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Nothing Makes Me Feel Better - Calmer, Clearer And Happier - Than Being In One Place, Absorbed In A Book, A Conversation, A Piece Of Music. It's Actually Something Deeper Than Mere Happiness: It's Joy, Which The Monk David Steindl-rast Describes As 'that Kind Of Happiness That Doesn't Depend On What Happens.

-Pico Iyer

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Nothing Makes Me Feel

Pico Iyer

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Nothing Makes Me Feel Better - Calmer, Clearer And Happier - Than Being In One Place, Absorbed In A Book, A Conversation, A Piece Of Music. It's Actually Something Deeper Than Mere Happiness: It's Joy, Which The Monk David Steindl-rast Describes As 'that Kind Of Happiness That Doesn't Depend On What Happens.

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Its No Coincidence That The Word Holiday Suggests A Holy Day, Or That The Longest Book In The Torah Concerns The Sabbath. If You Wish To Advance In Any Sphere, The Best Way Is To Take A Retreat.

I Do Think It’s Only By Stopping Movement That You Can See Where To Go. And It’s Only By Stepping Out Of Your Life And The World That You Can See What You Most Deeply Care About… And Find A Home.

The Dalai Lama Says Don't Pray For Peace, Don't Wait For Peace, Don't Talk About Peace - Do It Right Now.

I Am Simply A Fairly Typical Product Of A Movable Sensibility, Living And Working In A World That Is Itself Increasingly Small And Increasingly Mongrel. I Am A Multinational Soul On A Multinational Globe On Which More And More Countries Are As Polyglot And Restless As Airports. Taking Planes Seems As Natural To Me As Picking Up The Phone Or Going To School. I Fold Up My Self And Carry It Around As If It Were An Overnight Bag.

The Australians, It Seems To Me, Thrive On Their Remoteness From The World And See It As A Way Of Keeping Up A Code Of "no Worries, Mate," While Peddling Their Oddities To Visitors: Nonconformity Is At Once A Fact Of Life For Many, And A Selling Point.

I Began Thinking About Why Am I Constructing Almost A Shadow Father Or Ghost Father In My Head Into Graham Greene In Response To The Father Who Created Me? What's Going On Here? I Think A Part Of My Sense Is It's Every Boy's Story. When We Are Kids, We Imagine That To Define Ourselves Or To Find Ourselves Means Charting Your Own Individuality, Making Your Own Destiny And Actually Running Away From Your Parents And Your Home And What You Grew Up With.

America Has A Hold On Imaginations That No Other Country Does. I Think That Is Partly Because It Is An Immigrant Country And There Is Still A Kind Of Innocence In America That Translates Very Well Everywhere In The World.

The Reason I Love Travel Is Not Just Because It Transports You In Every Sense, But Because It Confronts You With Emotional And Moral Challenges That You Would Never Have To Confront At Home. So I Like Going Out In Search Of Moral And Emotional Adventure Which Throws Me Back Upon Myself And Forces Me To Reconsider My Assumptions And The Things I Took For Granted. It Sends Me Back A Different Person.

As Thoreau Famously Sead, It Doesn't Matter Where Or How Far You Go - The Farther Commonly The Worse - The Important Thing Is How Alive You Are. Writing Of Every Kind Is A Way To Wake Oneself Up And Keep As Alive As When One Has Just Fallen In Love.

All Good Trips Are, Like Love, About Being Carried Out Of Yourself And Deposited In The Midst Of Terror And Wonder.

I'm One Of Those Perverse People Who Likes Being Alone. I Always Took Myself To Be A Community Of One. That's What I Am Comfortable With.

Serendipity Was My Tour Guide, Assisted By Caprice

[the Dalai Lama] Told Me Some Years Ago, "i've Made Every Concession To China, And I've Been As Open And Tolerant As I Could, And Still Things Get Worse In Tibet." If You Look At It From One Point Of View, As He Himself Says, His Monastic Position Of Forbearance And Nonviolence Hasn't Reaped Any Benefits. And Yet, He's Thinking In Terms Of The Long Term, Of Centuries.

I Like California Because It Still Has The Glamour And Romanticism And Exoticism Of A Very Foreign Place. It Was The Place That When I Was Young, I Was Raised On "i Love Lucy" And Listening To The Grateful Dead And Reading Jack Kerouac. They, To Me, Were All Symbols Of This Very Foreign Sense Of Promise And Movement. After All This Time Here I'm Glad I Still Have It.

Dalai Lama Has Not Coming To Show Us His Kindness, So That We Can Enjoy His Charisma, He's Coming With A Specific Message For The Specific Circumstances Of The World Today.

We Travel, In Essence, To Become Young Fools Again - To Slow Time Down And Get Taken In, And Fall In Love Once More.

