[MUSIC PLAYING] MENG: Good morning, my friends. Thank you all for coming. For those who do not
know me, my name is Meng. For those who know me,
my name is still Meng. The reason I told this joke
is about, I don't know, many years ago-- MATTHIEU RICARD: Yes. MENG: In 2007 or something,
back when even I was young, yeah, we did this together. I told this joke. Yeah, I told this joke. He still remembers. So, which is why, I
told this joke again. Yeah, we are very
funny together. I think the last joke we
told each other was just now. So we talk about
changing the world. And he says, yeah, because
of you, the north and south are switched. And I said, no, North and South
Pole are still the same, East and West Pole, different. MATTHIEU RICARD:
A very good one. MENG: Good one. Anyway, you all know Matthieu as
the happiest man in the world. But every time you say that,
Matthieu gets embarrassed. So please don't say that. Please do not say
Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world. I repeat, do not
say, Matthiew Ricard is the happiest
man in the world. MATTHIEU RICARD: Don't
think of a white bear. MENG: Don't think
of the white bear. Jokes aside, I'm so happy
to have you, my dear friend. Matthieu is, in my opinion,
a true gem in this world. MATTHIEU RICARD: It is
getting worse and worse. MENG: It's getting worse, right. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MENG: By the way, in the
email I sent them out, I call you a saint. MATTHIEU RICARD: Now
it's time to retire. MENG: He's a gem
for many reasons. I think one of
the big reasons is because he is the
best person who is bridging East and West,
the best of ancient wisdom, Eastern wisdom with the
best of Western science. Because he has a PhD
in molecular genetics under a Nobel Laureate
from [INAUDIBLE]. Yes, [INAUDIBLE], yes. I almost got it. And after his PhD, he
decided to become a monk. MATTHIEU RICARD: Not
immediately, right? MENG: Not immediately, yeah. He said, when I grow up,
I'm going to be a monk and then he did. And then, he was
under the tutelage of at least two
Tibetan masters-- two great masters, Kangyur
Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, yes? And he has 60,000 hours
of meditation training right now, thereabouts,
give or take 10,000. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MENG: Yeah, what's 10,000
hours between friends, right? And when I met you,
I think you were the first person with
10,000 of meditation able to be in an fMRI machine. You could be the person
to have spent the longest time in an fMRI machine. MATTHIEU RICARD:
That's possible. MENG: Yes, contributed
greatly to science. And because he speaks the
language of East and West, he speaks French, he speaks
English, he speaks science, and he speaks Tibetan,
and he speaks wisdom. He's everything. And, on top of that, Matthieu
is a humanitarian leader, tireless, working for the world,
trying to feed hungry people, teach the illiterate. And, on top of that,
in person, if you ever have an unrealistic expectation
about what a holy man should be like, unrealistic,
unreasonable, he meets those expectations. He's spoiling the market
for everybody else. So it's wonderful to
have you in this world-- MATTHIEU RICARD: Thank you. MENG: --and in Google. And my friends, please
welcome Matthieu Ricard. MATTHIEU RICARD: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to
everyone here at Google. I'm so happy to be here, back
for the first-- third time. And since Meng likes
to make the same jokes, at 10 years interval,
I recall also that last time, he said that
since Google didn't exist in 1967 when I
first went to India, so besides entering Google,
the next best thing I could do is to spend 45 years
in the Himalayas. So I'm really happy to be back. Last time was a
talk on happiness. I find happiness pretty
boring, and especially, because the risk
is that we will try to look for selfish happiness,
which is not only boring, but which is a
recipe for failure. And I want to say why. Because there are people,
smart philosophers, who make big statements. We, as sentient
beings, our main goal is to live the full
span of our life. I mean, for those who
find taste in life. It's OK. Good. And therefore,
during this life, we are entitled to
look for well-being, and flourishing of happiness. Oh, great. That sounds OK, so far. Therefore we should be selfish--
big, logical, and experiential mistake. The idea that, well, if
you really want to survive, really want to be happy,
everyone for themselves, and we have a good
chance to achieve that. Why is that
fundamentally flawed? First of all, on the
purely experiential aspect, if you think someone
who's thinking me, me, me, all day long, there's
a very miserable situation, because you feel so vulnerable. Anything that will be said
in terms of praise or blame, of gain or loss, the
whole world becomes either a potential threat
or some kind of instrument that you hope to use to
maximize that selfish happiness. So then it's a completely
unbalanced situation. The world is not a
mail order catalog for your desires, your
fancies, your hopes and fears. Plus, on top of that, within
the bubble of self-centeredness, it's pretty stuffy to
live in that bubble. And everything takes
huge proportions. It's like a storm
in a glass of water, and everything that
happens unsettles you. If you put a handful of salt in
this glass, it's undrinkable. Put it in a big
lake, no big deal. Put it in the ocean, you won't
even notice the difference. So a very narrow mind of me,
me, me is not very pleasant. And, of course, you will be a
pain to almost everyone that's around you. But the other reason is why
it doesn't work is even, I would say, deeper. It's basically because it
puts you at odds with reality. You would assume, maybe I don't
have anything against others, but it's not my job. So let's try to
build my happiness in that little bubble. It's easier if it's
only about my happiness, not about everyone's happiness. How can I think of that? So I have nothing against
others being happy, but it's not my job. So that supposes that
we could function as an independent bubble. And we would be some
kind of separate entity from the rest of the
world of reality. But if you look at the
white sheet of paper, the first thing you
could write on it is others, others, others,
others, others others. I have a friend who teaches
at Harvard, Greg Norris. He studies how many things
are implicated and produced in a white sheet of paper? 30 nations. A white sheet of paper
in France, white one. There's wood that
comes from Finland. There's starch of potato
comes from Czechoslovakia. And then, of course,
the guy in Finland and the whole history with his
grandparents and everything. So suddenly, the whole
thing-- others, others, others are present in everything. So our happiness, our suffering
are so intimately intermingled to this interdependence,
to the idea that we could function as a separate
entity is bound to misfunction. Now if you look experientially
