Good Life Project - Matthieu Ricard: World's Happiest Man on What Really Matters.

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

What turns a devout scientist into Buddhist monk?Born in France in 1946, Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who left a career in cellular genetics to study Buddhism and live a largely monastic life in the Himalayas over 45 years ago.Sharing his insights, Ricard has since become an international best-selling author and a prominent speaker on the world stage, celebrated at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the NGH forums at the United Nations, and at TED where his talks on happiness and altruism has been viewed by over six million people.His books have been translated into over twenty languages, and his newest is, Beyond the Self: A conversation between Neuroscience and Buddhism.Ricard was lightly dubbed "the happiest man alive," after neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin scanned his brain during meditation and found the highest capacity for happiness ever recorded.As a trained scientist and Buddhist monk, he is uniquely positioned in the dialogue between East and West. He is an active participant in the current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives in Nepal and devotes all the proceedings of his books and activities to 200 humanitarian projects in Tibet, India, and Nepal.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do neuroscientists know what consciousness is? Hardly any neuroscientist will pretend that we know really what consciousness is, for a very good reason. It's that it's a matter of experience. And experience is experience as the first person. You cannot know what experience is by describing everything from the outside, what kind of neurons have been activated, what area of the brain. Even if you knew the function and the activity

of billions of neurons when you are angry or see the color red or feel love, that will tell you absolutely zero what it feels to experience love or anger. So modern science now tells us that meditating or training your mind for a relatively short window of time can create pretty big changes in behavior and outcome. But what if you actually spend somewhere between 40 and 60,000 hours in meditation? Well, that's the life that today's guest, Mathieu Ricard, has lived. Growing up in France, the son of a renowned philosopher and an acclaimed painter, he

started to stake his claim as a scientist in molecular genetics when he decided to actually make a pretty fierce left turn and found himself living in a hermitage in Nepal, studying Buddhism. He eventually took his vows and became a monk and has lived there ever since full time, devoting himself to the study and the practice and relieving of suffering. Along the way, he has started a foundation called Karuna Sechen, which now serves, it helps educate and provide healthcare for some 300,000 people. And he has written a series of books, the latest of which is a really fascinating dialogue between him and a friend of his, Wolf Singer, who is a neuroscientist, around how classic Buddhist

practices rewire your brain. It's called Beyond the Self. I had the opportunity to sit down with Mathieu as he was here in New York for a brief amount of time before returning to Nepal. And we went deep into both his own personal journey, how he made decisions like leaving sort of popular mainstream life as a rising scientist to become a monk in Nepal, to how all of these different practices profoundly changed him in his life, and how it has also inspired him to then return to a certain extent and participate in the evolution of science around these practices, and also begin writing again, and sharing and publishing books and also heading up this foundation, Karuna Sechan. So really excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I'm fascinated by you, by your story, by your work. What I'd love to do is sort of touch down in different parts of your story. I grew up in France in a family that seems like it was very steeped in scholarship, in philosophy. And from what I know, your dad was a philosopher. Your mom was at one point.

She's a painter, and she's 94. And we just last year helped to make a book of 70 years of her painting, which was a beautiful photo book. And they did a big exhibition of 70 years of painting. How wonderful. So she's still alive, and she doesn't paint anymore because her hands are getting too feeble. But she knew all the painters of

her time. Simply she left for India for 20 years so that made a fatal blow to her career but she was already exposing in museums and she did a scene sort of paintings for Maurice Béjar,

who was a famous choreographer. So she would have a nice career, but she became a Buddhist nun as well. So that's usually not very good for PR for a Parisian painter. To vanish for 20 years. What made her, what drew her to that?

I mean, if she was very much on a path as a painter, what made her then become a Buddhist monk? I was a scientist and a photographer and I also became a Buddhist monk. So, I guess probably the same reason that I moved from a scientific career to study with

Tibetan masters is that, well, you find very interesting people in the artistic world, in the science world in the intellectual world but it not necessarily gives you role models for living a good life and also to become

a better human being to also be more at the service of society and go at the root of the mechanism of happiness and suffering. So, you know, Parisian life is not particularly conducive to flourishing. A lot of tormented people. And also, the thing that struck me, and I guess it struck her as well,

is that you meet all kind of people who are genius in their own fields, but that doesn't translate necessarily as being a good human being so it's puzzling for 18 years old to see those great mathematicians scientists, philosophers and some of them are wonderful people some of them are absolutely impossible

but it has nothing to do with their other skills for which they are sort of renowned. So there's this kind of discrepancy that is incoherent in a way that is puzzling. Well, after I met those men and women of wisdom in the Himalayas, you can't have a spiritual master that is very respected and sometimes say, he's a great master, what a pity, he's so angry, jealous, arrogant.

It doesn't work because they are respected as spiritual teachers because their messenger is the message. And they are people of compassion, of wisdom, of inner strength, of humility. And so whatever you look as a human quality, you would like to become like them, not just to know the skills that they have developed. It's so interesting the way you phrase that. I'm asked often how I choose who to bring into these conversations. And one of the things that I've realized, maybe I didn't realize I was doing at the beginning, but I realized since then, is I look for what I would call embodied teachers.

