>>Dan Ariely: I want to start with the question of what can we learn from Buddhism and your
own experience about happiness?
How do we become.
>>Matthieu Ricard:Well, I was thinking about when the panel started with pleasure, the
relationship between the two.
You know, people speak of magic moments.
Walking in the snow and under the stars with a wonderful person.
But sometimes this is magic moment, there's nothing I can do about it, but when you think
about why was it magic?
At that time, it was a sense of having no inner conflicts, of feeling a bit spacious
with the universe, with a loved one, this kind of peace.
So it's not that magic.
You can understand why it happened.
So could we consider that as something like a way of being that we could cultivate as
a skill?
Now, to come back to pleasure, you come back from this walk in the snow and under the stars
and you take a wonderful hot shower.
It's bliss.
Pleasure.
Now, you stay 24 hours in that hot shower, it's not so interesting.
So pleasure is very much dependent upon time, circumstances.
It's something that uses itself as we consume it.
And if it's -- on top of that you add craving or grasping, then somehow it dims the feeling
of deep satisfaction.
Actually, you can enjoy something pleasurably, and in the brain build up the wanting circuit
which is different, and at the end you may experience something that you want without
feeling pleasure.
That's called addiction.
So in a way -- >>Dan Ariely: Just a moment there.
So you're trying to separate happiness from pleasure and you say pleasure is much more
temporary and -- >>Matthieu Ricard: Well, pleasure, you look
for pleasurable sensations.
And so those are very vulnerable, let's say, to outer circumstances.
And basically if you are keeping on trying to renew that all the time, and this is the
recipe for happiness, it looks more like a recipe for exhaustion than happiness.
So let's take happiness now as a way of being.
So a way of being that is not just happiness on its own but a cluster of human qualities.
It is inner peace, inner strength, inner freedom.
It is loving kindness, compassion, friendship, resilience, inner courage.
And those are things that the more you experience them, rather than pleasure, the more actually
they get deeper and stronger because it builds up something.
So in the end you end up with inner resources to deal with the fundamentals of life, no
matter what happens, that is the opposite of pleasure.
So it builds a platform in life on which you come back.
After winning the lottery, you come up, you even go below.
If it's a drama, you also come back to that platform, but you raise that platform as a
skill.
So now it's also something that give you a sense of confidence that you can go through
the ups and downs of life, so, therefore, you feel less vulnerable, you feel less threatened,
you feel less protective, so you also naturally will open more to others.
So that element, I think especially the notion of loving kindness, altruism, compassion,
benevolence, those are key components to generating happiness.
And it's not necessarily pleasant.
We were talking yesterday while we were taking a walk that can it be compatible with sadness?
So if it's pleasure, no way.
But you see an injustice, a massacre, it's incredibly sad.
But you can keep the sense of courage, of determination to change that, of compassion,
of sense of direction in life, and so you will treat that in the best possible way,
in a constructive way.
You won't fall into despair.
So it's compatible with what I call a way of being, which is flourishing and well-being,
even though it's very unpleasant.
So in that sense, it is different.
>>Dan Ariely: Yeah.
Sorry, I want to find out how you do this because it's interesting -- I mean, it sounds
promising.
So here's my kind of big struggle with pleasure.
There is an analysis of people who have been climbing mountains.
And when you read these stories about mountain climbing, they look -- they seem like stories
of pure misery.
You would think it's elation?
No.
First of all, it's very dangerous, but it's frostbite and hard to breathe and hard to
walk and injuries and so on.
And from these descriptions you say somebody just did that, and they got to the top.
They will say this was the biggest mistake of their lives, they'll go down and never
do it again, and from there just try to get simple pleasures out of life rather than this
horrific experience.
Nevertheless, people finish climbing big mountains, the Himalayas and they go back and do the
same thing again.
And it's the kind of pleasure that looks to me like it's not captured day-to-day thinking.
It's a pleasure that comes from achievement, and it's a pleasure that comes from competition.
It's a pleasure that comes from overcoming challenges.
It's a pleasure that comes from pain and misery in some interesting --
>>Matthieu Ricard: You know the idea of flow.
>>Dan Ariely: Yeah.
>>Matthieu Ricard: It is not so much the competition.
I think flow is something that you are fully engaged in.
You forget yourself.
It's just challenging enough that you have to put the best of yourself and not too much
that you panic.
So it's not boring and not stressing.
So flow can be achieved through mountain climbing or a surgeon or an artist.
It could be achieved also through medication.
It's flow without action.
So a continuous stream of experience which has a quality, a sense of flourishing, that
time takes another value.
When I sit in my hermitage, some people say it must be so boring sitting months alone
in the hermitage.
Don't you feel lonely?
Doesn't the time seem long?
>>Dan Ariely: You must have access to Paul's movies when you sit there.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Right.
But I find the time so rewarding.
