Mission: Joy - Finding Happiness in Troubled Times
Counterintuitive Wisdom on the Art of Living
What is your mission?
Do you see a connection between suffering and compassion? You might be surprised to hear the Dalia Lama and Desmond Tutu speak on suffering and compassion.
The new Netflix documentary Mission: Joy — Finding Happiness in Troubled Times explores the nature of suffering, joy, and compassion with His Holiness the Dalia Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu inspired by their 2015 book titled: The Book of Joy with Douglas Abrams.
A theme throughout the documentary is how compassion is our most valuable and important thing.
Desmond Tutu tells the story of Nelson Mandela,
When Nelson Mandela went to jail, he was young and, you could almost say, bloodthirsty. He was head of the armed wing of the African National Congress, his party. He spent twenty-seven years in jail, and many would say, Twenty-seven years, oh, what a waste. And I think people are surprised when I say no, the twenty-seven years were necessary. They were necessary to remove the dross. The suffering in prison helped him to become more magnanimous and willing to listen to the other side. To discover that the people he regarded as his enemy, they too, were human beings who had fears and expectations. And they had been molded by their society. And so without the twenty-seven years, I don’t think we would have seen the Nelson Mandela with the compassion, the magnanimity, the capacity to put himself in the shoes of the other.
Similarly, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky — who spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, said, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and deep heart.” Then you have figures like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (and others), who stated, “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”
What if finding joy and meaning are on the same path?
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