Falling In Love

And If Travel Is Like Love, It Is, In The End, Mostly Because It's A Heightened State Of Awareness, In Which We Are Mindful, Receptive, Undimmed By Familiarity And Ready To Be Transformed. That Is Why The Best Trips, Like The Best Love Affairs, Never Really End.

Unlike Many Spiritual Leaders, Dalai Lama Is Never Been In A Position To Just Sit On A Mountain Top Handing Out Wisdom. He's Had To Live Out His Principles In The Middle Of This Very Complex Situation, Every Day For Sixty Years Or More. I Think It's Something That Moves Many People About His Example.

Travel Is Not Really About Leaving Our Homes, But Leaving Our Habits.

Dalai Lama Has Made New Opportunities For Women That They Never Had In Tibet, Introduced Science Into The Monks' Curriculum And Had Tibetan Students In Exile Take Their Classes In English After The Age Of Ten So That They Will Know More About The Outside World. But One Of The Great Things He's Done Is To Bring All The Tibetan Groups Together In Exile, As Perhaps They Couldn't Have Been When They Weren't In Exile And They Weren't Under Such Pressure.

We Travel, Initially, To Lose Ourselves; And We Travel, Next To Find Ourselves.

When I'm Wandering Around The Himalayas, Most Of The People That I See Are Westerners From Germany, California, Or The Netherlands, Who Are Wearing Sandals, Indian Smocks, And Are In Search Of Enlightenment, Antiquity, Peace, And All The Things They Can't Get In The West. Most Of The People They Meet Are Nepali Villagers In Lee Jeans, Reeboks, And Madonna T-shirts Who Are Looking For The Paradise That They Associate With Los Angeles - A Paradise Of Material Prosperity And Abundance.

Like The Moon On The Water, In A Way. When You Confront A Zen Master, What You're Really Seeing Are Not His Limitations But Yours.

Traveling Is A Way To Reverse Time, To A Small Extent, And Make A Day Last A Year - Or At Least Forty-five Hours - And Traveling Is An Easy Way Of Surrounding Ourselves, As In Childhood, With What We Cannot Understand.

Every Day There Are Small Moments When We Have A Choice: Will We Take In More Stuff, Or Just Clear Our Minds Out For A Bit?

Any School Would Gain, If The Students Began The Day With Meditation, Cleared Their Heads And Got Themselves Centered.

For Me The First Great Joy Of Traveling Is Simply The Luxury Of Leaving All My Beliefs And Certainties At Home, And Seeing Everything I Thought I Knew In A Different Light, And From A Crooked Angle.

Dalai Lama Is Transforming Those Criteria - And The Whole Way Of Conducting Politics. He's Conducting Politics In A Much Deeper Way Than Most Politicians Are Able To. He's The Only Politician I Know Of Who's A Monk. The Pope, Of Course, Is In A Similar Position, But The Pope Isn't In The Same Way Leading A Country Of Many Million People.

Yet [dalai Lama] Has Said Very Strongly That Basic Freedoms Of Thought And Speech Have To Be Respected In Tibet And They're Not At The Moment. Tolerance Doesn't Mean Accepting What's Unfair.

Mr. Trump Doesn't Radiate Many Of The Qualities I Respect. But What Do I Know? I've Never Met Trump. I Know He's Savvy Enough To Change His Tune According To His Audience And I Don't Know Very Much At All About How Government Works.

The Beauty Of Being Foreign Is That It Snaps You Awake.

Visiting A New Town Is Like Having A Conversation. Places Ask Questions Of You Just As Searchingly As You Question Them. And, As In Any Conversation, It Helps To Listen With An Open Mind, So You Can Be Led Somewhere Unexpected. The More You Leave Assumptions At Home, I've Found, The Better You Can Hear Whatever It Is That A Destination Is Trying To Say To You.

Finding A Sanctuary, A Place Apart From Time, Is Not So Different From Finding A Faith.

Quitting, For Me, Means Not Giving Up, But Moving On; Changing Direction Not Because Something Doesn’t Agree With You, But Because You Don’t Agree With Something. It’s Not A Complaint, In Other Words, But A Positive Choice, And Not A Stop In One’s Journey, But A Step In A Better Direction. Quitting-whether A Job Or A Habit-means Taking A Turn So As To Be Sure You’re Still Moving In The Direction Of Your Dreams.

Travel, In The Superficial Sense At Least, Is A Good Cure For Loneliness. When You Travel, Especially In The Third World, You Quickly Find That You Get More Friends Than You Know What To Do With.

There's So Much Visible Stuff Around Now, We're Tempted To Forget That It's Usually The Invisible That Matters Most.

