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The fabric of life, the fabric of phenomena is absolutely interconnected, interdependent. So our happiness and suffering happens through and with others. If we are alone, suspended in space, love, suffering, we'll have no meaning but friendship, love, what meaning would it have if we were alone in the universe? We are so connected with human beings that the pursuit of selfish happiness, sense of exacerbated self love will never work.
Roma Ronald, the French writer, said, if your pursuit of selfish happiness is the only purpose of your life, only goal of your life, your life will soon be goalless. My name is Benoit Kim, and together we will be exploring the depth of a human mind. Today's conversation with an ordained budhist monk known as the world's happiest man will redefine what happiness is and how we all can sustain this elusive state despite the ABS and flows of life.
Metchi Ricard is an ordained French Buddhist monk, humanitarian, internationally bestselling author of 22 books, photographer and a scientist, metchu received his PhD in molecular genetics under the 1965 Nobel Prize laureate Francis Jacob, and he's also the Dalai Lama's official French interpreter. Expect to learn about the wisdom of the world's happiest man, the difference between happiness and pleasure, how to be happy, sustainably the Buddha nature, how to do compassion, meditation, the scientific evidence of altruism, and much, much more. Also, please check out Matthew's forthcoming book, the Notebooks of a Wandering Monk, detailing his Buddhist training and all the great wisdom he's obtained through his teachers in the Himalayas in the last 50 plus years.
Welcome to discover more. Discover More, discover More is a show for independent thinkers, by independent thinkers. Met you.
Many blessings to be here with you today. And welcome to Discover more Very happy to be with you. So, as the world's happiest man and one of the most and one of the most well known Buddhist monks that even Jay Shetty talks a lot about, what is the definition of happiness and how is it different from pleasure? So first, thank you so much.
We get that question behind from the start. So as a disclaimer in the name of all my scientist friend, how we could know the level of happiness of a billion human beings. So obviously it doesn't make sense.
It's a nice journalistic formula which somehow sticks to it. Was it came out after in Madison, Wisconsin. We did some study on neuroscience and meditation with the long term meditators who did between 10,000 to 60,000 hours of meditation.
And we were more precisely studying compassion. And compassion occur unconditional compassion for all sentient beings. And it happens that it increased the level of gamma frequency to a magnitude that was not previously recorded in neuroscience.
Not only me, of course, all my colleagues who did the same. It's not a personal thing. It's a result of long term training.
So altruism, compassion, benevolence also somehow related to positive mental states. So anyway, nothing to do with happiness. There's no happiness center in the brain.
It's a result of a cluster of basic human qualities. But some journalists found this story interesting and I think it's important to distinguish happiness and define it better. Aristotle says the goal of goals, everything we do is in the pursuit of happiness and happiness is a goal in itself, as Aristotle say and also Buddhists say, because we need to get rid of the suffering and its cause, it will be better to know little bit what it is.
Otherwise we are shooting arrows in the dark. So anyway, the first I think distinction very clear is the continuum of happiness and pleasant sensation is different. There's nothing wrong with pleasant sensation.
Don't get me wrong, to get a hot shower after walking in the snow is fabulous. But 24 hours is not very pleasant. Listening to the most beautiful music is great.
24 hours might be a torture. It was used in Guantanamo to torture people. So pleasure is great, but it changed in nature, becomes neutral or aversive with time.
You can feel pleasure while everyone else is suffering around you. And basically it's more like pursuit of hedonic happiness. It's not a state of way of being, it's a fleeting experience like a candle that use it up itself.
While if we define happiness as a way of being in the world, that means a cluster of fundamental human qualities like compassion, benevolence, altruistic, love, resilience, inner strength, inner freedom, sense of deep, sense of serenity. Those actually are not vulnerable to time and circumstances. The more you experience it, the more they become deeper, the more they grow, the more they become solid.
It's like the platform you are on life. It can go up and down and you come back to that. Even we have joy and sorrows but it is your baseline and this can be enhanced because every of those important human qualities say like compassion or sense of inner strength or inner freedom can be cultivated as skills.
That means you can enhance your basic level of happiness. So that's I think the main thing. So we could say in two words it's an optimal or an exceptionally healthy state of mind that produced throughout different emotional state events of life.
And it's like the depth of the ocean. There could be a calm motion on the surface or big waves, but the depth of the ocean is always there. So that's a short take on happiness and pleasure.
Of course I didn't expect you to address the timeless question of the pursuit of happiness. But I do want to go in on compassion that you talked about and as a psychotherapist, right, as a social scientist myself, I do agree that happiness is a clusters of symptoms or clusters of states. It's not just a singular neurobiological or neurochemical thing, it's just like depression.
Depression is a clusters of symptoms. It's not just a single sadness in your most recent New York Times article interview met you with David. You shared with him that Dalai Lama's biggest advice to you after the retreat was meditate with compassion.
Meditate with compassion in the middle and end the meditation with more compassion. So can you talk more about why do you feel like compassion is a key ingredient in the pursuit of happiness? It's compassion together with wisdom. Those are like the two wings of a bird and you can't fly just with one wing.
You don't train one wing first, a second. Those have to come together. You have to have a correct understanding of reality.
And then out of that you feel boundless love and compassion for those who suffer because of distortion of reality. So now, usually we have four components we call boundless love or benevolence. That is mostly the wish may all sentient beings find happiness and the cause of happiness.
And the cause of happiness is very important because if we mistake the cause of happiness and run, we may run towards happiness and actually run towards suffering. And we want happiness badly, and we turn our back on the cause of happiness. Sometimes we are addicted to the cause of suffering.
So you see, it opens a whole field of knowing what are the cause of suffering really at different levels and what are the cause of genuine happiness. Then there is compassion. So it starts with the unconditional love.
So now you may say how you do that with a dictator, a bloody dictator, bashar Assad or Putin and many others we can name. Well, the point is, it's different from a moral judgment. We know very well there are people which are like incredibly obnoxious and harmful and which are the cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
But precisely, we may wish may the causes that brought someone like this, the personal causes that make someone become like a completely pitiless psychopath, the cultural environment that brought someone like that in power made those change. So when you encounter suffering, this unconditional benevolence becomes compassion, which instead of the wish, the general wish, may all being find happiness and the cause of happiness, you now say, may all being be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. So basically, compassion is unconditional benevolence applied to suffering.
And then the last, the fourth one element of compassion is impartiality. Now, you cannot just love your dear ones and your dog, because all sentient beings, without exception, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, may I suffer the whole day, and if possible, my whole life would like to find happiness. Even people who hate themselves, if we were given the possibility to find some elements of happiness, they will somehow take it.
If we take the example of the sun, the sun shines on everyone, good and bad, close and far. But if you are very near because of life circumstances, say your companion, your children, your dear ones, they are close, so they get naturally more light, more warm, but not at the cost of discriminating against other. If you were decided I'm only going as a sun to shine on my dear ones, then the light will be very narrow, not very warm, not very light.
So actually you would love less even your loved ones if you have a very shranked sort of compassion and love. So some people is not realistic because there's infinite number of beings. Of course, it's not the question of saying I'm get up in the morning and I will resolve all the suffering in the world, but at least you can exclude no one from your heart.
So in your mind at least you don't exclude anyone from that wish. May they find happiness and the cause of happiness, may they be free from suffering and the cause of suffering, even the worst dictator you may wish, may the hatred, the indifference, the cruelty that in that person's mind may dissipate. So that's the point.
