own experience about happiness? How do we become.

>>Matthieu Ricard:Well, I was thinking about when the panel started with pleasure, the

relationship between the two. You know, people speak of magic moments. Walking in the snow

and under the stars with a wonderful person. But sometimes this is magic moment, there's

nothing I can do about it, but when you think about why was it magic? At that time, it was

a sense of having no inner conflicts, of feeling a bit spacious with the universe, with a loved

one, this kind of peace. So it's not that magic. You can understand why it happened.

So could we consider that as something like a way of being that we could cultivate as

a skill? Now, to come back to pleasure, you come back

from this walk in the snow and under the stars and you take a wonderful hot shower. It's

bliss. Pleasure. Now, you stay 24 hours in that hot shower,

it's not so interesting. So pleasure is very much dependent upon time,

circumstances. It's something that uses itself as we consume it. And if it's -- on top of

that you add craving or grasping, then somehow it dims the feeling of deep satisfaction.

Actually, you can enjoy something pleasurably, and in the brain build up the wanting circuit

which is different, and at the end you may experience something that you want without

feeling pleasure. That's called addiction. So in a way --

>>Dan Ariely: Just a moment there. So you're trying to separate happiness from pleasure

and you say pleasure is much more temporary and --

>>Matthieu Ricard: Well, pleasure, you look for pleasurable sensations. And so those are

very vulnerable, let's say, to outer circumstances. And basically if you are keeping on trying

to renew that all the time, and this is the recipe for happiness, it looks more like a

recipe for exhaustion than happiness. So let's take happiness now as a way of being.

So a way of being that is not just happiness on its own but a cluster of human qualities.

It is inner peace, inner strength, inner freedom. It is loving kindness, compassion, friendship,

resilience, inner courage. And those are things that the more you experience them, rather

than pleasure, the more actually they get deeper and stronger because it builds up something.

So in the end you end up with inner resources to deal with the fundamentals of life, no

matter what happens, that is the opposite of pleasure.

So it builds a platform in life on which you come back. After winning the lottery, you

come up, you even go below. If it's a drama, you also come back to that platform, but you

raise that platform as a skill. So now it's also something that give you a

sense of confidence that you can go through the ups and downs of life, so, therefore,

you feel less vulnerable, you feel less threatened, you feel less protective, so you also naturally

will open more to others. So that element, I think especially the notion of loving kindness,

altruism, compassion, benevolence, those are key components to generating happiness. And

it's not necessarily pleasant. We were talking yesterday while we were taking

a walk that can it be compatible with sadness? So if it's pleasure, no way. But you see an

injustice, a massacre, it's incredibly sad. But you can keep the sense of courage, of

determination to change that, of compassion, of sense of direction in life, and so you

will treat that in the best possible way, in a constructive way. You won't fall into

despair. So it's compatible with what I call a way

of being, which is flourishing and well-being, even though it's very unpleasant.

So in that sense, it is different. >>Dan Ariely: Yeah. Sorry, I want to find

out how you do this because it's interesting -- I mean, it sounds promising. So here's

my kind of big struggle with pleasure. There is an analysis of people who have been climbing

mountains. And when you read these stories about mountain climbing, they look -- they

seem like stories of pure misery. You would think it's elation? No. First of all, it's

very dangerous, but it's frostbite and hard to breathe and hard to walk and injuries and

so on. And from these descriptions you say somebody just did that, and they got to the

top. They will say this was the biggest mistake of their lives, they'll go down and never

do it again, and from there just try to get simple pleasures out of life rather than this

horrific experience. Nevertheless, people finish climbing big mountains,

the Himalayas and they go back and do the same thing again. And it's the kind of pleasure

that looks to me like it's not captured day-to-day thinking. It's a pleasure that comes from

achievement, and it's a pleasure that comes from competition. It's a pleasure that comes

from overcoming challenges. It's a pleasure that comes from pain and misery in some interesting

-- >>Matthieu Ricard: You know the idea of flow.

