Sunbathing is Permitted

In the final section, His Holiness paints a moving picture of the selflessness that leads a practitioner to reach the highest level of spiritual practice. You come to this expanded spiritual capacity by extending the insight you gain about your own condition to others because you see that they are in a similar situation. Here the emphasis is on developing totally unbiased compassion through a series of cascading cause-and-effect exercises. Ordinary involvement and compassion are not replaced by a supernatural approach, but are expanded far beyond their usual scope and thus transformed. The Dalai Lama focuses on how to achieve this enlightened attitude, sustain and strengthen it while avoiding what undermines it. As with the previous steps, the quest for happiness is not renounced but adjusted towards a higher purpose, the transformation here being a broadening of perspective so that the suffering of others becomes our primary concern.
The process of self-study and self-help offered in this book leads us, first, to stop pursuing mere superficial pleasures in the present moment, then to becoming entangled in distressing feelings, and finally to breaking free from selfishness. Through selflessness, which calls for the development of insight, His Holiness displays the geography of his exercises and in the penultimate chapter offers insights into the true nature of reality. The stages of meditation covered in this section gradually lead to direct insight into the true status of people and things, so that our counterproductive ways of reacting can be removed and replaced with positive feelings.
On the pages before you, the Dalai Lama explains in great detail how each exercise is built step by step. His unique approach is to weave through all these exercises two core exercises, compassion and the insight of selflessness. Since these exercises are seen as the two wings of a bird flying towards enlightenment, it shows us their effect and meaning from the beginning. That is because, as he explains, the earlier and later exercises influence and deepen each other. Thus, these stages of spiritual practice are not rigid categories that require full understanding of each step before the next can be started; rather, they ask for familiarity with and constant practice of the whole range of exercises to enable cross-pollination.