I think wisdom is a really important component that people forget about. Because I think when people think about boundless love, our boundless capacity for love and endless capacity for compassion, people think in a very naive terms oh, so you give away your Social Security numbers, you give away bank information to a stranger as a compassionate act. But that's naivete.
You still have to be grounded in realism. Right? So I like the highlight of wisdom there. Yeah.
So wisdom is also attuned to reality, is to know that things are impermanent, that things are interconnected. We are not like small snooker balls that sometimes interact and which are independent in nature. The fabric of life, the fabric of phenomena is absolutely interconnected, interdependent.
So our happiness and suffering happens through and with others. If we are alone, suspended in space, love, suffering, we'll have no meaning but friendship, love, what meaning would it have if we were alone in the universe? We are so connected with human beings that the pursuit of selfish happiness, sense of exacerbated self love will never know. Roma Roller, the French writer, said if your pursuit of selfish happiness is the only purpose of your life, only goal of your life, your life will soon be goalless.
And then the next step for those people is when they finally get that clear in their mind, in their hearts, they look at others and they say well, even that person is confused deep within also that person, she doesn't want to suffer. So why not be concerned by her fate? Why not wishing that he find happiness? Why not wishing that she find to remedy to the cause of suffering? So, you know, step by step, you can enlarge the scope of those wishes for others to be happy and be free from suffering. This idea of having a boundless aspiration, that all beings be happy, it is definitely possible as an aspiration even, you know, you're not going to do it.
My brain is going somewhere weird. Bear with me, Matthew. I like to make different connections and find the intersection points.
So I represent Christian faith, as you know, and I know you view Buddhism as a way of life, right? So in Christian faith, a lot of Christians struggle with this idea that God's grace and forgiveness is for everyone. Not just for Christians, for everyone. Just like the rays of sunshine.
You said either everyone benefits from the sun or nobody. I just like to keep this open. Like, do you have any thoughts there? Given the underlying theme, possibly similar in Buddhism, which is the Buddha nature, we said that every sentient being has the Buddha nature deep within.
There's basically an original goodness, not so much original sin, let's say. So we say it's like a nugget of gold. So now that nugget of gold can be buried into rock, can be fallen in the worst garbage, but gold is gold.
The gold itself has not been denatured. It's not improved. Once you have cleaned it, you just reveal what it was.
Now you may ignore that, and then you will say that we are like a beggar who doesn't know that there is a nugget of gold buried under his hat, his shack. So he's rich at the same time and poor at the same time. So therefore, that's why we say that if we could bring the lovingkindness and compassion is somehow a reflection of that.
If we didn't have that, this bondless, love would not come at the surface. And so the whole part of Buddhism is to actualize that treasure that we have within oneself. And so we are not really washing original bad nature, which would be our start, because we say, like, you can clean a piece of charcoal for 100 years, it's not going to shine like gold.
So removing the layers or removing the clouds, that prevents us from seeing the sun. But the sun has always been shining in the sky. It's just that it was obscured for a while.
So that Buddhist concept makes us also think that there's no one that is intrinsically heavy. This could be a lot of heavy piled up upon that gold like a mountain and quite hard. But nevertheless, it's a bit like what Nelson Mandela said after 30 years in jail.
About his jailers, he said, if you look deep within, you'll always find something good deep within human beings. This reminds me of a famous story from Thailand, I think this was maybe 30 years ago, where a lot of archaeologists and people, they're cleaning this famous temple in Thailand, and it was a mud. It was like a mud Buddha statue, pretty big.
And once they cleaned it, they realized it was a golden Buddha, but they kept it under the mud. The pursuit of enlightenment, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of what is aligned with you is uncovering and revealing what is already within us to begin with. And you see also, enlightenment is a kind of ultimate perfection.
You get rid of all obscurations, all defilements, all mental toxins, all basic ignorance. So you cannot fabricate perfection, you can only uncover it. Perfection is not something you can manufacture with this and that, and you're buying gadgets and putting them together and boom, there's perfection.
But what you can do precisely for the gold is to remove what prevents perfection from shining forth. Speaking of enlightenment, Matthew, I read your book. Your forthcoming book.
The Notebooks of a Wandering Monk. You described enlightenment as a perfect awareness in the book. So can you go a little bit deeper into how you view enlightenment and whether having perfect awareness is actually beneficial for most people? Because I think having heightened, increased awareness comes with burden if you really think about it sometimes, well, it's not awareness in the usual sense.
It's not only that, of course. So first of all, as a disclaimer, of course, I'm not in close to enlightenment, don't get mistaken, but in the text and receiving so many teachings. So basically enlightenment is like first you get a room with light and shadows and gradually the shadows disappear and there's only light.
So light is not like something shining in the dark. It's the light of wisdom, the light of inner freedom. And so wisdom, in a way, when we speak of awareness, it's not just mindfulness being aware of this and that when you wash the dishes.
This is more like ordinary mindfulness, which is great awareness, is that we aware of your with our nature. Pure wisdom is 100% like the center of the sun. There's not a trace of darkness in the center of the sun.
Enlightenment is going from being entangled in suffering to be completely free from the cause of suffering, from delusion, deluded perception of perceiving the world as permanent, or to bridge the gap between appearances and reality, to know that things are impermanent, they appear, yet they avoid of intrinsic existence and all that. So it's perfect wisdom. It is completely free from mental toxins like hatred, craving, lack of discernment, pride, arrogance, jealousy.
We detail 84,000 of them, the main five ones being those. So when you are completely free from those and you have bloomed to the ultimate level, they are opposite. Opposite of hatred is unconditional love.
Opposite of lack of discernment is wisdom, opposite of jealousy is rejoicing. Opposite of pride, humility, all these qualities, and especially the union of wisdom and compassion. So that will be, in short, enlightenment.
All the shadows have gone and all the qualities have bloomed. I love your ability to make, relatable and digestible metaphors and analogies. It's very visual.
So Matthew, in chapter 24 in your forthcoming book, you describe your masters and the enlightened one's ability to read minds and thoughts of others on countless occasions due to their perfect awareness. This is going to be a heavy question, so feel free to elaborate and go deep. We're in the heavy waters.
You know, I'm trained as a scientist and I think one thing I got out of working six years with Francois Jacob at Pastor Institute and also my father, who was a very rigorous intellectual mind, francois Rover. They gave me the taste for rigor. So no mess around, no wishy wishy staff.
So I know perfectly well that at the state of knowledge we have now of functioning, of the brain, those things, we have no mechanism, no explanation of that. And I discussed that at length with my neuroscientist friend. I even spoke at a neuroscientific meeting with a few hundreds of them.
And I was in dialogue with my friend Wolf Sinker, with whom I do the book, also at MIT Press, like the notebooks of a wandering monk called beyond the Self. But at the same time, I cannot not testify what I've been witness of that will be not honest. So I'm not trying to convince anyone.
I'm totally not in that state of mind. I just said, look, this happened to me. I was not dreaming.
And as one of my friends said during that conference, we don't think Matthew is just telling the slide, but we are in big trouble if that is correct because we don't know how to explain that. But just to give you a short example, because no matter how you look at it's, very hard to find any other explanation. So one time I was in my hermitage in Darsheeling in India.
So I was living in a nine foot by nine foot hermitage with an hermitage without electricity, without water, but the most comfortable life years of my life because I was so much where I wanted to be, near my teacher. So one day I thought of doing my practice. I remember that I have gone fishing when I was young because my grandmother was going fishing.
