Dalai Lama: Mother’s Touch Root of all Human Value (& Religion)

I think the DalaiLama’s comments below have great bearing on our discussion here about spiritual process and the importance of the feminine in shaping human consciousness.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the Dalai Lalma is his willingness to break out of the boundaries of his own religious tradition and the Buddhist focus on Emptiness. He was quoted recently on the forum as saying Emptiness had no inherent existence, and he made additional comments that he was uncertain about the function of emptiness.

Now he goes one step further, says our core human values are defined by mother-child’s first embrace.

Why is this so significant?

Because Gautama Buddha, according to historians, never experienced that core human experience. His mother died while giving birth to him.

I pointed this lack of a mother out on this forum as being significant to his “psycho-history” and his development of his cosmic theory of Emptiness as the highest value, and it triggered severe reactions amongst some Buddhist followers as somehow being irreverent or petty or unimportant to such a divine ingallible being as Buddha.

Perhaps hearing it from the Dalai lama will make it more significant.

If we accept his premise that bonding with your mother is at the core of all human values and inner peace, and religion is the supposed carrier of humanity’s highiest values, then we have to ask if the current world religion are doing their job. How much spiritual value do they place on mothers as spiritual leaders? How do they embrace this principle of the feminine within their dogma, their leadership structure, and their practices?

michael

Bonding the key, Dalai Lama says
Tender embrace of mother and child gives spiritual leader inner peace

Michael Scott, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, September 08, 2006

The Dalai Lama believes he has the key to a happier world, and it has nothing to do with political process or balance of power.

The Buddhist spiritual leader, who arrived in Vancouver Thursday for a three-day visit, said the force that brings the deepest satisfaction to the world is the tender embrace between mother and newborn child.

Transcript: Interview with the Dalai Lama
“I am now 71 years old [but] I feel, still, deep in my mind, my first experience, my mother’s care. I can still feel it,” the Dalai Lama told a small audience at city hall, after a private meeting with Mayor Sam Sullivan.
“That immediately gives me inner peace, inner calmness,” he added.

The challenge in modern society is to hang on to that deep sense of connection later in life. “When we grow up, when our brain develops, then our intelligence causes short-sightedness,” he said. “And I think also the influence of the environment [plays a role]: then aggressiveness, fear, jealousy, anger, frustration — these things arise, and [cause our potential to] become submerged.”

The Dalai Lama said his No. 1 priority is to promote this quality of human bonding, a force he calls “human value.”

“After birth, our first experience is mother’s affection,” he said. “Mother’s care. The child at that time, just after birth, may not have the idea ‘This is my mother.’ But [will have a connection] because of the biological system or need, feeding, relying on that person. And on the mother’s side there is also that sort of tremendous feeling of care — and with that milk, also comes [the connection].

This is not due to religious faith, but because of the biological factor. That is the basis of our life breath, how our life started.

“So, now the time has come, I feel, that as a result of discussion — of exchange, different ideas, different views — and as a result of listening to others’ problems, and noticing the global-level problems, including terrorism, I feel, if we make more effort to sustain our basic value,

I think humanity may become more peaceful. More compassionate. As a result, differences can be easily solved through dialogue. Through talk. Through mutual understanding. So that is my number-one commitment: the promotion of human value.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is in Vancouver for three days of public discussions and events around the inauguration of an education centre being built here in his honour. During his first stop, at city hall, he answered a wide range of questions with humility, insight and humour.

Smiling at a mannerly scrum of reporters and photographers, the Dalai Lama expressed his admiration for the media, and then grinning broadly, explained how he often says that reporters should have long noses like an elephant’s, miming a long trunk-like proboscis that gently snuffled at his interpreter’s elbow. ”

[You need a nose like this to] smell everywhere, he said to sustained laughter. “I think, with respect [to Mayor Sullivan], you should use it to smell politicians, mayors, prime ministers, religious heads, businessmen, scientists. I think everywhere. I think we should know the reality.”