Matthieu Ricard in conversation with Pico Iyer

sometimes as you know vanity fair or the new york times magazine or one of those asks somebody to come up with her ideal dinner party and nearly always she will choose as one of the guests a born conversationalist with a kind of shinosekoi and subway affair and she'll usually also try to invite an artist who's been to the furthest corners of the earth and brought back some of the deepest and most inspiring images from there and quite often the respondent will choose a scientist who sits on the facts of life as they have been empirically proven and every dinner party of course needs a wise man so today we thought we would give you the ideal dinner party all in the form of material all four people most of you i think know that madhu was born in paris and grew up the son of a celebrated abstract artist and one of france's leading editor intellectuals he got a phd in cellular genetics at the institute pasteur under the nobel prize-winning francois jacob but in the meantime in his early 20s he went to india and nepal and he met various tibetan teachers who seemed to sit on a sense of wisdom and peace and happiness that i think he hadn't met so often in paris and so he threw over his promising career and decided to study with him and he's been a monk for more than 40 years he's been bringing the words of his holiness the dalai lama into french for 25 years and after about a quarter of a century of this his father came to nepal and essentially asked matthias why he had become a monk and mateo essentially asked his father why he hadn't and the transcription of their discussions the monk and the philosopher became a huge hit across the globe matia then brought out a beautiful book on happiness reminding us all that it's something that all of us have in our power regardless for religion or tradition or lack of same he's brought out seven books of photography including one motionless journey that to me is the most haunting investigation of change the system change and the relation of self to the world that i've ever encountered and now finally in english his great 850-page magnum office on altruism is with us this week and in it he uh stitches together cutting-edge research from labs across the globe a really deep command of the philosophies of east and west and extraordinary data on everything from climate change to homicide rates as a way of showing us not only that altruism is how we make our own lives the lives of people around us much better but also how through it we can transform our relationship to animals the environment and the world and as you all know match is in constant demand he's at the world economic forum in davos every year he's constantly a ted i last met him in fact in october at ted global so we're really lucky to have him here i'm sorry to embarrass you with uh all of that matthia and i'll embarrass you further with a not very friendly question which is all of us in this room know how important altruism is what is it that we fail to understand or need to understand about it that we don't uh i don't know thank you first people for those kind words i think it's not that we fail to understand but maybe we don't take the full measure of what i love to call the vandality of goodness because you see maybe it's not really our fault it is natural that our attraction our attention is has to be attracted specifically to something that is out of the norm that was possibly threatening and that is surprising for which we need to pay attention so if something is going fine look you know i have not much to worry specially about being here sitting uh and if 100 if all of you today have done some wonderful things you know you some of you might have gone together to help the elderly or do something great for an ngo or just like relate in the decent way to each other this is no news and it doesn't surprise us no we want at the when we finish and we go out i don't think anyone will say nobody started a fist fight such a relief you know so no but if two people start a fist fight you know you in two weeks we said you know we went to this conference on our tourism and those guys start bashing each other so then if you see 40 000 homicides uh when you are you have been 20 years old you would have seen 20 000 violent dead on tv on movie uh 20 years old 10 000 when you are 12. what does that mean you know about reality so it is perhaps not a conscious bias but it's maybe that we need to pay attention to residentials and we underestimate and we often exaggerate the opposite you know the wicked world syndrome everybody is bad money man is a word for man or fruit who comes with ideas that have not taught much about human nature but from what i know about human beings they're all but rascals good start in life you know you start with that and then okay so this idea sort of cast a shadow on the fact that yes selfishness exists i don't have to write a book to prove the existence of selfishness or especially not 800 pages but along that the possibility of altruism has been vastly underestimated and the potential that we have within us the fact that there is not a single social psychological study ever that comforted the ideology of universal selfishness and your scratch at the surface on an altruist and the selfish would bleed if you are very smart you will find somewhere a really selfish motivation in the most seemingly most generous altruistic behavior that ideology is just wrong it's ideology and it's never been it's armchair science basically so that i think something that we need to take the measure of it is seen for instance in natural catastrophe you know look at katrina there was this report there's rape there's a rampage and that was all over the news the governor sent the army instead of sending no help because it was so dangerous but then in the end all the newspaper apologized because there had been mutual help there was the robin hood of the group that keeping on helping people few people went to the supermarket to get clean water for their children it's not what we call rampage there was not a single murder not a single rape and so because we have this kind of tendency to to exaggerate that and it sounds like i and my colleagues in the media are partly to blame you've probably heard this phrase in english if it bleeds it leads you know the more violent the more horrific the event the more attention we pay to it which actually from what you were just saying is almost optimistic in other words violence or catastrophe is exceptional and kindness and peace are the everyday norm which is why we don't feature it in our headlines now we see that in nepal during this last tragic earthquake you know it's just the norm moments of tragedy and panic the moment it happens but right after you get calm you get solidarity the people organizing each other helping to start 95 percent of the thing is done by the local people not just by the rescuer who come from here and there with dogs and they do come and they do help but most of the work is done by this movement of solidarity and the best of people comes at the surface and that's much more the rule that the exception and i think one thing i got a lot from your book was that altruism is different from compassion and compassion is different from pity you have this beautiful quote from somebody who says that pity arises out of sorrow compassion arises out of love but i think in our minds we often confuse compassion and altruism how would you so all those words of course it just means you know basically it's all about the definition that we put uh behind them so pt is a sort of uh feeling uh you feel sorry but powerless and i remember so the dalai lama gave one this example you know you fly over the pacific ocean and you see someone you know swimming there he i don't know how he got there but he's swimming and you know there's hopeless so you can't do much from you you know very far in the airplane there's no one to signal so you feel sorry but no powerless now there's little mist of some fog and there's an island a quarter of miley way and the guy is filing the wrong direction so now because there's a possibility of that person being saved could i do something you know send a message or make a sign or so the fact that there's a possibility to come out of suffering is right to this very strong powerful compassion because there is a possibility to overcome so no i think definition helps and also because they they concern different mental states so altruism is basically an intention and a determination to achieve something good for others now it is genuine tourism is that's your primary goal you may get some you know bonus like the warm glow the happiness of having feeling you did something really great one of the best things you did in life but that's kind of a secondary effect your main goal was without calculating you know if i do that it's going to do that to me that's going great and get more out of it that i am giving so that's of course not general tourism it's kind of interested