And one time near the seaside, my uncle had some ponds and there were some big rats that were eating all the flowers. So he gave me a small rifle and he said, why don't you try to shoot some of those rats? And I was maybe 14 or 13 and I don't know what came in my mind because I never touched a rifle or other that I went and shot quite far. The rat jumped and I hope still now that I didn't harm that poor rat which had done nothing to me.
And then imagine for so far a fish if we were hooked by taken by a hook drawn into water and then they cut our head. We won't find it's a great thing to do. So suddenly all this thing came clearly to my mind.
You put in the shoes of the others and they say, how could I have done that? And it's mad inflicting unnecessary suffering to another sentient being. So I say, I must go and see my teacher and sort of confess about that. So I went down from a hamitage about 200 yards and I came in the room and he was sitting there.
His name was Kangyurinboche, he's a very great Tibetan master. And his son at that time, I didn't speak Tibetan yet he was interpreting for me through English. So I sort of paid homage.
And as I was approaching consumer, she said something to his son and they both laugh. So anyway, when I came, he asked me directly, how many animal did you kill? So there was no funny light shining something in the it was the most natural thing, almost like a joke. It was teasing me.
But nevertheless, that was the question I had in mind. So I said I was just going to speak about that. Now you may say, well, I talked with some of my scientist friend about that.
One of them said, well, there's a lot of things happening in life which have no meaning. You meet many people if you are in a big city, many people in the day and they have no meaning. Now you meet someone you met in Paris when you were young.
So wow, how come we just meet here? By coincidence. It has meaning, but the probability of meeting that person is not lower or higher than meeting anyone else. So he said, when things have meaning, they strike you.
But I gave him a counterexample. I said, well, once I did a book with a physicist, trin huan Tuan. It's called the Quantum and the lords in English.
And I was going to a TV show, a book review show, and I walked towards my publisher to pick her up and go to the show. On the way, a taxi stops with a guy, came out with a letter with a stamp. And he said, I'm going to post that letter for you.
I didn't know that guy. He was simply writing me a letter because of the books. I said, I give it to you, I'm not posting it.
Okay, serendipity then we went to the show. After the show, go to have a drink somewhere and Haley taxi to go back. There's a guy in the street say, oh, I want to speak to you.
I said, Where are you going? So let's go the same place. You can speak in the car. So as we spoke, the taxi driver said, well, you know, you speak about this TV show.
2 hours ago I picked up a lady who was coming from there. I said, what was her address? And he gave my sister's address. So he picked up my sister and now he was picking me two years later.
I said, how many? Taxi Driver 14,000. Okay, again in the same day. So that's purely like winning the lottery.
There's nothing strange. This is a very unlikely event like winning the lottery, but there's nothing out of this world because it's normal for a guy to go and post a letter. It's normal for a taxi to take people.
It just happened. That's nothing extraordinary, it's just a funny coincidence. But no.
My teacher telling me that never ever did he ask me about my childhood. He asked me if I had parents, which I said I have a very dear uncle. I said I was engaged in some studies when I first met him.
He said, better you finish all that before coming to live here. That was in seven years. About it, about my personal life.
My mother came there, but besides that, never asked me what I was doing when I was child. We did like this, did I do that? Never. He always spoke about giving teachings, speaking about stories of Tibet, of other great masters of the past, telling stories or ordinary conversation of the day.
So how come, and if it wasn't that he somehow has read my mind, why in the world would he ask such a weird question? It makes no sense. So it's not like a normal thing to do, like going to post a letter. Why anyone would ask this question out of the blue to someone who never asks about his past at the moment, I was going to speak about that.
So I have no other explanation. That was the most obvious. And not only that, but we have a lot of similar stories.
And when Wolfsinger came to Nepal and some of us started to tell the story, he said, stop it. If one of this is true, we are in deep trouble. So I have no explanation except possibly reading the mind.
That seems the only way I can imagine. But from the science it doesn't make sense because the two brains would have to be on the same state to think the same thing at the same time. But at the same time, I cannot say that I didn't witness that.
So I leave it as an open question. And my friend Francisco Varvilla was a great scientist. He was saying about all these things, about the ultimate nature of consciousness.
Let's leave it open because that's how knowledge can progress. And so far we don't have explanation. And I don't want to give spooky ones because I don't have one.
Simply, it did happen and I leave you with that. Food for thoughts. So a lot of food for a thought.
But like I said, just to add on to that, as a psychotherapist, I also prize high emphasis on rigor, especially now. There's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, but I do want to share my own, I guess, opinions about what you shared reading the book as well. So I believe in synchronicity and serendipity.
And as you know, people's hormones sink, hormonal energy. They do sink, like menstrual cycles. And a lot of people don't know this, but I did a lot of research where in the 1970s, in the United States, there has been documented three series of scientific studies documenting telepathy and synchronizations of thoughts and images.
So what they did is they put three people in three separate rooms in a household for this control study. Three, three part series of scientific studies in the 1970s. They gave one controlled group certain sets of images to think about at night.
And over the time of the study control durations, the other two people who never communicated with the first person, the control group had the exact same sets of images in their dreams for the next week, never conversed, never talked to each other, but their images in their minds synchronized with different people. And a lot of studies have been shown about twinning effects. Twins.
People study twins with similar thoughts and content. And I've experienced this with my clients, with my fiance, just out of nowhere. We have the exact same thought at the exact same time.
So I just wanted to share that as well. Wolfsinger also mentioned a study in Stanford, I think in the 70s, commissioned by the US army, putting people in submarines and trying to communicate like that. And he said it was not a big sample, but it seems interesting.
So personally, all these people, they are mediums who read future, I have no any trust in those. But we say that at least just make it clear from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism, precisely when you have enough freedom boundless compassion, your wisdom increase. But there are a number of capacity that comes with spiritual experience.
So normally this is not something that happened by accident. Some people a little bit more gifted and they see it's really a side effect of spiritual realization. So from our perspective, I will be less convinced until I see some real solid evidence about normal folk having these kind of intuitions.
But who knows? Again, we have to keep open. But in Tibetan culture, it's really the result of advanced spiritual practice and it's more like an extra thing that you are given, like bonus almost. So if you don't mind, Matthew, since we're in the areas wishywashy, as you called it in chapter 36, you talk about reincarnation.
We're just going to all the heavy waters. So you documented in details your journey to find the reincarnate of a famous teacher, right? Given your intersection with your Buddhist identity and the rigor of your scientist background, how do you explain reincarnation, especially your PhDs in molecular know just to begin with? An anecdote. Once in Berkeley, I was with Paul Eckman and another researcher called Levenson, and they were studying human conflicts.
They studied with couples and they wanted to see if a Buddhist monk can handle or diffuse conflict better. So they put me with two people. One was Professor Glazer.
He was a Nobel Prize of physics. He found the Glaser bubble chamber and then he studied the brain. And the question was how a scientist trained person could believe in such.
Stupid thing as reincarnation. So with Professor Glazer, it went very, very well. We were measuring everything in our physiology.
We were very calm. And at the end he said, oh, I wish we could have more time to talk. And then without telling the person, they put me with the so called most difficult person in the contest of Berkeley.
So he came in and I said, we're supposed to have a conflictal discussion. He said, no problem with me. And then he went on, boom.
