Mind and Heart Talk Dr Matthieu Ricard

so thank you dr koidala and i'm sure like you know that you have a lot of questions as dr kodala said that he wanted questions from you so you know please save that for uh the talk after matthew so please uh matthew and a couple of things i forgot uh for matthew's introduction which dr cordell already said he has many things and it's only difficult to summarize in five minutes i tried my best but matthew is here in front of us so you know please go ahead matthew so i'm sorry to stay seated it's okay for you you want me to stand in the back it's okay the monks are quite lazy and also i i if i make mistake they can correct me nearby so thank you so much doctor thank you shalav um you described me as a as a you said you're a hard guy and brain guy you know i'm afraid my neuroscientist colleague told me that i had a brain but they said there's nothing left in the right side and nothing right in the left side so they say it's hopeless so anyway it's good because my heart is still running and i think you know um good heart is a a good heart is also a healthy heart a good heart in the sense of kindness compassion openness to others less self-centeredness you mentioned the study about aggressivity interestingly enough there's also a study about analyzing the language of people now how much they employ me me mind etc uh you know compared to average people and then they correlated that precisely with the heart problem and other things and those who are excessively self-centered it also turned that they have more heart attacks and things like that so of course me me me also lead to aggressivity because if your world is reduced to the bubble of self of self-centeredness and it's kind of stuffy in the bubble of the ego you know so that means the rest of the world is seen either as an instrument for the um you know achieving your self-centered goals or as a threat to those goals so you divide the world in attraction repulsion and completely centered upon yourself which is very not only unhealthy but unrealistic because we are so deeply interconnected and so first of all you know someone said can we do a selfie there's no self so you do selfless selfies how do you do that so anyway so if you look carefully according to buddhist philosophy uh the mind or consciousness is a dynamic stream of experience so of course there is a person that is our history which is not the same the in the same way that there is the ganga is not the same as the mississippi river but there's no such thing as a little head popping up from time to time saying you know i'm the real ganga don't forget so there's no such thing it's a dynamic stream so if we verify that as as a me that is really the heart of my being and then we divide me and the rest of the world and what is mine and everything many psychological studies have shown that this exacerbated self of a sense of self self-importance actually doesn't bring happiness you look for so-called hedonic happiness i mean endless succession of pleasant sensation which is a recipe for exhaustion basically it doesn't work as happiness and you fail actually to do so that there's so many studies have shown that while if you are left self-centered i mean if you really open your heart so that no one is left out of your heart then this you don't have also the sense of being vulnerable because you don't constantly try to protect yourself and see the world as a possible instrument for maximizing your personal preferences and the world the universe is not a mail order catalog for your design and your fancies and even it also there's seven billion being used in the same catalog and they cannot you know the world cannot be what all they want it to be so it simply doesn't work not only is a very unpleasant situation meaning me all day long but it assumed that you are separate entity that we relate like snooker balls that sometimes bump into each other but we don't realize that this is bound to fail because it's at odd with reality reality is not made of separate entities even things are not as solidly existing as they seem the eye is not as such a solid thing as it seemed although we feel like that and so if we base our reactions towards the world on this it's not going to work so it's frustration not only it makes you unhappy but you make everyone unhappy now if you realize the profound interconnectedness the interdependence of everything the fact that things relate but they are not as solid as they seem they are not made of separate entities autonomous entities then this is opening the the door laying the foundation for compassion because you realize your common humanity your common sentience even with eight million other species which are co-citizen in this world we realize that deep within when i wake up in the morning i don't wish may i suffer the whole day and if possible my whole life so then if you transport yourself and it's not rocket science to look at others just i might be confused and look for happiness in the wrong place and actually be addicted to the cause of suffering and it happens so often in life out of confusion and ignorance but deep within no one wants willingly to suffer for good so if i acknowledge that in myself then i say okay now what is what are the means to accumulate to avoid what brings suffering and try to build up what brings well-being and then if i value that i'm concerned by that i'm going to discriminate in my action not harming others and so forth otherwise as our teacher the rokin ceremony used to say you can't keep your hand in the fire and hope not to be burned so the law of cause and effect works in that way so if you realize that then others in the same way they don't want to suffer so that's the basis of our common humanity because then you can become concerned by others faith and then if you are concerned you're going also to act in ethical way that doesn't bring suffering but bring happiness so that is also why chandra dalai lama said good heart my religion is good heart it could look