The Book of Joy

questions. The kind of acceptance that the Dalai Lama and the
Archbishop were advocating is not passive. It is powerful. It does not
deny the importance of taking life seriously and working hard to change
what needs changing, to redeem what needs redemption. “You must not
hate those who do harmful things,” the Dalai Lama has explained. “The
compassionate thing is to do what you can to stop them—for they are
harming themselves as well as those who suffer from their actions.”
One of the key paradoxes in Buddhism is that we need goals to be
inspired, to grow, and to develop, even to become enlightened, but at the
same time we must not get overly fixated or attached to these aspirations.
If the goal is noble, your commitment to the goal should not be
contingent on your ability to attain it, and in pursuit of our goal, we must
release our rigid assumptions about how we must achieve it. Peace and
equanimity come from letting go of our attachment to the goal and the
method. That is the essence of acceptance.
Reflecting on this seeming paradox, of pursuing a goal yet with no
attachment to its outcome, Jinpa explained to me that there is an
important insight. This is a deep recognition that while each of us should
do everything we can to realize the goal we seek, whether or not we
succeed often depends on many factors beyond our control. So our
responsibility is to pursue the goal with all the dedication we can muster,
do the best we can but not become fixated on a preconceived notion of a
result. Sometimes, actually quite often, our efforts lead to an unexpected
outcome that might even be better than what we originally had in mind.
I thought of the Archbishop’s comment that it takes time to build our
spiritual capacity. “It’s like muscles that have to be exercised in order for
them to be strengthened. Sometimes we get too angry with ourselves,
thinking that we ought to be perfect from the word go. But this being on
Earth is a time for us to learn to be good, to learn to be more loving, to
learn to be more compassionate. And you learn, not theoretically. You
learn when something happens that tests you.”
Life is constantly unpredictable, uncontrollable, and often quite
challenging. Edith Eva Eger explained that life in a concentration camp
was an endless selection line where one never knew whether one would