And after ten minutes, they could see the physiology going down. He was calming that. And at the end he said, I can't fight with this guy.
He is always smiling, and he gives reasonable answer, and there's something about him that I cannot fight. So now, to be serious, this is a very big cultural divide, as much as this is goofy stuff here in the west, it is common in the culture or in Asia, both in Hinduism, Buddhism and others. So that's to start with.
Now, the real question is what is the ultimate nature of consciousness? Because if the consciousness is 100% the functioning of the brain, as some neuroscientists postulate, but they all know that they are not there to claim it for sure. And consciousness is the question of the 21st century for neuroscience. If consciousness is 100% the brain and forget about recarnation, there is no question it all stopped and your brain goes back to Earth.
Now, if it's not the case, then you have a point. And there could be what was consciousness before, what it could be after. So what are the arguments from Buddhism? Well, it somehow goes back to Leipniz question, why is there something rather than nothing? You see? So the Buddhist answer is, unless you bring God, there's something, because God created everything, where you just have to acknowledge the existence of phenomena.
It is the nature of thing that the world exists. You don't have to say, why does it exist? It does. So we call that a primary fact.
And if you go back to atoms and particles and quarks and then quantum vacuum, why it is there? Why it is there, that's it. And then from several you could be without beginning. That was Bertrand Russell said, it's difficult to imagine beginninglessness, but there's no logical flow, while the first course has a lot of logical flows, why that cause came from what was before, how did he become a first course to start with anyway? De novo.
Creating something from nothing is difficult. There's a Buddhist saying that a million cause cannot make something that does not exist coming to existence, because nonexistence is the concept we have of the absence of things. But the concept of the absence of something cannot be a cause anyway.
So what about consciousness? Similarly, going down to the quark, the quantum vacuum and so forth, if you go introspectively to consciousness, you look at your consciousness first, you see a lot of thoughts, memories, things happening. And by the workings of your mind, then you go deep within, behind the screen of thought, this pure awareness that allows thought, the space of being aware, of being conscious. The basic cognitive faculty light itself.
Light can shine on the heap of garbage, doesn't become dirty. Light shine on a heap of gold, doesn't become expensive. Light is just revealed.
So pure knowing doesn't need to have a content. You can be pure awareness without conceptual content, without mental fabrication. Just aware, purely aware.
Now, if you reach there introspectively, no matter what scientists so it is called the first person experience. Well, the scientists, the third person experience what happens in your brain, but they don't come to consciousness. And then when I look at pure awareness, I don't come to neurons.
I don't even know I have a brain or they told me I have a brain, but I don't see feel my brain. So I come to pure awareness and that's it. I just have to acknowledge.
So it's primary fact also, and the Western phenomenologists also agree on that consciousness is a primary fact because you cannot go out of consciousness to say, oh, I have a brain. Consciousness is made by this and that. You're already in the space of consciousness.
So therefore, in the same way that the world cannot be created from nothing, we say that consciousness cannot just come out like last boom. It's not just the complexification of life of neurons and so forth. There's a qualia there.
There's not something that isn't conscious one instant and conscious the next because that will be a change in nature. So we say that the one instant of consciousness now is triggered by preceding instant of consciousness. So just like the universe, from the Buddhist perspective, it has no beginning and no end.
It has constant transformation. So that's the philosophical analysis of the idea of a continuum of consciousness. Now, when we discuss that with neuroscientists like Christoph Koh, who is the head of the Seattle Institute and I mentioned what would be the facts that if they were proven true, will go towards saying that consciousness not just 100% the brain.
So there's a number of things like near death experience, but that's not a very good one because so many things can happen when you are in the between life and death. Tons of neurotransmitters. A moment becomes a big time.
You can imagine all kinds of things, a lot of gamma frequencies. You can have bliss and see all kinds of things light, tunnels of light. This is not although it's very interesting and this could be life changing experience if you come back.
But that doesn't show anything about consciousness. You can see a paradise and all that. It's basically the functioning of your dying brain and then you come back.
Now, the two things that are left is remembering past lives, okay, or mind reading. So remember past. Life is tricky.
There's a lot of things happening in the world. There's a scholar in Virginia, Ian Stevenson, who studied 200K or 600 cases all over the world, not only in Tibetan kids, who say, well, I was born there. This is my parents living that village, my former life and so forth.
So he tried to see, as a sociologist, what was behind that. Mostly four or five years old, boy and girls. And there are many striking stories, like in India, a time of Gandhi.
There's a famous story which I cannot have no time to tell you, but who knows? These people telling stories, they could have been briefed by someone. So it is interesting. So Ian Stevenson, after 600 case analyzing them, he came with 20 case which says, pointings towards reincarnation, that means there was no way that the child could know so much detail about the place or other people that are supposed to be there from her parents and die young, for instance.
And he said the OCAM razor is the simplest, is that they did remember something. But, you know, when I discussed that with some scientists like Christoph Kor, I said, well, we don't know how to handle that because there's no mechanism. Again, they don't say the study was flawed.
They say, we don't know. So it's just left like that, and nobody know how to use that. But that's complicated because you see, it require a lot of going around, and as Stevenson did.
So mind reading will be the simplest. But the problem is those great masters who sometimes show that capacity, and we say that they don't show that to impress people. They show that when if it's useful to a student, but if you ask them, they say, oh, no, I don't know anything about that, because they don't want to remain humble.
And it's not something that you boost about. So it's very unlikely that they will come to a lab just to prove that, and that they thought it will be good for humanity. So therefore, I'm afraid it might remain for a while as an undecided question in terms of proving it.
And also synchronistic moment, I was literally thinking about consciousness. I had a question about consciousness, and you brought up consciousness, even though I never said the word. And we also call that flow state, right? Group flow, when group of people can synchronize on a certain wavelength.
But I want to add, because I know about that study they just referenced. I know one of the kids of the 20, she says she was a princess from England, and she was able to disclose, never revealed, never documented declassified archaeological evidence about very secret life of the Queen and the princess from hundreds of years couldn't because there was no Google back then. There was no AI.
There's no way for her to access such information. And she was nine years old. So it's unknowable.
Right? Well, I've met a few people like that, all those who said they were Egyptian princess. And I don't know why they are not sweepers or something, they're all something very fancy. So a little doubt.
Anyway, I mean one of the most striking case if you want to go, is Kochanti Devi. She was a young girl and in school she always told her parents that she wants to go to a place called Merut, which is a few hundred kilometers from Delhi. And she kept on bugging their parents and they beating her.
And then the teacher at one point said no, what happens with this girl? She always wants to go to there. And she was also speak the dialect of that place which her parents didn't speak. And she was describing, she said my husband, I died when we were young.
And my husband said he would not remarry. And he kept some money somewhere under the floor and this and that. So very precise how the house looked like.
So finally Gandhi sent a few people there, elder people, reliable people to see. And they found immediately the place. He gave the names and all that.
So they were kind of died. She died before her husband. So the husband didn't go, but he sent his brother and saying I'm your husband.
So he came to Delhi and the girl immediately said you are not my husband, you are my brother. And once you even teased me and all that. So he was freaked out.
So he went back and finally the girl was there, went there and then on the platform they all everyone waiting. And she saw her former grandfather and she jumped into him or grandpa. And she went to the house and she said here's the place where we had hidden the money for you and you remarried and you said you were not.
So anyway so anyway it was like that a big story with lot of details. Why girl who have absolutely no reason to know all that. So it's one of those things that you go wild.