like something very banal but of course when someone like him was an immense heart says that it takes a very profound resonance so there is a correlation between having good heart and a physical good heart but you will notice that there is no such correlation with intelligence intelligence is ethically neutral now those guy who did 9 11 they were very smart to do all that with a few razor blades and good planning so an instrument can do a lot of good in the case of human more than any other species immense good and also immense devastation we have just have to see how a psychotic mind somewhere now is doing so incredible understandable suffering to poor people who never you know there was no reason to do those wholesale massacre as it happened now in ukraine and other places as well so it's the mind it's intelligence which has planned that it's certainly not the heart the good heart so good heart has a ethical value intelligence doesn't like a hammer can be used to build or to break so that's why it's so important that the good heart is is a question now um we may question but i mean i got a few uh recently a question from ishvanes was there was a photo exhibit i didn't expect a question like that but don't you lose hope in humanity because i'm doing a french exhibit in france about into beauty beauty of of of human spiritual beauty which is some great masters and you know who embody love and compassion men and women and human beauty that the potential for kindness and goodness that we have and the beauty of the of our environment which will uh if we uh in wonderment with our natural environment naturally we respect we don't want to destroy what is mexican or if i found this flower beautiful i'm not going just to next moment to trample on it and so if we are concerned we act to protect so this isn't it so they say don't you lose hope in humanity with all what's happening and everything so of course terrible things happen in the past they happen now they always happen somewhere in the world sometimes this uh madness is exacerbated and leads to sort of like a sudden increase in those suffering but all together not of course nowadays we know exactly what happens anytime in real time in the world so now there is especially grave crisis but all together if we look and if you say that most people think he's just completely naive and cuckoo but there's a harvard psychologist called stephen pinker he wrote a very well documented book based on so many research about the decline of violence it's called the better angels of i think of our nature in english so he looked at all the numbers since you know throughout history and clearly although there are incredible tragedies unexplainable unexcusable but violence has significantly diminished in the world as we promulgated human rights women's rights children's right abolition of torture and so forth and so even nothing is perfect yet it's still slavery there's still torture but at least it's not supposed to be legal just to give you a quick example because when you ask people himself they just don't see the point if you look at the rate of homicide in europe there were good data in uk in the 14th century it was about hundred of missiles per year for a hundred thousand persons now it's one average in europe so it's not ten times ten percent less thirty percent it's hundred times less the average number of casualty in wars whether it's civil wars uh any kinds of wars after the second world war has done down 30 times over 60 years although there are things like ukraine iraq iran wars and so forth so there are many reasons for that democracy i mean mostly those wars are people with by far nation who are not democratic democracy increases our role of of women it's very important you know if a woman has eight kids because she has no say about it like in some places then she also can control them and the society is poor and there's increased violence exchange exchanging he said you know in europe in the i think still middle age there was 500 small entities you know principalities dukes and so forth and they're all always fighting against each other invading one one year then three years later the other one will invade and they will burn the field maim the peasants all kinds of things constant violence in fact now there is about 30 entities mostly a democratic you know very unlikely belgium will go at war against italy nowadays so it has changed a lot for the good exchanging before we didn't exchange so much for through the world so if you exchange with someone with mutual benefits they better be alive so all these things makes that somehow violence has decreased now let me say okay well that's a view of things although it's based on solids research but also if you look at children and you know your mission is to give children a new lease of life when their life is threatened because their most vital organ is not working properly what better gift can you do [Music] to someone who has a whole potential of life ahead of her or him than you know allow that potential to be expressed and that person to fulfill their aspiration for the happiness of also the parents and everyone so that's to make a more happy society if when children pass away less and this about also uh child and mother and child mortality you know in tibet where we were doing our programs once we did a survey of 300 mothers of all ages of course they have six seven children 80 percent of mother has had lost a child at some point in their life i mean not not necessarily at birth so it's still very prevalent i don't know what's the rate in nepal so all these things are preventable and anything we can do is that but we may childhood is a good place to to see you know about the the dispute about human nature so are we isn't my nature basically bad as some philosopher like hops and all that were thinking it's only the government and society we sort of control them so that they don't kill each other at all times you know winston churchill say history has been just a part of humanity