at the state of mind that is full of warmheartedness,
benevolence, kindness, consideration, care,
empathy, altruistic love, wishing everyone
happiness, compassion. That means the wish
that they may cease to suffer when they suffer. So these are the most
fulfilling states of mind. We need to remember, a
particularly filling time in our life is really a time of
unconditional love for a child or for someone. Even the founders of
positive psychology, like Barbara
Frederickson, called love in the sense of
positive resonance with others the supreme emotion. Because among all
positive emotions, it's the one that broadens
more your perspective, your way of seeing others. So first, it feels good. And, of course, if you are
warm, people usually like it. Even dogs would like
to stand next to you. They will sort of sense that
you are a good, nice person to be with. And then it's also functional. Why? Because then it is attuned
to the interdependence. If you realize that when
you wake up in the morning, I don't want to
suffer the whole day, and if possible, my whole life. And then it's not very
difficult to put yourself in someone's mind. And so even if the
person is confused, doing exactly the
opposite what that person should do to find well-being. But still, basically
do not want to suffer. So then that common humanity,
that common sentience, I would say, with other
sentient beings, like animals, creates this feeling
of interdependence, of the common wish to escape
suffering and find flourishing, and therefore, if you value
your own wish for happiness, how can you not value, and
therefore, be concerned? At least not neglect, or
disregard, or use an instrument in a way that wish of others to
escape suffering and be happy. So on the individual
level, I think the pursuit of selfishness,
if it doesn't work, the other one is
bound to succeed. But now, if we take the
little bit global picture to see why this
notion of altruism is something more than the
kind of noble utopia, some kind of luxury that we could afford
when everything goes well. And people say, at
times of catastrophe-- and actually, we
could see in Nepal, in every major catastrophe
of any kind, how the first thing that happened
after the initial shock of whatever might be--
a bomb or, in that case, an earthquake-- how
people got calm, organized, incredible
solidarity, helping each other, bringing people to hospital. Most of the work is done
by local populations. The rescuers, they come,
and they help with dogs, and stuff like that. But 95% of all that work
is not about looting, is not about doing
terrible things. This is always, again and again,
the same pattern that occurs. So there's a hope that we
have that within our self, and we can enhance that. So why in the global
picture is it so important? So if you think of the
situation of the world, we are often, in the old days,
kind of being on the edge. And we could be in our own life. We have to deal with
our mind, to begin with, from morning till evening. And that mind can be your best
friend or your worst enemy. I mean, when people suffer
terribly within themselves, even they are living
in a little paradise, it's the product, the
working of the mind. Those ruminations,
hopes, and fears that lead to depression,
to despair is mind-made. And then, you can see people who
keep their joy of leaving even in the face of seemingly
very adverse circumstances. So the power of
the mind-- it's not that we should neglect
our outer condition. And the last one
who would say that, because I try to dedicate at
least a good part of my life to-- we helped 41,000
people over last month in the earthquake
area of 160 villages, so the idea of remaining
to poverty, to whatever we could do to improve others'
conditions, that's for granted. But, at the same time, we tend
to neglect the inner condition for flourishing. And I'm fundamentally
convinced that altruistic love is one of the main
contributors of that cluster of human quality that leads
to well-being and flourishing. But there is challenges. There are challenges in society. There are plenty of
people who live in poverty in the midst of plenty. And then, so we have all
these challenges in our lives. But if we look at
those challenges, basically, one of the most
serious ones in our times is the difficulty we have to
reconcile three times scales. There is the short
term of the economy. Of course, the
economy says we are making 10 years, 20 years plan. But nobody will buy bonds
that will mature in 100 years. And basically, if it's
not one day to the other, coming and going up
at the stock market, it's the end of the month, the
end of the year balance sheet. That's what matters. If you turn to economies,
you should be altruistic. That's great, but that's not
what the economy is about. So there is this question
of the short term. And people say, if the
economy flourishes, everything else will go
along as a sort of byproduct. But the fact is, you could be
in the most powerful and richest nation and still, if people feel
miserable, what's the point? So the idea that happiness
will come out of GDP has been already shown
to be just a fallacy. It doesn't work like that. Then we have the midterm
in terms of time frame. That is what? That is your life. That is a career, a family,
a generation, your lifetime. So how do you measure
that satisfaction, or that sense of fulfillment,
or accomplishment? First of all is
what is the quality of life moment after moment? How do you experience at
the working place, when you study, when you
engage with others, what do you see deep within? Sadness? Despair? Or joy to do what you do? And then, if you look at 10
years, how rewarding was that? How fulfilling was that? I remember when I was doing
the book on happiness, meeting someone in Hong Kong. We said, 20 years ago, I
wanted to get $1 million. Now I've got $10 million, and
I wasted 20 years of my life, It's not that just the
pursuit of that, per se, is wasting your life. But he found that it
has no meaning for him. So we need to get some kind
of satisfaction in our life. That's obvious. Otherwise, what's
the point going on? But then there's
a new challenge. And, of course,
you guessed what. It's the long term. And that new challenge
is our impact on the future generation. And that's new why? 10,000 years ago, there was
one to five million people on earth. They could not do much damage. I mean, whether they were
doing, the earth's resilience will repair that instantly. And then when came the
Industrial Revolution, scientific technological
revolution, giving us a
thousandfold more power to influence our
environment, nobody decided to ransack the planet. Therefore, we don't feel
individually responsible. Plus it's a certain timespan. Plus it's not really
visible day after day. It's visible on the longer term. And we are equipped
emotionally by evolution to react to images of danger. If I said, there's
a rhinoceros coming full-speed from this
door, everybody runs. If I said, there will be