altruism it happened it's not bad necessarily no reciprocal tourism in the village where everybody have each other for the crops to build house they all come that's great but that's there's also mutual interest let's say but there are moments where we feel unconditionally you know i want this child to be happy i want that person to be happy now when that meets with suffering so we just call it compassion does the shape that the benevolent benevolent wish of others happiness takes when it meets suffering which becomes like the two sides of a coin it becomes the wish men suffering on the cause of suffering be dispelled so now empathy is little bit now slightly used in many many different ways especially in europe i don't know if it's the case here almost empathy is almost synonymous with altruism and that does that thing uh not quite correct because empathy has a very precise role empathy has two kinds one is emotional resonance now you come i see you smiling i immediately feel some kind of joy of seeing you smiling i know it's because of you it's not just emotional contagion but you know i do feel that if i see if i'm a nurse if i see someone who a social worker or anyone who sees someone in deep pain and suffering i do suffer because of that person's suffering and the suffering is real you can show that in the brain now imagine so basically you are a caregiver and then your your patients either they cure or they die whatever but it's very rare that you have to deal with some we are someone a patient that is in intense suffering for 10 50 years now it's very very exceptional but if you suffer day after day because of the suffering of of repeatedly exposed to intense suffering the people the patient change but you are there it if you only that's what you have is too much so you come to exhaustion burn out and so what people tell you now you have to keep a distance protect yourself okay if that's the only way to do it's better to do that than burning out but isn't it there a better way so we explore that with neuroscientist tanya singer at the max planck institute in leipzig and what we found because she asked me to go in the scanner and say you know do what we do your staff you know the buddhist meditation so i know we had we could communicate and then it was a quest uh advances type of mri which was real-time ephemeris so you could see immediately something roughly what was going on in the brain so after 10 minutes she said what are you doing go ahead with compassion meditation he says that's not what we see normally with empathy come out we have to talk so then we talked and he said you know could you just do empathy leave alone that compassion stuff you know so i say well i can try so i i'd visualize i'd seen the bbc documentary on romanian children who were in in a in a home hospice terrible condition you know sometimes would break their bones just by walking they were so frail so those imager tried to focus again and again and again try to keep love and compassion out but just resonating so when i mentioned that with the dialogue i says how can you stop compassion i say well normally we would not do that but that's what so focus on suffering again and again we didn't now in the mri i was completely burned out so then tanya said well would you like to make a break or shall we move to the compassion meditation i said please let me do it finally give me the permission so then when i turned it was i think since i never done that before just a better empathy it was like a very powerful like like a damn breaking out of a flow a stream of sort of this feeling of embracing warm heart loving kindness instead of feeling powerless and a little bit disgusted and all that completely changed and in the brain it was like day and night so since then tanya repeated that with other practitioners and she could show that it's completely different secretary in the brain and what she's doing now for one year which she just finished the study with 350 volunteers to do three months of mindfulness three months of loving kindness and treatments of cognitive like perspective taking and she couldn't show that the loving kindness meditation is actually an antidote to the empathic distress so in brief we could say that standalone empathy is a bit like a electric pump without water it burns you need the water of love and compassion so that that could have wonderful you know applications in the medical world in social workers who've constantly faced this problem of burnout yeah i was just reading how if you show a picture of one child who's suffering and say please will you contribute ten thousand dollars many people will do so if you show a picture of five people let's say in the same village suffering please give ten thousand dollars they won't in other words the empathy is going up in against the compassion and we're so relating to that one kid that it neutralizes our ability to see five kids who are individuals but when you were talking just a minute ago i was also remembering how the first time i spent a lot of time with his holiness dalai lama i really understood how passive passive passivism and passiveness are exactly the opposite the pacifism is an action and an intention and to use your word it's an intervention it's not just standing back from the world it's actually bringing a clear light into the middle of the struggle um and i think that's often not understood when people talk about non-violence but nonviolence is definitely not passive no exactly it's actually the most courageous yeah you know the the burmese monk who were barefoot in front of the harmed people is so much more coverage than being on the roof and and shooting like a sniper yeah so yes it's it take no gandhi the the salt marsh it takes immense courage those are not weak people and also non-violence doesn't mean that you cannot be strict and possibly use forcible means it means that your only goal is to avoid harming someone voluntarily that you want to minimize suffering by all means you always give preference to dialogue so it's a there's no place for hatred but there could be place for being firm and you know resolute and standing your ground and not so this is quite different yes yeah easier to eliminate your hateful thoughts than to eliminate your enemies and i think people often say to you well how does altruism feature when somebody of malevolent intent a terrorist comes into this room how does altruism respond to that well if it's only one terrorist maybe we can manage something yeah it depends what you know the drama was told but what about this non-violence you know if someone comes with a gun and it's going to kill all of us what do you do i'll first shoot in the legs and if he falls down he'll come and pet his head so but the one of the question that uh you know we we had in the san francisco berkeley was you know and again and again i heard that you know it was same in the iraq war people say what about your meditation what you can do with sudan and iraq when someone's told us about isis you know how do you react with isis first of all i think this question by itself is sort of not fair that thinking that something like having a a benevolent and loving attitude is going to solve it will be the remedy now to that issue it's like you know why are we waiting that the forest is in fire and and that would have been efficient at the time of the spark because nothing started without some hatred with some lack of education some lack of care for bringing education for anything that would you know when there's a huge epidemic and then everybody is falling and thinking you say well what about your silly vaccination what does it do to this how can you stop the epidemic with your stupid vaccination your vaccination is to prevent and so there's so many things we can do before the forest is in fire that we neglected to do and every single genocide there was so many precursor signs that we have ignored i was telling you that in the case of the khmer rouge i know a jesuit french father five years after all he went every year and told you know this thing is coming and nobody thought you know that it was serious so in a way whatever you could do to you know raise benevolence and so forth has to be done at the earlier stage to take in consideration nobody is born as someone whose only idea when he's seven years old is to blow up the world and cut people's head you know it's happened for many different circumstances so in that case what is the role of compassion yes first of all is that to use any means that is needed to minimize suffering but no place for hatred the reason is that of course we could have moral judgment this is absolutely without excuse this is 100 percent you know blameable there's no any it's inexcusable this isn't horrific but compassion is not about a moral judgment compassion precise role is to address the cause of suffering wherever they are and whatever shape they take so you cannot deny that terrorists are bringing or any dictator is bringing immense suffering to the world so then you would think