Translator: Hugo Wagner
Reviewer: Helene Batt There are many challenges
that we face today. First, there's our mind, that we have to deal with
from sunrise to sunset. It can be our best friend
or our worst enemy. There are also the challenges
we face in our daily lives, such as insecurity -- the difficulty we sometimes face,
just trying to survive. We have to deal with the economy
in the short term, but also consider in the medium-term
our quality of life, and how to thrive -- throughout our career, with our family,
our generation, in our lifetime. If a country is rich and powerful
but its people are miserable -- then what's the point? There is a new challenge
which has come upon us, almost without our knowledge, and which, for over a century now,
is affecting generations to come. For the first time in human history, the fate of future generations
closely depends upon our actions. That's something completely new. It wasn't a conscious decision, but our actions have gradually
led us to this point. We're now a bit like this man standing
at the edge of Victoria Falls. It's possible that there's
a point of no return, and this man, with one more step,
is going to cross it. We don't really know
where the point of no return is. In the field of environmental studies, scientists have defined
a certain number of parameters. You can see them on the screen. They each have a critical importance for the future of the biosphere
and of our planet, and thus, for the future
of generations to come. That circle you see is a bit
like the edge of Victoria Falls. Beyond that limit, we don't really know
what's going to happen, but we can expect to reach
a point of no return. This chart depicts the situation
in the year 1900 -- not such a long time ago. In 1950, the so-called
Great Acceleration happened. We went from the Holocene -- a 12,000-year period
of a very stable climate that enabled the development
of agriculture and the growth of civilization -- to the so-called Anthropocene, the era when humans
started to have a major impact -- the biggest impact on our planet. So hold your breath for a moment -- not for too long, just long enough to imagine what
this next graphic, from 2010, looks like. As you can see, we have greatly exceeded the safety limits
for some of these parameters. To give you just one example:
biodiversity depletion. If the extinction of species
continues at the current rate, 30% of all species on Earth
will have disappeared by 2050. I'm not just talking
about Siberian tigers, Tasmanian devils and unicorn rhinos, but thousands and thousands of insects,
fish species and amphibians. The fish population has already decreased
by 80% in the oceans. On December 13, a bill was passed
to prevent deep-sea trawling, a technique that consists
in raking the seabed, the same way a bulldozer would raze
Notre Dame Cathedral. This is the same seabed that took nature
thousands of years to create. So this is where the real challenge is. The environmental question is,
of course, eminently complex. But if we think about it, it is simply a question
of altruism and egoism. If we have any consideration
for the generations to come, we cannot keep doing things this way. They will think: "You knew,
yet you didn't do anything." We are in the position -- I'm a Marxist, a Groucho-leaning one -- and Groucho said, "Why would I care
about the next generations, what have they done for me?" That is exactly what we say, and that is also sadly what
the U.S. millionaire Steven Forbes said on the lovely Fox News channel, when he was asked about the inexorable
rise of sea levels, "I find it absurd
to change my behavior today for something that will happen
in 100 years." After me, let the flood come. So we need to face all of these challenges that encompass,
if you look at them closely, the areas of economy, greed, solidarity, which is necessary
for personal fulfillment, as well as the areas
of altruism and egoism. Was Plautus right when he said, "Man is a wolf to his fellow man"? Hopefully that's not true of everyone. There are people who are not
who we think they are. Shouldn't we instead talk
about the banality of the good that's woven into our daily actions? Or perhaps, as Sigmund Freud phrased it: "I don't pay much attention
to good and evil, but on average, I have uncovered
very little good among humans. As far as I can tell,
they are mainly just vermin." A word to the wise. Not everyone is that way, though. We do have empathy. Take, for example, this man
who lost both legs when he was five, and who, for his entire life,
took care of people in need. These are his parents. There is also cooperation --
this was taken in the U.S., but even when I was living
in Bhutanese villages, you would see that when a house
gets built, everyone comes to help. It's a big party, celebrating
the joy of collaboration. And not only humans share that. I was asked to mention
that this was not photoshopped. The horse and the goat are indeed friends, and the goat found that this
is a great way to cooperate to reach the leaves. There is also of course, the absolutely merciless struggle
for the life of an ice-cream cone. But "the struggle for life"
wasn't actually a Darwinian concept. He talked a great deal about cooperating with other human beings
beyond our relatives, and even with other species. "The struggle for life" was a phrase
used by Herbert Spencer -- "Darwin's Bulldog". It actually turns out
that during evolution, cooperation proved to be more creative in driving increasing complexity
as evolution continued, and that we, humans, as Martin Novak
from Harvard would put it, we turned out to be "super-cooperators". That's why we need to reach
a higher level of cooperation. Altruism is not a luxury but a necessity. It's the social connections we have that make our existence
happy and fulfilled. They are in fact key factors
that determine our quality of life. And they're not limited to humans. Here are two 100 year-old
Japanese women who live in a place with the greatest number of 100 year-olds. And if we ask why --
all the studies have shown that it's because these people are born,
live, and die together. They always live close to each other. They care for one another
and support each other. They share each others' joys and sorrows. So, some people claim:
"Man is a wolf to man." If you look closely, though, if you scratch the surface of an altruist,
it's the egoist who will bleed. You can always find hidden motives. People will tell you:
"I rescued that person, and then I was feeling great,
it was wonderful." But do we really tell ourselves, when we jump into frozen waters
to rescue a child: "I will feel great afterward"? If you ask people who've done it,
they'll tell you: "But I didn't have a choice,
of course I went to help that child!" So you didn't have a choice,
you were like a robot. That's not altruism, that's instinct. What does "not having a choice" mean? It means that the choice is obvious. The choice is the expression
of what you are. That man didn't ask himself
for 30 minutes: "Should I reach out my arm,
or should I not?" It's spontaneous because it represents
who your inner self really is. There are people like
Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, as well as the entire village
of Chambon-sur-Lignon, who helped save 3,000 Jews
over the span of several years, by helping them escape to Switzerland,
in spite of all the threats from the German garrison
and the Vichy government. Many lifesavers and righteous people
did so while risking their lives and the lives of their families, for many months, without expecting
anything in return. No reward of any kind. Even neighbors would sometimes
be suspicious about them. For years, they wouldn't talk
about what they had done, until people finally found out. True altruism exists, of course. But instead of calling altruists saints, or exceptional human beings, let's try and rediscover
this human kindness within ourselves. It exists primarily through empathy. Empathy is an emotional resonance; it makes us understand,
cognitively speaking, what the other is going through. Rousseau said: "The wealthy man
cannot picture himself a poor man." Empathy is not enough, though. If you only reason
through the suffering of others, you will find yourself
in a state of emotional exhaustion -- burnout. 60% of nurses in the U.S.