a rhinoceros in 30 years, everyone says, so what? So in the '60s, '70s, when the
first data about global warming came out, those scientists
went to the White House and they told the
advisors, in 50 years, it's going to be a real mess. So they went, all right,
come back in 49 years. We'll see. But that's not the
way to proceed, because 49 years will
be much too late. The tipping points
will have occurred, and then we don't
see that happen. A friend of mine, who is
a great environmentalist says, if CO2 could
be pink, and we saw the sky becoming
pinker every day, we'd worry a little bit more. So it's hard to feel
it in one's flesh. But yet, it is absolutely
true that no matter how complex scientifically,
politically, economically, the question of
the environment is, it is a matter of
selfishness versus altruism. I'm a Marxist. Not worry, not the Karl
tendency, the Groucho tendency. So Groucho said, why should I
care for future generations? What did they do for me? AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] But unfortunately, I heard
a serious version of it by a US billionaire
saying on Fox News-- and maybe you heard of
that, Fox-- he says, about the rising of
the oceans, which is happening three millimeters
every year, no matter what. He says, I find absurd to change
my behavior now for something that will happen in 100 years. So after me, never mind. So we won't be
there in 100 years. Maybe some of you, if you
live 120, or something. But, of course, there will
be billions and billions of people who will say, you
knew, and yet, you did nothing. So it's not a trivial matter. And people say,
well, we'll adapt. Yes, of course, 200
million climate refugees, the wars because
of that, terrible devastation, two, four,
six degree increase, a complete upheaval
on the planet. We might adapt, but at the
cost of how much suffering? So that's for, again, question
of altruism versus selfishness. So now, you'll get,
environmentally speaking with economists,
this schizophrenic dialogue. They don't speak
the same language, because someone
said in 50 years, you're going to get all that. And they say, no, I'm
interested in the balance sheet at the end of the year. So we need a common
concept, at least of a platform of discussion. Over the last 10
years, I've been going around meeting all
kinds of wonderful people, psychologists,
environmentalists, social workers,
spiritual men and women of wisdom and compassion. I was seven times a day at
the World Economic Forum, all kinds of weird places
for Buddhist monks. And yet, the common
thing, the only concept that emerged through that,
and which I spent five or six years researching for this
book, is a simple one-- having more consideration for others. It's no rocket science. If you have more
consideration for others, which is the
definition of altruism, an intentional motivation
to benefit others, full stop-- of course,
we have other thoughts from time to time. There's no question about that. Selfishness does
exist, but we do have moments where we do
think in the altruistic way. So if you have more
consideration for others, for sure, you will have
a more caring economics. That can be made into two
things that homo economicus, maximizing their personal
preference cannot do, poverty in the midst of plenty. The homo economicus would
never resolve that question. And the common goods, quality
of the air, of the atmosphere, of democracy, of
all these things that we can have in common,
but you could easily be a free rider, do nothing
for that, and still benefit. But you need to step out of
maximizing personal interest to take care of the environment. So we need caring economies. Then we need to work on
gross national happiness. I mean, provide better
conditions at the working place, in education,
in transport, everything that makes a
life that can be fulfilled. And then we need to care
for our future generations. So that concept at
least allows people to come together, have a common
platform for a better world. So to illustrate that, we have
this idea of this limit here. And, of course,
if you say, well, let's go on using all
the resources we have. At the current rate of
increasing of using resources, by 2050, we'll
need three planets. We don't have them? It's, again, no rocket science. Still, people say, let's go
on, let's go on, let's go on. So let's go on is
like this president, who about 10 years ago,
speaking about his country, he said, five years ago, we were
at the edge of the precipice. Now we made a big step forward. So you see what happens if this
guy makes a big step forward. So that's called illimited
material quantitative growth. It cannot work forever. So what does that
line correspond to in terms of science? So here we go to what some
scientists have defined as the planetary boundaries. Well, we were in the Holocene,
a period of exceptional climate stability for 12,000 years. It more or less
ended in the 1950s, entering the Anthropocene, the
age of where human beings have the major impact on the planet. So in 1900s, we were well
within the limit of safety. And safety means
we could actually continue to prosper for
another 50,000 years, most likely without big
upheavals, if we were to keep those factors
within the limits of safety. And you can see them. That's what the main
most important-- they are quite related. If you increase CO2, you
will increase the acidity of the ocean, and so forth. Now 1950 comes, so-called
the Great Acceleration. Some of those factors
are looming now to be more looking
like dangerous. Now, hold your
breath, not too long. But imagine the next slide. And here we are. We have vastly overgone some
of the limits of safety. To give you one idea,
a very clear picture of the loss of biodiversity,
at the current rate, today, of losing
species forever-- it's not just diminishing,
or something-- losing them. In 2050, we will have lost 30%
of all species on the earth. And it will go on,
of course, over 2050. That would be the
sixth major extinction since the apparition of
life on earth, the fifth one being that of dinosaurs
and many other species. So that's not a small thing. And everyone will be
deeply affected, of course. So that's something
that we cannot ignore. It's coming very soon. This will be your children, your
grandchildren, and so forth. So what can we do about that? Well, we could sit
like that, as I do, in front of the Himalayas,
waiting for the glaciers to melt. I have seen them
melting over the last 45 years, before we had never
heard of global warming. Tibetans and Nepalese say
that, that they cannot only go for one month over the ice in
the winter with their yaks, where they used to
go for three months. So it's, again, very clear. Why? Because of this
Great Acceleration. Here's the loss of
biodiversity, of water use. And an interesting
one is methane. You say, why, methane? Methane now come
mostly from livestock. The use of livestock
for meat production has become now the
second major factor of greenhouse gas effect. That may seem strange,