what are the possibilities for addressing the causes of that suffering so you may say well what about if any possible means that that hatred that cruelty that indifference that greed whatever it is if there's a way to somehow it could be eradicated that would be great who will not wish that the dictator would change it may be not realistic maybe not possible now but at least you can have that wish without you know sort of minimizing the harm they do without having some kind of contempt for the victims so that is what compassion is about so compassion is the way a physician will look at a very sick math person so however terrible the sickness is the physician is going to see is there a cure or not not just bashing the patient with a stick now in that analogy of the first fire of course speaks to everybody in california because we have a lot of forest fires uh and i was once in the middle of one and my husband down 440 other houses burnt down that day and i quickly saw that as you said by then it was far too late and although now we're all living in imperial places in the hills of california we can wish for more dc-10s or better helicopters or 10 000 firefighters instead of 500 none of that is really going to help what is going to help is as you said avoiding throwing the spark being vigilant about not throwing the matches in the brush and clearing the brush in other words all the precautionary things we do so that the fire never starts because once it starts there's no stopping it and so that's why it's not so fair you know to say what your meditation can do with south sudan you know well you know there could be something to be done when people when hatred begins in people's minds yeah and i think i've also heard you say that meditation is is like the construction of a hospital so if you see children in suffering on the street of course you want to help them but actually you also have to do the hard work of creating a hospital where they can be cured for rather than just racing out and trying to be answered the question when people say this isn't selfish when you go uh three months in your heritage uh to meditate so you could help people and they say well first of all if one of the main goal is to get rid of selfishness you know then it seems too selfish and then the example of the hospital yes while you are doing this building up this courageous compassion you know it's like building the hospital or the pipes the electricity the cement doesn't cure anybody but when it's ready it's so much more powerful so the best advice i could give you know to people who wants to work in the field of humanitarian activity now i've been involved now for 15 years now we accomplish 140 projects every year we treat 120 000 patients in india nepal and tibet plus the kids we put in school during the recent earthquakes since one month we have been helping 70 000 people in 200 villages with food medicine and all that so first of all obviously this is some of the consequences of for all of us having training that but you know at the same time one of the advice i would give to anyone who works in the humanitarian work is to train those qualities because how you see many projects failing it's not that there is nothing to do in this world it's not that there are no resources it's usually most ngo collapse because of internal problems you know it's either the worst case is corruption but it's also very often clashes of ego and everything goes wrong and then you completely hijack of your noble intention to help others because of human shortcomings so it will be a good you know instead of you know all kinds of training they do for ngos one of the best one will be to to develop the inner resources that you can go through all that with a clear goal not to build a clinic to build the school and not get hijacked by all those you know hopes and fear and how the people treat you and the enough gratitude all this stuff you know just keep going in an everyday level though so often what we're encountering is the choice between one good and another good or one form of kindness and another kindness if we're a parent if we're a teacher if we're a spouse let's say our child comes and says daddy i don't want to go to school today because i want to go and help somebody how do we bring an altruistic response to i mean and there are many such situations that's just one of many but well you know again there's one thing that we can always check is the motivation no matter what no you cannot it's not always easy to predict the outcome and the short term and long term consequences of your action we lack sometimes information sometimes there's so many impressive and predictable parameters and we are not enlightened so we may like some kind of wisdom but at least we can check the motivation and we don't do that often enough i guess so then the motivation and i remember the dilemma expressing it very clearly and in detail he said first we must check i am doing this for myself or for others so of course just to clear away something altruism is not about sacrifice the idea that something can be only altruistic if it really cost you and it's so painful you know i'm going to do that but i hate it but i have to do that because i'm altruistic that's so silly no altruism is the only and the best way to become happy yourself as a bonus you know it's like you you grow a crop for the further we eat for the rice you get the the hay with it you didn't do it forever you get it as a bonus so the twofold accomplishment of other happiness and yours comes through altruism pursuit of selfish happiness is done to fail me me me all day long very uncomfortable everyone thinks you are a pain and then it doesn't work because it assumes you are independent entities while we are interdependent so that's not working but besides that you have to motivation has to be checked and so there's nothing wrong to wish your happiness you are one human being you why not so white so that's part of compassion to wish also to to be happy but is it mostly for me or or of others that means others are many and you are usually one yes unless you have split personality or something like that so then is it for the short term or is it for a fewer number or greater number and is it for the short term or for the long term so maybe for the shorter you know it might be nice but maybe for the long term again like the hospital building if your a child you know gain more capacity to help others in buddhism we give the example of if you want you're a beggar you want to give a banquet to 100 megahertz you know you don't have so you need to build up something that you have the capacity to help so ideally it should be for the greater number and for the long term so of course every single action if we have to calculate all that this may be a bit cumbersome but it becomes sort of natural to intuitively check is i'm do i'm really concerned by the happiness and suffering of others when i do that so they're writing a book finally say thing that you know it's a big undertaking so the first thing why i'm doing that is it really for the only reason that even it helps one person is worth doing so if you continue with that motivation that that's really keep you in the right direction and i know that dalai lama always says this is related you can always condemn the action but not the actor yeah that's how it's bottom it's beautiful yeah i remember i was once traveling in a bullet train with him in japan and i just read a book on matsetung and i'd read that matsutung had written in the margin of one book if something's black and i say it's white it's white if something is up and i say it's down it's down in other words my my word trumps everything i'm the only authority and i cited this to his holiness he grabbed my arm and he said never say anything i will get marseille you can criticize his actions but never criticize the man and he's speaking about the man who tried to destroy tibet and brought so much suffering that was really humbled and moved that he would have that degree of some sense of compassion and altruism for the person and his human potential and his buddha nature and his original goodness even in the midst of all the ways has gone wrong so when when you say that to someone they say but it is the person who did the action yeah and you and they think they have the final argument but you see there's a beautiful image in the one of classic buddhist texts it's called the way of the bodhisattva and he said when someone beats you with a stick nobody gets angry with the stick it'll be silly though but some people might kick the stick but basically you know when you bump into a stone you kick it a second time but that's kind of silly so nobody gets angry at the stick you get angry with the person yeah but but the text goes on but that's just silly the person is money is sort of manipulated by hatred or by anger just like the person is manipulating the stick so the real enemy is not the person but hatred so it doesn't mean that at that moment the action of the person who