Hand in Hand
Our dear friend, Catherine Ingram, has reported on the Vancouver Peace Summit, a three-day gathering of luminaries including the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle, Maria Shriver, numerous Nobel laureates, and a couple dozen other presenters.
The Dalai Lama, Catherine said, emphasized again and again the need for women to have greater roles in leadership in all fields because, he said, they are “biologically” more nurturing and have a greater sensitivity to suffering. He feels that our educational system is the domain in which ethics and a connection to the totality of life needs to be taught now that there is a worldwide diminishment of the role of churches and the cohesion of families, arenas which once provided more spiritual and ethical sustenance. He also implored the educators and scientists attending the conference to introduce emotional and social intelligence in schools and for the media to start concentrating more on “good news,” stories that uplift our spirits instead of scaring us to death.
Eckhart Tolle, she said, suggested the introduction of “awareness” training in schools, not just as one of the subjects but as the main subject — “awareness of emotions, awareness of thoughts, of other human beings and their thoughts,” and for young people to learn to not equate their thoughts with who they are so that a child has a sense early on of his or her own nature and of the nature of the other children.
There was a moment I heard about, Catherine said, that I didn’t actually witness. After one of the sessions, the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle held hands as they walked to lunch. It is an image I would have liked to imprint in memory, one that I might call upon in moments of distress. To most of the world, they are probably the two most respected spiritual leaders of East and West. But in these last days and over the many years I have known them both, they have shown themselves to be wise global citizens, beautifully human and simple, doing their part for a gentler world.