but that's the case. According to IPCC and
[INAUDIBLE] report, after the habitations and
before transportation, before the cows, the
planes, the sheep, it is the whole
chain of production from meat production. That may seem strange, but it
is the case, 14% or 15% of that. And that's used
mostly to maintain emission besides deforestations
and the other things. So methane is 20
times more active than CO2 for
greenhouse gas effect. And that shows because of this
extreme level of consumption, 120 kilos of meat in
USA, 80 in Europe, only 3 in India, per head,
per habitant, per year. It's about 7 in Africa. Luxembourg has the
world record, 137 kilos. We don't know exactly why. That, of course, comes at
a price, an ethical price. there's about 65 billion land
animals killed every year. 1,000 billion--
that's 1 trillion sea animals for our consumption. Ethical problem,
but not only that. I mean, we do that
in all kinds of ways. And is it because
we are so selfish? Because man is a wolf or man? Well, of course some--
and first of all, wolves are quite nice,
sociable animals. They're very sweet social
life, and the best friend of man, dog, comes actually,
as you know, from wolves. So it's not a very
good comparison. But say, of course,
there are people who manifest terrible cruelty. But the idea that we're all like
that, that's the big mistake. Is it true? Look at this nice kid. It doesn't seem that is that
much of cruelty, at least, potentially. And then we could also think
that we are psychologically wired like that. Like Freud, we're to think
that we're all "rascals." So if that was the case, that's
a good start in life, isn't it? But is it really this case? I know this guy for
quite some time. He doesn't look too
bad, to me, at least. And then if you look at
people, what is the greatest joy than to cooperate? Where I live in
Bhutan and Nepal, like here in this Amish
community in the United States, when time comes to build
a house, everybody comes. And not only you build
a house, but it's [INAUDIBLE] celebrating,
of making a feast, of being together. And it's well-known
that hunter-gatherers, the main factor
of social life was an equalitarian
cooperative community. And that's the great
joy of doing that. And not only human
beings do that. And someone said, please tell
them there's no photoshopping. That is the real thing. So then, also, we know what
is the struggle for life? The survival of the fittest. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: But,
yes, that is true. But if you read
Darwin, first of all, the survival of the fittest
is not Darwin's formula. It's Herbert Spencer,
the bulldog of Darwin. And that led rise
to social Darwinism, like Enron type of competitions. But Darwin spoke so much
more about cooperation. He even considered
the possibility of extending benevolence
to others and your kin and even to other species. That's very clearly
expressed in Darwin. And I was really inspired
by discovering all that in Darwin's writing. In addition to that, the most
recent trend in evolution, like works of Martin
Nowak at Harvard, or the book "SuperCooperators,"
of [INAUDIBLE], that completely changed his views about that, is
that yes, there is competition. Of course, we know that. I mean, there's no
need to write a book in defense of selfishness,
or hurrah competition. But to show that--
and that's what they have shown-- that even
though competition doubtlessly exists, that cooperation
has been much more creative throughout evolution to
go from one step of complexity to another, from monocellular
to multicellular, to different kinds of
symbiosis between animals, up to social animals. So it is quite the case. And there was a survey
from the OECD in the 36 or so developed countries
proposing 10 factors that would contribute to
well-being and asking people what they thought about it. Income comes around
rank number six. So what's the matter
about the income? Number one was quality
of human relationships. That's what people said. This makes the
biggest difference to the quality of their
life in the family, at work, in the social place. Do we feel trust? Do we feel safe, and so forth? So again, this is not only
reserved to human beings, because we got that through
millions of years of evolution. If we have some quality, they
didn't come out of the blue. And if you look at the hotspots
for centenerians in the world, like there's one
in Japan, they all tell you, the reason
we feel we live long is because from birth
throughout life and up to that, we're always together. No one is left abandoned
somewhere in a corner. Now, yeah, I was surprised when
doing the research on the book to find out that there are
quite more people than I thought who thought, well,
basically, whatever you do, scratch at the
surface an altruist, and the selfish will bleed. If you're very smart. cynical enough, and
you really look, you will find a selfish
explanation for any seemingly altruistic behavior. So it's quite true that there
are hypocritical behavior or just that you do
something calculating what you're going to get in return. And you might make a big smile,
make a present to someone to cheat them. Or even not that bad,
but you could do just to boost your
self-image, or whatever, or just to relieve
you empathic distress. You see someone suffering. You have no way out. It's not that much that you
care about that wounded person. But since you have
no way out, you help because you can't
stand looking at that. I see with animals, if you show
terrible movies about animals, people say, oh, I love animals. I can't see that. Well, if you love animals,
look at it, and do something. So the idea of you do something
to relieve your distress is not fundamentally altruistic
because you think of relieving your sort of tension. Yes, this being
said, everyone who tried to find a
selfish explanation for every human
behavior has failed. This is armchair science. There's not one single
scientific study supporting the universal
selfishness hypothesis. Rather, the opposite,
people like Daniel Batson spent 20 years devising
skillful experiments in the lab in very nice,
controlled situations to put people in very
specific situations to see the outcome of a choice. And there's always the
significant people-- even if they have
an easy escape-- who choose the altruistic, or
what you call empathic concern solution. So his conclusion is after
20 years of research, we cannot prove 100% the
altruistic hypothesis. But at least, there's no support
for the universal selfishness explanation. It's just simply ideology
or just imagination. Now, but just to tell you
some of the arguments, now they hear about someone
who did a very beautiful act of generosity making a donation
to save 10 children anonymously so nobody is there
to praise him. He's not going to get his name
in the newspaper, and so forth. But then he confides
to a friend, I felt so good doing that. And then you see when
people are working now in humanitarian activities,