I Would Now Put All My Heart With The Tibetan People And The Tibetan Cause, But Not At The Expense Of The Chinese, And Not Say That Tibetans Are Good And Chinese Are Bad. And In My Own Life, I Hope I Would Learn To Be A Little Less Full Of Right And Wrongs, And A Little More Able To See Everything As A Potential Right.

I Exult In The Fact I Can See Everywhere With A Flexible Eye; The Very Notion Of Home Is Foreign To Me, As The State Of Foreignness Is The Closest Thing I Know To Home.

Everyone Is A Wordsworth In Certain Moods, And Every Traveler Seeks Out Places That Every Traveler Has Missed.

So It Is That Lonely Places Attract As Many Lonely People As They Produce, And The Loneliness We See In Them Is Partly In Ourselves.

I Love The Fact That We Can't Explain Coincidences. I Think It's Like Sometimes You Walk Into A Crowded Room And You'll See A Stranger And You Feel As If You Know Her Better Than The Friends That You Came With. And The Very Fact That You Can't Explain It Is What Gives It Its Power, That It Lies In Some Deeper Or Mysterious Realm, I Think.

Nothing Makes Me Feel Better - Calmer, Clearer And Happier - Than Being In One Place, Absorbed In A Book, A Conversation, A Piece Of Music. It's Actually Something Deeper Than Mere Happiness: It's Joy, Which The Monk David Steindl-rast Describes As 'that Kind Of Happiness That Doesn't Depend On What Happens.

For Citizens Who Think Themselves Puppets In The Hands Of Their Rulers, Nothing Is More Satisfying Than Having Rulers As Puppets In Their Hands.

Yes, We Know More Than Ever Before, And It's A Wonder That We Get To Inhabit A World Full Of Driverless Cars And 3d Printers. But That Doesn't Mean That We Know Any More About The Essential Things In Life - Love, Faith, Death - And It Would Be Dangerous To Assume We Did. The Only Thing That Gets Us Through Sometimes Is A Proper, Humbled Sense That We Don't Have A Clue, We Can't Be Sure What's Going To Happen Next And Life Will Always Be Much Larger Than Our Ideas Of It.

I Remember Many Years Ago, I Asked [dalai Lama] About Exile And He Said: "well, Exile Is Good Because It's Brought Me And My People Closer To Reality," And Reality Is Almost A Shrine Before Which He Sits. Exile Brings Us Up Against The Wall And Forces Us To Rise To The Challenge Of The Moment.

Our Own Country Seemed More Polarized Than It's Ever Been And Since The Two Terrorist Attacks Of 9/11, Religion Was In Greater Disrepute Than At Any Other Time In My Lifetime.

Death Undoes Us Less, Sometimes, Than The Hope That It Will Never Come.

My Christmas Present To Myself Each Year Is To See How Much Air Travel Can Open Up The World And Take Me To Places As Far From Sheltered California And Japan As Possible.

In The Past, Ive Visited Remote Places - North Korea, Ethiopia, Easter Island - Partly As A Way To Visit Remote States Of Mind: Remote Parts Of Myself That I Wouldnt Ordinarily Explore.

It So Often Happens That Somebody Says 'change Your Life' And You Repaint Your Car Rather Than Re-wire The Engine.

Changing Your Life

If You'd Asked Me Some Years Ago, I Would Have Said [dalai Lama] Is An Extraordinarily Compassionate, Clear-sighted, Calm Human Being. But Now, I'm More Convinced Than Ever That His Political Positions As Well As His Spiritual Positions Arise Out Of Such Precise And Realistic Thinking That They're Extremely Sound.

For More And More Of Us, Home Has Less To Do With A Piece Of Soil Than A Piece Of Soul.

We Can Better See What We Don't Have. The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener And Now We Can Actually Go And Visit His Grass Much More And Feel The Absence Of Green In Our Own Lives.

Movement Is A Fantastic Privilege But It Ultimately Only Has Meaning If You Have A Home To Go Back To.

What We Have To Do Is Act As Clearly And With As Pure Motivation As Is Possible Now, And That Will Sow The Seeds For Good Action Maybe In The Twenty-second Century.

The Dalai Lama Says Tibet And The Modern World Can Engage In A Conversation; Perhaps Tibet Has Something To Share With The Rest Of Us Based On Its Researches Into Mind, And We Have A Lot That We Can Share With Tibet.

In A World Full Of Shifting Borders, Everything Is Happening All At Once In Every Possible Direction.

The More We Run From A Problem, The More We're Actually Running Into It.

As Soon As I Began To Talk To Dalai Lama, I Realized That Chinese And Tibetans From His Point Of View Are Mostly The Same. And As He Pointed Out During The Recent Disturbances, The Chinese Are Suffering Under A Tough Government Much As The Tibetans Are.

