The Dalai Lama speaks of cultivating hopeful, appreciative, heartening thoughts and feelings and how the vibrations of these thoughts really, truly, exist and affect others. He gives talks on ‘Inner Peace/Outer Peace’ and suggests both are so closely interrelated as to be one. What we do to help ourselves – releasing our physical tension, soothing the nervous system, slowing down the breath and the activity level of the mind, calming our anxiety, fatigue and sadness, even for a moment – helps everyone: those we know, those we don’t know, those we have yet to meet, those we’ll never meet.
Thich Nhat Hanh describes the reality of ‘inter-being’, as he calls it, as all things existing in a state of interconnectedness, a state of being interwoven and mutually dependent. And it’s not simply a pleasing or interesting theory – it’s real. Animals exist because there’s rain and sun and air and gravity that create the plant life and other animals which are part of them and upon which they depend and all those things coming together, integrating, sustain human life. Our modern human lifestyles and attitudes compartmentalize – with practice, we begin to see and feel the deep connections in nature, in culture, in the political sphere, and in the expansive spiritual territory where we all reside. The big picture, the whole picture.
Your happiness depends upon the quality of your thoughts.– Marcus Aurelius
And, it seems, on others’ thoughts, as well.
I think it’s a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn’t their life and our life. Nor your life and my life. That it’s just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.– Kate Forster