Teachers who don't just have incredibly bright things to say, but when you look at the beginning, but I realized since then is I look for what I would call embodied teachers. Teachers who don't just have incredibly bright things to say, but when you look at the way they live their lives, when you're in their presence, you just feel there's this, to use your word, coherence. Yeah. So I spent seven years non-stop with

the teacher. Another 13 years after my first teacher passed away with the second teacher, Dilgo Kinser Moshi. For many was his kind of attendant, means I was sleeping on the floor in his room, he was very old, and being there all the time, when he was meeting kings, and when he was giving tisheks to farmers, you know, all kinds of situations. And in 13 years, I never ever witnessed an action or a word that could remotely harm anyone. It's not that he was, you know, like a passive, everything is okay, let everyone run over me. He was incredibly strong, and you know, you were in a feeling of awe in front of him but and sort of no any crack or defect in the armor of unconditional loving kindness but not this kind of softy sentimental one it could be strict but

also if you knew it was just for getting rid of some of your defect so the mixture of being like a mountain unshakable mountain, and no, you could not find defects. And it's not also something showy or self-advertising. It's something that you discover with time. So even you cannot judge of the ultimate enlightenment

of someone from the inside. But that coherence that you see over the years in private, in public, with humble people and with the supposedly big stuff, this is a teaching in itself. Because if you see of someone, oh, I've never seen him doing anything that could be remotely harmful to someone,

you say, well, of course, but it's not very common in daily life. Someone would never say hurt someone. Indeed. So I want to fill in a quick gap. So we were talking about your mom and her decision to take her path. You started down a very traditional path. You started down the traditional path of academics and science and pursued your PhD. And it sounds like the reasons that your mom and you both changed course pretty dramatically were pretty similar because you then went from the world of science and academia to a monastery in Nepal. Well, first of all, yes. So, again, you know, I traveled when I was a little bit over 20 in 1967, met a great master, including the one who's become my first main teachers.

And then I came back and forth many times. I think I went seven times back and forth until I finished my PhD every summer for a month. So even while you were pursuing? So I had really a lot of time to mature that, not to make sort of hasty decision and to let this be a natural sort of culmination of aspiration. You know, it's like the example of an apple on the branch. If it's too early, you pull hard the green apple and you break the branch and you get a fruit that is not edible. When it's ready,

you just put your hand and turn a little bit and it falls in your hand. So when things are ready, it's natural, effortless, it's the obvious things to do. So after seven years or six years at Pasteur Institute, it was the clear thing that this is where I wanted to live, the kind of person I wanted to be with, and what I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life. And retrospectively, now I'm nearly 72, I feel incredibly fortunate that I took that decision at the right time because too early might have been a little bit premature, would have created difficulties with my father, you know, sort of waste of all the education. Too late would have been a waste of time. So it was perfect.

Yeah, I guess you follow your intuition to a certain extent with that. It became obvious, you know, those things, people, oh, how can you, you know, such a difference, you know, you live the Parisian life, a scientific career, just go to the Himalayas,

to a small hermitage without heating, electricity and running water. Must have been a shock or something. It was the most natural, obvious things to do. You cross a mountain pass, discover another valley, and you're happy to settle there. It was absolutely a no, just a seamless transition. Even from the outside, it looks like a big jump.

Yeah, but I mean, it really goes along with what you were saying earlier, which is that you see people of arts and science in a big city with huge accomplishments in their field. And yet underneath that, so often the more fundamental science and art of just living a good life is not being expressed. Well, you know, it's not that they are, of course, scientists are all bad people. They are extraordinarily good people. I just come from Madison, Wisconsin, where I've been collaborating with Richard Davidson, who is the leading neuroscientist.

He's such an incredibly good human being. What I was mostly saying is that there is no obvious correlations. To be a very good scientist doesn't mean that you'll be a very good human being you can be terribly mean also while you need that coherence for a spiritual master yeah otherwise there's no point when you decided to actually stay full-time for the first time from what i know and and tell me the details, you didn't immediately take vows as a monk. That still took a number of time.

Yeah, you know, monks may also seem something from the outside that's quite visible, like a walking flag almost with this colorful dress. And again, for me, it was a no-brainer at some point. So I sort of settled there when I was 26. Then after two years, my first, I spent seven years in Darjeeling without going anywhere. And after three years, my first teacher passed away in 1975. So I stayed another four years in the hermitage. I did maybe five years of solitary retreats with some guidance from time to time.

Then in the late 79, I went with my second teacher, Degocaine Sérumoché, receiving, he was giving four months of non-stop teaching to thousands of devotees, monks and lamas. So, you know, until 30, I didn't know whether I would have a family life or not, but the solution seems to be, you to be equally interesting in a way. So at that time, there was someone who was very well known for giving monastic ordination. And I was more or less living in a very simple way. So I asked my teacher, you know, would it be good to just simplify my life by becoming a monk? He said, oh, great idea, it would be very good. So at 30, I took monastic vows.

But again, it was also effortless, just like a little step over something. And I felt great freedom because, you know, I could not imagine, you know, if you have a family and children, of course you have to have some responsibility. I mean, you cannot just say, okay, hey guys, I'm going to the mountains

for three years in retreat. And so I wish you well, you cannot just say, OK, hi, guys, I'm going to the mountains for three years in retreat. And so I wish you well. You can't do that. And so it's a wonderful adventure to raise children. It's a wonderful act of love and enriching experience. I'm sure I've seen that. You know, now we founded a humanitarian organization. Now we have 30,000 children in our school,

so I have all the time with kids. And in our monastery, we have young kids also. So I see that. But at the same time, I wanted to one-pointedly pursue the spiritual path, so it was much easier to just be completely free. If I want to get up, I get up. And the only thing I leave behind is my footsteps.

I have no house, no low land, no car, no nothing, so I'm just completely free. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging

Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? You mentioned, um, solitary retreats or, um, time in solitude. For what, to a Western mind would seem like an inhuman amount of time. I think we tend to have trouble with being with our thoughts for a few hours and you're talking about being on retreat for years. Tell me more about what this experience is

and also why it's important. Well, you see, if you build a hospital, you might say, oh, no no it's not a good idea you are a surgeon why don't you operate in the street emergency and that's the time you will spend three years all the construction

work the plan bridge that's a waste of time it doesn't cure anybody zero but when it's ready it's so much a powerful tool to alleviate suffering so the idea is to really perfect yourself to become a little bit more of service to others because i can see now in the humanitarian world where i'm quite engaged we have 200 humanitarian projects in asia now what Very often, such projects are usually a lot of conflict of egos, people burning out, or worse, corruption.