they spend one month with us. And at the end,
here's what they say. Oh, I got more than I gave them. So those smart
psychologists, those who defend universal
selfishness, they come and say, look, you did that
for the warm glow. You say you need all that,
and you feel so good. And that's the thing
that you take out of it. So you just did
that to feel good. So is it true all the time? So let's look at
this short movie. OK, so you think
this guy is saying, the one who jumped
on the rail track, I'm going to feel so
good when that's over. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: But
that's not finished. because then you interview
those guys, and they say, of course, I had to do that. I had no choice. This guy was going to die. I jumped and took it off. And then those smart guys, they
come again and say, hey, hey, you had no choice, automatic
behavior, instinctive behavior. This is neither
altruistic nor selfish. You just did it like that. What does that mean? Everyone I talk with
wishes it's going to be serious about that
question, like Daniel Batson said, of course
there's a choice. But that choice doesn't
take long to deliberate. No, it's like, it comes
with what you are, but it's not that you are
behaving like a robot. And look at this
guy, is he going to think for half
and hour, should I stretch my hand or not? Maybe if I break
his little finger, the insurance company will sue
me, or something like that. So there is a choice,
but that choice takes a fraction of a second. So you may say, I had no choice
because it was too obvious. And by the way, this guy
had a choice, clear choice. Sorry, I don't have
the next slide. I don't know what happened next. Now, people had choice. In the Second World War, in
every persecution, genocide, there were people who took
immense risk for themselves, for their family,
over a long time. They were certainly
not looking how to feel good and
have the warm glow. There was terrible danger. This is Pastor Andre
Trocme and his wife in the village of
Chambon-sur-Lignon in Haute-Loire, near the
Swiss border in France. Over the years, they saved
3,500 Jewish persons. They never closed
their door to anyone who sought help and refuge. They had then to go
through Switzerland. They were over constant
threat of deportation from the Gestapo, Even the
Vichy French government was threatening them. They never made a concession. The whole village did that. And they certainly had the
choice, and they did it. So rather than say,
well, those are saints. Well, this was a whole village. They are not born as saints. There's no saint gene
or something like that. They just say that is the
most natural way to do. So instead of saying,
oh, those are incredibly exceptional people,
it's better to try to find that potential
within our self, because we do have
that potential. We do have the
potential for care, as this Chinese person,
who lost his two legs, and all his life has
been helping sick people. And look, with the kind of joy. So when you see
someone with empathy, like this woman with born
TB that we helped in Tibet, of course, when you see
that, or even worse, when you see the extreme
form of deprivation, of starvation, and
so forth, you feel a strong emotional
resonance or you try to imagine yourself
in the place of that, and that's called empathy. But empathy alone is not
enough, because what happens? Imagine you are a nurse, or
a doctor, or social workers. I know of someone working with
the homeless in San Francisco. If you, day after day
after day, resonate with the suffering
of others, well, neuroscience shows
that you do suffer. This is real suffering
in the brain. There's no question. So it may be too much, asking
to suffer for 20 years-- morning, afternoon, and all the
time, so you lead to burnout. And by the way, 60% of all
medical personnel in the United States have or will suffer
or burnout for their life. So is there a remedy to that? So we studied that with
Tania Singer-- and of course, there is this burnout
happening-- who is a neuroscientist, one of the
world's specialists of empathy, and she asked me to come in
the MRI, one of the 120 hours that I spent in an MRI machine. And she said, well,
just do your meditation, and we'll see what happens. So it was a special MRI
called real-time fMRI. You can see immediately
what's happened. You don't have to
wait for weeks. And then after 10 minutes,
she said through the mic, what are you doing? This is nothing we see
normally for empathy. I said, well, I'm meditating on
compassion and loving-kindness. She says, well,
basically, come out. We have to talk. It's not the same
areas of the brain. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: So we talked,
and she was a bit annoyed, because it was so different. And she said, couldn't
you do just empathy? And so I thought of, well,
I said, OK, I can try, push away your compassion. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: So when we
split after the Dalai Lama, he says, how is it possible? You see all these
terrible things and don't have compassion. I said, well, we just
tried to focus on suffering and suffering only. So I had seen a documentary
on the BBC the day before on Romanian orphans. It was so dramatic. And all those type of movies,
like when I was in London recently, I saw a photo
exhibit on the Vietnam War, I mean, it's just if you look
at that for half an hour, you will fall quickly
in empathy and distress. So I tried for one
hour, doing that. And in the MRI, you have to
alternate to measure properly. So you do rest,
and then the state, and then rest like 50 times. And after, well, I was
totally burned out. I mean, only resonating
with the distress, I was feeling powerless,
almost like disgust. I didn't know how to deal
with those terrible suffering. It's all negative violence. And then at the end, it was
about 11:30 in the morning. Tania said through
the mic, would you like to take a break for lunch? Or would you like to move to
your compassion meditation? I said, please, let me do
the compassion meditation. I can't stand it anymore. So when I did that, it was
like breaking open a dam. I mean I felt that
outpour of affection, embracing, like every
atom of suffering was filled with an atom of love. I felt much stronger
actually in contrast with this empathic distress. And it was completely
different, like day and night. And in the brain, of
course, it was so different that we pursued the
study with other subjects and eventually published
a paper showing that that completely
different network of the brain for empathy, empathic distress,
and for loving-kindness and compassion is a more
positive sort of network of affiliation, maternal
love, sense of wholesomeness and reward, positive
affect applied to suffering in a constructive way. And now, Tania has been
doing a one-year program. We turned to the volunteers
to distinguish those. She studied mindfulness for
three months, perspective taking for three
months, meta, which is loving-kindness for three
months in different orders. And premier results