is under the power of hatred who does nothing or can't do maybe for some reason nothing against that state of mind that's overwhelming is not that whole situation is not something that will be counteracted by any possible means but the idea that it is the person is fundamentally you know evil or degraded or something fundamentally evil with at the heart of the structure of the person that's what the mistake is because it's like if you have a deep grave sickness you know my sister she's two years older than me but when she's 42 she be she had parkinson's and all her life she says i'm not a parkinsonian i have the parkinson so in the sense that if if you go to the doctor and say you have a flu you go doctor i am the flu okay what can you do for me you say i have the flu so you know you suffer from a sickness so anger hatred jealousy craving arrogance to the sickness of the mind so the idea that there is something you know behind the screen of thoughts behind the scream of emotion that basic cognitive faculty you know in buddhism we call the luminous aspect of the mind it doesn't mean that it shines in the dark but that what allows to to to know everything to know emotions to know hatred or no love but which is not tainted by neither of those that cannot be spoiled and this is very simple reason because its function is to know if you are aware of hatred that awareness is not is not angry is just aware it's like a beam of light if you shine something on a heap of garbage the light doesn't become dirty if you shine on the heap of gold it doesn't become expensive light is what reveals sort of basic consciousness because of its very fundamental nature it cannot be permeated by that or like a mirror you know many why you don't buy new mirror every day it could be a mirror you can look inside 10 times and then you have to throw it because it's full well you can look at yourself hundred thousand times i would not advise that because you will fall in the category of the narcissistic epidemic but a mirror can reflect a thousand angry face a thousand smiling face why because the face doesn't belong to the mirror allows that so because of that which is the fact you know if you look within you see that it is the potential for changing the contents so that's why nobody's irremediably evil even they might have from young age strong tendencies towards harming like psychopaths they begin by torturing animals then they move on but even that there's something always that is has to be unspoiled and you could sort of bring that at the surface so the buddhist example is like and i mentioned i recall speaking with the people who were in jail for 25 years and they did they said you know when usually when we get spiritual advice they tell us that first of all we are born in a kind of sinful manner and then we are also committed a huge scene so we are you know these twofold sinners and then we are caught for many many years in this jail so it doesn't look very good but if we when you say that yes we have done that yes we are in this situation but we are more like this idea of a budget of gold that is fallen is the most dirty abominable place but you pick it up you can polish and the gold will shine it has always been gold but simply it was messed up in a huge way so that gave us kind of idea of a potential you have a potential for change and that can be put to use that's the lotus in the mud honest isn't it that's the gold in there in this or the gold fallen in you know the dirty toilets or whatever you may think of so if somebody here says well i loved what matthias said about altruism how do i develop it in myself how do i go home and embark on cultivating this attribute what would you recommend well you know i think also this is just really one aspect of the question if i may say because uh if you just develop in yourself it's great and you know if you make you want to make a beautiful garden every flower has to be fresh and beautiful so human society is made of individuals but that will not be enough and i remember a french philosopher the french philosopher sort of they have something you know they always have something to argue about they don't they don't like they don't like happiness now when i wrote this book on happiness there was a a review called the dirty works of happiness and so and they don't like that much meditation either so one of them said you know it's nice on meditation but you're never going to change society institutional like that so why because you know an institution no we are the same like aristotle aristotle you know i'm he said i don't feel i'm a better human being the terrorist doctor but aristotle was in favor of slavery we are not because institutions change it's not because human being changed i thought about that i said well what he was saying in scientific terms he said we have the same genes that are without we know that human genome hasn't changed there's a small gene for a simulation of milk that slightly changed at all but to have an altruistic gene might take 50 000 years so this we cannot put our hopes in that but there's many way to change individually you can train your mind and that's neurosciences neuroplasticity you can be exposed to a different environment and epigenetics tell you that your genes might be expressed or not it's not just to get the genes like a blueprint but if you build a different house once you get the blueprint or if you have 100 lights and some are off some are on those who are off is like they are not there so there's many ways that you can become a different person now when the certain number of persons with a certain vision of the world or certain ideas that slavery is an abomination get a critical mass there's a change of culture and that's the magic of the whole thing is the articulation between evolution of culture and individual change so both have to be possible so for your employer your first part of your question individual changes is possible through training the mind and then it is a kind of mystery while it seems so not obvious to everyone because any skill that we have no did we didn't get it through some kind of training i mean who was born learning and knowing how to read and write to play chess to play the guitar to play anything how many hours for professional training now it it comes to altruism you know attention open presence kind of emotional balance and that's well that's who i am take it or leave it what does that mean then if you say that when you are three years old what what quality quality you will develop so why those fundamental human qualities should be the exception that they are sort of grave in stone and nothing can change that just doesn't make sense and we know that we may not have the same potential the same margin in the same way that not everyone will become a marathon olympic champion but we can start running decently we can start playing the piano decently if we do if we do little exercise every day so in that sense you know if we start training those qualities not just by taking 15 seconds of unconditional benevolence that we might feel for a child for a loved one but nurturing that for 10 minutes why not with all kinds of things for 10 minutes i promise you that if one of my friends from nepal or tibet comes in one of those cities and some of the gyms you can see through the window and they see all those guys running on those treadmills or bicycle that goes nowhere they will be astonished they said this is like a mad house or whatever those people tearing themselves sweating they just go nowhere at all are they doing some kind of you know punishment for something a crime they committed they have been assigned to do one week of you know treadmill but we know we do that because we know it's good for mental and physical health so why could we not do that for compassion that you one of the great things in your book is you describe compassion gymnasium as something you can have in corporations children being taught to train their minds as well as training their bodies and i think one of the most optimistic things that i carry away from your work is also what you mentioned a few minutes ago which is neuroplasticity 20 years ago i think people more or less assumed that the brain was something fixed like our arms and legs and now we found to the scientific research in which you've been involved we can grow whole parts of our minds or diminish them if we don't pay attention to them and and so this visible empirical scientific proof that we can develop qualities and actually change the contours of our brains and the good news for someone like me was almost 70 and had the beginning meditation is that you can change the last moment your last breath basically and that was fun actually you know the big discovery of in neuroscience over the last 20 years was neuroplasticity that means throughout life so it was taught before that the brain is so complex that when it gets the kind of adults that finally everything is more or less in place don't mess up with that brain you know so nothing could