at one against the other all through history so is it the case or as a social animal or do we have a greater predisposition to appreciate love and kindness and and give it and cooperate so there have been territorial saying that we are a little brute beast early and then we sort of socialized that was the view of sigmund freud for instance but scientific study and that's where it become you know interesting because you do study what how the children behave and then you make conclusion out of it so there's many uh great researchers who did that including in la in the max planck institute in leipzig verneken and tomasello to just mention them who study very young children from one year old to four and then they first look at how cooperative they are for instance they would children will play in the room with or without their parents and someone would be sitting on a stool and dropped something a pen not intentionally but a by accident and you see that 90 percent of the kid they drop what they do even playing and run towards picking up that and give it to the person even they you put some obstacles like balloons they go over it all around it to do that and if the guy chose it they don't move they really see that it needs help so there are many experiments like that and they even then did that with chimpanzees so we also do that you know although they for instance the two chimpanzees in two different cages and one uh there's food there so one symposium could get it if the other one help him with the mechanism but the other one is not going to get the food he's simply going to help his friend to get the food so the other one is sort of you know the sort of bang little bit and say you know do something and then eventually they do it and also you do something where they they need to both pull a rope together to get food you know the tray comes to their cage but on one of them they fed him like anything 10 minutes before so he's not hungry at all so he has no interest to pull the rope but the other one is hungry and sees that and he sort of say hey pull the rope and he does it so you see so their their conclusion was that it's already started for a common ancestor five million years ago five billion million years ago so there is a natural predisposition to cooperate until five years old children are almost unconditionally cooperative there's a great study done in yale university where you very small babies know like eight months older one year old and you show them a box and there is two puppets one puppet is trying to open that box and doesn't succeed like i said a blue puppet then the yellow puppet come and help to open the box okay then you do the same thing but ins instead of a blue yellow pipette coming to help a red puppet comes and when the box is half open you slam it back okay no no nasty puppet then an experimenter who doesn't know which is what so it doesn't sort of say hey you want this one it's the good one so the other experiment that doesn't know which is the good and bad puppet just show like that to the baby no like one years old he looks like this and then 90 percent take the helping puppet that means they it's not towards them the two people behaving nicely or not toward each other and naturally they prefer that now with three months old babies of course they were not going to catch a puppet but they see they look where they their gaze is going are they looking at the nice puppet or the nasty one 90 percent again prefer at three months old so this is something that is not learned that is not because of reward it is something in it so we can become psychopath we can commit mass murder genocide all kinds of terrible things but this is more like a deviation so you know anna aaron spoke of the banality of evil speaking of adolf ishmael and other nazis who were seemingly ordinary bureaucrats and end up you know being the cause of the death of millions of people but there's also we could speak of banality of goodness that is most of the time most of seven billion human beings behave decently with each other and we don't notice because that's our baseline this is our default mode we don't so okay let's make an experiment today when you go out are you going to congratulate yourself because nobody start punching each other no you are not this is normal now if two people start punching each other after one week people will say you know there's dr kerala and these funny monks were there speaking about altruism and good health and those two guys start bashing each other that would be the talk of this of the evening that means it's a deviation that's why we pay attention to it that's why the media pays so much attention to it because evolution has equipped us to react to some potential threat if you hear a loud bang you know something happened may be dangerous if two people fight something terrible could happen so we need to bring our attention on that otherwise we we relax it means that you know the media are so fascinated and we also by violence that is a distorted proportion of reporting on it i remember once being called for i don't know for which reason to it's one french tv and they say okay we are going to ask you to comment the first item of the news so they gave me the list i say don't you have something nice that happened in the world there's plenty it was all catastrophe murder something something something so we lose trust in human nature so now to complete quickly with the children that is quite interesting you may say okay now if they are so gullible uh you know cooperative you know they are going to be exploited by others so it's interesting that at five years old when their emotional brain and so more cognitive control comes in they start sort of discriminate between people who reciprocate to behave nicely with them and others and others so they they begin to say okay not everyone is a nice guy i should be a little bit careful and protect myself and my dear one so you could say well that's a healthy reaction but it should not go too far either then