In my heart of hearts, though, I’m a rebel. To avoid burnout, I need to remember that. I’m healthiest, most creative and productive when I’m in touch with my rebel self and find a group that’s OK with that.

Becoming self-aware is also helpful for organizations. They do best when they clarify their mission, even when that means saying “No” to lots of otherwise good ideas that are offered but aren’t really aligned with the essence of their role. Earth Quaker Action Team, my primary affiliation, claims its rebel role in the larger struggle for environmental, economic and racial justice. In our new campaign Power Local Green Jobs, other groups we talk with expect that we will join with them as they advocate, or organize, or do job training. We get to explain over and over the advantages of a division of labor: “Do what you’re best at and we’ll root for you while we do our rebel thing.”

A group that embraces its particular role in the movement can also have a diversity of roles within its membership. Within EQAT we have people who as individuals shine as organizers, helpers and advocates and contribute quite a lot to the group’s internal life. Within any group there is room for all as long as they support the clear, overall mission.

Of course a membership that includes multiple role identities will also experience conflicts, and that’s a good thing — especially when hard choices must be made. An organizer may object that a rebel’s tactical proposal is premature because the group doesn’t yet have the resources to deal with the consequences.

A helper may say that more solar installation training needs to be in place before the utility yields and funds extensive rooftop programs, or else the poor and people of color will be overlooked when workers start lining up for jobs. An advocate may note that the opponent is for the first time engaged in serious consideration of the demand, and argue that this is the wrong time for militant action.

People who face strategic hard choices are more likely to come up with creative and wise next moves when the four roles fight it out — fighting fairly while acknowledging differences. The research is clear: Over time, diversity actually does produce the best outcomes. Or at least diversity works when everyone agrees on the bottom line: The role the group plays in the larger movement.

This illustration from Earth Quaker Action Team can be repeated for organizations taking a different role: advocacy, say, or helping or organizing. The combination of diversity of membership and unity of purpose is a winning combination.

Bill Moyer’s Four Roles is about effectiveness. Instead of one organization trying to do many things and risking scatter, his vision was that of a proliferation of groups, each maximizing strength through focus while networking and supporting a broader sense of unity. That’s what a powerful movement looks like.

---

Syndicated from the Transformation section of openDemocracy where this article first appeared.  George Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group which just won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. 

 

Be The Change: This week initiate a conversation with friends, colleagues or family about the four roles, and explore which role each person resonates with most and why.

 

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

Rediscovering The Art Of Reverence

Rediscovering the Art of Reverence - John O'Donohue

 

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

 

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. 

 

In order to become attentive to beauty, we need to rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence. As children we become aware of the word 'reverence' as used to describe the way a person is present in prayer or liturgy. When a priest celebrated the mass with a sense of reverence, you sensed the depth of his presence to the mystery. Though the church was full of people, he was absorbed in something that could not be seen. Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery.

 

But it is more than an attitude of mind; reverence is also physical — a dignified attention of body showing that sacred is already here. Reverence is not to be reduced to a social posture. Reverence bestows dignity and it is only in light of dignity that the beauty and mystery of a person will become visible. Reverence is not the stiff pious posture which remains frozen and lacks humour and play. To live with a sense of reverence is not to become a prisoner of dull piety.

 

Playfulness, humour, and even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal. Reverence is also the companion of humility. When human hubris intrudes on or manipulates the sacred, the consequence is inevitably humiliation. In contrast, a sense of reverence includes the recognition that one is always in the presence of the sacred.

 

To live with reverence is to live without judgement, prejudice and the saturation of consumerism. The consumerist heart becomes empty and lonesome because it has squandered reverence. As parent, child, lover, prayer or artist — a sense of reverence opens pathways to beauty to surprise us. The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.

About the Author: Excerpted from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O'Donohue.