What to make about that? Again. So? I don't know. Me, I'm puzzled as a scientist, like anyone should be.
But these things did happen in history and we have to somehow take it into account. And it's somewhat anecdotal. No science needs to be done in control condition where you can repeat it in similar condition and you have to have a control group and all that.
So this is not possible. So it's possibly that science can never but at the same time an accumulation of anecdotal evidence at the end it start building up a case. That's the only thing we could say.
But anyway, again, I'm not here to convince people. I know it's puzzling and I myself don't see any explanation other than that. And I'm not into pushing that like anything.
But it just happened. So what to do? It's like the nature, right? So the underlying theme of your saying Matthew, is the interconnectedness of all of us, whether you view consciousness as an emerging phenomenon or not. Dr.
Paul Conti, a famous psychiatrist, describes consciousness as an emerging phenomena, practically speaking, like what can we take away about why it's important for us to keep an open mind and respect and almost revere that there are certain parts of life there will never be concrete answers because I think we like conquering this reductionistic, right? What can we practically take away from what we just never you know, some people said it's like try to reach the know we never reach because the horizon keeps going further. So when that argument was given, I remember Christoph Kot said well, you know, in past many said that about particular scientific questions and in the end they were solved. So it's simply to keep an open mind that possibly there would be a way to decide on those questions and not just extraterrestrial life.
For instance, nowadays with all these exoplanets and probably there are millions or if not more of them, there's most likely there's some kind of life somewhere. But I remember about the SETI project was trying to listening to waves coming from, I don't know, maybe quite optimistic. There was a scientist in Europe say well, even some green men are in my garden, I will close the window and continue to work.
So that's not the attitude we should have, but there are some, probably some. So let's just keep an open mind to that. We probably discover many more things and many more mechanism, many more possibilities.
I thought a lot about how to conduct this conversation with you since you represent so many just a rich background and so many intersections. But I do want to go into the scientific realm since we're on the train. So I love your Carl Popper quote in your book.
A theory that in principle cannot be refuted, that is unfalsifiable, is not a scientific theory, it's an ideology. Can you elaborate what you shared in chapter five about your seemingly conflicting rigor of a scientist and your Buddhism? Because we've been talking about things that are unfalsifiable in a sense. Well, there was a theory, for instance, which I debunked, not me, but I pulled out all the philosophers who debunked it about universal selfishness.
That's in the altruism book. And some people say, well, if you look in depth, you will always find a selfish motive no matter what. But that's unfathivable.
You cannot falsify that because you can always have an explanation. You gave a fruit to a kid who is asking you for a fruit, okay, no, it's not altruistic because the kids were bothering you and then you just give that to keep it quiet. So it's not altruistic.
So you can always find an explanation and it's nothing you can prove. If that theory explains every possible experimental result, you always find a selfish explanation and then that's finished because you cannot disprove it. So that's why you need experiments.
And that's why, for instance, Daniel Batson did for altruism over 25 years or more, he did 35 different kinds of very clever experimental settings, putting people in situation and showing that, yes, there were people who were genuinely altruistic even. It was not about feeling some self gratification or for instance, if there was a cause for themselves, all these things when the arguments were given, or maybe this is the selfish explanation, he would find experimental setting and device to put people in such situation that you could eliminate that explanation. And after third different settings he said well, at the end this is clear that genuine altruism does exist.
We are not all altruistic all the time, but it exists as a state of mind. It's not that we are universally selfish and that was based on 30 years of experiments. So a theory that you cannot disprove because always you go to see a psych analyst before time, you say you are anxious, you are right on time, you say you are obsessed by perfection and you are late, you are avoiding me.
So in any case, there is an explanation to prove that the person has a problem. So how can you get out of that? Yeah, I feel personally attacked as a psychotherapist, but I never said that to my patient. No, not psychotherapist, psychoanalyst.
Psychoanalyst. I do agree that that's a confirmation bias, right? If you have a certain belief, you uphold it, you will find ways to intellectualize it and makes whatever fits your belief system or operating system. I want to go into the similar train, but take a little soft pivot because with everything you sent me to you, I sense underlying humility is yes, you subscribe to the rigor of your scientific training and evidence and empirical data while being open minded and accepting that there is things are unknowable.
So in chapter 16 you talk about meeting and learning from the Dalai Lama. You reference his great humility along with your other masters, despite being the most well known spiritual teachers of the generation. How do you explain the oxymoron of those who possess the faculty of humility while also being the best at what they do? Well, there is a beautiful example in Buddhist literature you say a fruit tree which has no fruit, the branch go proudly to vast up to the sky.
When there's lot of fruits, the branch go low because it's heavy with fruits. So humility is a natural expression of wisdom, of knowing the immensity of what is to be known, of knowing that pride is a mental toxins that undermine your own happiness and that of others. Arrogant people are no fun to be around, you don't feel good around them and then you cannot really feel good within yourself.
So humility is a natural understanding that there's so much to learn and also that pride is a poison so it's not a fabricated thing. It's a natural thing. And that's true that all my teachers were incredibly humble despite their boundless qualities.
No. I described a meeting of my second teacher, digo Kenzerin Moshe, with the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama wanted to receive teaching from him, so he would come almost every year for a week or so to Dalama's residence and offer him teaching.
And they were actually who would be lower than the other. They were kind of rivality, try to sit lower than the other and be more humble. When my teacher would come to the Dilemma sports, he would prostrate.
He would try to prostrate three times on the floor, but he was old and heavy, so he could only once dilemma had done three times in between. And it was a wonderful lesson that to see those two sons of shining like two sun shining in the room of joy, of wisdom, of kindness at the same time, so humble. And once also, two great scholars came from Tibet to our monastery in Nepal, and they came to see Kensel Embushy, and he knew them well, and he said, oh, while you are here, why don't you teach for a while at our philosophical college? And one of them said, oh, you know, I know nothing, and also he knows nothing.
So he was humble for two, and the other one was nodding. So we say the water of quality doesn't dwell on the rock of pride. So humility is a natural consequence of spiritual achievement, my teacher would always say, until me, excluded all my teacher.
The teacher were enlightened, and they were incredibly all of them were humbled. Going full circle into how we started this conversation with happiness and the core ingredients of happiness, which is compassion and wisdom. I think humility is a prerequisite to achieve wisdom to begin with.
Yes, of course it is, because if you think you know everything, why should you learn and work hard? Okay. I want to use as a segue into going to the I guess, like, the meaning making of this world, because I think our ability to make meaning is also what makes us humans. But I think to make meanings, it also requires humility.
So I'm going to ask you this question. In your book, someone asked you about what is the meaning of life, which is one of the biggest philosophical questions, right? Just like, what is consciousness? And you told them in your book that, I'm just grateful that I get to make meaning to my life. Can you elaborate on that? It's inspired by what the Dalama said.
He said, the point is not to find the meaning of life a big thing, but how can I give meaning to my life? Because meaning of life is so vast, it's so unprecise. So, of course, Buddhism has some idea how to not to waste your life in distraction in pursuit of fame, image, and all these stuff that only bring disappointment and disillusion. But to really use your life to progress from ignorance to wisdom, from suffering to the freedom from suffering.
So basically to follow the path of transformation that leads to enlightenment. So that's really to have a precious human life and extract the quintessence of human life. And Seneca, the philosopher said, it's not that we don't have much time, it's that we waste a lot.