suffer from burnout eventually. We need to add another dimension. We need warmth, kindness and goodwill, love that fills every atom of suffering
with an atom of love. And then the burnout disappears. If there's a gradual reduction in empathy,
there is no reduction in altruistic love. That's what makes a warm aura so helpful. This aura is an ability
we picked up from evolution through maternal and parental love. But from that basis we can extend
the circle of our altruism, even to other species -- like this tigress from Calcutta,
who raised orphan piglets. To attain a more altruistic society,
we need to start by changing ourselves, like these spiritual masters, who spent years and years
cultivating compassion. This is my master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Some of his disciples
collaborated with neuroscientists to carry out experiments in order to study
the short and long-term effects of trained compassion and altruistic love. First, they studied people who had
practiced meditation for 50,000 hours. They observed profound structural
and functional changes within these individuals' brains --
activations in certain brain regions, occurring at levels
never before seen in neuroscience, detected by electroencephalogram. This was taken after a two
and a half-hour long MRI -- a functional imaging -- which I had in the U.S., at the lab
of Richard Davidson. He's very relieved the meditator
survived it all. Now let me show you quickly,
if you look at the diagram on the left, you can see meditators that are resting, as well as meditators that are engaging
in mediation on compassion. Several areas --
more than I can point out -- are highly activated. On the right side, you can see novice meditators. When they're at rest, nothing happens.
When they meditate, nothing happens. That's normal; they're not trained. But you don't necessarily need
50,000 hours of mediation. We were able to demonstrate
that only 15 days were enough to bring about changes in the brain,
even structural ones. You can see here the result of a few weeks
of meditation at full awareness. The density of some areas -- like the hippocampus,
that handles new phenomena -- is increased through training,
even after a small amount of time. In only two weeks, you can induce more active and present
pro-social behavior. Only 20 minutes per day. It even works in pre-schoolers,
four and five year-olds. Over the course of eight weeks,
we teach them how to cooperate, how to share someone else's feelings, how to be conscious of their breathing. After eight weeks, we notice greatly enhanced
pro-social behaviors. And then we let them
take the ultimate test -- the sticker test. They are given 50 stickers, which they're asked to give
to their best friend, to their least best friend, to an unknown kid,
and to one that is sick. We do the test before
and after the intervention. At first, they give everything
to their best friend; after the intervention, the discrimination levels out --
between "my group" and "the other," between best friend and least best friend. Knowing the challenges that discrimination
poses in our society, we can imagine the importance that
these very simple interventions could have if they were used
as early as nursery school. But it's not all bad news. We can actually progress
towards this age of altruism. Violence has indeed decreased, though we'd never know by listening
to the radio or the TV, with stories of gunmen
armed with AK-47s in Marseille. And yet, in 1350, there were 100 homicides
per year in Oxford per 10,000 inhabitants. Today, it's 0.7. It's basically a logarithmic scale. Today, you are 100 times less likely
to die from homicide in Europe. The levels of violence and abuse
against young people have decreased by 50% in the past 20 years. We've seen the abolition of torture
over the centuries. The average number
of war victims has dropped from 20,000 to only 1,000
between 1950 and today. There are of course deadly wars going on
in Syria, Sudan, Irak and Iran. And yet, these places
have never been so safe. So, there is some good news,
but it's not enough. We need to cultivate
our inherent ability to be altruistic. It's a training of the mind. It's not about sharing the feeling
of goodwill for a few minutes. It's about trying to cultivate it
every day for 10 to 15 minutes. To fill our mental scenery
with this altruism, feeding it when it's fading,
reanimating it when we get distracted, coming back to it --
that is meditation. We also need points of inflection
so that societies may change. That is the evolution of culture;
and it is possible. There is a need for cooperative education,
for a positive economy. There is a need for lasting harmony,
as opposed to impossible progress. Harmony consists in addressing poverty, in getting one and a half billion
people out of poverty, and in stopping this absurd
consumption at the top, that's causing global warming. The U.S. releases 200 times
more CO2 than Tanzania; Qatar, 2,500 times more than Afghanistan. So perhaps we should start searching for what Pierre Rabhi calls
"a happy sobriety," by finding our inner satisfaction, as opposed to searching
externally in vain. Live together. As Martin Luther King said: "We must all learn
to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools. " Thank you for your attention. (Applause)