>>Dan Ariely: Yeah. >>Matthieu Ricard: It is not so much the competition.

I think flow is something that you are fully engaged in. You forget yourself. It's just

challenging enough that you have to put the best of yourself and not too much that you

panic. So it's not boring and not stressing. So flow can be achieved through mountain climbing

or a surgeon or an artist. It could be achieved also through medication. It's flow without

action. So a continuous stream of experience which

has a quality, a sense of flourishing, that time takes another value. When I sit in my

hermitage, some people say it must be so boring sitting months alone in the hermitage. Don't

you feel lonely? Doesn't the time seem long? >>Dan Ariely: You must have access to Paul's

movies when you sit there. >>Matthieu Ricard: Right. But I find the time

so rewarding. Just before lunch break, 15 minutes, it's like a stream of melted gold.

I have this 15 minutes to just go deeper and trying to generate compassion and all that.

So it is a kind of inner flow. So I think, really, it's the quality of experience

that will determine over the long time how you go about that.

>>Dan Ariely: So you have been called the happiest man in the world, I think.

>>Matthieu Ricard: Sorry. I have made so many disclaimers about that.

>>Dan Ariely: I don't think you said it. >>Matthieu Ricard: Forget about that.

>>Dan Ariely: Somebody said it. Clearly you're very happy.

>>Matthieu Ricard: Not too bad. >>Dan Ariely: Not too bad.

[ Laughter ] >>Dan Ariely: So we've tried to kind of think

about what kind of things we do wrong and how can we do it better. Spending money, being

happy, what kind of things our intuitions are generally not correct. And from your experience,

what kind of things actually are making people become happier and more satisfied?

>>Matthieu Ricard: Typically, you know, the lottery is studied very much. The comment,

people say, "Oh, of course he's happy. I would be happy."

And then you hear of people who have everything to be happy. They are beautiful, they are

famous, they have a lot of money and they are very depressed. "Oh, what's wrong with

this guy? If I had that, I would be very happy." I think it's too much. Of course we need to

improve the outer conditions. No question. Especially there's still 1.5 billion people

living in abject poverty. There's conflict. There are mothers who cannot feed their children.

No question that we should improve outer condition in this world.

This being said, especially when we have what we need, if we keep on placing all our hopes

and fear in the outer world, we are in for a big disappointment because precisely, we

when we get it, we say so what? We expected something wonderful and it is just ordinary.

So we vastly underestimate the importance of inner conditions. We deal with our mind

from morning to evening. That's the ultimate experience of whatever we do. Whether you

get a Ferrari or something else, it's your mind that is going to translate that into

happiness or misery. And that mind can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Depends

how it works. So at least if we could pay some attention

of how to deal with the mind, how to deal with emotions, how to recognize that aggressivity,

hatred, jealousy arrogance, craving will just destroy your happiness and physically make

you unhappy and will destroy the happiness of others. And if you find out that loving

kindness, compassion, cultivating inner peace, the simplicity of the present moment contribute

to flourishing and then you will be a person that will be happier to be with and that transformation

will lead you to serve better others, and then you realize cultivating as skills those

inner conditions matter tremendously. >>Dan Ariely: I buy it. So how do you -- I

want to be less jealous. >>Matthieu Ricard: How do you learn chess?

How do you learn to read and write? How do you learn to juggle or play tennis? You practice.

So we do have this unconditional love feeling for a very dear person for 15 seconds or so

and it comes back and goes, but who sits for 30 minutes cultivating loving kindness? Very

few. We go at 5:00 in the morning --

>>Dan Ariely: We have email all the time. How do we have time?

>>Matthieu Ricard: You are on this bicycle that goes nowhere not even in the kitchen

because fitness is good for your health. Why there's no compassion gymnasium? My friend

Paul Ekman says we should have compassion gymnasiums every block.

>>Dan Ariely: So give us a specific example. How do you practice compassion?

>>Matthieu Ricard: Let's say you want to practice loving kindness. You start with something

easy, someone you really love so you don't have to try absolutely have loving kindness

for a dictator or something. Or someone even worse, your next colleague at the office.