So those are human shortcomings. So instead of doing a training for NGOs by how to do proper audited accounts, etc., which is, of course, necessary to be transparent. But one of the main ones would be to grow your fortitude, your resilience, your determination to be at the service of others and not just see how people treat you, what they say, what they do. Everybody should be perfect on the way.

You're about to build a school somewhere, but your job is not to make everybody perfect. Your job is to build the school, make everybody perfect. That's the job of the Buddha. So in a way, to have this inner sort of, to cultivate these fundamental human qualities is definitely not selfish. It's actually preparing you better to be of service to others. And then the extensive time in solitude is sort of a mechanism to allow that to happen on a people level?

Solitude is definitely not to get away from people. It's like, say, you could see a musician, an athlete, who is early in the morning, alone in the training, in the training in the stadium where there's no spectators and again and again he runs and swims

or three hours of swimming in his swimming pool. This is sort of not very glamorous, you could say, but that was allowed them to then be at the top of their qualities. So if we are a little bit like wounded deers that's high in the forest until the wounds are healed, then you can gamble and frolic around with other deers. So our wounds are not just the wounds of suffering, depression. It's really in case of basically healthy mind, healthy body, person.

They're still the woods of ignorance, of, you know, animosity, jealousy, arrogance, craving. Those are, you know, afflictive mental state that we all have to different degrees. And those are source of torment for oneself, torments for others. So in a way, we need to give us the time to go the route of that, to uproot them.

Especially the Buddhist path offers a whole array of methods to do that. And they're very rich, they're very complex. So you need to go to this systematic training of the mind to free the mind from those toxic elements. So that takes time, because it took time for those to form in your mind, thought after thought, emotion after emotion. So it's not just like a magic bullet that in three weeks of a self-help book or something you will get rid of animosity and craving. This is just like nonsense.

So it takes time to make real progress. And that's why we do that. It takes 10,000 hours for a pianist to play well and be at his first concert. So some of my friends, when we evaluated roughly the numbers of hours of practice when we went to the lab, we don't really count that, of course. It would be stupid. But for the neuroscientists, they needed to know roughly what we went through.

Many of us had done 40 to 60 thousand hours of practice or meditation. So that makes a difference. It's huge. It's so fascinating. So it's really less about solitude. It's less about withdrawing yourself from other people. It's more about creating the conditions

to allow yourself to just focus intensely on the practice. And also, it is freeing oneself from the scattering, distracting, endless noise of so many aspects of daily life. This crazy speed and just solicitation of

the mind, you know, like I was with a Tibetan Lama one time in Times Square, seeing all those, you know, lines. Yeah. He said, you know, they are trying to steal my mind. So that your mind is completely stolen by the ads, the radio, the news, the social, you know, encounters where everybody's called blah, blah, blah. And then the mind is even 10 times more blah, blah, blah of the neurons. So that's not a conducive sort of conditions to mature something over time in a deeper

way. So the solitude, the conditions of, and not always completely alone, there might be other retreatants, but the suitable condition that you can pursue, especially at the beginning, this process of transformation will be constantly taken away from it. Yeah, and it's really the conditions to pursue this sort of, what I guess in almost modern terms

would be considered the deliberate practice to allow yourself to, not perfect, but I guess cultivate the stillness, the awareness. Well, yes, people know that musicians, they spend hours and hours every day. So nobody finds that strange. Actually, they are admiring the kind of self-discipline and dedication. So this is about doing the same thing with the mind. So it would be a mystery if all those qualities would be at the top right at the beginning without any training. That would be an exception for sure.

Yeah. And it's so interesting that you made that comparison because when you think about athletics or arts or performance or science, well, of course people assume naturally you would focus on this one particular field and you put in your time. You do the work to become as good as you can be at it. But when we're talking about just perfecting the mind in the name of living a better life

or relieving suffering, we don't have that same lens. Well, that's what we call contemplative mind science or contemplative science. And also it's not with the idea of becoming an extraordinary performer, you know, like a champion. So, the idea of performing better than others is not the point. It's the idea that it from time to time is precisely that over the last 20 years, you know, the neuroscientist has found out that the brain can change until you're dead. Before it was thought that once you reach adulthood, the brain is so complex that if you were changing something, it would mess up the whole thing.

And then it was found with various ways that in animals first and then in humans, that anytime you become exposed to a new situation or you train in something new, whether it's singing, juggling or in that case meditating or even learning as London cab drivers who learned 14,000 streets by heart, their brain changed. So then the same thing happens with training in compassion, training in focused attention. So that's why it was a natural encounter for Buddhist contemplative to work with neuroscientists. And there's a new field, we could say, that's called contemplative neuroscience. And last year in San Diego, there was a symposium

that was the third one of anyone interested in those fields, clinical application of meditation, neuroscientists looking at the change in the brain. There was a thousand scientists, not just like self-help people, but really serious scientists coming for, see what is the progress in the field. And there's more and more research

being done in that sector. Yeah, it really is interesting to see those two worlds coming together. And it feels like it's just the last 10, 15 years that really it's caught on. There's a tremendous amount of research and publication. Yes, absolutely. The number of publications on mindfulness

has gone from 20 per year, 20 years ago, to I think it was 400 last year. Yeah. And also you found some, we found some when I discussed with Wolf Singer in this book called Beyond the Self, we call it like that because one of the findings

that we found so similar between the Buddhist approach and neuroscience is that there's no central post of command in the brain. The brain is all about synchronicity between different areas, dynamic rearranging of those different areas talking to each other. And the result is a particular mental state. So it's like emergent phenomena all the time, completely dynamic with everyone, every area talking to each other. And there's no, you know, like a hub in the middle,

like the control tower in an airport. So that is very close to the idea of the lack of inherent existence of the self in Buddhist philosophy, where we say, of course, there is a self, but it's a conventional label that we give to the dynamic flow of experience that our consciousness goes through that makes our person, our personal history.

