da Scriffles

Forgive your enemies and live an extra seven-and-a-half years! You heard right genius. 

Michael J.Gelb, author of How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, also told seekers of Happiness and Englightenment at the Happiness & Its Causes Conference at Brisbane's Convention and Exhibition Centre, about the Counter Clockwise Study which showed that you turn back the hands of time by believing you are young.

Scriffles, being a character out of a da Vinci painting, has of course forgiven all his enemies but he is a bigger soul than I - he is 500 years old! 

We have argued and agreed to disagree about this. ;) 

We all have at least one pair of shoes that never fit because one shoe fits the wronged foot and the other shoe fits the wrongee's foot - it's like watching Dancing With The Stars, awkward. 

And forgiveness has to be sought. To me, Gelb and Scriff are really talking about letting go of resentment - which is quite a different thing. Resentment is murderous!

Built up over decades, a resentment is difficult to toss away for a mere seven-and-a-half years. 

However, Gelb's advice to find happiness by doing the thing you always wanted to do makes sense - this too is my truth.

The Renaissance was built on the pursuit and exploration of Truth, Beauty and Goodness - finding a higher self, being centered and serene. 

Did you know that Copernicus - the man who first suggested that the Earth is not the centre of our universe - was seeking perfection?

Apparently, the maths for the old way of thinking was awkward and he thought that God would not do such sloppy math! He was right.

Leonardo - a genius - had insatiable curiosity and a grand passion to know Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Did you know that he invented the parachute - centuries before people took to the skies?

Recently someone tested his parachute design by jumping out of a plane. It worked! Was da Vinci the Apple of his time or what? 

I haven't thought this day's lecture through properly yet but when I look at the gridlock - and think of all the money spent of transport plans that just collected dust over the past 20 years - or when I see an old person standing on the bus while teenagers sit - and I remember how I was always made to stand for an adult - there are so many ways to trash Truth, Beauty and Goodness.  That tunnel won't last 500 years will it?

Gelb has three secrets to Happiness: gratitude, forgiveness and humour. He also recommends faking it until you make it.

The "Indiana Jones of Psychology - Robert Biswas-Diener - showed a diagram today to illustrate research about what makes happy people.

His diagram resembled the image on the left. He asked people all over the world to rate their happiness on a scale of one to seven in a survey that also asked them what they rated more important in their lives: love or money. The happiest people rate love most important and money least important - destitute people rate friendship, family and community above money.

Funny that the shape of the diagram is like the shape of infinity with its ends missing. There's a message in this. The Brisbane Convention Centre is full of people searching for Happiness - at lunch time the restaurants and cafes and takeaways are packed with Happiness people. The sky is blue, the sun shines, the birds sing. And we spent the day in a hall talking about happiness.

On the bus home I looked out the window and watched fluffy, white, billowy clouds drift in slow motion across the top of Woolloongabba.  

The other thing the sticks out about everything that was said about being happy is the need to be mindful on a "three-time scale".

Your ability to do this - to put other sentient beings before your own self-interest (and not just your loved ones) - "is an expression of what you are within".

The Dalai Lama's French interpreter, Matthieu Ricard, is a French monk. The "three-time scale" means three different time periods: a moment (short-term), a lifetime, and eternity (the environment).

Research published by National Geographic in a 2005 cover story called What's In Your Mind shows that monks and people who have meditated on compassion and cultivate mindfulness actually have better control of their brainpower - training yourself to think of others is just like learning a new language or to play an instrument. It's brain training.

HOWEVER! (And this is why it's not something everyone does.) It takes effort, practice over many years and it will not make you rich. It will however make you happy. So make up your mind already! Do you want to be happy or do you want to be rich? You can't have it all - even if you are rich. And you can be in the pink without a dime.

 

 

The Dalai Lama was surprised when former Australian of the Year, Pat McGorry, told him that youth suicide rates in rural Australia are higher than in cities.

The discussion was about happiness, sadness, compassion, consciousness, reality until the Dalai Lama insisted that Pat, who had been sitting quietly on stage, take his turn to speak. He was the last speaker. 

Pat McGorry, was on stage in conversation with the Dalai Lama at the Happiness and Its Causes Conference - along with leading international scientific thinkers Dr Paul Ekman (via video link); Professor Marco Iacoboni (discovered mirror neurons); and Alan Wallace (consciousness expert).

And what Pat McGorry wanted answers to was how do you change society's attitude to mental disorders, how to you change people's minds in order to create a world where children with problems are caught in time to be treated so they grow out of their affliction like some kids grow out of asthma - he says this is possible if we try.