Home Is Essentially A Set Of Values You Carry Around With You And, Like A Turtle Or A Snail Or Whatever, Home Has To Be Something That Is Part Of You And Can Be Equally A Part Of You Wherever You Are. I Think That Not Having A Home Is A Good Inducement To Creating A Metaphysical Home And To Being Able To See It In More Invisible Ways.

As A Member Of The Mainstream Media For Many Years, I've Learned Just One Thing: Never To Trust Anything I Read In The Mainstream Media - Not Because Of Any Agenda Or Deliberate Dissimulation, But Simply Because It's Filtered And Comes Very Often From Someone Whose Judgment I Might Not Trust In Other Circumstances.

Home Is Not Just The Place Where You Happen To Be Born. Its The Place Where You Become Yourself.

From The Beginning, I've Stressed That Home Is Something Internal, Invisible, Portable, Especially For Those Of Us With Roots In Many Physical Places; We Have To Root Ourselves In Our Passions, Our Values And Our Deepest Friends. My Home, I've Always Felt, Lies In The Songs And Novels That I Love, In The Wife And Mother That I'm Never Far Away From, In The Monastery To Which I've Been Returning For 25 Years.

I Think [dalai Lama]is Far And Away The Most Solid, Deep-thinking, Far-sighted Politician I've Met, And I've Been A Journalist For 26 Years For Time Magazine, So I've Met A Lot Of Politicians.

With The War In Iraq, He [dalai Lama] Feels That The Causes Of That Lie Maybe Hundreds Of Years Ago, And He Says, "what We Do Now May Have Consequences Far Into The Future That We Will Never See."

He [dalai Lama] Feels, And I Feel, And Everyone Feels The Suffering And Frustration Of The Tibetans Who Long For Action, Who Long For A Militant Response. But, In Some Ways Very Few Of Those Individuals Have Ever Been In The Position Of Being Head Of State.

What More Could One Ask Of A Companion? To Be Forever New And Yet Forever Steady, To Be Strange And Familiar All At Once, With Enough Change To Quicken My Mind, Enough Steadiness To Give Sanctuary To My Heart. The Books On My Shelf Never Asked To Come Together And They Would Not Trust Or Want To Listen To One Another. But Each Is A Piece Of A Stained-glass Whole, Without Which I Wouldn’t Make Sense To Myself Or To The World Outside.

What Is Fascinating About A Place Like Los Angeles Airport Is That It Is Lots And Lots Of People, Many Of Whom Have Saved Up All Their Lives And Channeled All Of Their Energies Toward Coming To The Promised Land Of Abundance And Plenty - The American Dream. But As Soon As They Arrive Here They Get A Crash Course In The American Reality.

I Often Think We're Most Happy When We Forget The Time.

We May Be Joined These Days More By The Questions We Have In Common Than By The Answers We Share.

I Like The Way That American Has Become A Kind Of Spiritual Home Even For People Who Have Never Seen It. American Dreams Are Strongest Of All In The Hearts Of People Who Have Only Seen America In Their Dreams. I Think It's Refreshing And Reviving To Go Around The World And See How America Still Occupies This Special Place.

A Comma . . . Catches The Gentle Drift Of The Mind In Thought, Turning In On Itself And Back On Itself, Reversing, Redoubling, And Returning Along The Course Of Its Own Sweet River Music; While The Semicolon Brings Clauses And Thoughts Together With All The Silent Discretion Of A Hostess Arranging Guests Around Her Dinner Table.

The Dalai Lama, These Days, Encourages Westerners Not To Take Up Buddhism, Partly Because He Feels That Our Roots Are Deep In Other Traditions, And We Should Go Deeper Into Our Own Traditions Rather Than Just Acquiring The Surfaces Of Others.

More Than Any Religious Figure That I Can Think Of, Dalai Lama Goes Out Of His Way To Attend Interfaith Conferences; Religious Harmony Is One Of His Urgent Priorities In Life.

Priorities In Life

In An Age Of Constant Movement, Nothing Is More Urgent Than Sitting Still.

In The End, We Need Two Things To Lead A Balanced Life - A Sense Of The World And A Sense Of Ourselves; It's Like Breathing In And Breathing Out. And If You Can Only Get To Know The World By Stepping Out, And Losing Yourself In Experience, You Can Only Get To Know The Self By Stepping Back, And Finding Yourself In Contemplation. One Without The Other Leads To A Kind Of Madness.

I've Also Learned From [dalai Lama] That We Make The World By How We Choose To Look At It. In Any Situation You Can Make It Constructive Or Dismaying, Depending On That Powerful Computer We Call The Mind.