But there's no autonomous, separate, permanent entity that is the self. That is often the case when you think of the soul in Christianity or the Atman in India. There's a kind of entity. Buddhism said, no, it's just a dynamic stream and to that we give a label of a name or individual. So, in a way, over the years, by collaborating

with neuroscientists, I found that it's a very easy and natural collaboration because we don't have stumbling blocks where science and Buddhist sort of, Buddhist approach of the mind are irreconcilable. The only big contentious issue is the nature of consciousness.

Is it 100% the brain or not? But there's no such thing as saying, you know, okay, according to our scripture, the world was created in six days and that's it. So now, of course, science, it just can't go on like that. It doesn't work. So then you're stuck. So now, of course, science just can't go on like that. It doesn't work. So then you're stuck.

But with the Buddhist exchange, you are not stuck. You're just continually exploring in an empirical way. Yeah. I mean, it feels to me like a lot of that really easy relationship also comes from the fact that Buddhism is not sort of, I'm coming from the place of a neophyte, but my experience of Buddhism is that it is not sort of a hierarchical, theological, traditional religion. The way that you look at so many others where there is some entity or some being and there are supernatural claims, which you either buy into from a place of faith or not, you know, without judgment either way. Whereas Buddhism has always struck me as more of a science of living that within its own

teachings opens itself up to testing and validation. Well, Dalai Lama said if any tenets of Buddhism is clearly refuted by science, then we have no problem of abandoning it. No issue at all. But there are things which still, you know, is far from the view of most modern scientists, especially about the nature of consciousness, where Buddhism says, you know, the matter, it cannot come ex nihilo, the idea of creating something from nothing

and becoming something. There's a lot of logical arguments against that. It cannot also disappear into nothingness. So that's a primary phenomena. But he said the same is true for consciousness. Because we see a present instant of my consciousness, immediately preceding instant has to be of the same nature. We can have an unconscious moment.

The next immediate moment is conscious. So there has to be a chain of conscious moment continuing because the cause has to be, the result has to be somehow coherent in nature with its cause. So that means also there is a beginningless stream of consciousness and it cannot come to a complete end. I mean, it cannot disappear into nothingness. So that aspect is quite far from what most neuroscientists believe, reductionist approach, the physicalist approach of consciousness being just a property of matter,

of the complexity of the neurons and so forth. But still, you know, hardly any neuroscientist will pretend that we know really what consciousness is for a very good reason. It's that it's a matter of experience. And experience is experience as the first person. You cannot know what experience is by describing everything from the outside, what kind of neurons have been activated, what kind of area of the brain.

Even if you knew the function and the activity of billions of neurons when you are angry or see the color red or feel love, that will tell you absolutely zero what it feels to experience love or anger. So this pure experience, you cannot get out of it to study. So that is what is called in the science of consciousness, the heart problem. So even Western philosophers call it the heart problem. And you can get out of that. So in a way, certainly there are different perspectives about that.

And in that sense, Buddhism and most of the neuroscientists would not agree. But still, it's a matter of investigation. It's not a dogma. Yeah. Building on that, though, I think, and this is where I struggle with some of the ideas as well. I feel like it builds on this point that you're making, is the idea of

reincarnation, of consciousness sort of moving from one manifested state into the next and the next and the next. So, that is vastly, really, not very well understood for cultural reasons. Okay. In the West, basically, it's not at all in the culture. In the East, whether you are a sophisticated philosopher or not,

people, it's part of their worldview. Now, they set it very exotic of thinking a young child, remembering past lives and all that, although there are hundreds of such testimony, but now how can you test that scientifically? That's another point. But that's why the real issue is the nature of consciousness. So first of all, to dispel misunderstanding, Buddhism, so-called reincarnation, is not about an individual entity jumping from one body to

another one through some passing to some mysterious stuff because there's no such thing as a self self-autonomous self so it's more like as i mentioned briefly earlier the fact that the stream of consciousness cannot be born ex nihilo and cannot entirely disappear as well, because that moment of consciousness now will trigger the next one. So that process goes on. So that's the view. So again, it's not about an individual entity sort of jumping from one life to another, is the continuation of a flow of consciousness, just as, you know, the world of material phenomena

is ceaselessly transforming, but even something like an object is broken or is burned, but that doesn't mean that the particles, the atom, goes into nothingness. It transforms into something else. When your body dies, it goes and it's eaten by worms and it, whatever, we're all sort of star dust in a way. And so that doesn't go into nothingness either.

So that's the view of Buddhism. So the point of the continuation of consciousness beyond this association with the physical body is really comes down to what is the nature of consciousness. And so far, that question, even from scientific perspective, is far from being settled. So the discussion with Buddhist contemplative

and philosopher is still very much alive. Yeah. I want to talk about meditation with you because it really does seem to be at the center of the practices that allow for the cultivation of all these states of being towards the end of relieving suffering and living well in the world. You, in your teaching and in your writings, describe a couple of different styles, approaches, types of meditation.

From what I've seen, at least three, compassion meditation, I believe what you call open presence. Open presence, yes. Right. What's the language around the third one? So you see, actually, people speak of meditation is like, it's such a generic term. Yeah. It's like training. Right. So tell me what you mean by that.