Just before lunch break, 15 minutes, it's like a stream of melted gold.
I have this 15 minutes to just go deeper and trying to generate compassion and all that.
So it is a kind of inner flow.
So I think, really, it's the quality of experience that will determine over the long time how
you go about that.
>>Dan Ariely: So you have been called the happiest man in the world, I think.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Sorry.
I have made so many disclaimers about that.
>>Dan Ariely: I don't think you said it.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Forget about that.
>>Dan Ariely: Somebody said it.
Clearly you're very happy.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Not too bad.
>>Dan Ariely: Not too bad.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Ariely: So we've tried to kind of think
about what kind of things we do wrong and how can we do it better.
Spending money, being happy, what kind of things our intuitions are generally not correct.
And from your experience, what kind of things actually are making people become happier
and more satisfied?
>>Matthieu Ricard: Typically, you know, the lottery is studied very much.
The comment, people say, "Oh, of course he's happy.
I would be happy."
And then you hear of people who have everything to be happy.
They are beautiful, they are famous, they have a lot of money and they are very depressed.
"Oh, what's wrong with this guy?
If I had that, I would be very happy."
I think it's too much.
Of course we need to improve the outer conditions.
No question.
Especially there's still 1.5 billion people living in abject poverty.
There's conflict.
There are mothers who cannot feed their children.
No question that we should improve outer condition in this world.
This being said, especially when we have what we need, if we keep on placing all our hopes
and fear in the outer world, we are in for a big disappointment because precisely, we
when we get it, we say so what?
We expected something wonderful and it is just ordinary.
So we vastly underestimate the importance of inner conditions.
We deal with our mind from morning to evening.
That's the ultimate experience of whatever we do.
Whether you get a Ferrari or something else, it's your mind that is going to translate
that into happiness or misery.
And that mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Depends how it works.
So at least if we could pay some attention of how to deal with the mind, how to deal
with emotions, how to recognize that aggressivity, hatred, jealousy arrogance, craving will just
destroy your happiness and physically make you unhappy and will destroy the happiness
of others.
And if you find out that loving kindness, compassion, cultivating inner peace, the simplicity
of the present moment contribute to flourishing and then you will be a person that will be
happier to be with and that transformation will lead you to serve better others, and
then you realize cultivating as skills those inner conditions matter tremendously.
>>Dan Ariely: I buy it.
So how do you -- I want to be less jealous.
>>Matthieu Ricard: How do you learn chess?
How do you learn to read and write?
How do you learn to juggle or play tennis?
You practice.
So we do have this unconditional love feeling for a very dear person for 15 seconds or so
and it comes back and goes, but who sits for 30 minutes cultivating loving kindness?
Very few.
We go at 5:00 in the morning -- >>Dan Ariely: We have email all the time.
How do we have time?
>>Matthieu Ricard: You are on this bicycle that goes nowhere not even in the kitchen
because fitness is good for your health.
Why there's no compassion gymnasium?
My friend Paul Ekman says we should have compassion gymnasiums every block.
>>Dan Ariely: So give us a specific example.
How do you practice compassion?
>>Matthieu Ricard: Let's say you want to practice loving kindness.
You start with something easy, someone you really love so you don't have to try absolutely
have loving kindness for a dictator or something.
Or someone even worse, your next colleague at the office.
[ Laughter ] >>Matthieu Ricard: So you start with that,
and you have this natural love and feeling, embracing and you want only that person to
be happy, be safe, be flourishing in life.
And then instead of giving few thoughts, you let that fill your mental landscape.
If it declines, you revive it.
And you don't do that just for a few thoughts, you try to extend that for ten or 15 minutes.
Or you repeat it several times in the day.
>>Dan Ariely: So you think about that person and all the wonderful things you want.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Not only that but you try to grow a genuine sense of living.
Not just thinking again.
But it's a trigger.
And then after that, you think, well, I don't wake up in the morning thinking may I suffer
the whole day and if possible my whole life.
So does that person, so does that person, so does that person.
So I project myself in your mind, in their mind, and I say they may be diluted in the
way they try to find happiness in the wrong place, but basically they don't want to suffer.
So if I value my own happiness and that of my child, I start valuing them, I see the
interdependence among all sentient beings, and suddenly I can extend that.
So then comes something that is very rewarding, is that sense of connectedness, of having
this natural benevolence to others, that readiness to be of service when occasion comes, and
it suddenly makes it much more fulfilled life.
Experientally, this emotion, loving kindness and compassion.
Neuroscience will tell you this is the strongest activation of positive emotion.
>>Dan Ariely: So lets look at a little bit of data.
Can you share with us a little bit of -- >>Matthieu Ricard: Yes.
If you could show the slide.
So of course we say that this is good for you.
You sit in these beautiful places.
It's easier to be there.
It disappeared.
