Happiness

A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

Matthieu Ricard

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782396369
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Talking About Happiness

2. Is Happiness the Purpose of Life?

3. A Two-Way Mirror: Looking Within, Looking Without

4. False Friends

5. Is Happiness Possible?

6. The Alchemy of Suffering

7. The Veils of the Ego

8. When Our Thoughts Become Our Worst Enemies

9. The River of Emotion

10. Disturbing Emotions: The Remedies

11. Desire

12. Hatred

13. Envy

14. The Great Leap to Freedom

15. A Sociology of Happiness

16. Happiness in the Lab

17. Happiness and Altruism: Does Happiness Make Us Kind or Does Being Kind Make Us Happy?

18. Happiness and Humility

19. Optimism, Pessimism, and Naïveté

20. Golden Time, Leaden Time, Wasted Time

21. One with the Flow of Time

22. Ethics as the Science of Happiness

23. Happiness in the Presence of Death

24. A Path

Afterword

Notes

FOREWORD

The first time I met Matthieu Ricard he was huddled over a computer monitor in a back room of Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Matthieu was overseeing a group of monks who were laboriously copying texts word by word from the traditional long rectangles of woodblock-printed pages, typing them into a computer program with a specially designed Tibetan font.

What had been tall stacks of yellowing handmade paper between hand-carved covers was now stored digitally, in an electronic space the size of the palm of a hand. The digital age had entered the monastery. Now anyone with computer access could tap into texts that for centuries had only been found stored away in hermitages and monasteries in the high, hidden valleys of Tibet. Matthieu was helping to preserve for the modern world wisdom from the ancient.

Matthieu seems the perfect candidate for that task. His background includes one of the finest educations the modern world can offer. He holds a doctorate in biology from the prestigious Pasteur Institute, where his main adviser was a Nobel laureate. And yet he has spent more than a quarter century as a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas, learning from some of the most fully realized Tibetan teachers of our day.

More recently I’ve worked with Matthieu as part of the Mind and Life Institute, which brings scientists together in dialogue with Buddhist scholars. That ongoing conversation has resulted in remarkable findings that show how meditation can reshape the brain, strengthening the centers that undergird good feelings and compassion.

Here Matthieu speaks with unparalleled authority. I witnessed him work in collaboration with Professor Richard J. Davidson, head of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as they prepared to pilot a series of brain tests that would be used with advanced meditators. Matthieu was both a key collaborator in considering what measures would make the most sense, and the first experimental subject.

For the first tests, Matthieu lay within the noisy maws of a magnetic resonance imager (MRI), the diagnostic imaging device that uses huge magnets that whirl around a person’s body as he or she lies within the machine. The MRI offers a precise image of a person’s brain (or other internal tissues), but it is also an ordeal for many people, some of whom panic at being trapped inside the monstrous machine. Matthieu endured his captivity for more than three hours while going through the paces of several kinds of meditation: concentration, visualization, and compassion.

At the end of that grueling session, we rushed into the room to see how Matthieu had held up, slightly apprehensive about the effects of his ordeal. But Matthieu emerged from the machine smiling. His comment: “That was like a miniretreat!”

That reaction to what most people would find overwhelming bespeaks a special state of mind, a capacity for confronting life’s ups and downs with equanimity, even joy. And Matthieu, I realize, has that joie de vivre in full measure.

The psychoanalyst C. G. Jung once described the role of a “Gnostic intermediary” as someone who himself plunges into spiritual depths and emerges to bring the vision of that inner possibility to the rest of us. Matthieu fills that role.

Beyond his well-cultivated temperament, Matthieu brings a quiet brilliance and always quick mind. I’ve witnessed him in sessions of the Mind and Life meetings, where the Dalai Lama explores in depth a scientific topic with a panel of scientific experts. Matthieu often represents the Buddhist perspective, speaking with a fluid intelligence that easily weaves together spiritual and scientific paradigms.

In Happiness he draws on both his ease in the world of scientific studies and philosophy and his intimate familiarity with the wisdom traditions of Buddhism, bringing these streams together in a seamless offering. The resulting insights are both inspiring and pragmatic. The vision of happiness conjured here challenges our everyday notions of joy, making a convincing argument for contentment over collecting “good times,” for altruism over self-centered satiation. And beyond that, Matthieu suggests how we can all cultivate the very capacity for such happiness.

On the other hand, Matthieu offers no quick fixes, for he knows well that training the mind takes effort and time. Instead he goes to the root of the mechanisms that underlie suffering and happiness, offering refreshing insights into how the mind functions and strategies for dealing with our most difficult emotions. The result is a sound road map, one based on cultivating the conditions for genuine well-being.

