After a failed uprising and the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, the Dalai Lama left for India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan Government in Exile) and in seeking to preserve Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him.

The theme of the book was mostly based around perspective. It is explained in this book how all feelings and thoughts come from your perspective. He shows you how if you go into any situation with a compassionate, and understanding state of mind, it helps to fully understand why people act the way they do. He goes into depth of what perspectives are best to have in life, and why. He then goes on to talk about certain processes and ways to help accomplish these states of mind. The book “How to See Yourself as You Really Are” by the Dalai Lama, is good book that talks a lot about human nature. It goes through chapters of how the human mind sees itself. Then he goes on to tell you helpful ways of understanding yourself, or “how to see yourself as you really are.” He explains all of this from a Buddhist perspective, and helps to give good tips on how you can reach the proper state of mind.Good book. Is a bit repetitive and moralizing with too much stressing how life is suffering and all. Reifications such as "morality/moral values" and "cyclic existence" weren't defined, so it took me almost the whole book to figure out most of them. While I may have thought somewhere at the beginning "Oh, ok, he means that", later on I got confused again about how the term was used. And I think it was only possible for me to figure them out at all because I already was familiar with the concepts using different (more common) words. I doubt that someone who's new to this would understand what he's talking about. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-07-22 21:12:39.410427 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1138923 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid S0022 Donor

Drawing on wisdom and techniques refined in Tibetan monasteries for more than a thousand years, and adopting as its structure traditional Buddhist steps of meditative reflection, How to See Yourself As You Really Are includes practical exercises and gives readers a clear path to assess their growth and personal development. Also, he's forcing the concept of "cyclic existence" on us (while saying at the beginning that what he's about to tell us could be applied without having anything to do with religions) and basing the concepts he's talking about on it.

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The only way to gain this understanding is internal. You need to give up false beliefs you are superimposing on the way things really are; there is no external means of removing lust and hatred. If you are pierced by a thorn, you can remove it forever with a needle, but to get rid of an internal attitude, you must see clearly the mistaken beliefs on which it is based. This calls for using reason to explore the true nature of phenomena and then concentrate on what has been understood."

But perhaps this is to be expected from a reader who feels that without passion (something the Dalai Lama puts forward as a 'sin' and undesirable), while causing many of the world's problems, has also created some of the world's finest moments in art, science, literature, social reform and more. Without passion there would be no impetus to create, to achieve a state closer to the divine. On 17 November 1950, at the age of 15, he was enthroned as Tibet's ruler. Thus he became Tibet's most important political ruler just one month after the People's Republic of China's invasion of Tibet on 7 October 1950. In 1954, he went to Beijing to attempt peace talks with Mao Zedong and other leaders of the PRC. These talks ultimately failed. This book is one of the most meaningful and loving book I have ever read, and I believe you will feel the same way if you give the books many reads in smaller chunks like I did. I feel that Dalai Lama is doing his best in making Buddhist teachings more approachable to people of other religions or non-religion.

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I myself re-read each chapter for 3 to 6 times and my advice is when you read a chapter, if you don't get at all what Dalai Lama means in the first place, that's fine. Close the book. Do something else. Then return to read it again. You can stop and return to it as many times as you want as I think it depends on different cases. Usually as I re-read a chapter in Part IV for the 3rd time, I started to get what he really means. Reading it a couple of times more indeed deepens my understanding in his teachings a lot more. And this makes me think perhaps because the teachings are so deep and unfamiliar with general readers, they would find it difficult to enjoy it the way they typically do with other books. However, I can make sure with you Dalai Lama knows this, that's why he keeps saying in the book "please bear with me as I am going into more details here" or something like that. The book's third part describes how to harness the power of meditative concentration with insight to achieve immersion in our own ultimate nature, which undermines our problems at their very foundation. The fourth and fifth parts discuss how people and things actually do exist, since they do not exist in the way we assume. The Dalai Lama draws readers into noticing how everything depends on thought -- how thought itself organizes what we perceive. His goal is to develop in us a clear sense of what it means to exist without misconception. Then the final part of the book explains the way this profound state of being enhances love by revealing how unnecessary destructive emotions and suffering actually are. In this way self-knowledge is seen as the key to personal development and positive relationships. Once we know how to put insight in the service of love and love in the service of insight, we come to the book's appendix, an overview of the steps for achieving altruistic enlightenment. In all areas of thought, you need to be able to analyze, and then, when you have come to a decision, you need to be able to set your mind to it without wavering. These two capacities - to analyze and to remain focused - are essential to seeing yourself as you really are.... All these improvements are made in the mind by changing how you think, transforming your outlook through analysis and focus. All types of meditation fall into the general categories of analytical meditation and focusing meditation, also called insight meditation and calm abiding meditation."