because again you my group are in group out group and then you start again making a big sort of you know uh sort of distance between you and others so there's a third age briefly i mean this is such a nice story around 12 years old then children again open in different way a more abstract way for instance a group of school children could make collect funds for kids in afghanistan even they do so in europe so they start thinking not the child they have in front of them who suffers and they feel empathy so all this needs to be known and also encouraged so that children can bloom into good human beings so they they can thrive in their own life and be good for society so um yes so when you know you are trying to do that we are trying to do that in karuna just to very quickly you know we chatted as my dear friend shall have said 20 years ago very small with kempo ramjan boucher rafael is here in tibet and few other friends and it was very small you know we were like you know it was like the far west of the humanitarian i mean not organized at all but gradually he kindly spoke about me giving 100 of my books but i would definitely not be enough to what we do today which is about we have 400 000 people every year in different ways in india and nepal a little bit in tibet and we start in france and we have a few places elsewhere so in the field of health education social services trying to serve the most impoverished people populations and also empowerment of women very important in india we have a lot of women adult alpha you know literacy program and and also professional training in india over the last two years with 60 000 kitchen gardens you know the monoculture so uh they buy their own food at the markets which is ridiculous for farmers so we give them different plants and they grow their own vegetables they exchange so we do that in nepal so in many ways so this we try to help and many other people fortunately join us because i can't churn the book every week and anyway i'm too old not to do that but fortunately it's going on so that's a wonderful thing and what we do we see if we can find ways to cooperate but to put that in action is very important and i must say in my personal life thanks to my great teachers you know considering bushiy and others and the dilemma who always says compassion compassion compassion so truly i felt how crucial and centered central the the notion of altruism and compassion is but and it's very wonderful to try to cultivate you know in your own heart because if we don't then we have nothing to give if we are like a a beggar who wants to give a banquet to 100 beggars i mean just what can you give or should give so we need to have something to give if we want to do so so we need to cultivate compassion in the first place uh so anyway the best way to prepare for running an ngo it would be maybe to do a retreat on growing compassion seriously from the depth of our heart to magnify it and it's not like bodybuilding you know there's a limit or jumping you cannot jump five meters you know we don't 240 meters but we'll never jump five meters but why compassion should be limited you know one can't you double it or multiply almost infinitely because it's a qualitative state of mind it has no bonds only the bonds that you put so when someone said you know the buddhist idea of unconditional love is very unrealistic i mean jonathan hague was a very well-known philosopher in the united states this is crazy you know you should help your kids first and the dilemmas thing is just unrealistic i said look it's not the guy who wakes up in the morning thinking i'm going to help all the world i mean of course he's going to calm down i guess but the point is not to leave anyone out of your heart you know you are not going to be able to do so but there's so many people who live so many others out of their heart and they discriminate for so many reasons based on anything you can imagine religion that creed age sex caste whatever and so they say okay i'm going to help those ones but not those bad guys so there's no such thing as bad guys there's only people who are sort of sick in their mind and sick in their heart you know if you look at the with the eye of a physician if you see a dangerous mad person the the psychiatrist is not going to take us a big stick and bang on that person's head he might control him for a while and then see can i cure that person from that mad sickness or not so with that idea even a bloody dictator you may see how can possibly on the short or the long term change that person or change the culture from which that person arose so seeing more like a healing hate and healing all those things that are the cause of suffering compassion is not per se moral judgment of course ethic is a very important affair but compassion is more about remaining to the cause of suffering whatever they might be and wherever they are so a bloody dictator that's the one that is now in action in a way is a cause of immense suffering so compassion is how can we remedy that suffering not by head but by trying to all possible means to neutralize the violence if we can but also remedy the causes that made that possible at all it should not happen that means something went wrong in education in in institution in political system that such person can gain such power with such a harmful mind so this is where compassion can be applied to even the worst people we can imagine i remember french intellectual told me your compassion this is really so stupid look those tibetans we have compassion for the chinese this is stupid i told him this is not about that this is about remaining to the cause of suffering and even those who suffer you know in the at the time of where there was labor labor camps in tibet i remember the one of the physician of the dalai lama attention he said among his group of sixty people five or ten survive only and he said in this case and all those if he had felt hate all the time for the people who were torturing him he said he would not have survived he