happen but in fact it's constantly changing now if you train into something like juggling you can manufacture 30 000 new neurons every month you know in certain areas of the brain related to what you're training so the brain is constantly changing and the good news also it is not only like you know the first studies we did with neuroscientists was with meditators who had between 10 000 to 60 000 hours of meditation because obviously when you begin a new field of research it's always nice to expect the strongest difference so you go for the the most trained you know athletes if and but then after that of course that will not help society so much if everyone has to do sixty thousand dollars of meditation this is a full-time job so but what non-passivity is beautiful is it starts within few hours there was a study in israel showing that the sixth house you already see macro neuropathicity starting to happen so if you do one month 20 minutes a day there's not only a functional change but a structural change in the brain and it can be in a for you know increasing sort of something like assimilating training but it also could be decreasing some other things like there was a training of two weeks 30 minutes a day on compassion that richard davidson and someone did in his lab ellen wang and you could see a shrinking within two weeks of the amygdala which is the area of the brain that has to do with fear and anger fight or flight response and just two weeks so that shows that if you pursue regularly even a short training but with time you want to change and then when individuals start to change then gradually around them things change and then there could be a tipping point for culture change and for culture to change you don't need to have everyone to chase a sort of strong current of ide can make the tipping point occur and it happens many occasions in history no abolition of slavery so 10 people decided that it was not okay they went to the british parliament they said you are fools the first the british empire economy will collapse without slavery impossible ten years later nobody it was abolished and nobody today can say no this was not so bad it was quite a nice means to run the economy after all it's not possible the idea is gone so likewise i think the universal declaration of human rights ten people decided to do that it was adopted and now who will come back on this who will take away the writer to vote for or for a woman that does and many things change through the culture now in france uh in europe 250 years ago it was very common saturday afternoon you're not going to see a baseball match or in france they didn't have baseball but other sports like now but you will go to witness public torture they will hang people they will put them on the wheel and break their bones that was tough you would take you know your wife and kiss to see that it doesn't exist voltaire was upset about one of them because eternity was innocent on top of that so he made a big case but that was practiced almost everywhere you can't even imagine that although there are still barbaric acts but basically throughout the world this is no more acceptable so culture can change that's the good news and i think as i understand it in your tradition there's meditation and meditation some of us associate meditation with emptying the mind and some associated with with developing focus but i think what you were talking about for example when you were imagining the romanians as you went into the lab was a meditation where you're deliberately tilting your mind towards altruism others is that right is that particularly the devil well you know yes because meditation is a generic term yeah so it's like you say oh i'm training what chess or badminton yeah so any so mind is training the mind so whether you train loving kindness or focus compassion is not quite the same and in the brain of course you see very different signatures so there are many kinds of mind training and actually that fits very well with the sanskrit root the words bhavana means to cultivate in tibetan there's a word which we translate by meditation which means to become familiar with something so you could become familiar with uh with compassion with altruism with uh familia with a new way of perceiving others you could no new way of translating the outer world in happiness or misery that makes a big difference but you could also become familiar with that what i mentioned before this basic you know awareness this pure awareness luminous awareness devoid of content which is not emptying your mind but seeing the root of the pure awareness that is at the root of everything which we're not so familiar with if you ask someone what is the nature of your mind they say what nature of mind what does that mean sometime but if you become familiar with that notion through your experience then you are familiarizing yourself it's not just cultivating with effort so all these fall within the sphere of what we call meditation so you see just emptying your mind and relaxing it's a pretty ridiculous view of meditation yeah because anyway if you empty your mind won't permit it won't be empty very long just guaranteed you have a beautiful line actually in your book on happiness in which you says say happiness is a way of interpreting the world and i think altruism as you describe it just now is in some ways it's a way of working on the mind so that you're seeing the world differently um but it is because uh you see you could be miserable in little paradise i mean we know that yeah we hear of people who are very rich very famous on top of that they are beautiful everything so called everything to be happy right we have that formula then we hear they got the big nervous breakdown depression what's wrong with this guy if i had all that of course i'll be happy but that's the problem is you know it's not the case and then you see people who face great adversity and still they have this incredible sort of strength and joy so the mind can override that so that's very important but i think also in the global picture you know why i think altruism has a good chance to succeed and then back to the scientist casket you know evolution selects traits no it's not pushing things and the traits are the most favorable to survival if you look now at the situation ten thousand years ago there was five million human beings on earth no no big deal that they would couldn't have no impact on the planet but now we enter the anthropocene we are the major actors we are determining the fate of future generation so then now uh we need more cooperation the cooperation is a trade that should emerge rather than competition because we our all interest is to to sort of work together we're on the same boat so that should be the trade that we become enhanced and there have been the kind of models showing that if you take you know an altruist and a selfish one by one against each other the good guys will be eliminated because their other ones are merciless but if you take a group of altruistic people they have a tendency to aggregate you know to work together they sort of like appreciate each other they like to cooperate but the other group is not even a group it's a bunch of you know selfish people that constantly you know kick each other's leg as a group they will be less prosperous so that's a good thing and then finally i think with the main argument of the of those 900 species if i can spare you reading the whole thing is that i realize by meeting all these great minds you know great philosophers economists and scientists on all fields that one of the main challenges of our time is to reconcile three time scales because we have a schizophrenic division between the short term you know the economy is always about the short term and if economy doesn't go where everything else will go to the drain well economy should be at the service of society to begin with but it is true that it's more on the short term then we have the quality of life that's your life you know whatever long time you live a family a career and that life satisfaction is measured by two things first what is the quality of your experience moment after moment and then how do you look at 10 years 20 years with sense of fulfillment or frustration or regret that's what matters after all and then you have the long term which is the new challenge because we didn't before we didn't have that impact on the future generation it was minimal but now we are the main actors they will say you knew and yet you did nothing because we are actually deciding on their fate so now it's quite depressing when environmentalists speak to economies knowing that's what's going to happen in 50 years of politician and they say come back in 49 years we'll see but it's no more possible so this is a kind of schizophrenic dialogue so we need a concept because after all not of course most people would like to have a better world and to find a mutually agreeable solution to our difficulties but on what platform on what basis and that's where the notion