You tell one of your friends, okay, I decided to train. He's waiting for what comes next. Are you training in chess or swimming? So it's the same. If you train the mind, what are you training the mind to? To become a merciless sniper that will harden his mind so that he will kill anybody that he's supposed

to do, that's a form of training. You are hardening your mind and chasing away all forms of compassion. So your brain will change. Now instead you decide to train focused attention, so the areas of the brain linked with focused attention will be changed and your way of being will be changed.

Will be more attentive, more present, less distracted, more lucid, less carried away by ruminations and expectation and hope and fear. So that's one thing. Now, we all have a potential for loving kindness and compassion. We know that we can be unconditionally kind with a child, with a dear person, whoever, an animal. But it come and compassion. We know that. We can be unconditionally kind with a child, with a dear person, whoever, an animal. But, it comes and goes. It's like fledging. It's not certainly at its optimal point.

Any skill is not at its optimal point at the start. So, this we can train. So, that's another kind of meditation. Now, very often we have a very sort of narrow mind. Everything that happened in that small space you know it's like a firecracker in a in a little box it create a lot of damage a firecracker in open space is almost unnoticeable so likewise open presence is a state which is

extremely lucid extremely clear yet so vast you know that the little thoughts of hopes and fears, they will be much more not able to destabilize you, not able to carry you away into all kinds of reaction that will end up in torment. So it's kind of space of inner freedom. And that's key for emotional balance, for having the resources to lead the ups and downs of life, and for inner freedom, to rest in a peaceful state of mind

where you're not the slave of your own thoughts. So all those are different types of training that belong to the vast realm of meditation. So there's no such thing as meditation as one thing. Yeah, so it's really different approaches for training. It's different aspects of training, and certainly not emptying your mind and relaxing and getting as stupid as you can.

The way that we're often told is just clear your mind of all thoughts, which is nearly impossible. Who has ever cleared his mind from work? It doesn't last more than five seconds. Yeah. What's interesting, though, is so you just shared these three different methodologies. And attached to each of them, you also shared a certain outcome that I think from the outside looking in, we would say is desirable or maybe not. How does the training relate to you attaching to wanting that outcome? Like,

are you training for the purpose of that outcome? Or are you just training? Well, one of the outcome is to be free from attachment. So again, you see, the argument that meditation is selfish, because you could be helping others, if the goal is to get rid of selfishness, it's not selfish. If the goal is to get rid of stickiness, of craving, of clinging, of grasping, it's not yet another form of attachment. And we warn people, if you attach to the result and the goal,

then the medicine becomes a poison. So because the goal is freedom from attachment. And if you are free from attraction, repulsion, hopes and fears, then animosity, hatred will not grow. Compulsive craving will not grow. You have no reason to be arrogant. You have no reason to be jealous. So if you get rid of all these kind of graspings, that freedom actually is a goal that you cannot be attached to because it's the essence of freedom. So it's like saying in the middle of the sun, can you find an area of darkness? So it's really dissolving the very notion of craving at the root. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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will vary. So that freedom is desirable because who wants to suffer? Nobody wants to suffer and suffering come from those things, from hatred, from craving and so forth. So to aspire to this freedom is not a form of attachment. It's like the person who is suffering for so long and is just fed up with that, this kind of weariness and lassitude. I want to get out of this vicious circle.

So that aspiration is legitimate. It's not like grasping to a kind of blissful state or something, like a little artificial paradise. Yeah. You've referenced a number of times now that you have, for a long time now, had scientific collaborations, sort of exploring, working with neuroscientists, really looking at what's actually happening within the brain through this devotion to practice, to training over a long window of time, and also looking at the difference between the brains of people who've been doing this, I think you said 40,000, 60,000 hours somewhere

in there for you versus somebody who's fairly new to this. When you talk about, you know, aspiring to freedom, what is the neuroscience showing us changes within the brain of somebody who has engaged in these practices extensively for a very long time versus somebody who hasn't? Well, the point of doing so was some kind of natural curiosity for knowledge. You know, as an ex-scientist, during a meeting of the Mind and Life Institute in 2000 on destructive emotion, where there was many of those great neuroscientists present in India at the residence of the Dalai Lama, and I was participating. And when the Dalai Lama asked us, what can we contribute to society through these encounters?

And the idea of doing a research program came up. And then since I was an ex-scientist, I thought, okay, I will come and we'll see. So, the idea and that collaboration has become more and more fruitful was not just to prove that meditation changed you. After all, we know that. Personally,

we have no need for outer proof because if you become a better human being and somehow you know it's because of the training you have undergone, if the lab tells you that your brain has changed, then so what? But if you want to introduce it in secular ways, in schools, in all kinds of works of life, I think nowadays, since most people put their trust in science, except a few crazy people,

it happens sometimes, unfortunately, these days. But since science is a kind of source of valid knowledge, so if science, you know, yes, confirms that there's a real change, you're not just fooling yourself, you know, by being relaxed and feeling good. But then the next moment you are confronted with difficult situation, you, again, just as before, you know, as unequipped to deal with those human situation. So what was found, yes, is that, you know, each type of meditation has a different signature in the brain. And those changes are very significant. When meditators engage in specific meditation, like compassion. This area of the brain related to that, like parental love, empathy, positive effect,

they are activated much more than they would be in untrained subjects. And then after time, you also see structural changes. Those areas, the gray matter is increased in volume, the number of connections is greater. So simply like muscling your arms, simply those areas grew stronger. They are more salient in the brain. So that became quite clear. And also when you

ask those mediators to perform certain behavior tasks, like attention tasks. There's a task very simple that's called sustained attention task, vigilance task. So you see numbers on the screen like from zero to 10. And it's a small number. They flash three or four per second. And then each time there's a zero, you push a button. That seems very simple.

