By Sherry Gaudreau
The Dalai Lama is no doubt one of the most inspiring people in the world. You may wonder, what is the actual responsibility that comes with being the Dalai Lama? There are three main commitments; promoting human values, advocating religious harmony, and healing the Tibetan people with their struggle for justice.
The broadest commitment he has is promoting human values. I say broadest because well, everyone in the world has human values. We all have our own battles with forgiveness, tolerance, compassion, and self-discipline. These values are called secular ethics, which are defined as a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties. The Dalai Lama said, “By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection and warmheartedness -- or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being.” He believes that many of the problems we face in the world today are caused by neglect. We need to promote our positive human values, because we often forget them. We all have good qualities, but he urges us to learn how to fight our bad qualities. This will benefit ourselves by strengthening our inner values as well as the people around us as we become a role model. How do we develop good values you may wonder? He says it is much like physical exercise, the more we train our abilities, the stronger they become.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama will speak on Oct. 18 and 19 at Western Connecticut State University, and the public is invited to a free showing (video simulcast) in the Ives Concert Hall, 181 White St. To help promote this opportunity, WCSU students in the Writing and Linguistics Department's Advertising, Copywriting and Promotions class created a Twitter page. and they are writing this blog daily.