"It's an activist agenda," he told the Dalai Lama. "There's a lot of enemies because it's about changing the status quo and it's about reform. How do we present this to our enemies and change the way they think?" he asked.

And then he mentioned the high youth suicide rates in Australia . But what about on the farm? _ asked the Dalai Lama. And Pat McGorry told him that Australia's rural communities are in decay and towns are dying and there is no space for youth in cities or in country towns - that's what  Headspace is about. McGorry is a Headspace director. The Dalai Lama recommended a more friendly, less self-centred, more warm-hearted society.

There must not be too many things that surprise the Dalai Lama - what do you think?

"I am not a specialist," he said. "Our existing education system is very much materialistic. We must introduce education for warm-heartedness."

It must be universal so this process of teaching warm-heartedness can not be through meditation or prayer or religion - it must be secular.

"There's no adequate information about warm-heartedness. We consider this a religious matter. You have to think seriously about that.

"We all have the same potential for warm-heartedness but we need to nurture these things: basic human qualities, good qualities."

I often feel like a character out of a Jane Austen novel - rarely the heroine these days.

I know my character flaws and over the years I have tried very hard to be the "good", do the "right". If I were a character in a Charles Dickens' novel I would be the one who never got away with anything and was always required to "be good".

My belief is that life is not about actual "right". It's not about actual "good" because these are relative - you can be right all the time if you hang out with people who think like you do. You can all be wrong together. Just think of the climate change debate. Just look at the political reporting about the Labor leadership and Prime Ministership of Julia Gillard.

All the fuss over who said and who did what to whom boils down to nothing but hot air. I guess if you want to be remembered do something worthwhile, say something worthwhile. 

Do you think that Alexander The Great should be considered "great" just because he conquered the "known" world? Maybe. But it didn't last long - well, he died so he didn't have time to do anything, so I guess he's great. Does anyone know what benefits flowed from this "great" acheivement? So he used elephants! But he did add to the sum total of knowledge at the time and probably opened up new trade routes. You probably can find Greek pottery in India thanks to Alexander. Many a mere ordinary mouse appears to think themselves an Alexander these days.

I fear that today we don't examine this idea of "worthwhile" too much unless it applies to us personally. I won't be around when the Torres Strait Islands sink beneath the waves and the stars go black so I don't care. How many times have I heard a similar refrain? 

For some people, worthwhile is bringing up a family, for others it is cooking food for others, or teaching. It's all cool and awesome in my book. It's "great"! 

Maybe worthwhile is as simple as peace of mind, the ability to turn the other cheek and show compassion. That's not easy. The ABC recently screened a series by Jimmy McGovern called The Accused - you should catch it if you can. It is crazy amazing and awesome!

There's a norm and you've got to find it and conform otherwise ... I think this is the part in the Bible which refers to "the meek". The meek shall inherit the Earth, not the powerful, because it takes immense (great) strength to be meek.

Try not exploding over dinner with someone you have known forever who obviously has an axe to grind but does not say a word in order to apply the pressure - there's Dickensian bile.

If you manage to show compassion, or do something worthwhile,  six out of 10 times (that is a passing mark) people still tend to only count the four times you didn't turn the other cheek. Fat people must walk the plank along with old people, poor people, people of different races ... the list could go on depending on who you meet. 

Legislate all you like to stamp out discrimination but the Dickensian Truth of Humanity and the Darwinian Theories will prevail. 

Sydney University's Professor Paul Griffiths spoke at last year's Happiness Conference in Brisbane about Darwin's theory of Group Selection - he tried to explain how altruism flourishes in society.

Google this topic and all you get are academic/scientific abstracts - no wonder this kind of thinking does not pass into general knowledge. I can't think that a busy teacher would have time to read this stuff in a world saturated with information.

Prof Griffiths told the 2011 conference that Darwin's theory of Group Selection had been discredited but was again gaining credibility. A successful society co-operates. FACT.

So even though it appears that selfishness prevails in our society there are enough altruistic individuals in our midst to dissipate the selfishness. As altruism flourishes in one group, individuals break away to move to another group to seed the process again. Eventually, selfish groups should become extinct because they fail. See Libya, Syria... despotic regimes. 

The more I blog, the more I write, the more I am in awe of great writers like Charles Dickens who build the truth of the world in words. If I could have dinner with anyone alive or dead it would be Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.

 

If only Charles Dickens were alive to provide the commentary on our rapidly transforming world today! Recognizing a Dickensian moment is possible but putting it down on paper with panache - that's something else.

Define "good", "worthwhile", "great", "awesome". Define "right". Then take your self-interest out of the equation and redefine it. Who says there is nothing left to explore?