But what happens is your attention gets tired. After 10 minutes, people's performance decreases sharply. But with trained meditators, they do that for 45 minutes with zero mistake out of 1,000 trials. And they don't seem to think it's a problem. So they have a tool that has been perfectly, you know, become more flexible, that is well-trained. And so maybe attention is a great thing, but it's all the more interesting if it's about emotional balance,

it's about loving kindness, to be a good person, and kind, benevolent, et cetera. So now it's quite clear. And that's we reviewed in the Beyond the Self with the book of Willem Roff Singer. We have a big chapter on meditation on the brain to sort of make a quick review of the science. And recently, again, there was, with Richard Davidson and Antoine Luce, we did an article in Scientific American about the long-term effect of meditation.

So now it's widely accepted in the world of science. Yeah. What's fascinating to me also about the conversation in your latest book was the idea of science. Yeah. What's fascinating to me also about the conversation in your latest book was the idea of efficiency, was the idea that when you start, and it makes perfect sense, because when you think about, again, using the analogy of athletics or art or something like that, when you start something, it's very labor intensive, and it's very inefficient in your brain, and you're using a lot of energy because you're not wired for that in the beginning. But over time, through repetition, repetition, repetition, your brain becomes, it redirects all its wiring.

It reconnects the neurons in a different way. And it becomes super efficient at this thing. So if you're talking about something like compassion, in the beginning, it's a labor to effectively, because if this is not your natural state, you've got to rewire things. But what I found fascinating was that over time, it seems like it just becomes, you know, from a behavioral standpoint, it just becomes much more the way that you are in the world. But it looks like there's neuroscience now support why that happened. Yes, it becomes first it becomes contrived, difficult, and you don't do it well.

And then in the middle, it still requires some effort, and you do it okay. In the end, you do it perfectly without effort. It was very interesting that in the attention task, they measured the beginners and untrained subjects. Those who have done a reasonable amount of training, medium, say, 5,000 hours of practice on attention, and then the long-term meditators, more than 30,000 hours.

What they found is in the beginning, the attention areas are highly recruited. If you give them an attention task, they really try hard. The brain areas are strongly activated, but they still don't perform very well. It's like you learn how to ride a bicycle. You're very nervous, a lot of attention, and still you're very clumsy. Then the mid-term meditators, they still have to engage those areas very strongly, very actively, and they perform reasonably well. Now, if you go to the long-term meditators, they are absolutely good at the attention task, but they only need to slightly activate the attention area because they are sort of,

you know, they are so well-tuned. And I remember, it's like entering the floor. I remember a downhill Olympic skier, a woman who became gold medal. And she says, you know, when I won that downhill race, I felt like a river. It was totally

effortless and beautiful. So that's a consummate skill. And so all those qualities, including well-being which is a cluster of qualities like loving kindness, inner freedom, those are skills that you can train. is it's just such a clear manifestation of a Western mind where I said, wow, this is fascinating that you can actually see that happen in the brain. And then I looked at the numbers that they were using.

It's like you said, the difference between somebody who's considered kind of a newbie at around 5,000 hours of meditation versus somebody with 30, 40, 50,000 hours of meditation. The Western mind in me is like, wow, so somebody who's considered, you know, a novice has already got 5,000 hours. Yes, but interesting, I think, for society, because, you know, who's going to do 5,000 hours and even less 50,000 hours? So if it wasn't the case that the second wave of research was about people doing 20 minutes a day, as we do for physical exercise,

over a certain number of months. So if that has given hardly any result or difference, then you say, okay, that's good for you, you're imitating the Himalayas, but you know, that's something out of mainstream. So it doesn't concern us. It cannot bring good to society. There's no point trying to put meditation in school because, you know, this is out of reach. Now, since it turned out that even four weeks of 20 minutes a day of caring mindfulness or a kindness curriculum like Rishi Davidson is doing in medicine and his Center for Healthy Minds, if that already gives a behavioral difference,

kids become more pro-social, less discrimination, more emotional control or balance. If that happens within four or 10 weeks and you can see in the brain that the neuroprostheticity is already beginning to take place then you say you are into something for society and that's the case and most of the clinical intervention now of mindfulness-based trash production the mbsr that was started 30 years ago by john cabazin it's obviously done with patient that goes through these eight weeks training right and that gives tremendous uh you know, good, precious results.

But that's different. You have there sometimes university professor or truck drivers or anybody. There's absolutely not people who have been inclined to meditate before. And that's what is interesting is they continue after the training, most of them, because it brings them such benefits. So that is the main point, in fact, for society, outcome of our collaboration. Yeah, so it's more the actual, it seems like,

interestingly enough, the behavioral outcome manifests far more quickly than the sort of neurological efficiency in the brain. Well, you can see the change happening in the level of the brain, of course, but it's not as big.

And also, you see all kinds of change in the immune system and all other aspects of our health as well. So the real goal ultimately is to get rid of the cause of suffering, but in the meantime, you get also some bonuses on the way. It's interesting too, because there is,

you talk about this in the recent conversation, there's always, once you see something where there's a benefit, then one of the questions always is, can I, quote, hack this in some way? Can I use neurofeedback, biofeedback, you know, substances to try and get these similar benefits without having to actually do the slow, painstaking work. And we're seeing that a lot, so I'm curious.

Like kids who want everything right now and make a tantrum to get it. But we're like the grown-up versions of those kids. But you see, okay, athletes, they say Olympic athletes, unfortunately there's been a lot of cases of doping, right? So because they're all at the top and they want to get this slight edge on their competitors. But imagine nobody would have thought, okay, you know, I'm not going to train at all.