of consideration for others is the only concept that can no okay now we can speak the same language if i have more concentration for others i will go for caring economics because there's two things that the selfish economy cannot do which is to address the idea the no the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty now the definition of the more economic use is maximization of personal preference and interest and it's supposed to rule everybody and to be the magic formula but in fact first of all we are not just doing that and second you will never remedy the poverty in the midst of plenty with this principle the second thing it cannot do is address the common goods quality of the air of the oceans you know the pursuit of justice and democracy you have to step out of just maximizing so that's why we need carrying economics then we need on the midterm to favor the condition that would allow people to flourish to express their potential their aspiration to access to education to be reasonably out of conflicts and violence and things like that and then in the long term if you have consideration for others you're not going to jeopardize the fate of future generations so i'd like to uh cite my grand friend marx but not not carl groucho and he said why should i care for future generations what did they do for me so that's basically what you know a few billionaires say no i find absurd to change my behavior for something that will happen in 100 years so the problem is that it will happen we won't be there but many many others will be there so that's why you know the question of the environment is complex scientifically politically economically it boils down to altruism versus selfishness so it becomes very pragmatic concept not just a luxury when everything goes well or something novel ideal is the concept that can bring a solution so that's why i'm totally in favor of the altruistic revolution [Applause] i remember actually the dalai lama's youngest brother who of course is an incarnate lama himself he shares his holiness his gift to making things very pragmatic as he was saying and accessible and ecumenical and he just said to me one day well every morning you're taking a shower and you're spending 20 minutes in the shower you could be thinking about the warriors game you're missing while hearing about altruism you could be talking about the u2 concerts at the fabulous forum last week or you could be thinking about everything that's coming in the day to come and bringing some light of altruism towards it think of the people you meet and just in those 20 minutes which otherwise go idle you can begin to train your mind and what you do in those 20 minutes actually reflects everything that follows in the next 20 hours so it was i thought a very nice practical way of reminding us how we have the capacity to do it again regardless of our tradition at any moment so there's two uh nice contour point to what you said one is in traditional buddhism there's a practice where you use every seemingly neutral kind of boring stuff as as a reminder of compassion altruism for instance if you wake up you think oh may i wake up all beings from the sleep of ignorance if you if you go upstairs you know climb the stairs you say may i i take people out of your depravation and suffering so and if you take a shower may i sort of wash or you know seeds of suffering of all sentient beings so to sort of relate something neutral that normally is neither good nor bad let's say another vietnamese no always do something good so that's the traditional you have sutras using those examples for almost everything you can do but then there's another if you take the modern technology conversion that is what my friend meng at google said and his call is big secret and that's the 10 second meditation every hour so when he said that it's about compassion so when he said that we were in medicine with the vicious davidson and his oldness and i thought you know you know if many is a good family this guy is too much you know 10 seconds you know really that's can't get you know it's like it's like the twitter of meditation but i found this much deeper than what it looks so what is what is those 10 seconds every hour maybe not every hour but say this is six times a day that will not be too bad first of all nobody can say they don't have 10 seconds but you you over and again i don't have 20 minutes but 10 seconds i don't i don't tell me that okay so now what you do for 10 seconds you don't jump around people's neck for 10 seconds because you might get in trouble if you get in the street or at the office but for 10 seconds you look around or even there's nobody you look for the window or in the street or you imagine people if you happen to be alone and you think may this person be happy may this person flourish in life made that person and his dear ones and despaired suffering and so forth really from your heart 10 seconds it's not too much asking right and then okay you might think 10 seconds then you start again not saying nasty things no tens you know why it's not it's uh and i gave this image to men to to to know to make to help him to reinforce his case if you open a flask of perfume for 10 seconds and then you close perfume will stay for quite long and if you open it for 10 seconds at regular interval maybe the perfume will stay all the time so when you do that repeatedly it sort of sets some mindset in motion it's a trickle and then it's maybe not joined between the two ten seconds so that you somehow in a different frame of mind more altruistic more well inclined more benevolent more trusting so i think this is actually quite smart and it it corroborates a buddhist instruction for meditation that it is better to meditate for short periods but repeated than the long one from time to time oh it's another example if you water your plants in apartments you put it in water every day if you put a bucket every three months your plant is dead in meantime so on that note let's ask our fearless leader to come out i think ted has three or four questions he's going to share yes i am i have them i'll read them from out here um the first uh we've got a lot of questions uh asking about the aftermath of the earthquake in nepal in particular to your monastery yes so uh you know uh foundation karuna sechen so when i first started it uh i wanted to someone suggested we do a formal organization in france i wanted to call it compassion in action you know friends are very secular they say that's too religious i don't know why but anyway so i call it karuna which means compassion and nobody knows it so it's like so then we started uh 15 years ago now we accomplish 140 projects and then so we have a clinic in nepal with 50 people doctors and nurses and we have 500 monks who are one of the good things about most discipline and they do whatever is necessary together so then when that happened uh we were just absolutely ready we had actually done several rehearsal for earthquakes because we knew it was going to come one day or another we had containers with staff and food and tools so the monastery was uh badly damaged structurally but didn't collapse so nobody died there but we immediately within no house first of all we had 5 000 people in the monasteries compound because there was a big teaching going on with the 85 years old llama with a big tent covering the garden and the courtyard so we had then 5 000 people for 15 days and we bought you know drinkable water as much food as we could and the monks took care but the main thing that we started doing very soon is to go outside in the villages where the most of the damage has been done some villages were you know broken down 90 percent of the houses so since there are many many many villages very remote difficult of access and most of the big organization didn't know so much what to do they want kathmandu so we manage now most if i see i add the numbers from what i heard last week from last i i was in touch with them we probably have helped 70 thousand people and just just help by saying the good words but seventy thousand people we brought food version for at least half a month for them for each of them top online tends to to make a shelter because it was raining after the earthquake and then medicine supply with the doctors to see what we could do so in 200 villages and now after the the crops grow in july august so the basic foods will be available we will move to community projects rebuilding schools and dispensaries and that probably is difficult to say but at least two years we will devote as much resources as possible for that so because the interest is really focused on the immediate news you could see it was first item of the news for a week then a little bit less and now we know same in every catastrophe after two three months it will be something else it happens in the world so we can't expect this great solidarity that that happen uh in aftermath of the earth of the earthquakes but we'll have to continue to find help to carry that over in the long term yes