Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

When we engage in mindful e-mailing, that recollecting quality of mindfulness is the main one we rely on. The first thing we recollect is that there is a human being on the other end, a human being just like me. The second thing we recollect is this insight that people who receive e-mails unconsciously fabricate missing information about the emotional context of the sender, so we apply the appropriate care and caution.

Given that, here is the practice for mindful e-mailing.

PRACTICE OF MINDFUL E-MAILING

1. Begin by taking one conscious breath. If this is a particularly sensitive situation, calm your mind with a few minutes of Mindfulness Meditation (see Chapter 2) or Walking Meditation (see Chapter 3).

2. Mindfully reflect that on the receiving end, there are one or more human beings. Human beings just like me. If this is a particularly difficult situation, it may be useful to visualize the receiver or receivers in your mind and to engage in a few minutes of the Just Like Me / Loving Kindness exercise (see Chapter 7).

3. Write your e-mail.

4. Before sending, mindfully reflect on the insight that if the emotional context of your message is unclear, the receiver’s brain will just make something up that is likely more negative than you intended. Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes, pretend you know nothing about the sender’s (your) emotional context, pretend also that you have a negative bias, and read your e-mail. Revise your e-mail if necessary.

5. Take one conscious breath before pressing Send. If this is a particularly delicate situation—for example if you are writing an angry e-mail to your boss or your subordinate—take three slow, conscious breaths before pressing Send. Feel free to change your mind about pressing Send.

Meng’s Magic Mushroom Mantra

Let us close this chapter with a mantra that I created for myself. It summarizes many of my social skills practices. The mantra is:

Love them. Understand them. Forgive them. Grow with them.

Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation involving other people, I silently repeat the mantra to myself. It usually works. It works especially well with children and bosses.

My friend Rigel suggested that my mantra may also apply to magic mushrooms (very funny, Rigel), hence the name of the mantra.

CHAPTER NINE

Three Easy Steps to World Peace

The Story Behind Search Inside Yourself

To reach peace, teach peace.

—Pope John Paul II

Search Inside Yourself started with a simple dream, and that dream is world peace.

Like many others wiser than me, I believe world peace can and must be created from the inside out. If we can find a way for everybody to develop peace and happiness within themselves, their inner peace and happiness will naturally manifest into compassion. And if we can create a world where most people are happy, at peace, and compassionate, we can create the foundation for world peace.

Fortunately, a methodology for doing that already exists and has already been practiced by various peoples for thousands of years. It is the art of using contemplative practices to develop the mind. Most of us know it as meditation.

Meditation, at its simplest, is the training of attention. With enough meditative training, one’s attention can become unwaveringly calm and focused. With that enhanced quality of attention, one’s mind can easily, and for extended periods, become highly relaxed and alert at the same time. With that combination of relaxation and alertness, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness. Here’s an analogy: Think of the mind as a snow globe that is shaken constantly. When you stop shaking the snow globe, the white “snow” particles within it eventually settle, and the fluid in the snow globe becomes calm and clear at the same time. Similarly, the mind is normally in a constant state of agitation. With deep mental relaxation and alertness, the mind settles into calmness and clarity. In this mind, the third quality, inner happiness, naturally emerges.

Inner happiness is contagious. When a person allows her inner glow of happiness to emerge, people around her tend to respond to her more positively. The meditator then finds her social interactions becoming increasingly positive, and because we are social creatures, positive social interactions create more happiness within her. A happy virtuous cycle of inner and social happiness thus establishes. As this cycle becomes stronger, the meditator finds herself becoming increasingly kinder and more compassionate.

We can train and develop the mind to create inner peace, happiness, and compassion. The best part of this training is that we do not even have to force ourselves to have those qualities; they are all naturally already within each of us, and all we need to do is create the conditions for them to emerge, grow, and flourish. We create those conditions through meditation. With meditation, we allow ourselves to become much happier and much more compassionate, and if enough of us do that, we create the foundation for world peace.

Hence, in a serious way that is almost comical, the key active ingredient in the formula for world peace may be something as simple as meditation. It’s such a simple solution to such an intractable problem, it is almost absurd. Except it may actually work.

This insight led me to an epiphany. I have found my life’s goal. My life’s goal is to make the benefits of meditation accessible to humanity. Note that I am not trying to bring meditation to the world. I am not even trying to bring its benefits to the world. All I intend to do is to make its benefits accessible. That is all. All I am doing is opening the door to the treasure room and telling people, “Here, all this treasure you see, feel free to take as much of it as you want, or not.” I am merely a door opener. I am confident that the transformative power of contemplative practices is so compelling, anybody who understands it will find it irresistible. It is kind of like offering the secrets of health (for example, hygiene, nutrition, exercise, and sleep) to unhealthy people. Once people understand and begin to experience the benefits of health, there is no going back; it is just too compelling.

But, how? How does one make the benefits of meditation accessible to humanity? The answer to that question is something I half jokingly call the Three Easy Steps to World Peace.

1. Start with me.

2. Make meditation a field of science.

3. Align meditation with real life.

Start with Me

The first step is the most obvious, and it’s attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: I need to become the change that I want to see in the world. To this end, I came up with an almost measurable goal for myself—that before the end of my lifetime, I want to create in myself the capacity to be kind to everyone, all the time. I want to be the Kindness Channel: all kindness, all day.

Make Meditation a Field of Science

To become widely accessible, meditation needs to become a field of science the same way medicine became a field of science. Like meditation, medicine had been practiced for countless generations, but ever since medicine became a field of science starting in the nineteenth century (beginning, perhaps, with Pasteur’s research into microorganisms), everything about medicine has changed. I think the most important change was access. When medicine became scientific, it became greatly demystified; new tools, equipment, and methodologies became available; and training and certification of service providers greatly improved. In other words, a lot more people gained access to good medicine. I want to see the same thing happen to meditation.