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Dalai lama quotes on life and money11/8/2023 Ricard translating for the Dalai Lama in Paris in 2008. Otherwise “they are going to die with my brain.” “I have met so many extraordinary people and seen so many fabulous things,” he says. There are stints interpreting for the Dalai Lama and speaking at Davos and the UN and collaborations with world-leading scientists (he has co-authored papers on the neuroscience of meditation). But it does relate a personal as well as a spiritual journey, from long periods in remote Darjeeling, Nepal, Bhutan and 21 trips to Tibet, including one in 1985 as one of the very first outsiders allowed in following the Chinese invasion. He knows “some guy on Amazon who always writes terrible things” will laugh at a person whose faith focuses on the death of ego writing 800 pages of autobiography. He doesn’t like me calling it a memoir – he visibly bristles when I suggest it and says he is not fully at ease with his long-time publisher’s insistence on labelling it as such, preferring to call it “testimony”. Ricard’s latest book, Notebooks of a Wandering Monk, is all about his extraordinarily full life. Why would this be the only thing in our human being that is fixed?” Some find it easier than others – he describes himself as “naturally inclined to serenity and rarely troubled by turbulent feelings” – but if you start from a low base, you are more likely to see a dramatic improvement.īut Happiness came out 20 years ago it’s old news. “Actually, it would be strange if that wasn’t the case. I feel I’m bad at happiness can that change? “Of course.” Our mind can be “our best friend or our worst enemy”, Ricard says: we need to cultivate qualities – “benevolence, inner strength, inner freedom so you are not too fragile for the ups and downs, discernment” – that mesh together to create eudemonia, and that’s a skill that takes practice. ![]() But there’s nothing wrong with pleasant sensations! It’s simply a different thing.” Pleasure fades, becomes neutral or unpleasant or inaccessible when circumstances change, he says, while happiness, “the more you experience it, the more it gets deeper, vaster, resistant to circumstances. But if you stay 24 hours under a hot shower, you will not like it.” He could listen to a beautiful piece of Bach three times, he says, but not for 24 hours. “Of course not! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking a hot shower after walking in the snow. That’s not bad, is it? There’s a hint of the professor he almost became, dealing with a dozy student, as he replies. I see pleasure – small joys – as an accessible form of happiness: enjoying nature, my family, cake. That distinguishes it from pleasure, which is “perfectly fine, but not happiness”. ![]() You can feel it even in moments of grief and regardless of your material circumstances he calls it “a way of being that pervades”. This kind of wellbeing is “a sort of bonus” that comes from compassion, benevolence, altruism – and it is lasting and stable. ![]() “I wanted to call it Suffering,” he says, which makes me laugh, imagining his publishers’ faces, but for once he is deadly serious: “No! It’s true!” Real happiness, he explains (he calls it “eudemonia”, an ancient Greek term) comes from ridding yourself of sources of suffering: hatred, pride, jealousy and so on. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The GuardianĪnd anyway, he did write a book called Happiness. Matthieu Ricard lives in the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. One of my friends said: ‘On your grave it will read: ‘Here lies the happiest man in the world.’’” But his spiritual teacher’s grandson, he says, told him: “Take it and use it. “How can we know the state of happiness of 8 billion human beings? Maybe there’s a guy who’s in complete bliss all the time?” Does the label annoy him? “No. “Just think for two seconds,” he says with gentle exasperation. His meditation also activated an area of the brain associated with positive emotions. The electroencephalogram recorded unprecedented levels of gamma waves, associated with wellbeing and focus. Like so many of us, I have spent most of my life wondering about happiness: is it really achievable? How? Is it selfish to even strive for it? Who better to help than “the world’s happiest man”? This millstone of a title –“a nonsense idea” he calls it – attached to Ricard after he took part in a 2004 research project that analysed his brain as he meditated on compassion.
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