so thank you for asking the next our website karuna sechen has news ways to help and the good news from our side is uh since uh we are our vocation is that we have a very very little overhead it's about four or five percent and there's a benefactor that covers that since few years so 100 percent of any health goes directly to the field so that's making us feel very comfortable and happy when we can report to others because we know that nothing is wasted on the way there's at the information table outside there's uh more information on the monastery and how you can help if you're so interested so the monastery itself will also need rebuilding because there's much less enthusiasm for rebuilding monastery and doing humanitarian work so anyone who has a sort of inclination for preservation of spiritual heritage and monastery will need a lot of help because the whole main structure has to be redone and there's a website sachen.org which is dedicated not to the humanitarian side but with the spiritual side of our activities okay let's say you were to return to the career of a cellular geneticist what would be the most important takeaway having been a monk for the last 40 years that would be applicable to a career as a scientist you know in those forms when you enter something you have n a non-applicable i spent already quite sorry so to answer your question i'm not going to go back to molecular biology so i don't have to think what i will bring back but i do spend a lot of time relatively i mean in the neuroscience labs and so what do i bring from uh not being among you know being among is is just like a detail it's true for me it was just changing clothes but the important thing is to devote you know 50 years of your life to study with those great masters and practice without a mock or not it's a convenient choice you know only two pair of shoes one set of clothes is so much easier no car no land no house there's freedom so that's the choice but i think what i always kept from the scientific background is this uh strong inclination for some kind of rigor you know no nonsense and that buddhism is really also about bridging the gap between appearance and reality so it is the same it's a it's a rigorous investigation of reality but it's not just you know you know biology and physics but it's also reality of mind relative and absolute reality is things like that but what i may bring now to when i collaborate with my neuroscientists or psychologist friend is this kind of wealth of knowledge which i i don't i'm not invented anything myself absolutely zero i just that kind of this uh being the sort of uh you know testifying or bringing some of the traditional knowledge accumulated over many thousand years and i think in that sense we could say that all the meditators who have collaborated with neuroscientists psychologists are not just guinea pigs they're also collaborators because you see first time you go okay come in the mri so how do we study meditation so you go for 20 minutes and we see what there's the peak of activity somewhere no it doesn't work like that we have to compare a state of rest instead of meditation 20 times 50 times and then you rest for 30 seconds you engage the musician for two minutes so is it possible to engage in full compassion in two minutes what happens yes so that's a good point so all these we we sort of device together and so in the process it's like better testing you test a new technique a new product and then you refine it or you a musician and you start a piece of music and you refine it and to give you an example i went for the first time in a coma lab i didn't tell my 92 years old mother because she was already worried when they wrote in those things but if on top i'm going to a coma lab so it's a world specialist of comma and is the first scientist who could distinguish to mri different types of coma people who are still conscious and they can reply by mentally moving their left or their right arm is fascinating so he's in belgium so i went there and there was other specialists who came from different places uh they wanted to see a different level of clarity of consciousness because now you only have the waking up stage the commerce state and the deep sleep or in conscious state and but there's less intermediate states so they were to see if a meditator would engage in a very clear limpet state or a new meditative state that we we named uh what is called self-absorption in uh cognitive opacity that means getting in a kind of set of top so they can really stupid like you fall in mud mentally so anyway so so to do that we sort of work together but that sometimes can be challenging and that's why uh in this time the fact of having spent long many days in hermitage is helps you because for instance why is it challenging because you are not just nicely meditating you know in a spa or facing the himalayas the last time there was this first they put you know 256 electrodes then you have this called trans-magnetic cranial stimulation you know it's a nice apparatus that first we have two kilos and the guy has to hold it so sometimes he push on your head and then it sends you every second for three hours one tesla stimulation that's the kind of thing that normally should so it's like you see in your brain like and then to cancel the noise that will perturb the analysis of the brain by the electrocephalogram they send you what they call a white noise this is a very sweet term for full blast okay and then they push on your head with that thing that was being binged and before i always refuse to do that because it's supposed to make me my chest not to come back out of it but i say okay i'm 17 or i can't risk that no problem so and then you know you you they tell you now you engage there you can't hear so they put you some screen now okay now you start your pure awareness meditation you have this thing and then there's another guy come with a written thing don't blink if you spoil the electrocephalogram so you say like this [Music] 10 seconds later relax your facial muscles okay then again and then after two three hours you know could you fall asleep you know you're just boom boom okay fall asleep so he had died so you know you you bring your expertise as a meditator to that so basically that's what mind training is useful [Applause] next question how do you work with fear the kind of fear that feels so instinctual or fear from the depths of unconscious each one of us has grappled at some moment with a feeling with feeling like a victim and even if there's awareness it's only a perception those intense body sensations and mental chatter take over and feel so real so when we first i remember the first time i went to richie davison's lab in 2000 we were just playing because we we had a new field of you know so-called contemplative neuroscience so you know everything is allowed you can try weird things so i first wanted to try many many kinds of meditation and then we didn't pursue because it's expensive it required many many more subjects so i thought of trying six states you know like open presence which is a very vivid state compassion focused attention visualization etc one of them was fearlessness and then rishi was very surprised which is davis i said why fearlessness they say well because it's a quality that i observe in most of my teachers this sense of being extremely kind and compassionate but be also like a mountain that can be unshakable by the winds and the storms and this kind of incredible those faculty of having so many inner resources that you know there's nothing that can feel sort of insecure or destabilized you could not imagine someone like my teacher cancer in bashir being destabilized by something he will feel sadness he will feel joy but being destabilized losing his bearing that's seems almost inconceivable so then also when i uh mentioned with it is discussed with his holiness about empathy and compassion he said no empathy when is self-oriented the way that others suffering impact you so that the more suffering the more you become oppressed you know you become empathic distressed because if there's big suffering then big oppression while compassion is other oriented reactions so the more suffering the more courage determination so he spoke of compassion and courage so another of my teacher told me that compassion and altruism also go with fearlessness and selfishness somehow with fear so now this being said fear of course is absolutely required as a basic answer to immediate danger i mean that fear there's no any question about that and if a rhinoceros comes full speed you run i mean the guy will say i'm fearless you know too bad so that's not doesn't work and you need to you need that and it has to shortcut every other thing because you have no time to to ponder too many stuff but what i guess you are referring to is the kind of more existence and fear you know waking up in the middle of the night and feeling this despair or anguish or something no of course it unfortunately it happens i know some people who tell me that