I'm just going to train a substance and I'm going to beat a sandball. It will never work. So they do that as enhancers. But you can, you know, you can, you don't need substances. You can put, you know, some, sometime for people who suffer from epilepsy, you have to find out some place in the brain where you can put some electrodes. So to neutralize the fits. Now, while doing that, you have to look, so you open the skull and you put some electrodes and try to find the area that will prevent an epileptic fit. While doing so,

the scientists found that sometimes they put the electrode in a particular area and people feel incredible bliss like they never felt in their life, like unbelievable bliss take out the electrode boom it's gone you put it a little bit next within seconds they feel there's no need for me to be in this world it's obvious to them they want like they will commit suicide in one minute take off back. So you could do that. You could put substances in the brain, but just there are like stimulations of the brain, but there's no neuroplasticity. The moment we take off the trigger,

the drug, the electrode, it's gone. So it doesn't replace training at all because training brings about a complete restructuration of several areas of the brain, not only one area that is sort of muscled up, but the way the connectivity with other areas is changed. So basically you are changing the brain in an incredibly complex way

that never any specific substance or stimulation or feedback will ever do. And also the idea that, you know, you would put a few electrodes on the forehead. And when you engage in meditation, it goes beep, beep, beep. You hear birds singing. And through that, you can know that you are in the right thing, and you can do further. I mean, it's like a children's game. Compassion has to be recognized, or loving kindness. We have to identify that feeling.

You have to live with it for hours and hours and hours. And then, gradually, it will soak in your innermost being, and it becomes not a second nature, but your nature. So, you don't need those beep, beep, beeps to do that. You need sound instruction from a qualified teacher and a lot of practice. Yeah, it's interesting because there's I'm curious about all of this. I'm curious about any technology or training

methodology. But I guess it's tempting for people to bring up with gimmicks and stuff. I think it is because we want to get there now. What a quick fix! But there's really interesting research around, so I'm not somebody who dabbles in any sorts of substances. There has been some really interesting research that's come out over the last few years

around experimentation with certain psychedelics and end-stage cancer patients, how they're mired in feelings of anxiety and fear. And in a single experience with a substance like psilocybin, during the moment of the experience, has them reconnect with spaciousness and expansiveness. And what's interesting to me is, in at least the research I've seen,

is that even once they're out of the immediate effect of it, you know, the few hours, the diminishment of anxiety and the feeling of spaciousness and being completely at peace seems to sustain. So that's where my curiosity is. I guess if you had the insight

that the mind can be in a very different state, not through training, but through either a psychedelic drug or sometimes through near-death experience. Near-death experience is when you get some accident or some terrible scene. You're almost about to die, but you come back. But you had some incredible experience when it was at the borderline between dying and not dying. And many of those experiences are mind-opening. So to see

this vastness, this possibility, even though you don't experience it, is as having been somewhere with a beautiful landscape and that you know there's something there. So that conforts you on the idea that, well, there's other things. It's not completely limited to a little sort of narrow state of mind. And that might give you some kind of encouragement

to slowly build something in that direction. This probably won't be exactly the same and probably is the good thing. But that we usually underestimate the power of transformation of mind because we see that within minutes, if you have this substance, the mind behaves so differently

and experience the world so differently. So we say, okay, if there's a transitory state, but now if you tell me that through sustained training, I definitely can enhance vastly my compassion, I can become free from animosity, this vicious anger, jealousy, this state of inner freedom

that comes with some kind of deep sense of fulfillment. No I tend more to believe that possibility because I've seen briefly a glimpse of that. You know it's like a teaser of a beautiful movie. It's like the trailer. Trailer. I like that visual actually.

One of the things that you also speak about and this is something that's just kind of fascinating to me as well, is as training in the mind, various approaches to training in the mind become more and more popular and people are exploring them, there's science around it and popular practice, there can be side effects. There can be unintended effects of this training and practice. I don't know if you'd call them side effects, but it doesn't just make everything better for everybody. Is that so? Apparently, I'm told. Well, I think I would call them more unexpected bonuses, usually. Side effects, you know, it depends what you do.

If you put someone who is extremely disturbed, sometimes people call it neurotic or whatever, but let's say someone who has a lot of difficulties, a lot of inner suffering and conflict, who is at the edge of depression, whose mind is really in a difficult state, very confused, a lot of conflicting things and so much cause of inner torments and suffering. Now, all of a sudden, if you put that person, okay, now you do a 10-day completely silent, 10 hours a day intensive practice, their mind might go completely wild

and sometimes they may fall into good, these things could escalate in the wrong way. But that's simply because it's not a way to, it's not a very healthy way to proceed. Now, if someone is disturbed, then first of all, especially in Buddhism, there's so many teachings that usually in traditional way come much before doing meditation. You know, seeing what are the different things that bring about suffering,

craving, like rumination. So first analyzing the very causes of suffering, realizing that human existence is so precious, you are given this opportunity for whatever lifetime you have to go from this state of confusion and suffering to a more sort of state of freedom and goodness. So you have a fantastic opportunity given, like giving a field to a more sort of state of freedom and goodness. So you have a fantastic opportunity given, like giving a field to a peasant.