A few days after my wife and I first met Matthieu, we happened to share some hours together in the Kathmandu airport, waiting for endlessly delayed flights. Those hours sped by in minutes due to the sheer pleasure of being in Matthieu’s orbit. He is without doubt one of the happiest people I know — and happiness is contagious. I wish the reader a similar contagion, enjoying the pleasures to be found in these pages.

Daniel Goleman

Mendocino, California

October 2005

Happiness

INTRODUCTION

When, in the early morning, I sit in the meadow in front of my hermitage, my eyes take in hundreds of miles of lofty Himalayan peaks glowing in the rising sun. The serenity of the scenery blends naturally and seamlessly with the peace within. It is a long way indeed from the Pasteur Institute, where, thirty-five years ago, I performed research on cell division, mapping genes on the chromosome of Escherichia coli bacteria.

This would seem to be a pretty radical turnabout. Had I renounced the Western world? Renunciation, at least as Buddhists use the term, is a much-misunderstood concept. It is not about giving up what is good and beautiful. How foolish that would be! Rather it is about disentangling oneself from the unsatisfactory and moving with determination toward what matters most. It is about freedom and meaning — freedom from mental confusion and self-centered afflictions, meaning through insight and loving-kindness.

When I was twenty I had an idea of what I did not want — a meaningless life — but could not figure out what I wanted. My adolescence had been far from boring. I remember the excitement I felt when, at sixteen, I had the opportunity to join a journalist friend of mine at lunch with Igor Stravinsky. I drank in everything he said. He autographed for me a copy of the score of Agon, a then lesser-known work that I was especially fond of. He wrote these words: “To Matthieu, Agon, which I like very much myself.”

There was no shortage of enthralling encounters in the intellectual circle in which my parents moved. My mother, Yahne Le Toumelin, a well-known painter, full of life, poetry, and human warmth, who became a Buddhist nun herself, was friends with the great figures of surrealism and contemporary art — André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Maurice Béjart, for whom she painted vast theatrical sets. My father, who, under his pen name, Jean-François Revel, became one of the pillars of French intellectual life, held unforgettable dinners for the great thinkers and creative minds of the time: Luis Buñuel; Emmanuel Cioran, the despairing philosopher; Mario Suares, who liberated Portugal from the yoke of fascism; Henri Cartier-Bresson, the “eye of the century”; and many others.

In 1970 my father wrote Without Marx or Jesus, in which he expressed his rejection of political and religious totalitarianisms alike. The book stayed on the U.S. bestseller list for a whole year.

I was hired in 1967 as a young researcher at the Institut Pasteur, in the cellular genetics lab of François Jacob, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for medicine. There I worked with some of the great names of molecular biology, including Jacques Monod and André Lwoff, who lunched together every day at the communal table in a corner of the library, along with scientists from all over the world. François Jacob had only two doctoral students; he confided to a mutual friend that he had taken me on not only because of my university work, but also because he’d heard that I had plans to build a harpsichord, a dream I never brought to fruition but which earned me a place in a highly coveted laboratory.

I also loved astronomy, skiing, sailing, and ornithology. At the age of twenty, I published a book on migratory animals.¹ I learned photography from a friend who was a professional wildlife photographer, and spent many a weekend stalking grebes and wild geese in the Sologne marshes and along the beaches of the Atlantic. I spent winters coursing the slopes of my native Alps and summers on the ocean with friends of my uncle, the navigator Jacques-Yves Le Toumelin, who, shortly after World War II, undertook one of the first solo trips around the globe on his thirty-foot sailboat. He introduced me to all sorts of unusual people — adventurers, explorers, mystics, astrologers, and metaphysicians. One day we went to pay a call on one of his friends and found a note pinned to the door of his Paris studio: “Sorry to miss you — I’m off to Timbuktu on foot.”

Life was far from dull, but something essential was missing. In 1972, when I was twenty-six and fed up with life in Paris, I decided to move to Darjeeling, in India, in the shadow of the Himalayas, to study with a great Tibetan master.

How had I reached this crossroads? The striking individuals with whom I’d crossed paths each had his or her own special genius. I’d have liked to play the piano like Glenn Gould or chess like Bobby Fisher, to have Baudelaire’s poetic gift, but I did not feel inspired to become what they were at the human level. Despite their artistic, scientific, and intellectual qualities, when it came to altruism, openness to the world, resolve, and joie de vivre, their ability was neither better nor worse than that of any of us.

Everything changed when I met a few remarkable human beings who exemplified what a fulfilled human life can be. Prior to those meetings, I was inspired through my readings of great figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, who by the sheer strength of their human qualities were able to inspire others to change their way of being. When I turned twenty, I saw a series of documentaries made by a friend of mine, Arnaud Desjardins, on the great spiritual masters who had fled the ruthless invasion of Tibet by communist China. They were now living as refugees in India and Bhutan. I was tak...