[ Laughter ] >>Matthieu Ricard: So you start with that,

and you have this natural love and feeling, embracing and you want only that person to

be happy, be safe, be flourishing in life. And then instead of giving few thoughts, you

let that fill your mental landscape. If it declines, you revive it. And you don't do

that just for a few thoughts, you try to extend that for ten or 15 minutes. Or you repeat

it several times in the day. >>Dan Ariely: So you think about that person

and all the wonderful things you want. >>Matthieu Ricard: Not only that but you try

to grow a genuine sense of living. Not just thinking again. But it's a trigger. And then

after that, you think, well, I don't wake up in the morning thinking may I suffer the

whole day and if possible my whole life. So does that person, so does that person, so

does that person. So I project myself in your mind, in their mind, and I say they may be

diluted in the way they try to find happiness in the wrong place, but basically they don't

want to suffer. So if I value my own happiness and that of

my child, I start valuing them, I see the interdependence among all sentient beings,

and suddenly I can extend that. So then comes something that is very rewarding, is that

sense of connectedness, of having this natural benevolence to others, that readiness to be

of service when occasion comes, and it suddenly makes it much more fulfilled life.

Experientally, this emotion, loving kindness and compassion. Neuroscience will tell you

this is the strongest activation of positive emotion.

>>Dan Ariely: So lets look at a little bit of data. Can you share with us a little bit

of -- >>Matthieu Ricard: Yes. If you could show

the slide. So of course we say that this is good for you. You sit in these beautiful places.

It's easier to be there. It disappeared.

>>Dan Ariely: Are we in the way? >>Matthieu Ricard: Well, it's gone. You are

there, this is the data. Now it's gone again. Okay. Now you are there. It is good for you.

You can meditate. It is in a traffic jam. I don't know why it's running so fast. I don't

know, whatever task. Then the idea came about 15 years ago to see

what long-term meditators who had done 50- to 60,000 hours of meditation, like a violinist

will do his first concert, it's 10,000, so five times that, what will happen if we look

in their brain, in their immune system. So we took some of those guys, myself included

-- >>Dan Ariely: Can we have the data slides?

>>Matthieu Ricard: Yes. So that's, for instance, one of the great teacher that trained us on

compassion and loving kindness. And then so you can see that it seems to be some kind

of, you know, strength, inner peace, inner felicity. They don't seem too much stressed.

Then we took them to Madison, Wisconsin, and then we tried to measure the brain activity

with electro encephalogram, I won't give you the details, all with the scanner that the

meditators described as it is cold, it is noisy, it is dark, it is narrow. Nevertheless,

and we spent two and a half hours. This is the first time I came after two and a half

hours upon arrival with Richard Davidson. But what they found with experienced, you

see the curve below, that is the novice group that did one week of loving kindness meditation.

The pink line is when they rest, the blue line is when they meditate. Nothing happens.

Look at the upper curve. The bottom line is when they are at rest and don't do anything

specific. When they engage in compassion meditation, you see a huge increase, several hundred percent,

in the gamma frequency. That's huge. It was so huge that they thought it was an artifact.

It has to be replicated many times. If you look in the brain, look on the left

side, the meditator at rest, and when they engage in compassion, several critical areas

of the brain having to do with empathy, with parental love, with positive emotion are activated.

On the right, this is novices at rest. Nothing happened. Meditation, nothing happened. That

shows the effect of training. >>Dan Ariely: Let's go back to the previous

slide. So it tells you that meditators are able to have basically brain control over

compassion? >>Matthieu Ricard: Yes. What I was just going

to show next, actually, is if you ask them something strange, to meditate, 30% of compassion,

60%, 90, that seems odd. I give you 30% of my compassion only because I don't like you

or you, I like very much? We did it for 22 hours. It was a marathon. They did (indiscernible)

of three days, fortunately, and it turns out that those subjective feeling of 30% of bringing

compassion and more and more, it matches with what is measured in the brain.