Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

I have participated in two Buddhism-Science panels, one at MIT and the other through the Dalai Lama Peace Center in Vancouver Canada. Each event evoked out-of-body feelings of the unreality of a wedding day. There was the swirl of the 200 photographers who track HHDL’s every bow, smile, laugh, attentive head nod, finger pointing rhetorical flourish, cough, and sneeze. At MIT, bomb-sniffing dogs circled the space-age auditorium, sniffing under chairs and behind posters protesting for a free Tibetan state. Stone-faced secret service agents, mumbling into collar microphones, stood in dark suits positioned in perfectly proportioned geometric arrangements to protect the space that HHDL moved through. Outside the MIT auditorium at 6 AM hundreds of meditators, peacefully arrayed in rows of upright torsos and braided hair, sat in contemplative anticipation, occasionally awakened by the strike of gongs. The dozens of volunteers who made these events possible, long time practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism from the west, uniformly spoke of being touched by HHDL. Literally touched. One recalled clasping his hands years ago in New York. Another recalled a brush during a bow in Daram Sala India, where HHDL resides. Still another recalled his hand on a shoulder at a reception following a talk. They could remember the precise instant of the touch, the warm feeling that rippled through their bodies, and the lasting change this contact introduced into their lives. Often the act of recalling the touch produced bright eyes, a flush, a head tilt, tearing, and an intimate but remote look in the eyes.

On the stage in Vancouver before our dialogue, HHDL entered stage left and proceeded to greet the four panelists with his customary bow and clasped hands. The sighs, tears, appreciative head nods, goose bumps, and embraces of the 2,500 people in the audience produced a crackling ether that filled the art deco auditorium. I was the last panelist for HHDL to approach. From eighteen inches away I came into contact with HHDL. Partially stooped in a bow, he made eye contact with me and clasped my hands. His eyebrows were raised. His eyes gleamed. His modest smile was poised near a laugh. Emerging out of the bow and clasped hands, he embraced my shoulders and shook them slightly with warm hands.

As he turned to the audience, I had a Darwinian spiritual experience. Goose bumps spread across my back like wind on water, starting at the base of my spine and rolling up to my scalp. A flush of humility moved up my face from my cheeks to my forehead and dissipated near the crown of my head. Tears welled up, along with a smile. I recalled a saying of HHDL’s:

At the most fundamental level our nature is compassionate, and that cooperation, not conflict, lies at the heart of the basic principles that govern our human existence.

 

For several weeks after I lived in a new realm. My suitcase was missing at the carousel following the plane flight home—not a problem, I didn’t need those clothes anyway. Squabbles between my two daughters about the ownership of a Polly Pocket or about whose back-bending walkover best matched the platonic ideal—no bristling reaction on my part, just an inclination to step into the fray and to lay out a softer discourse and sense of common ground. The frustrated person behind me in the line in the bank, groaning in exasperation—no reciprocal frustration, no self-righteous sense of how to comport oneself in more dignified fashion in public; instead, an appreciation of what deeper causes might have produced such apparent malaise. The people I saw, the undergrads in my classroom, parents at my daughters’ school, preschool teachers walking little groups of three-year-olds in hand-holding chains around the streets of Berkeley, those parallel parking their cars, recyclers picking up cans and bottles, the homeless shaking their heads and cursing the skies, people in business suits reading the morning paper waiting for a carpool ride, all seemed guided by remarkably good intentions. My jen ratio was approaching infinity.