You also have to reflect on impermanence, that is, you will die, but you don't know when. So suddenly you start to set in more, you put the foundation with a worldview, and then, okay, what are the cause of suffering? It's animosity, rumination, hope and fear. First looking from the outside with the cause of suffering it's animosity rumination hope and fear first looking from the outside with the help of someone to identify those and how could i use some antidote you're given all kinds of tools you are not just dumped into a meditation room and say you know

sit there and do nothing don't move and deal with your mind, and that mind is such a chaos, it sort of destroys yourself. So I think it's basically, you know, just sort of inappropriate situations that normally would never happen if you do it in a traditional way with an authentic or qualified instructor. Yeah, so I guess that's really, that's the big point,

is that it's important to do this in the right context, under the right instruction, where it's not just the training, but also its guidance and its teachings around that. And it's the tools that also support it. Well, once in my life, I on itself because it's so powerful. So I said, well, it's not something to put in the hands of a Buddhist monk. So likewise, you know, there are methods to first clean your mental house and everything has to be prevalent and progressive. So you don't put someone who has never piloted an airplane on a supersonic jet. You put it on a flight simulator

where there is no risk of crashing and slowly, slowly you learn. Or you don't learn to sail on a boat on a super hurricane day. you learn with a fresh breeze on a beautiful day with a qualified sailor and slowly slowly you gain skills makes perfect sense when you phrase it that and kind of lay out the picture that way it occurs to me as we're speaking that uh the quote career that started with you in science has never really ended. Well, it did.

There was a big gap because for, say, 30 years, I was completely on my own with my teachers, I mean, my own, not coming back to the Western world with my teachers in the Himalayas, practicing the small hermitage, studying the scriptures, hardly reading any Western book in either French or English. So I have a big gap of what happens in the world in those days. And it was kind of an accident when in 1997, someone proposed that I do a dialogue with my late father,

the French philosopher Jean-François Ravel, the monk and the philosopher, and became a huge sort of bestseller in France. So suddenly it was thrown back into the western scenes and then it sort of snowballed because I did other books with astrophysicists and so, so, so, so but of course I never imagined that I would go back to a scientific lab

so it's only in 2000 when I was invited to participate in the Mind and Life Institute and later I became, I've been close associated with the Mind and Life Institute, and later I became, I've been close, associated with the Mind and Life Institute since then. I'm part of the family. We founded the Mind and Life Europe now. And so then, yes, I went to the lab, first as a guinea pig, then as a sort of collaborator,

because the meditator has to co-design the protocol of the study with the scientist. Otherwise, how do you study meditation? So they made me co-sign the protocol of the study with the scientists. Otherwise, how do you study meditation? So they made me co-sign some papers to show that it's not just subject and guinea pigs, but also full-fledged collaborators. So yes, I was certainly not expecting that. But again, I don't do it that much. I go maybe a few days here and there,

several times of the year, to do the nice thing, which is to go in the scanner, try experiment, different states of mind, and then my scientific friend have to crunch the data for several months. I don't do that. I go back to my mountains. I want to start to come full circle with you.

I know we're... So, final question, really. Well, two more questions, because one is just a curiosity for me. Monastic life. When you go back and forth between, you know, when you spend the vast majority of your time there, and then you enter back into, you know, you come, you go to Wisconsin, you're in a laboratory environment, you're in major cities. How is that for you? Well, the only reason I do that is, you know, to share that idea to me. I believe that the collaboration is useful to society,

not the programs in school. So it's the idea of benefiting others in different ways. Then, you know, the books in the beginning brought some resources, and I don't need them. So I started this humanitarian organization, Karuna Sechen. Thanks to not only the books, of course, but after that, this expanding and a lot of philanthropists and, you know, joining us. Now we are helping nearly 300,000 people every year in the field of health, education, and social services

in Northern India, Nepal, and Tibet. So that's also a reason why I sort of continue to move back and forth. And also there's an opportunity when my friend Wolf Singer asked us to do this, proposed that we do this dialogue together over eight years that's just published by MIT Press. So it's tempting with such a great mind to

spend time on and off, you know, a week every year over a long time and then we mature this dialogue. So, it's, of course, it is inspiring and it's mutually enriching, but if I was thinking that this doesn't have much

use, then I would happily stay in my hermitage non-stop and that actually I'm contemplating doing that much more because, you use, then I will happily stay in my hermitage nonstop. And that actually I'm contemplating doing that much more because I've been doing that for 20 years and I think I could share whatever I could and at some point there's no point going into the civilization of repetition. So I think I've done what I could.

The humanism projects of Corona session seems to continue on their own merit. And I think probably I've spoken too much. So it's time to go back. As my dear 94-year-old mother says, silence is the language of the future. So I'm trying to put that into practice. How often are you in touch with your mom?

Well, because she's 94 I go much more often to see her so I know I spend several months every year because it's nice to be together

and she lives in a Buddhist center in south of France where all my friends who I met came to the Himalaya as well 40 years ago

50 years ago they also live there they're a group of translators. So it's like sort of my sort of heart friends. And so it's nice to be there when I'm not in Nepal, this kind of place where I feel comfortable to be. Yeah. So as we sit here, the name of this is Good Life Project.

And one of the things we're really just exploring, what does it mean to live a good life? So if I offer that question or that prompt out to you, what comes out? So I think a good life is not only, of course, a life where you flourish. I mean, really a life where every moment is felt worth living.

And then when you look at 10 years, 20 years, you say, well, that was worth to be alive. So that sense of feeling fortunate, deep satisfaction. And for that, I can't believe that it can happen if you try to pursue alpination in a selfish way. I think it's a self-destructing concept.

It will never work because me, me, me all day long makes you miserable. It makes miserable everyone around so i think genuine fulfillment and flourishing can only come through you know a big heart unconditional benevolence and that's fulfills the aspiration of others of course because it is the point but also that's the best way to fulfill your own aspiration for happiness. So that's a win-win situation. Selfishness is a lose-lose situation.

So that's really, I'm totally convinced of that. That's also why before this, Beyond the Self, I wrote a much too big book on altruism, 800 pages, because I wanted to make a case that this is the most pragmatic answer to the challenges of our times. You know, for the care for future generation, for the environment, care for social justice in the midterm, and more caring economics in the short term.

Altruism is the answer, not selfishness. So that's, I think, a great source of joy to share some ideas. And now, as I'm getting older, I want to gain some freedom to continue my path. Thank you. You're most welcome. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible.

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