you don't know what so much what to say but somehow hope and fear go together you know you have this uh sort of it's usually comes i mean in buddhism we explained that if you start from the state of you know pure awareness there's not so much that very strong solid distinction uh because it's all this kind of unified state of awareness but when you start to you know discriminate self others and it becomes solid and more verified and other becomes either a subject of you know could bring you some pleasure or satisfaction so something that you need you want to attract or a potential threat that you want to get rid of so it is the seed for fear or anger or hatred towards what may looks may seem like a a threat or a potential this problem or displeasure for you and that can be magnified to an extent that you are so you know sense of self examined sort of self-centeredness me me me me the very little sort of very confined and narrow space of mental space that everything seems to threat we have an expression in tibetan buddhism to say the whole world seems to revise like enemy miss everything is a potential sort of threat to your well-being and so forth so that's clearly a mental fabrication because it's the world is not like that we say it's like seeing a rope in darkness and thinking it is a snake and you react very strongly to that so you need light to see it's just a rope so the snake has never been on the road but for you it was very real so that sort of mental fabrication that may lead to different levels of fear that's something that can be limited by the mind but the basic fear is of course something that's very important the buddhist country of bhutan is called by some of the happiest place on earth is there a place where you are the happiest so it's bhutan he said it's known as the happiest place on earth yes where are you [Laughter] is there a place where you feel the happiest no but bhutan is they didn't say they were the happiest and it's not the case they just said that happiness should be at the heart of policies and it's better to bend for groceries happiness than gross national product and that's very sensible and that takes kinds of financial wealth social wealth and environmental wealth so this is kind of triple paradigm i cannot give you too much detail but to give you an example if you only the gdp if you buy tobacco it's good for gdp then you will get cancer you go to hospital it's good for gdp then the the people have to bury you and it's expensive it's good for gdp but britain is counted as a minus for social wealth to give you an example so like that so but uh what was the other question is there a place where you feel the happiest well i remember well i won't answer that but i will tell you the anecdote of it and then i'll see if i find an answer but i will recall a beautiful experience with the dalai lama where the conference on what was it an attentional thing and he really wanted having scientists from the east so he brought a japanese scientist who was a specialist of laughter and so he was to this this five-day meeting and he was supposed to speak the last day so we all were waiting for this specialist of laughter but for the week you know we are sitting like 10 of 10 of scientists or buddhist monk and there is a silent public of 100 people around he didn't say well and he looked very stern and then he did a presentation which was quite interesting he said they made an experiment of bringing people with diabetes to an academic lecture very serious and then they let them see it and then and then they measure their diabetic level and it was increased and then they say if you have diabetes never go to academic lecture then the next day they took the same group and they brought one of the best japanese comic and that people laugh and laugh and laugh and that diabetes never went down so he did that then he asked his holiness your holiness could you tell us what was the happiest moment of your life there was some silence everyone went wow we are going to learn something very special so then i went like this and he says i think now so anyway i won't be as pretentious that to say that now is always the happiest moment it would be nice but i think the most rewarding moment was definitely the moments where being with my spiritual teachers not so much when they were you know teaching to big crowds or traveling to wonderful places in tibet but some moments where we were traveling maybe and there was a moment where we were sitting there doing nothing special and then we know some kind of agenda and then the incredible quality of their presence gives such a sense of harmony and if nothing better you could wish in the world so this is the most sort of uh complete uh moment i can remember it's just sort of being and trying to mingle your little mind with this vast mind of compassion and wisdom for me my that was the most precious moments i think i i went through yes all right two more questions um we know you take care we know you take care of the health of your mind how do you take care of the health of your body i know i had no insurance of social security for 40 years i was lucky i guess no last two years i got something i don't know what if you are sick you go to see the best the best doctor you can find or something like that exercise meditate sleep sleep yeah well i think there are many good advice for living a healthy life so that's it sorry but you know it's the last question final question um so you're a photographer it used to be that you framed a picture you had film you took the picture you turned it in to get developed you waited and then you saw your work today you snap a picture you look at it immediately if you don't like it you take more pictures is there anything that can be learned from the way it used to be well i'm not sure well the thing is that when i left france the the very kind secretary of my boss francois jacob she sort of let my salary run for six months that was nice because i could live 15 years with that spending about 30 40 dollars a month and then since i was also you know i took some of my cameras mostly to photograph my teachers and the world around them i really had so little means for many years so i would take about what 15 rolls a year it's not very much for a photographer and there to it was called a chromium to send it to bombay hoping that it would come back really it was such a pleasure and after three weeks one month you got in the mail those little rolls with the with the box of slides and you look at it so because of that you know if i look the first book i did jonathan enlightenment which was documenting all these 30 first or 25 first years in the himalayas i remember extraordinary scenes you know when i took one shot and i really waited is it worth it to take and then someone was okay okay i'll take this one but i would never double triple because first i tried to be careful and second i had to minimize films so i don't know if i had taken 100 i guess now knowing for the portraits how when you take several shots is always one better so somehow i would have maybe but at least you are so careful to to really take the right image so average quality is better at the same time you cannot really experiment in a creative way you know i have a photograph since i i use digital in tibet with galloping horses you know you have to take oh flying birds you know in front of my hermitage there's this those this beautiful himalayan magpie so colorful that come every morning and it's funny because they always come in the same direction and they never see them coming back so there's an inexhaustible pool of magpies in one place going to the himalayas anyway i photographed them but imagine photographing a flying magpie with a 300 millimeters so 9 20 photos you're lucky if one magpie is in the frame you got a half of a tail or something so i have some fantastic photos a few of them but which film i would have given up i would not even try what a waste you know but then you can play like that and horse race you can take many understudy this is magic moment with two horse like look like twins and so anyway those thing i think allows you to i think somehow yes come out with better images in the end and portraits you will be amazed how if you take many many like that there's one there's something so much more of the presence of the brightness in the eye and the two or three before and three after after it's just not the same so it's you can't the idea if you get exactly the right moment this doesn't work because it's so fast and your reaction is not that fast so it's luck thank you very much

Channel: LiveTalksLA

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Keywords: Matthieu Ricard (Author), matthieu Ricard, Pico Iyer (Author), Literature (Media Genre), Talking, Buddhism, Buddhism (Religion), altruism, neuroscience, Talks, Interview, meditation, compassion, loving kindness, happiness, Happiness (Award-Winning Work)

Id: 0UZrxFc1wkE

Length: 85min 24sec (5124 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2015