I Think China's View Of Freedom Has To Do With Material Wealth And Modernity, And The Dalai's Lama View Of Freedom Is Liberation In The Buddhist Sense, Which Is Freedom From Ignorance And Freedom From Suffering.

The Central Paradox Of The Machines That Have Made Our Lives So Much Brighter, Quicker, Longer And Healthier Is That They Cannot Teach Us How To Make The Best Use Of Them; The Information Revolution Came Without An Instruction Manual.

Making A Living And Making A Life Sometimes Point In Opposite Directions.

Making A Living

One Of The Interesting Things About Los Angeles Is That It's Still Supplying The Whole Of The World With Its Dreams Through Movies And Songs And Tv - Often Of An All-american Family At The Same Time As The Real Los Angeles Is Peopled By Souls From Vietnam, Guatemala, And Korea Who Look Nothing Like The Images Being Beamed Out. I Think All That Is Going To Have To Change And Illusion Is Going To Have To Catch Up With Reality In That Regard.

The Dalai Lama Acknowledges That He's Met Westerners Who To Some Extent Are Clearly Easterners At Heart, And He Would Never Want Them Not To Become Buddhists Just Because They Happened To Be Born In California.

You Can Continue Your Practice, You Can Exercise Kindness, You Can Practice Meditation Whether You're In A Prison Or A Millionaire's House, Whether You're In India Or Tibet.

Travel, For Me, Is A Little Bit Like Being In Love, Because Suddenly All Your Senses Are At The Setting Marked “on.

I Wanted To Bring The Book Out Right Now Because I Think Anyone Who Cares About Tibet Knew There Would Be Disturbances In The Run Up To The Olympics [2008]. Many Tibetans Feel It's Their Last Chance To Broadcast Their Suffering And Frustration And Pain To The World Before The Olympics Take Place And China Is Accepted As A Modern Nation And The World Forgets About Tibet.

Most Of Us Who Have Been Lucky Enough To Hear, Read And See The Dalai Lama, Often Come Away Thinking, "what A Kind, Inspiring And Golden Human Being!" That Is True, But I Think It Does Him An Injustice.

In An Age Of Distraction, Nothing Can Feel More Luxurious Than Paying Attention.

You Can See Exile As Loss, And Then It Will Be A Loss For You. You Can Treat It As Opportunity And Then All Kinds Of Benefits Accrue.

So Travel For Me Is An Act Of Discovery And Of Responsibility As Well A Grand Adventure And A Constant Liberation.

The More Internationalism There Is In The World, The More Nationalism There Will Always Be, As People Feel Scared Of The Other Streaming Into Their Neighbourhood And Don't Always Know Where To Lay Their Foundations In A World On The Move.

Often When We Think Of Exile We Think Of Destruction Or Loss. But The Dalai Lama Always Says Exile Is Reality, It's Something We Can Make Use Of, And He Has Used It To Get Rid Of Everything That He Thought Was Stifling And Old, And To Create A New, Improved And Much Healthier Tibet.

Perhaps The Greatest Danger Of Our Global Community Is That The Person In La Thinks He Knows Cambodia Because He's Seen The Killing Fields On-screen, And The Newcomer From Cambodia Thinks He Knows La Because He's Seen City Of Angels On Video.

Many People Would Say That A Tibetan Monk, Even In Lhasa, May Be Free While The Ruler Of China May Not Be Free.

I Loved The Quiet Places In Kyoto, The Places That Held The World Within A Windless Moment. Inside The Temples, Nature Held Her Breath. All Longing Was Put To Sleep In The Stillness, And All Was Distilled Into A Clean Simplicity. The Smell Of Woodsmoke, The Drift Of Incense; A Procession Of Monks In Black-and-gold Robes, One Of Them Giggling In A Voice Yet Unbroken; A Touch Of Autumn In The Air, A Sense Of Gathering Rain.

We Travel To Open Our Hearts And Eyes And Learn More About The World Than Our Newspapers Will Accommodate.

For More And More Of Us, Home Has Really Less To Do With A Piece Of Soil Than, You Could Say, With A Piece Of Soul. If Somebody Suddenly Asks Me, "where's Your Home?" I Think About My Sweetheart Or My Closest Friends Or The Songs That Travel With Me Wherever I Happen To Be.

Anybody Who Travels Knows That You're Not Really Doing So In Order To Move Around - You're Traveling In Order To Be Moved. And Really What You're Seeing Is Not Just The Grand Canyon Or The Great Wall But Some Moods Or Intimations Or Places Inside Yourself That You Never Ordinarily See When You're Sleepwalking Through Your Daily Life.

I Think That Mass Communications As Well As Mass Travel Have Made The Whole World Available To Us In Ways That They Haven't Been. As With Any Kind Of Freedom, The More Of It That One Has The Greater The Need For Limit And Restraint. But I Think That It's A Nice Challenge To Be Saddled With.

