my Buddhist blog number 158

Hi Everybody,
Beautiful autumn day again here in Kew. So beautiful as to be Spring -like in fact! We're in the middle of a chapter about Buddhism and happiness, and trying to illustrate that when Buddhism and indeed today's social scientists are talking about happiness they have in mind a much broader and deeper experience than might generally be thought. We ended the last episode for example by describing how this concept of happiness would certainly be strong enough to embrace the pains and the problems that we all commonly encounter and would empower us to look for the seeds of the positive in things that go wrong in our lives rather than being eaten up by the sense of loss or damage.

And both Buddhism  and today's social scientists would want to embrace several other dimensions that are difficult to wrapped up in the simple word happiness but that we would all freely recognise as central to a durable sense of well-being. Dimensions such as
- rich and positive relations with others
- a sense of accomplishment in our endeavours
- a sense of meaning and purpose in our activities, and let's not forget
- a sense of compassion and altruism

In his book Flourish psychologist Martin Seligman recounts for us a brief but very telling anecdote which goes as follows:

' My friend Stephen Post, Professor of Medical Humanities at Stony Brook tells a story about his mother. When he was a young boy and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood she would say, ' Stephen why don't you go out and help someone?' Empirically Ma Post's maxim has been put to rigorous test and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.'

So a powerful life-lesson there in just half a dozen lines. Ma Post's natural wisdom he tells us, has been put to rigorous scientific test, and it reveals that showing compassion and altruism towards others produces the single most reliable increase in our sense of well-being. Evolutionary biologists have the devils own job to explain for us the evolutionary benefits of altruism and here we have a psychologist telling us that even the smallest acts of kindness and compassion towards others can have the most powerful effect on our personal sense of well-being.

But that simple human story illustrates two other fundamental qualities that are deeply interwoven into the Buddhist understanding of well-being, both of which seem to be born out by what the scientists tell us they have learned more recently.
We look at those next time.

Best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as a download on Kindle.