said definitely and those who had hate they said they sort of faded away and died of feminine and sickness and so forth he said i saw that there were young people indoctrinated you know brainwashed and all that and i managed to feel some compassion and he said that saved me so okay if you say that you know casually they are easy for you you know but he went through that for so many years and likewise i met people who were tortured in the argentinian jail at the time of the generals and and one of my philosopher's friend mikhail benasayaki was tortured a lot and he said deep within i kept my human dignity and i never feel hate i thought there was those were mad people and he said somehow that saved me so that's i think to preserve our sanity we need to keep that compassion and that good heart so you know sorry in france there was something called the blablacar it's no no you share car so i'm the blah blah monk so it's nonstop so anyway you talk of sustainable harmony maybe i say a few words because it's an interesting concept although it didn't pick up very much once there was a report on positive economy that was given to the french president francois hollande and somehow i was part of that i don't know why so i presented that concept and so that's very interesting concept but then that didn't go anywhere he said see you see you soon that's all anyway so i think sustainable development of course is great but we always feel is quantitative development you know to do more more more of this more of that and we can't because we don't have three planets we don't have five planets by august now we have exhausted the renewable power the renewable part of earth resources so this is untenable we know more and more and still we don't do by far what is necessary out of difficulty for politicians to decide so basically this the western churchill said a politician looks for next election this is tomorrow we have something to do about that and then a statement is looking at the next generation so there is more than time to look at next generation it's almost late i mean all the scientists of the environment and i know intimately quite a few of them said we have six seven years and each time they say it's still possible but we have six seven years and it needs drastic change so what the what the politicians say is still possible you see it's possible they say it's possible but possible yes but at what cost are changing dramatically the way we live and that's usually they are not ready to do that you know so sustainable development has this little bit suspicious of quantitative so sustainable harmony is basically the same but is doing better with less so the it's called like a sort of you know happy simplicity or happies are being more content and having a better quality of life not at the in a sort of consumerism and and materialistic way there have been studies showing actually that the most consummate consummation and materialistic minded people there's been a 20 year study in rochester university compared to the less sort of you know materialistic and concept consumerism-minded people those who are the most 25 percent most sort of what you call extrinsic values you know your your card where are your claws law your social status and all that usually they look for again hiddenly happiness no pleasant sensation and they start not so happy they are less healthy because they tend to abuse of all kinds of things they have a lot of social relation but less real friends they are less concerned about holistic question like you know poverty in the midst of plenty and the environment and world health and so forth they are more obsessed with debt strangely so anyway he said that tim kessler who did this study said well i'm not a moral philosopher but if you want to be happy have good friends and you know be concerned by the global issues and so forth you better be like those who value more intrinsic value which is the quality of human relationship that's one of the main factors of well-being in fact all the studies shows that as well you will be healthier you will be happier more like the what the greek or demonia which is a sense of flourishing and thriving which is more not just less sensation so you know there's all these things if we were to do that do better with less we can do it but we cannot keep on adding to our endless needs so so uh this sustainable harmony is to remain in harmony with nature instead of using it in an unsustainable way and it's also uh sustainable harmony now is about remaining to social justice in the sense of poverty in the midst of plenty you know just to say very quickly the the model of the homo economic growth is to maximize personal preferences so and then so-called using the voice of reason that's all the modern economy is based on that but i have a friend called denis noel who's a great economist he says the voice of reason alone cannot deal with two things poverty in the midst of plenty we have reason has no reason if you reason cannot tell you if you are only interested in maximizing your interest to pay someone more with those t-shirts in bangladesh that you sell in france or somewhere it needs to care and then the problem of the common common is the environment you know democracy advancement of science you have to step out of maximizing your personal interest so he said we need the voice of care so and then if we do so then social harmony and sustainable harmony so in a way just to conclude my blah blah talk i came to really be intimately convinced both at the light of buddhist teaching at the life of examples like dr corala and others like my dear friend dr ritt and others that benevolence i mean having more consideration for others altruism is really the most pragmatic answer to the challenges of the 21st century so briefly today we have a difficulty to reconcile the three time scale the short term you know someone needs a heart operation a mother in somewhere in south india or in the terrain needs to feed her kids for the next week and she doesn't