The Dalai Lama Would Say That Meditation Is Something That Can Help Everyone. But He's Aware That It Can Be Misused Or Things Can Go Wrong.

Dalai Lama Is Very Interested In Learning From And Sharing Tips With People In Other Traditions, But He Always Stresses That We Shouldn't Underestimate The Important Differences Between Them.

Living Here In California, I Think One Of The Scariest Things About California Is The Fact That It Is Rewriting Its Script And Changing Constantly And So Many People Don't Know Who They Will Be And Who They Will Be With A Year From Now.

I Suddenly Realized I Was Racing Around So Much, I Could Never Catch Up With My Life

For Centuries, Cubas Greatest Resource Has Been Its People.

A Person Susceptible To "wanderlust" Is Not So Much Addicted To Movement As Committed To Transformation.

I Think That Foreignness Is Always With You. Indeed, I Find California More Foreign To Me The Longer I Live Here. In Thirty Years Of Living Here On And Off, It Hasn't Lost Anything Of Foreignness. If Anything, It Has Gained.

A Lack Of Affiliation May Mean A Lack Of Accountability, And Forming A Sense Of Commitment Can Be Hard Without A Sense Of Community. Displacement Can Encourage The Wrong Kinds Of Distance, And If The Nationalism We See Sparking Up Around The Globe Arises From Too Narrow And Fixed A Sense Of Loyalty, The Internationalism That's Coming To Birth May Reflect Too Roaming And Undefined A Sense Of Belonging.

The Dalai Lama Says That When A Catholic And A Buddhist Speak, The Buddhist Becomes A Deeper Buddhist And The Catholic Becomes A Deeper Catholic.

Adventure Today Means Finding One's Way Back To The Silence And Stillness Of A Thousand Years Ago.

None Of The Things In Life - Like Love Or Faith - Was Arrived At By Thinking; Indeed, One Could Almost Define The Things That Mattered As The Ones That Came As Suddenly As Thunder.

The Ultimate Purpose Of Zen,' I Remembered The Roshi Telling Me, 'is Not In The Going Away From The World But In The Coming Back. Zen Is Not Just A Matter Of Gaining Enlightenment; It's A Matter Of Acting In A World Of Love And Compassion.

When One Questions [dalai Lama's] Political Actions, It Is Worth Remembering That He's The Single Most Experienced Politician On The Planet At This Moment.

I Think People's Minds Are Going To Have To Assimilate In The Sense That All The World Is International Now. The Whole World Has Gone Global. I Think Cities Like San Francisco And Los Angeles Are The Models Of Our Future.

Hello Kitty Will Never Speak.

I Think Of The Dalai Lama As A Doctor Of The Mind Offering Medicine And Specific Counsel And Cures In The Way A Great Doctor Would.

That's The Great Advantage Of Being A Foreigner: You're Not Paying Your Dues, But You Are Getting All The Benefits.

Comedy Is Nothing More Than Tragedy Deferred.

The Average American Teenager Sends Or Receives 75 Text Messages A Day, Though One Girl In Sacramento Managed To Handle An Average Of 10,000 Every 24 Hours For A Month.

The Less Conscious One Is Of Being A Writer, The Better The Writing.

We Have More And More Ways To Communicate, As Thoreau Noted, But Less And Less To Say.

And It’s Only By Going Nowhere - By Sitting Still Or Letting My Mind Relax - That I Find That The Thoughts That Come To Me Unbidden Are Far Fresher And More Imaginative Than The Ones I Consciously Seek Out.

Gandhi Or Bishop Tutu Or The Dalai Lama. I Think They're Really Embodiments Of What We Aspire To And, By Keeping Them In Our Heads, We're Reminding Ourselves Of Who We Could Be. That's What We're Hoping To Climb Up Towards.

For If Every True Love Affair Can Feel Like A Journey To A Foreign Country, Where You Can’t Quite Speak The Language, And You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, And You’re Pulled Ever Deeper Into The Inviting Darkness, Every Trip To A Foreign Country Can Be A Love Affair, Where You’re Left Puzzling Over Who You Are And Whom You’ve Fallen In Love With.

Not Many Years Ago, It Was Access To Information And Movement That Seemed Our Greatest Luxury; Nowadays Its Often Freedom From Information, The Chance To Sit Still, That Feels Like The Ultimate Prize. Stillness Is Not Just An Indulgence For Those With Enough Resources Its A Necessity For Anyone Who Wishes To Gather Less Visible Resources.

In Our Appetite For Gossip, We Tend To Gobble Down Everything Before Us, Only To Find, Too Late, That It Is Our Ideals We Have Consumed, And We Have Not Been Enlarged By The Feasts But Only Diminished.