So giving meaning to know sometimes people know they have only one year to live, and they live that year very fully with their loved ones appreciating nature, looking at the sky, looking at birds, and they say, it was the most rich, fulfilling year I ever lived. Well, we should live every moment like that because we actually that is certain, but the time of that is unpredictable. No, we say, I should feel fortunate to breathe in again when I breathe out.
So we should value time not being obsessed, like frantically making as much out of the time, but really appreciating its value and not wasting it to completely useless and meaningless things. Preoccupations. I think I have a question for you that you would appreciate.
I want to use this question. Take a moment to honor your mom mother as well. One of my favorite stories in your book is your mom first experienced spiritual teaching from Mother Teresa and then your master and decided to make vows to become a nun, even with the family.
In response to your mother saying that she has a family, your master asked if you can guarantee that you will be alive this time next year, then you can wait. It's such a simple yet profound question, because life is not guaranteed, like what you just said. Yes, that's right.
Any thoughts there? Well, to meditate on impermanence and death is not a morbid things. It's not, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, so why should I do anything? No, it's to give value to every moment. Because I know I die in three days.
I'm not going to mend my socks. I'm going to do what is most meaningful. I don't know, practice.
Think of my teacher, say a bye bye to many of my wonderful friends. What? I can use the time in the most meaningful way. So the idea people ask me, can you come next year in October? Who knows? We'll be alive.
They say, oh, are you sick or something? No, but I can't die tomorrow. What are you talking about? So they think it's a bit strange sometimes, but it is like that. So if we think like that again, it's not morbid.
When the dead comet actually comes, you already familiar with it. It's like almost like a friend. You're not shocked, oh, I'm going to die.
Okay, this is a time it comes, and you can be in practice if you are lucid and think of your contemplative state to cross that threshold. But if you start panicking and say, oh, I should have practiced before better, and all that. It's too late.
So again, it is not to feel into kind of negative attitude, oh, I'm going to die, I'm going to die. Why should I do anything but to really infuse every moment with the sparkling quality of appreciating and wonder and awe of every moment of life? Yeah, like memento. Mori because you know, it may not last for long.
Yeah. I love the impermanence aspect of Buddhism and also Stoic philosophy momento. Mori and also that's the nature of things.
As one of my Buddhist friends said, it's like the law of gravity. Whether you acknowledge it or not, it's there. So impermanence is the nature of things.
You don't have to it's not a theory or it's not a dogma. This is the way things are. So if you don't recognize it, you get attached to all yourself, your object, your dear one.
But if you know there's changes coming, then you don't grasp so intensely, and then you don't suffer so much when things change, because they change all the time. Yeah. Change is the only constant.
I want to go into your meditation practice, and obviously, you're the expert on meditations as the world's happiest man, you kept up your meditation practice for at least 30 minutes every day since your first trip back from India more than 50 years ago. At least 30 minutes more than that? I hope so. The best I heard about meditation is you meditate to improve the quality of your life, not to master meditation.
Can you care to add anything? I don't know whether that corresponds exactly. Meditation is a very vague term in English. Sanskrit word bhavana means to cultivate.
So you cultivate some quality, some skills, also some knowledge, a better knowledge of the nature of mind, how the mind functions. And the Tibetan word gome is also to become familiar. So you could be familiar with altruism and compassion.
As you learn, you become familiar with playing the piano, or it could be become familiar with again this pure awareness that lies behind the thoughts that it's there, but you are not used to see it. Or you become more start knowing it, become familiar with it. So it's a process.
So it's not just stopping and emptying your mind. And a mongo tree that doesn't work, the mind will not remain empty anyway. It's a lost cause.
And also, you should not block thoughts because they will not stop. You can just let it go like a bird through the sky, or you can multiply it. Why did that to me? Why not me? Why me? So that they may change reaction.
But if a thought comes, they will come. So then you let it go, and then there's no problem. So all kinds of things, that's part of meditation.
So meditation is also about cultivating specific qualities. So training the mind for attention. Without attention, you cannot meditate on compassion because if your mind is daydreaming around the world and you are not meditating on compassion, you are just distracted all the time.
So attention is the mindfulness is the basic tool. It's not a goal in itself, but it's the tool indispensable to cultivate any other quality like inner peace, inner freedom, dealing with thought, with emotions, increasing altruism, compassion. You need to be a mind that is stable and calm and focused.
Otherwise what are you going to do if you are distracted all the time? So all those process are meditation. And so as many times have as many kinds of meditation as they are training. If you tell someone, hey, I'm training, and he says, what, football or ping pong? So that's the same.
Meditation is training the mind in different ways. It doesn't need to be a forcible training, it could be just resting in equanimity in the nature of mind. But you need to be familiar with that.
It doesn't come so naturally to most people. So that's the point. So, yes, I've been trying to keep that hopefully more than 30 minutes a day, like I know in the morning, in the afternoon, and when we do retreats, then it's almost like whole day.
And we get up very early with breaks, but mostly we practice 810 12 hours a day, but not in a tense forcible way, in a flowing sort of there's the concept of flow by Qing Shank Milai so I met him a few times, he was a wonderful man. And the description of flow, that is not too difficult, not too easy, and you enter the flow and it's effortless and you lose the sense of self and you lose the sense of effort and time, but usually it's connected with self riding, mountain climbing, being a surgeon or something. So I discussed with him and we agreed that this profound meditation on awareness is a kind of flow, but without physical activity.
Otherwise, most of the criteria for flow and the sense of fulfillment when you do that apply to somehow meditation. So, yeah, I do know the science of flow pretty well, right? You need to have a certain level of challenge, a little bit of discomfort and full awareness to achieve flow states. I have a question for you, Matu.
I've been asking questions, but I have more questions where in the beginning we talked about the west, especially United States of America, we have this very oversimplified fixated versions of what happiness is and this incessant, endless pursuit of happiness, which is more pleasure like. Similarly, I think a lot of Americans now, after the Beatles popularized meditations in the west, after they brought it back from India, I think a lot of people get caught up in meditate every day. Optimally optimizations of your mind so you can get more productive, more efficient.
Do you see any, I guess, pearls or harm in meditating for the sake of productivity? And know inevitably when John Cabezin, who is a very good friend of mine and others like Daniel Goldman, Richard Davidson, altogether 30 or more years ago, they started to John Cabazin specifically the mindfulness based stress reduction program. You could not possibly bring something called meditation in the clinical world. He was working in Boston, but he clearly the patients undergoing difficult treatments like chemotherapy and others as well as the caregivers who instead of burnout and very stressed doctors and nurses and so forth, there was a lot of stress.
And stress is good when you run away from a rhinoceros, but it's not good when it's chronic and it depletes your immune system and it's bad for the neurode. So stress is good in stressful situation, but not all the time. If the alarm bell rings all the time, it's no good.
So there was gail prime with stress and he thought that mindfulness based stress reduction was a good entrance door. He could not possibly even he had studied in Burma and he's not a Buddhist himself, but he certainly drew from Buddhist practice and methods. There was no way to bring up a Buddhist practice.
People would have shouted like anything in the schools or anywhere, but it has to be secular. It's the only way you could have a truck driver, a university professor and doctors and doing the same thing. And following that program and over 30 years, it tremendous positive effect in the world.
