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I was truly honoured yesterday to sit with 15,000 other people and listen to the Dalai Lame give a talk on Universal Responsibility yesterday in Vancouver. (You can view the video of the talk online) The Dalai Lama was introduced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a way that made it feel as if he was introducing a good friend to an audience of good friends. It was a wonderful afternoon.

There were many parts of the teaching that resonated, and it will take me a while to process the entire experience. Just being in the presence of these two great men, and 15,000 people who care enough about peace to have gathered to hear them, was an overwhelming experience in itself. At times, it simply made me hum being in the same physical space as the current manifestation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion.

There were some things that did stand out for me, especially in light of the other teachings that are flowing into my life at the moment.

The Dalai Lama had some very interesting comments about opening and closing energies. In speaking about emotional energy he said that positive energy is opening while negative energy is closing (see his comments starting at about the 45 minute point in the video). “Hatred must find an independent target. Positive emotions are helpful to see a holistic perspective; negative emotions are the opposite,” he said. The lesson here is that in order to exhibit negative emotions, you must collapse your world onto a specific target. It is a closing energy that inhibits compassion, inhibits a holistic view of the world, and inhibits the ability to transcend personal issues and problems in order to express compassion.

Compassion is about understanding that our personal interests and the interests of others are essentially the same. If we are able to do this, then we see that, as the Dalai Lama says “war is out of date…the destruction of your neighbour is the destruction of yourself.” The Dalai Lama advocates genuine dialogue to explore interests in a way which holds open the truth of all perspectives and refuses to collapse one in favour of another. In today’s world, where we are more and more connected in the concrete world through economics, communications and environment, it follows that a more transcendent acknowledgement of this connection is required for our collective well-being. Narrowing one’s focus of the world increases the potential of negative emotional energy because it ignores the reality that we are increasingly and deeply connected. Simplifying things gives rise to the simple, one dimensional targets that hate requires. Keeping the world open and complex allows for less opportunities for negative emotions to arise, and therefore preserves our field of practice for compassion and dealing with the world in real terms.