Highlights and Commentary on Robert Thurman’s December 2006 Talk at the TED Conference

In the Vimalakirti Sutra, the Buddha creates a mechanism for seeing the whole cosmos out of jeweled parasols to “show the total interconnection of all life in the universe and all universes. And of course in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it,” began Robert Thurman, the first American to become ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist Monk by the Dalai Lama.

“He [Buddha] made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected.” He continued, “And of course in the Buddhist universe, we’ve already done this already billions of times, in many many lifetimes in the past.”

Modern technology, such as the internet and television, are very much like the magic parasols in the Vimalakirti. They are “forging a mass awareness of where everybody can really know everything that’s going on everywhere in the planet.” Thereby, the interconnectedness of the world is more apparent than ever. And the sufferings of the world are more intolerable as we sit comfortably watching them unfold.
“With all of us knowing everything, we’re kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.”

Nonetheless, we seem confined to our own suffering.
Tennessee “Williams writes, “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.” But according to Buddha, these are mind forged manacles, merely an habitual egocentric misconception. We are much more than just what lies within our skin. And as such, this illusion of an independent self is a source of great suffering which alienates us and makes life lonely. The Buddha sounding like a physicist said “The entire universe is nothing but combustion and vibration.” He taught that human life is like a river and that clinging to impermanent phenomena is the source of all suffering.

Albert Einstein explains, “We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self.”

With compassion and insight, this delusion of separateness from other beings is dissolved. With compassion we lose ourselves and are freed from this false boundary. We are free to feel what other people feel. It is no longer us versus the universe. We are the universe.

Thurman continued, “But who would really want to be compassionate? How awful! I am so miserable on my own. My head is aching. My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I’m never satisfied. I never have enough. Even [if] I’m a billionaire, I don’t have enough. I need a hundred billion. So I’m like that. Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people’s suffering. It would be terrible!”

“But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. When you’re no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom, or the intelligence, or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life, and you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing.”

“You know, we really learned everything in the ’60s. Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they’ve been trying to suppress it since then. I, me, me, mine. It’s like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. But when we’re relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. And we feel ourselves differently. It’s totally strange. It’s totally strange. The Dalai Lama always likes to say — he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it’s because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. It’s really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know — and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. Like, even when you’re having a good time, when is the good time over? The good time is over when you think, how good is it? And then it’s never good enough.”

Apparently, the more we strive for our own self centered happiness, the more elusive it becomes. Like Mick Jagger sang, “I can’t get no satisfaction, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried.”

The Dalai Lama agrees, “The more you think about your own self, the more self-centered you are, the more trouble even small problems create in your mind. The stronger your sense of ‘I’, the narrower the scope of your thinking becomes; then even small obstacles become unbearable. On the other hand, if you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life’s inevitable difficulties disturb you less.”

Thurman concludes, “I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion, is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That’s the key. Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they’re so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he’s fairly jolly. Even though his people are being genocided — and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun’s head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. I won’t even say what they do. But he feels it. And yet he’s very jolly. He’s extremely jolly.”

See Video of Robert Thurman’s Talk

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I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

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