When he gave a summary of 30 years of all these interventions in one of the minded life meeting in Phoenix, it was very moving because it's in hospitals in Hong Kong and China and all over the world. So now, yes, it is kind of taking in a nutshell some of the tools taken from Buddhist practice and it's not embedded in the whole Buddhist path. You're not trying to get enlightened, you are not trying to get boundless compassion, although you become a better human being hopefully and you grow more some compassion.
But it's not this unlimited goal of enlightenment is to be mindful in the present moment and it's a very, very useful tool for many things and it has to be secular. So it is by nature also not again embedded in a much richer sort of incredible, wonderful system of Buddhist philosophy and practice that is so much faster. So it's just one tool nevertheless it does lot of good.
So at the same time there's lot of also possibly misuse of meditation for very petty purposes. And that's personally why I like the notion of caring mindfulness. I discussed that with John Cabazine because you see a sniper who has been ordered to wait and ambush someone, he's very mindful.
He cannot be distracted, he should not be carried away by his emotions. He should be always in the present moment and non judgmental because he went to kill that guy. Oh, he's a nice guy after all.
I don't want to kill him. That was his job. So you could say he feels some of course it's an exaggeration and it's caricature, but basically it could fulfill some of the criteria of non judgmental being in the present moment, but that's not going to lead you to enlightenment.
But there is no caring psychopaths and no caring snipers, because then they will not shoot someone. So I know it's an extreme example, but if we have caring mindfulness, there's no problem. You don't use that to squeeze people at work so that they give more works in the same time and don't feel too stressed in a completely pitiless way, because then you will not be caring for their well being.
And so I think, although if the mindfulness best frustration is done by proper instructor and so forth, the component of kindness and compassion does come out, of course. But I think to state it from the start, it will take away many of those misconceptions and misuse possible. And that's why when I was asked to lead some mindfulness meditation at the infamous World Economic Forum in Davos, I will do caring mindfulness so that there's no possible confusion about squeezing your employees to get more out of them because they are less stressed.
So it's all about the intention. Sounds like that's why in Buddhism the intention is absolutely fundamental. When we start something, a meditation or anything, first we check our intention.
We cannot always predict the consequences of our actions, even with the best intention, but we can always check our action. Am I doing that only for me to pursue my completely selfish interest or for others? If I do it also for others, is it for a small number or the larger number? If it's for the larger number, if it's for the short term benefit or long term benefit. So ideally for the greater number, for the long term benefit, you must think and think.
So we said the intention colors. If you put a crystal or a glass on the red clot, it becomes red, if on blue clot becomes blue. So we take the intention is what colors your action.
So if your intention is right, the path and result will be right. If the intention is wrong, you may be very sweet, flattering people and only thing you want is to cheat them. If your intention in goes, you could be quite rough.
A mother that pushes her kids is going to run her over by a car. It seems brutal, she's pushing it away, but she saved the kids life. So the action looks brutal, but the intention was to save the life.
If you go to an old lady and say sweet world, because you want to get an inheritance, the action is kind of nice looking. But an intention is very selfish and mean. So intention is really what matters most.
I love your metaphors. Intention colors, your actions so visual. I do want to talk about altruism.
You brought it up early in the conversation and I know you're very, very big on altruism humanitarian effort. And I personally always thought that pure, unadulterated, absolute altruism is not possible because there's always a small hint flavor of self gratification. There is a famous term in sociology coined by a social worker.
We call it effective altruism. Regardless of self gratifications, if you're making a positive effect based on your intention, that's all that matters. Care to add anything, know, share about your perspective? Well, effective altruism is a movement that I really think is very important.
I know. I'm quite good friend with Peter Singer who wrote a book. The Most Good You can do.
And basically we try to apply that in our Corona section. Met an organization that helps 400,000 people now every year in India, Nepal and other places. And so the efficient altruism is if you have some time and resources and capacity, how best use it to remove suffering? Are you going to spend a million on one person or are you going to save 10,000 lives in Africa for the same amount of money? So that's the question.
Now, altruism is I think we need to stress its importance as only concept that can cope with the challenges of the 21st century because we are facing a kind of very difficult challenge to bring together the short term needs midterm and very long term. It wasn't the case when 10,000 years ago there was 5 million human beings on Earth, there were hunter gatherers until they start settling 10,000 years ago. So there was plenty of everything everywhere.
There was no competition. And the impact they had already they had some impact about big animals being eliminated but minor on the planet. So they were not really influencing the fate of future generations.
Now, after the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the boom of technology in the 1950s, the great acceleration, we entered the anthropocene. We became the major force that shapes the fate of future generation and the biodiversity and everything. And we know how we're starting to mess it in a big way.
So that's a new challenge and we don't feel personally responsible because nobody wakes up in the morning thinking I'm going to wreck the planet. But the accumulation of our actions and the increase of population, increase of our power on the environment has led to that unfortunate consequence, that we have environmental changes that have never happened in millions of years at such a speed and is clearly the result of human activity. So now, how can you put around the same table a mother in Africa who want to feed their kids in the next week? That's her main preoccupation.
A politician or an investor or a social worker who is trying to improve the situation over the next ten years at the workplace or the transport in standard of living, in people wanting to fulfill their aspiration to find a happy life and fulfill, have a good life and not forgetting the fate of future generation. Otherwise, like as Greta Thunberg said, we are actually traitors to the future generation. And they will say you knew and you did nothing.
So now my favorite Marxist was Groucho Marx. He said, you know, Groucho Marx, the Marx Brothers. He said Why should I care for future generations? What did they do for me? Well, I heard the American billionaire, which I'm not going to name, saying on Fox News about the rays of the ocean I find absurd to change my behavior now for something happening in hundred years.
Maybe he has no children or grandchildren, so that's typically okay, forget it, I do what I want. And they will see, they will manage, they will find something that's total selfishness. So in the end, the environment question is a question of altruism versus selfishness.
So selfishness gone going to do the job. Otherwise you'll get free riders, economy, everybody trying to make the most and disconsidering others, including cheating and all that. You'll get total disconsideration for social justice and welfare and all that and you don't care damn for future generation because you're not going to be there.
So that's not going to work. Once I remember I went with the Bhutanese delegation on this Gross National Happiness at the United Nations and I was given four minutes to speak about the inner side of happiness. And I basically said, while a nation that is the most powerful and the richest and where everyone is unhappy, what's the point? Maybe economists can say, well, compassion is nice, but it's not about economy.
But if they say they don't care, they don't care about poverty in the midst of plenty, they don't care about future generation, that discourse doesn't go anymore. Even some people do think that. So I think that's why I think it's such a pragmatic concept.
It's not an utopia or a feel good theory. Cooperation is the only chance of getting out of that trouble. And I'm not only one to say that, of course.
Bertrand Russell said that, kofi Anand said that cooperation is the only hope and cooperation, the positive cooperation where altruistic come together and work together for a better world. So I think that's why I was passionate about spending five years solid and documenting and researching that book on altruism, which has 1600 scientific references. And I got almost an altruism post traumatic syndrome after finishing it because I work so hard and has to write another 800 page book with these notebooks of a wandering monk.
So some friends of mine say, can you write 100 page book for once? But when you are passionate about something, it's difficult to make it too simplistic. Yeah, not to mention you have published 22 books, which is insane. I don't know because I was not very good at school and my teacher probably know more.
I lie. But I wouldn't be quite surprised but I wanted to ask you altruism question, because I read your epilogue. Yes, your parting message was about altruism and that we have to uncover, reveal and double down on altruistic acts because that is the only hope for 21st century.