show that mindfulness is great to reduce stress,
but it doesn't increase your prosocial behavior. Hence, we need
caring mindfulness. You get two for
the price of one. Because to be caring,
you need to be mindful, but you may not be necessarily
caring by just being mindful. Imagine a mindful
sniper, very mindful. He's always on the task,
never distracted, no emotions, always non-judgmental
in the present moment. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: A mindful
psychopath, same thing. But you can't have a caring
sniper and a caring psychopath. So therefore, please
add those 6 letters to any mindfulness meditation,
caring mindfulness, and that would work out nicely. So anyway, the idea that it is
loving-kindness mediation that really increases
prosocial behavior, and it is the
antidote to burnout. Because that very
positive mental state applied to suffering,
this is basically altruism applied to
suffering, compassion. That's kind of a balm, a much
bigger sort of thing that's just empathy. Stand-alone empathy is
like an electric pump. Without water, it burns. But if you add this very
warmhearted feeling, it is actually the
antidote to burnout. So that's why when you see very
warmhearted doctors on this, naturally, people
feel it so good. And that can be trained. And that's the whole
point of what we do. That certainly comes from
my tender paternal love. But we can use that to enhance
it, to extend it to others. So now, very
quickly, let's assume that altruism does exist. If you look at
the [INAUDIBLE], I think it's pretty
strong evidence. But you say, so what? You look at our world, the
strong narcissistic epidemic, the individualistic
trends, and the world's not going so, so well. Can we do something
using that potential? So can we change individually,
and can society change? So first, individually, this
is Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama's teachers. I was fortunate to
spend 13 years with him. My friend Vivian was here,
so I spent many years. My first teacher,
Kangyur Rinpoche. And His Holiness,
the Dalai Lama. here with Richard Davidson, the
neuroscientist from Madison-- I think he came here-- who is
very interested in encouraging these collaborations. So now then you've got
those who went to the lab and were studying with EEG. And here's Mingyur
Rinpoche in the fMRI. And he characterized fMRI as
being four characteristics. It is narrow. It is dark. It is noisy. And it is, what else? It is cold, so not a very
good place to meditate. But nevertheless, you can try. And then recently,
I was in the lab at Coma Lab in Liege in Belgium. This world specialist
on coma, he wanted to study different
degrees of lucidity. So then they put me
with an EEG, and there was something they call
transmagnetic cranial stimulation that was bom,
bom, bom, for five hours. And then you have to
meditate on pure awareness free from thoughts. And then at some point,
because I could not hear, because on top of,
they put you a white noise. And white noise is just
this white-like noise like, shhhh all the time. And then so I can't
hear any instruction, so they came with a board,
don't blink your eyes. So I went like this, and
then another board came. Relax your facial muscles. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: Meditate. And then they said, could you
self-induce a state of topor? OK. I went really stupid. And then with all this
and bing, bing, bing. And then they said,
could you fall asleep? No. After five hours, I managed
to fall asleep, so anyway. So here I come out of the MRI
after two and a half hours at Richard Davidson's. And then what the
results were with people with long-term meditation,
there was huge differences. On the bottom, you see
novice, not untrained people, knowing with the EEG, trying to
practice compassion meditation. The pink line is when they rest. Nothing much happened. The blue line is
when we meditate. Nothing much happened either. On top, the yellow line
is the meditators at rest. In the rest, they rest. But when they're engaged
in compassion meditation, you see this huge peak, in the
gamma rays of brain frequency that is so big that it
was never observed before in neuroscience. And since I was the
first guinea pig, that crazy idea of the
happiest person in the world came from a journalist who'd
never thought of a better idea, but it has nothing
to do with happiness. And there are seven
billion beings. And by the way, all the 20
others long-term meditators did exactly the same,
even better than me. So forget about that. So now if you look
at brain imaging, and you see on the left side,
the meditator is at rest and the B shows
meditators engaging in compassion meditations. Many areas of the brain
are strongly activated. Those are areas with a
sense of affiliation, empathy, what I mentioned
before, positive affect. On the right side, C is
the novice is at rest. Nothing happened. D is novices in meditation. Nothing happened either. That's normal. They didn't train. You might say,
well, great for you, 60,000 hours of meditation. What about us? Hence the 10-second meditation
of my dear friend Meng. Now, who can say they don't
have 10 seconds every hour? So stop everything. Don't hug people. You might get a
little bit in trouble. But just think for 10
seconds, may they be happy. May they flourish in life. And so, if you do that, it
sort of sets up a stream. Actually, if you do not
necessarily 10 seconds, but 20 minutes a day for
four weeks of mindfulness meditation, and now I
think I'm sure you'd get even better with
caring mindfulness, you can see a structural
change in the brain, in the hippocampus, which
is an area of the brain that assimilates novelty when you're
training to something new, whether it's playing chess,
or juggling, or mindfulness, or altruisitc love,
your brain does change. It also changes your
prosocial behavior. That's two weeks of
compassion meditation. And you see the prosocial
behavior, the blue stack, is much higher than any other
psychological intervention. And, at the same time, those
who are with this increased prosocial behavior, they also
found a decrease in the size, after two weeks,
of the amygdala, this area of the brain brain
related to fear and anger. So that's quite remarkable. So don't be discouraged,
not only 10 seconds, but 20 minutes a day does
make a difference very fast. You could even do that
with preschoolers, four or five years old. And you do some kind
of mindful breathing, you see with a little stone. But it's a 10-week program
that Richard Davidson did also in Madison, 40 minutes,
three times a week. Very simple intervention
about gratitude, emotional intelligence, empathy,
feeling what the other feels, and all kinds of
cooperative learning. I mean, I cannot
describe in detail. There's a nice
manual about that. But the fact is that even
this simple intervention with four or five years old
leads to a significant increase in prosocial behavior. That's the blue line