have what it takes or economies to do this super fast investment now in new jersey where every second they do millions of transactions completely crazy and also the looking at the return at the end of the month so that's the short term so then you have the you have to reconcile that with the meter midterm is a lifetime or a career family 20 years a generation and what is the main that we think we are looking for somehow to flourish in life we need to fulfill our natural aspiration for while being happiness for having a good life if a country is the most powerful and the richest everyone is feeling miserable what's the point so that's of course needs to take in consideration in everything we do in the way organized work transports social fabric and so forth and then there's a new challenge that we didn't have ten thousand years ago only five million people on earth and that challenge is now we are the main force that shapes uh the future of our planet now when we are 5 million that much we could do now we are 7 billion our power has increased exponentially before we had things we could throw now we have you know atomic power electricity fossil fuels all kinds of things the internet so our power has been magnified perhaps billion fold but our care has not been magnified to the same extent so that unbalanced we did a meeting in brussels with the dilemma minded life which is called power and care how to rebalance that how to ins to bring care in power to make it a force for good so in the long term having more consideration for others demands that we care for future generations otherwise they say you knew you did nothing and their faith is in our hands today so if we are selfish there's no environment problem because we won't be there in in 100 years you know my favorite maxis is groucho marx i don't know who knows groucho marx but he said why should i care for future generations what did they do for me but i heard stephen force an american billionaire saying the same thing on fox news seriously he was told about the race of the what the oceans that will bring catastrophes in hundred years he said literally and listen again and knot it down i find absurd to change my behavior today for something that happened 100 years so that guy's probably i guess he has no kids or he doesn't care for their children so basically and i think one of the greatest environment scientists said yes it is and altruism question the question of the environment so you see if you want to bring it on the same table scientists doctors politicians men of science studies involvement social workers people who are involved day-to-day relieving suffering they need to have a common concept to make a better world together except a few nuts like some we see today most people want a better world but they need a concept to work together to to unite those three times scale and selfishness not going to do the job you are going to magnify your your your returns now you are going to be selfish all the way and you don't care for future generation so more consideration for others you go towards social justice you remedy to poverty in the midst of plenty you have a an economy with solidarity with care caring economics we also did a minor life meeting in zurich on caring economics there's a book about that in the in the midterm you will make sure that the conditions of life [Music] allow for driving you know once i was in a business school somewhere in brussels and they say well you know the goal of government is not to make people astrological and happy i said no of course but at least to have the the structure and the the way that it people can do it without being completely raided by the free riders you know who dominate the ultra in economy without any regulation always the free rider no rule rule the game so people who trust each other they have no chance so there's all kinds of things that we can do so that people do thrive and that people can cooperate because other studies have shown that most people are ready to cooperate if they trust each other so trust has been going down in many countries so all these things can be done in the midterm and in the long term having more consideration for others is the only practical answer to make sure that our future generation will not inherit the completely damaged environment and suffer tremendously you know if we go to the worst prediction and is there we are not so close to going to that three degrees four degrees it's a entirely different planet population could be reduced to 1 billion which we say oh that will take care of overpopulation but at cost of how much suffering now in europe they're all crazy about the migrants and so forth 250 million climate migrants might come by 30 20 30 years if we go that way so it's nothing to compare with what's happening now if you look at the covet you know all the sorry to go to go on uh all the the various uh last 20 30 years all the viral problems all came to the same way i mean same origin unhealthy relation with other species and nature if you look at ebola aids they come from you know encroaching on natural environment in africa and so forth chimpanzees and others then uh you know the south the avian flu porcelain fluid the covet not covered by the others mostly came from you know this uh industrial farming we have hundred thousand chicken in a place ruled by 20 people so it cannot be healthy so all these sort of unbalanced relation with other species brought most of those were epidemic of the last 20 years though so all these things are warning signs that we should really recalibrate and go towards more altruism so it's not a luxury it's not an utopia it's a very pragmatic concept maybe it won't work there are a lot of contrary forces but it's up to us after all isn't it so sorry to take so much time thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Kathmandu Institute of Child Health Nepal

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Id: TY46-WgfrF8

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022