So, because it is a practical way and it's not altruistic, I mean, a utopian ideal, we should recognize that selfishness is not going to do the job. And Rand said, in my philosophy, altruism is immoral evil. And she wrote a book, The Virtue of Selfishness.
Sorry, that's not going to take us to a better world. So we need to recognize that there's scientific evidence abundantly that we are more inclined, even though we can become psychopaths, we can become commit mass murder, or what's happening now with some dictators. You know very well in Ukraine and other places this can happen.
But if you look at young kids, they are more inclined to cooperation and appreciating people who behave well with each other. It's abundantly documented by science. Even though we can become psychopath and mass murderers, there's a greater tendency to work together, to appreciate altruism, to feel good, the banality of goodness.
When we speak of a capitalist crime, idiot crime somewhere, everybody speaks all over the world on the TVs now. But if hundred people in Los Angeles go to help the elders, it's not going to make the evening news, because somehow this is more what we are. So we don't see the banality of goodness and we are polarized on the deviations of heinous behavior, because this is frightening.
Evolution equipped us to react to potential dangers. You don't congratulate yourself coming out of a train or a plane or a theater saying well, that's nice. Nobody stopped fighting on each other, because that's what is normal.
And if two people fight, then you say oh, these two guys fight and you will tell everybody. So we should recognize that. We should recognize that being as social animals, working together, expressing to the best the capacity we have for love, for altruism, for compassion, for caring for each other.
As Martin Luther King said we came on different boats, now we are all on the same vessel. We should recognize that and that's the only hope. So we should teach the scientific evidence and this fact in school, we should not be shy of saying that we are not imposing some weird religious moral values people resent.
No, people say the schooling should be value neutral. The kids will find their own value and all that where they'll find the value. In computer games, when everybody kill each other every 2 seconds, they will find some value, but not the right one.
So who can be against altruism, against honesty, against friendship, against being that trustable person? If you say is there universal value? I remember there was an opinion poll about people between below 25 all over the world, and majority, surprisingly more than 50% said there are no universal value. Why? Because if you ask a Pakistani if the universal value, they will think oh, they are going to bring Western values or a Chinese will think the same. But if you ask is honesty a universal value? Is friendship a universal value? Is kindness a universal value? They all say yes, but they don't want to be opposed.
A system, a moral system of a particular religion, a particular culture. But if though those basic value taken individually, of course we are for it, who doesn't want kindness? We thirst desperately for kindness. So why should it not be a value that we think is wise cultivating and spreading around? And these are so many benefits.
It's crazy. And hatred, you think it's not a universal evil. Who is going to promote hatred as a virtue? It doesn't make sense.
So there are states of mind which are detrimental to our happiness and detrimental to others happiness, hatred is one of them, discrimination is one of them. Jealousy, pride as others one. And there are some which contribute to the well being of everyone, especially kindness.
So that's I think we should recognize and then have no fear. But our education is just about solving problems, sharpening your intelligence and then you must become better human beings. Oh, that's the family should do that.
But now the families have been raised in the same neutral things. They also lost quite often. So basic human values in a secular way.
That's what Delema speaks about, secular ethics. This is fundamental because we want to become first a good human being so that we thrive in life and also a good person in society. Not a nuisance? No, I think your head is glowing, but that was maybe the shampoo you're using.
But I love your optimism and compassion and the seeking the universal values to go full circle with your faith in Buddhism. Siddhartha, the boy who became the Buddha I know, he obviously was born into great wealth and he left the city and he saw the poverty, the injustice, the horrible things and then he concluded that sufferings is originated from desires. What I like to focus on, given your altruism and this emphasis on compassion, he didn't give up and just got depressed and said oh, I give up, let me go back to my prince life.
He chose to do something about it. And I think that's altruism, extending a part of ourselves in the hopes and compassion of others well, you know, it's a know when I did The Monk and the Philosopher, that know, I deliberately left Pastor Institute to go to the mountains. But The Monk and the Philosopher, the first book that brought me back to the west and because of The Monk philosopher, I am here with you today.
Otherwise I will be completely unknown in the Himalayas. It really changed 25 years of milestone which I didn't plan, it just fell upon me. There was someone asked me the questionnaire, do you have a regret in life? They say one regret I had is I'd really try my best to cultivate compassion, loving kindness to the extent of my capacity.
I'm not any stellar meditator, but I try my best. But I could not put it in action. Hands, home, pure, heart, dirty hands.
So the mocha and the philosopher was either the beginning of my trouble or beginning of an opportunity, because I decided to dedicate 100% of royalties of all my booths, conferences, photography, and all that exhibitions to these first projects we did without any association. Then we founded Karuna Sechen after a number of years, and now it has branches in the US and everywhere. So this was missing, putting compassion in action.
So I'm very glad that thanks to all these new circumstances with the books and conferences and meeting people not only the books, of course, many people join us, philanthropists. Now we have a wonderful set of benefactors, small and big, so we could do save probably a few hundred thousand lives and help millions of people. So it's a kind of I'm happy to have done that and can rejoice and dedicate the merit and bring me a lot of happiness.
Yeah. My favorite quote from Reverend Martin Luther King, King Jr. MLK is, everyone is a saint and a sinner.
And I think we get to choose what part of ourselves, if we want to uphold more by being more compassionate. Well, I can't remember literally one of his quotes, but it's something like, either we will go toward compassion or we will die as stupid, selfish peoples. It's not exactly the word, but the spirit is like that.
And I also love that. Yeah. I love your grace, I love your optimism, and I love all the work you've done.
I didn't ask you about your photographer stuff, your photos, which is amazing. There's so many parts about you. But I mean, this that's one of the only thing I'm still doing besides translation.
I focus on translating Buddhist texts from Tibetan to English and French, and photography is my favorite way to distract myself. So I have a project of painting with light, which is actually the definition of photography, photography. So that may give me a lot of freedom to improvise.
Oh, paintings with light. Photography means writing with light. Oh, I didn't know that.
Oh, wow, that's cool. But I know a lot of people don't know every photos in your books are by you, so I just want to put it out there. Well, not except I don't do selfies.
Except selfies. Except selfies. But I did about ten photo books and they're amazing.
Seriously. They're majestic. They're amazing, amazing photos.
Seriously. Thank you. With that being said, Matthew all right, we're toward the end, and I just want to create opportunity for people to find you, get your book.
Where can people find you? Maybe share your website, your book, and anything you want to share today? Well, there is a website which has my name. Some friend wanted to do. I was bit reluctant, but anyway and then there's the website of Karunasechen.
You can probably put it in letters, but it's complicated to write. Then there's a session which is for our monastery. And the book is notebooks of a Wandering Monk is published by MIT Press.
It's just coming out, you know, probably it's possibly the last book of that kind. I do now I want to go back to translation. So I think the full circle happened.
Now, the main subject I wanted to deal with, like altruism, meditation, happiness and dialogue with science, you cannot repeat itself endlessly. So I think it's a good way to end writing, writing books and going back to contemplative life to the hermitage and to little bit of photography and then translation. And if I have a few more years to live, then I'm so happy to continue like that.
And my motto at the end is to transform myself, to better serve others. So that's I think what keep on inspiring me. Thank you for spending the time with this old monk, the wandering monk.
And I thank you to Helen for sending me the PDF version of your book before it was released. And you have plenty of time to recover from your 1600 pages of PTSD, so you can rest and recover. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much, Matthew.