compared to a control group. But then comes the
ultimate scientific test, the stickers test. And that's unforgiving. So what you do, you determine
before the intervention for each child in the class
who is their best friend. And then that's the first photo
you see on the left and then the child they cannot stand. And then you have
two other envelopes with an image of an unknown
child and the sick child. And before the intervention, you
give them a bunch of stickers and say, please give
it to anyone you want. So what happens? They give to their best
friend almost everything. Now 10 weeks later,
you will say, well, this is four or five years old. It's kind of a playful
intervention, no big deal. They get a good time. But how can it change? This in-group, out-group
sort of discrimination. Well, it changed in a big way. It levels down. They give practically
as much stickers as their best friend and
their least [INAUDIBLE] child. So if you think of the
deleterious effect in society of discrimination, whether
it's racist, ethnic, religious, social class, if you
could level these in a simple way
with young children, what a service to society. So we do that in India. We have 25,000
kids in the school that we built with
Carona Ascension. So we introduced yoga
class, meditation class. And one thing, for sure,
it increased the attendance to school. Now, here's the other good
news that the possibility of societal ways. So we always speak about
violence everywhere. In Marseilles, in
South of France, you can buy a Kalashnikov for
800 euros almost everywhere. I mean, and here, of course,
is much easier than in France. But still, what happens to
violence of other centuries? So if you look at the
book of Steven Pinker, there is a significant
decrease in violence, no matter what violence
is still there and was what you see on TV. In Oxford, in 1350,
there was 100 homicides per year per 100,000 habitants. Now it's 0.6. Now, in Europe, it
went down 5200 times. In Australia, as soon as
they banned personal arms, it went down 10 times. It's only Sicily
that's about 12. We don't know why. I think this is a good study. It should be done there. In any case,
basically, homicides have been going down
steadily over the century. That's what the
data said, if you look at abolition of torture. And if you look at the average
number of casualty per conflict all over the world, there
are two that are banks, one in the United States,
one in Uppsala, in Sweden. If you look at all the
countries, of course there are terrible
things happening-- ISIS, South Sudan, the Iraq-Iran
war, a million people died. But if you take all of
the countries worldwide, divide by the number of victims,
it went from 50,000 average to 1,000. So there's always something
somewhere terribly dramatic, but globally, it has gone down. Domestic violence is
still the main cause of violence in the world,
because it's 1 to 1. But the abuse and
violence, like in children in the United States, that
goes down by half in 20 years. So there is hope. Why is there hope? And how you could
find the articulation point between individual
change and societal change. Another great discovery I
made while studying research for the book is the notion
of evolution of cultures. But to get an altruistic
gene in every human being might take 50,000 years. It's too late for
the environment. So evolution of culture
is a Darwinian process that is faster than genes. There's actually a book called
that, "Faster Than Genes," which is a very good one. And the evolution of
culture can happen over a generation-- attitudes towards
war, attitudes towards women, homophobia,
environment, name it. Cultures are
changing quite fast. The slavery was abolished in
England in the 18th century. First of all, there
were 10 people who said, slavery is an abomination. Everybody laughed. The Parliament said,
there's no way. The British Empire
will economically collapse without slavery. We can't afford that. 10 years later,
it was abolished. Today, if you say, I'm against
slavery, people would say, so what? And people who would say,
how can you dare to say, no, it was not too bad. No, economically,
it makes sense. Shall we put back slavery on? Shall we deny voting
rights to women? Of course, we cannot go back
on those cultural changes-- fortunately. So we made big progress
of civilization. So that's why this
was 10 people who decided to start that company,
10 people who have decided to promote the universal
declaration of human rights, and they succeeded. So there can be tipping
points, a critical mass of individual new ideas. And after a while,
ethically, you can't feel comfortable if you
steal go against women and men having the same sort
of gender issue, having the same potential and
possibilities, and so forth. So that's why I think those
two individual changes, societal changes, the
cumulative of our generation, we don't have to learn again
that slavery is totally bad. We're born in that sort
of ideas and culture. So they'll fashion each other
like two knives sharpening each other. So there is a possibility. So what can we do? I can go back to my hermitage. That's a very nice time. That's what I see
in the morning. But we need to promote
also caring economics. As I mentioned,
that's the only way to remedy to poverty
in the midst of plenty and take care of common goods,
especially the environment. We need to enhance cooperation
within the enterprise. It has been shown
again and again that a company, a community,
and with this unconditional cooperation, transparency
of information, of sharing, less hierarchy
that is not waterproof is a company where
it's better to work-- I think Google is probably
a good example of that-- and therefore, so
more prosperous. It has been shown
again and again, that a company where it's
nice to work, also do better. And we need more
cooperative learning instead of competitive one. There's many areas
where we would boost our level of cooperation. We need no more sustainable
development of growth. It's a bit suspicious. You always think of
quantitative growth. We need qualitative growth. So instead of
speaking of growth, why not speak of harmony? For now, sustainable harmony
means reducing inequalities. There are still 1.5 billion
people under the poverty line. That's not going to work
well if you keep that. Inequalities are
growing in all the OECD countries last 30 years. This is very unhealthy. Less trust is not harmonious. And then harmony
for the future is to remain in harmony within
the planetary boundaries so that we can continue to
prosper, bringing harmony with environment instead of
disrupting this equilibrium. So sustainable harmony, I
think, is a powerful concept, and we should use it. We need local commitment. We need to do things ourselves. And global
responsibility, we have the WHO, which takes care
of epidemics, and so forth. No country can say,
there's a plague epidemic, I'm not part of that. We have to be part
of all things. Same thing for the environment. There should be global
