Matthieu Ricard: World's Happiest Man on What Really Matters.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2018
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What turns a devout scientist into Buddhist monk?
Born in France in 1946, Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who left a career in cellular genetics to study Buddhism and live a largely monastic life in the Himalayas over 45 years ago.
Sharing his insights, Ricard has since become an international best-selling author and a prominent speaker on the world stage, celebrated at the World Economic Forum at Davos, the NGH forums at the United Nations, and at TED where his talks on happiness and altruism has been viewed by over six million people.
His books have been translated into over twenty languages, and his newest is, Beyond the Self: A conversation between Neuroscience and Buddhism.
Ricard was lightly dubbed "the happiest man alive," after neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin scanned his brain during meditation and found the highest capacity for happiness ever recorded.
As a trained scientist and Buddhist monk, he is uniquely positioned in the dialogue between East and West. He is an active participant in the current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. He lives in Nepal and devotes all the proceedings of his books and activities to 200 humanitarian projects in Tibet, India, and Nepal.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do you feel about the first person? |
| 0:03.2 | Hardly any neuroscientists will be pretend that we know really what consciousness is. |
| 0:09.2 | For a very good reason is that it's a matter of experience. |
| 0:13.5 | And experience is experience as the first person. |
| 0:16.8 | You cannot know what experience is by describing everything from the outside, |
| 0:22.6 | know what kind of neuroscientists have been activated, |
| 0:24.6 | what kind of area of the brain even. |
| 0:26.0 | When you know the function and the activity of a billion of neurons |
| 0:30.4 | when you are angry or see the color red or feel love, |
| 0:34.7 | that will tell you absolutely zero |
| 0:37.2 | so what it feels to experience love or anger. |
| 0:45.0 | So, modern science now tells us that meditating or training your mind |
| 0:50.2 | for a relatively short window of time can create pretty big changes in behavior and outcome. |
| 0:55.8 | But what if you actually spent somewhere between 40 and 60,000 hours in meditation? |
| 1:03.2 | Well, that's the life that today's guest, Mathew Ricard, has lived. |
| 1:08.2 | Growing up in France, the son of a renowned philosopher and a claimed painter, |
| 1:14.1 | he starts to stake his claim as a scientist in molecular genetics |
| 1:19.0 | when he decided to actually make a pretty fierce left turn |
| 1:22.3 | and found himself living in a hermitage in Nepal, studying Buddhism. |
| 1:28.0 | He eventually took his vows and became a monk |
| 1:30.2 | and has lived there ever since full time, |
| 1:33.3 | devoting himself to the study in the practice and the relieving of suffering. |
... |
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