In An Age Of Speed, I Began To Think Nothing Could Be More Exhilarating Than Going Slow. In An Age Of Distraction, Nothing Can Feel More Luxurious Than Paying Attention. And In An Age Of Constant Movement, Nothing Is More Urgent Than Sitting Still.

American Dreams Are Strongest In The Hearts Of Those Who Have Seen America Only In Their Dreams.

Dalai Lama Is Taking A Subtle And Nuanced View Of Politics And He Is Thinking In Terms Of Events Well Beyond Our Lifetime.

As Soon As I'm On The Road, I See, Often Palpably, That I Know Nothing At All, Which Is Always A Great Liberation.

I Think Dalai Lama Is Always Careful About Stressing That People Be Led Into The Practice By Somebody Who Knows What's Going On.

Silence Is Something More Than Just A Pause; It Is That Enchanted Place Where Space Is Cleared And Time Is Stayed And The Horizon Itself Expands. In Silence, We Often Say, We Can Hear Ourselves Think; But What Is Truer To Say Is That In Silence We Can Hear Ourselves Not Think....in Silence, We Might Better Say, We Can Hear Someone Else Think.

...home Lies In The Things You Carry With You Everywhere And Not The Ones That Tie You Down.

Just As There Are Many More Californians Now To Be Found In The Temples Of Kyoto Or The Villages Of Bali Or The Mountains Of The Himalayas Than Ever Before, What Is Also Exciting Is That One Can Just Go Downtown Santa Barbara And Find Ayurvedic Medicine, Thai Restaurants, And Japanese Cars In Abundance.

To Step Away From The World Isn't To Draw Back; It's Actually A Way To Tune In.

Dalai Lama Was Leading His Country During The Rigors Of World War Ii, He Was In Beijing For A Year In 1954; He Was Up Against Mao Zedong And Zhou Enlai From The Time That He Was Fifteen. So He's No Newcomer Or Naive When It Comes To Politics.

I Think America The Symbol And America The Notion Are Still Very Different From America The Nation. What's Touching And Almost Regenerative Is That Whatever Is Happening In The Reality Of America, Where There Is A Murder Rate Worse Than Lebanon's And Where There Is So Much Homelessness And Poverty, Still America Will Be A Shorthand Throughout The World For Everything That Is Young And Modern And Free.

The More Ways We Have To Connect, The More Many Of Us Seem Desperate To Unplug.

I Think Dalai Lama Efforts Have Been Heroic.

Travel Is An Act Of Humility

Going Nowhere Isn’t About Turning Your Back On The World; It’s About Stepping Away Now And Then So That You Can See The World More Clearly And Love It More Deeply.

Turning Your Back

I Take Very Seriously The Sense Of Our Living These Days In A Global Neighborhood. And The First Sensible Thing To Do In Such Circumstances, As Well As One Of The Most Rewarding Things, Is To Go And Meet The Neighbors, Find Out Who They Are, And What They Think And Feel. So Travel For Me Is An Act Of Discovery And Of Responsibility As Well A Grand Adventure And A Constant Liberation.

But It’s Only By Having Some Distance From The World That You Can See It Whole, And Understand What You Should Be Doing With It.

Some People Will Always Ground Themselves Very Strongly In A Piece Of Soil, A Grandmother's Property, A Tiny Plot Of Land, And That's Great. But In The Age Of Movement, There's No Question That The Number Of People Who Don't - Or Can't - Is Growing Exponentially.

Writing Of Every Kind Is A Way To Wake Oneself Up And Keep As Alive As When One Has Just Fallen In Love.

[the Dalai Lama ] Says Western Traditions Can Teach Tibetans A Lot About Social Action, And He Thinks Some Christians Are Very Good At That.

I Think That America Is An Ideal Place For The Privileged Homeless, Who Are Used To Different Cultures. It's Easiest And Most Accommodating Because It Is A Country Of Exiles And Immigrants And Newcomers. There Are No Walls, In That Sense. There Is Always The Sense That Traditions Are Being Made As We Speak. So You Can Slot Yourself In. If You Are Living At A Distance In Society, This Is One Of The Most Congenial Societies To Live In.

We Travel, Initially, To Lose Ourselves; And We Travel, Next To Find Ourselves. We Travel To Open Our Hearts And Eyes And Learn More About The World Than Our Newspapers Will Accommodate. We Travel To Bring What Little We Can, In Our Ignorance And Knowledge, To Those Parts Of The Globe Whose Riches Are Differently Dispersed. And We Travel, In Essence, To Become Young Fools Again- To Slow Time Down And Get Taken In, And Fall In Love Once More.