governance for the environment. There's no question. We need to be
extending our altruism to 1.3 million species. We can't say they are just there
for our use, to distract us, or to entertain us. They are our [INAUDIBLE]
in this world. They have a life. They are subject of a life. They don't want to suffer. That needs to be respected. The natural equilibrium
needs to be respected. We are not the owner of
1.3 other billion species. We live with them in a very
vast interdependent system. And we need daring it. We need to dare altruism. We need to dare
that it does exist. We have a potential for it. We can teach it at
school, because there's a potential for that. Individually, we can change. Society can become
more cooperative. We don't need to be afraid that
it's a lightweight concept. This is the core
most pragmatic answer to our times'
different challenges. So in terms of
animals, we can say, as then I'm sure that
"Animals are my friends. And I don't eat my friends." That is quite a good, nice way
to explain why you don't want to eat fish in a restaurant. If they say, oh, you are
vegetarian, so you each fish. I say, well, look,
everything that swims, everything that runs,
everything that flies, they're all my friends. So then you can also do,
say like Martin Luther King, everyone must decide, a
man or woman, of course, whether he or she will "walk in
the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of
destructive selfishness. It's up to us. Someone like the Dalai
Lama shows us the part. We tried to implement that
and even turned activities. Now, we have now
developed 140 projects. This is one of our clinics. And we treat about
120,000 patients a year in Nepal, India, and Tibet. This is the clinic that
we built in [INAUDIBLE] with the help of the
Googlers here some years ago. That was a wonderful initiative. We built a school
with bamboos in Nepal, with a social
entrepreneur, 2,000 kids in the school that we can
be build for a $150,000 is a good return on investment. All made with bamboo, so
when there's an earthquake, it just moves a little bit. In Tibet, we build a
number of dispensaries. Obviously, we need
a bridge here. That's our car. There's a road,
and there is river. Nobody says, knows what. So the drivers reciting
his mantra very fast. And so we built 18
bridges, including one on the Yangtze
tree on the Mekong. They all come from
Tibet, by the way. We take care of the elderly. Here is finally the
happiest man in the world. We've got him. And the happiest woman
is there as well. So we've built a number
of schools there. And we're trying to favor
especially education of girls. And we intervene in earthquake
areas, first in Tibet in 2010. There was 10,000
people who died there. So we brought a lot of goods. And this year, from
April, we started building an earthquake resistant
school at 12,000 feet in Tibet. It's a boarding
school for children. In Nepal, as you know,
the recent tragedy so since we are in the place
with a clinic 50 people strong and a monastery with
500 disciplined monks, we could have teams
going to the villages. And now, as I said, we helped
40,000 people in 160 villages with food, with shelter,
and basic medical necessity. And then we're going to move
next, when the emergency is over, to community
projects, rebuilding school, rebuilding dispensary,
wherever it's needed. This is our mascot,
the Corona girl, I photographed her 12 years ago. I'm not the [INAUDIBLE] of
"Gone Girl," so I thought I should find her again. And so I found her. And I learned her
name, and she's called Beautiful Ocean of Turquoise. So this is our website. It's very easy to see
what we do and help us. And we are very grateful
to Google to host me again and also to have
helped us in the past. And I know you'll continue
to help us, of course. So thank you so much. And this was a few ideas. We still have, I
think, 10 minutes or so to have question and
answer before we break for the so-called meditation. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for your
wonderful talk. I'm wondering if you can talk a
little bit about enlightenment and if that's even a
goal worth pursuing or if that's a selfish goal. Can you tell us a
little bit more, please? MATTHIEU RICARD: Well, that
question often is put to us. Well, yeah, while in your
hermitage, practicing compassion or mindfulness,
whatever, ha, ha, ha, is it not selfish to be
in this nice place facing the Himalayas, not you
have to think about paying taxes and things like that? Well, I thought of it. As far as my teachers
and the tradition which I've been following for
45 years, one of the main goals is to get rid of selfishness
while doing this practice. So you cannot accuse someone
of being selfish if the goal of what he's doing now is
to get rid of selfishness. It's like saying
to someone who's building a big hospital,
what are you doing now with all this construction
work, plumbery, electricity. It doesn't help anyone. Go and do surgery in the street. But, of course, when
the hospital is ready, it's so much more powerful. So I think mindfulness is not
the ultimate sense of Buddhism. It's a tool. The essence of Buddhism
is wisdom and compassion. Now, to achieve that,
if you're not mindful, you're just distracted. So therefore, you
need whatever you do, whether it's activity in
your workplace-- multitasking has been shown to be a very
deficient way to do anything. They don't do anything
better in cognitive tasks, including the speed
of switching tasks, which would be the
quintessence of multitasking. You just get a messy mind. So the idea of
being concentrated, even if you do many things
in the morning, each time, fully on what you do, is kind
of the essence of mindfulness. Now, on a personal
level, it also helps you to have a
mind that is a bit more clear, a little bit more
stable, a little bit more calm. And that's also a better tool
to then cultivate qualities like altruistic love
and others and also to deal with your hopes
and fears and ruminations. So it's basically a much more
optimal healthy state of mind than a confused, ruminating,
torn apart, divided, conflicted mind, obviously. So I think it's a very
beautiful and powerful tool. But again, since
it's something that has become more and
more and more popular, I think, and I've
mentioned that many times to my good friend,
Jon Kabat-Zinn, please know, very explicitly
include the caring aspect of it, otherwise,
it could be misused because any tool can be
use to harm or do good. And again, we don't
want mindful snipers. They are mindful, by the
way, but they are not caring. So caring, I think,
it just simply dispels all possible deviation. But otherwise, it's a very
wonderful and powerful tool. This is secular, so
nobody can argue that it's something that is not for us. MENG: The book is "Altruism,"
available where books are sold. And my friend 's
Matthieu Ricard. AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] MATTHIEU RICARD: Thank you. MENG: Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
