In search of Shangri-La

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace…

WHEN I was an intern at Ateneo de Manila Law School’s Human Rights Center, that John Lennon classic was one of the staples of our jamming sessions—on the front steps of the law school after class, atop a jeepney in Palawan, on a beach in Bohol on a starry summer night, or in the ferry on our way to immerse with the Mangyan of Mindoro.

We were such idealists then, self-righteous in many ways. We fought for human rights. We spent our summers communing with farmers, fishers, indigenous peoples, prisoners, and the urban poor.

I remember reading a quote ascribed to Winston Churchill that if you’re still an idealist in your middle age, then you’re a fool.

Perhaps. Yet here I am, still an idealist, and unrepentantly so. I still believe in the inherent goodness of every human being. I still believe that there is a better way of living and being in this world, that humanity can transcend itself. I still believe that authentic happiness comes from dedicating our short time on this earth to something bigger than ourselves. In that belief, I have searched for that something bigger everywhere—I lived in Jerusalem to help the Palestine refugees, I worked in an anti-AIDS organization in Geneva, I helped at the Office of the President in Malacañang, and now I am working at the United Nations in New York, where being involved in a project like the one managed by the Bhutan government’s Gross National Happiness Commission is all in a day’s work.

But all that work, which continues to give me immense fulfillment and psychic reward, cannot compare with the real excitement I feel when I imagine the kind of society that mindfulness can create.

In the United States, and slowly in other parts of the world, mindfulness is becoming mainstream. If you had a chance to read my earlier commentaries on the matter, I made mindfulness look like it was just what Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and author, wittingly calls “a glorified version of an executive stress ball”—some kind of superpower, if you will, to better handle the complexities of our lives as humans. That is definitely true, and many science papers can back that assertion.

But that significantly undervalues the true potential of mindfulness. “It’s more like the large Hadron Collider in that it’s a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind,” as Sam Harris puts it, and, I would add, shift the entire human culture. As the Mindfulness Summit says, it has “the capacity to change the world from the inside out, one person at a time.”

Last month, I had the privilege to be part of the Mindful Justice conference. It was a historic gathering of influential leaders from the full spectrum of the US criminal justice system, to explore mindfulness-based approaches to transforming a broken criminal justice system into one that is more humane, compassionate, effective and sustainable, one that is a force for healing and community resilience for everyone affected by it, including the police and corrections officials, judges, prosecutors and public defenders, crime victims, and prisoners.

There have been many success stories of the transformative power of mindfulness, particularly in the prison population in the United States. “The Dhamma Brothers,” a brilliant documentary, tells the inspiring story of prisoners in a maximum-security prison in Alabama sentenced to life without parole whose lives were transformed when they were introduced to mindfulness practices.

Science has yet to provide the explanation for this transformative power. It might take a while for a satisfactory answer to come. Yet even without that scientific explanation, I believe. And it is because in the more than two years that I have been diving deeper into mindfulness, I am astounded by all the  highly-evolved, wise and compassionate human beings I have met and continue to meet in this space. My own life has been transformed by regular practice; I have a long way to go but I can see that I had become a kinder, more authentic human being as a result of the practice.

Robert Thurman, the preeminent Tibetan Buddhism scholar in the world and a good friend of the Dalai Lama, gave a lecture in a Buddhist psychology class I am taking at the Tibet House. I was captivated by his narration of the history of Tibet, which, for more than 300 years until the communists came, was able to create and maintain a remarkable society, completely demilitarized, and “a place of unprecedented opportunity for the individual intent on enlightenment: maximum low-cost lifelong educational opportunities, minimum taxes, no military service, no mortgages, no factories for material products, no lack of teachers and realized beings…”

As he narrated the story, it reminded me of a favorite movie I saw with my parents on our black-and-white TV set when I was little, based on the James Hilton novel “Lost Horizon,” which introduced me to that fictional, permanently happy land called Shangri-La.  It turns out it was not all fiction, after all.

I dream of that Shangri-La, for that better world where wisdom and compassion rule, for our children and our children’s children.

Joel Villaseca ([email protected]) is a lawyer living in New York City and training as a teacher with siyli.org. He says this piece is dedicated to Chochoy Medina, “who in many ways led me on this path.”