Falling In Love

Lonely Places, Then Are The Places That Are Not On International Wavelengths, Do Not Know How To Carry Themselves, Are Lost When It Comes To Visitors. They Are Shy, Defensive, Curious Places; Places That Do Not Know How They Are Supposed To Behave.

To This Day, At My Relatively Advanced Age, I Still Don't Have A Place I Can Really Call Home. I've Never Bought Property. I Just Move Between Temporary Base Camps. I Know That The Very Notion Of Home, Of Having A Family Or Community, Is A Hard One For Me To Embrace.

When I Was Two Years Old, I Heard About His [dalai Lama] Flight From Tibet. Being Very Little, I Said, "oh, Good Tibetans, Bad Chinese." Those Were The Black-and-white Ways That I Thought.

Black And White

Writing Should ... Be As Spontaneous And Urgent As A Letter To A Lover, Or A Message To A Friend Who Has Just Lost A Parent ... And Writing Is, In The End, That Oddest Of Anomalies: An Intimate Letter To A Stranger

It's Impressive That A Man [dalai Lama], On The Day After His Nobel Prize Was Announced, In October, 1989, Said To Me, "i Really Wonder If My Efforts Are Enough?" Most Of Us, If We Just Won The Nobel Prize, Would Think This Is Vindication, Or At Last There's A Chance For Tibet. He's The Rare Person Who Thinks, As A Buddha Would, "i Don't Know If I've Done Enough, I Don't Know If I Will Do Enough."

Because I Don't Belong Entirely To Britain Or The U.s. Or India Or Japan, I Build My Foundations In Some Way Deeper Than Mere Passports, And More In The Light Of Where I'm Going Than Of "where I Come From."

I Would Say That By Virtue Of Transforming Politics, [dalai Lama] Is In Fact Easily Underestimated.

Movement Is Only As Good As The Sense Of Stillness That You Can Bring To It To Put It Into Perspective.

In Terms Of Technology And Science, Tomorrow Does Know More Than Yesterday; But When It Comes To Emotions, Living With Uncertainty, Terror, I'm Not Sure We Know Any More Than Shakespeare Did, Or The Buddha. And The Power Of New Things - The Iphone Or Facebook - Is So Strong And Intoxicating That We Sometimes Forget That None Of Them Can Fundamentally Change Our Relation To Ourselves And To What Matters.

Suffering Is A Privilege. It Moves Us Toward Thinking Of Essential Things And Shakes Us Out Of Complacency. Calamity Cracks You Open, Moves You To Change Your Ways.

In An Age Of Acceleration, Nothing Can Be More Exhilarating Than Going Slow.

Destinations Are Less Important Than The Spirit You Bring To Them.

Travel Spins Us Round In Two Ways At Once: It Shows Us The Sights And Values And Issues That We Might Ordinarily Ignore; But It Also, And More Deeply, Shows Us All The Parts Of Ourselves That Might Otherwise Grow Rusty.

I'd Spent Thirty Years Visiting The Dalai Lama, And Twenty Years As A Journalist Going To Difficult Places, War Zones And Revolutions From North Korea To Haiti And Beirut To Sri Lanka, And The Question Came Up: What Does This Man Have To Offer To This World Which Seems So Torn Up And So Attached To Conflict?

You Rebel Against Your Parents Until You Become Them. One Day You Look In The Mirror And You See Your Father's Face.

Literally, When You Wake Up At 9 O'clock In The Morning In Havana You Don't Know Where You'll Be At Noon. But It's A Safe Guess That You'll Either Be Married, Arrested, Or In The Midst Of Some Incredible Transaction Where Somebody Is Stealing Your Passport Or Paying You In Dominican Pesos For It, Or Whatever. It's A Wild Place.

I Think People Like Me Are In A Relatively Privileged Position Because We Have To Some Extent Chosen To Live In Foreign Places. I Would Always Make The Distinction Between Those Who Are Exiles In Terms Of Being Thrown Out Of The Place They Want To Be, And Others Who Are Exiles In Terms Of Going Toward A Place They Would Rather Be.

He [the Dalai Lama] Has Made It His Mission To Say, "we Can't Afford To Squabble Over Minor Differences, We Have To Concentrate On What We Have In Common, Our Common Mission, Our Common Culture - And Indeed What We Have In Common With The Rest Of The World."

One Curiosity Of Being A Foreigner Everywhere Is That One Finds Oneself Discerning Edens Where The Locals See Only Purgatory.

Writing Is, In The End, That Oddest Of Anomalies: An Intimate Letter To A Stranger.

The Open Road Is The School Of Doubt In Which Man Learns Faith In Man.

A Holy Day, After All, Is A Day For Considering Everything You Otherwise Think Too Little About.

Technology, In Short, Cannot Teach Me How To Do Without Technology.

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