OPPORTUNITY

The Opportunity
—by Ward Mailliard

This nation and our world are in need of great healing. The modern pace of life and the level of our consumption as an antidote to the absence of meaningful human relationships is fragmenting our world and gradually eroding the very environment on which we depend. One of the most significant dilemmas of modern society is the separation and isolation that seems to be taking place at all levels of society from families to community to state and nation.

No one set out to create this division and growing isolation. It appears to be a naturally occurring phenomenon accelerated by modern conditions. Nonetheless we are left with the increasingly important question of how to find real happiness as we engage with the wonders and challenges of the modern world.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his book titled Ethics for the New Millennium calls us back into a thoughtful conversation about the values and ethics that govern our lives. It is not a prescription for our behavior, but rather an invitation to reflect deeply on what brings us, as human beings, true and lasting happiness. The Dalai Lama Foundation with the help of students on three continents has launched a multi-platform adventure called Project Happiness. The essence of this project is to engage young people in a cross-cultural dialogue about the relationship of happiness to one’s values and ethics. In this project, students from the United States, Nigeria and India are cooperating in creating their own curriculum for Ethics for the New Millennium. This curriculum will amplify those aspects of the Dalai Lama’s message that most appeal to the students’ own inner sense of what is true and communicate those ideas to other young people around the world in a manner that will draw them into this important conversation.

Through the use of modern technology, the Mount Madonna School students in California are reaching out to a group of students in Nigeria and the Tibetan Childrens’ Village in India to explore the cross-cultural dimensions of this project. They are exchanging emails, sharing writing, video, photography, art and music, through a web log and video log as they explore vital questions that will help them learn about what promotes lasting happiness in each other’s countries. The Mount Madonna students are also reaching out to a wide range of mentors and leading thinkers to find complementary ideas and processes that support the messages they find meaningful.

The culmination of this project will be a journey to India in March of 2007 for the American and Nigerian students to meet students from the Tibetan Children’s Village at Dharamsala in northern India. While in Dharamsala, they will all enjoy the unique privilege of deepening the conversation in a private audience with the Dalai Lama. Underlying the student’s extraordinary journey is the possibility that they will not only learn for themselves what promotes lasting happiness but they will also be able to inform us and reconnect all of us with a greater understanding of what we need to focus on to promote a more peaceful, happy and sustainable world. They will do this through the interactive web site they are putting up as part of the project, and through the book they will create together as a curriculum for other students. Their journey is also the subject of a documentary that will be aired as an independent film and on PBS. They will also be featured on Channel One, which is a station that provides content to a third of the high schools in America.

For the students it is a journey of a lifetime. For the world it is an opportunity to see, through the eyes of our children, what is most important in the quest for lasting happiness.