Creating Hope with the Dalai Lama

Along with the rush to return to the lives we led prior to the pandemic comes an underlying confusion and fear. While we all yearn to replenish our exhausted supplies of the warmth of human contact through the familiar old repertoire of handshakes and hugs, a bigger potential loss lurks beneath the surface. In the face of so much division in our society, one wonders about the status of the shared assumptions that such habitual greetings represent. As people emerge blinking from this radical social hiatus, will the mutual trust our gestures are understood to signal remain intact? In order to restore the collective emotional foundation on which our habits rest and regain the fullness of connection we crave, we are going to need lots of the world’s most universal value: hope.

The Bodhisattva of Compassion

When it comes to thinking clearly and acting productively in the service of creating hope, one figure occupies a singular place in global consciousness. At age 85, His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama has served his nation and humanity for a long lifetime in selfless devotion to the cause of inspiring humans to embrace their innate potential.

To his followers, he is the living manifestation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the patron saint of Tibet, and the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. To the world at large, he commands the kind of respect associated with only a handful of giants who have changed the course of history, people like Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. In addition to wielding influence as a political and religious leader, the Dalai Lama occupies an exalted position among the scholars with whom he meets on a regular basis to discuss the latest developments in physics, psychology, and neuroscience.