>>Dan Ariely: Are we in the way?
>>Matthieu Ricard: Well, it's gone.
You are there, this is the data.
Now it's gone again.
Okay.
Now you are there.
It is good for you.
You can meditate.
It is in a traffic jam.
I don't know why it's running so fast.
I don't know, whatever task.
Then the idea came about 15 years ago to see what long-term meditators who had done 50-
to 60,000 hours of meditation, like a violinist will do his first concert, it's 10,000, so
five times that, what will happen if we look in their brain, in their immune system.
So we took some of those guys, myself included --
>>Dan Ariely: Can we have the data slides?
>>Matthieu Ricard: Yes.
So that's, for instance, one of the great teacher that trained us on compassion and
loving kindness.
And then so you can see that it seems to be some kind of, you know, strength, inner peace,
inner felicity.
They don't seem too much stressed.
Then we took them to Madison, Wisconsin, and then we tried to measure the brain activity
with electro encephalogram, I won't give you the details, all with the scanner that the
meditators described as it is cold, it is noisy, it is dark, it is narrow.
Nevertheless, and we spent two and a half hours.
This is the first time I came after two and a half hours upon arrival with Richard Davidson.
But what they found with experienced, you see the curve below, that is the novice group
that did one week of loving kindness meditation.
The pink line is when they rest, the blue line is when they meditate.
Nothing happens.
Look at the upper curve.
The bottom line is when they are at rest and don't do anything specific.
When they engage in compassion meditation, you see a huge increase, several hundred percent,
in the gamma frequency.
That's huge.
It was so huge that they thought it was an artifact.
It has to be replicated many times.
If you look in the brain, look on the left side, the meditator at rest, and when they
engage in compassion, several critical areas of the brain having to do with empathy, with
parental love, with positive emotion are activated.
On the right, this is novices at rest.
Nothing happened.
Meditation, nothing happened.
That shows the effect of training.
>>Dan Ariely: Let's go back to the previous slide.
So it tells you that meditators are able to have basically brain control over compassion?
>>Matthieu Ricard: Yes.
What I was just going to show next, actually, is if you ask them something strange, to meditate,
30% of compassion, 60%, 90, that seems odd.
I give you 30% of my compassion only because I don't like you or you, I like very much?
We did it for 22 hours.
It was a marathon.
They did (indiscernible) of three days, fortunately, and it turns out that those subjective feeling
of 30% of bringing compassion and more and more, it matches with what is measured in
the brain.
So you can actually just generate brain state at will.
And similarly, now we could show that that's fine for 50,000 hour.
Now we show that two weeks can make change in the brain.
Structurally, it's in hippocampus which, as you know, integrates novelty when you have
new experiences.
And in many areas of the brain, two weeks, three weeks, eight weeks, it already makes
structural change.
Neuro plasticity is taking place simply with 30 minutes a day of mind training.
So that is a huge potential as a secular contribution to society.
It's not going to the hermitage.
It's doing it simply as much as you do physical fitness, you need to do emotional and mental
fitness.
>>Dan Ariely: That's great.
And as a last question, so you've -- Buddhism for a long time, have practiced kind, loving
meditation and argued it's correct.
Now neuroscience is showing changes in the brain is according to both experts and novices.
Why -- Why do you think this is not part of the human intuition of the modern world that
this is something we should be doing?
Because how many people here meditate?
That's probably a big percentage compared to a regular audience.
Why do you think this is not something that people intuit?
>>Matthieu Ricard: First of all, we need to demystify.
Meditation in Sanskrit is bavla, means to cultivate or to become familiar with.
So we become familiar with many things but possibly not the exactly right things for
general flourishing.
So in the eastern tradition, this is part of life, so not as odd as here.
>>Dan Ariely: Yeah.
>>Matthieu Ricard: So I think it's probably that we vastly underestimate the potential
of mind to change as skills.
Oh, this is for granted.
I'm like that, take it or leave it but I can't do much about it.
So that's a loser sort of perspective.
But what neuroscience shows, and that's why that collaboration is so fruitful, is that
neuro plasticity can happen at all ages and it start within two weeks and it certainly
makes a difference and in the behavior.
We don't have time, but just now with Richard Davidson there is a program for preschoolers
-- four, five years old -- eight weeks very simple training of the (indiscernible) behavior,
gratitude and so forth, and you will be amazed at the result.
It completely breaks after eight weeks the in group, out group.
We ask them to give stickers to their best friend and to the less likely friend in the
class after ten weeks, although at the beginning they give everything to their best friend.
So simple intervention.
Secular that based on this experience from the contemplative side that can be an immense
contribution.
We also work, for instance, with burnout.
>>Dan Ariely: I have to stop you.
>>Matthieu Ricard: Yeah.
>>Dan Ariely: This has been fantastic and inspiring, and I'm looking forward to more.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]