2018-01-29
1 小时 6 分钟Hardly any neuroscientist will pretend that we know really what consciousness is for a very good reason, is that it's a matter of experience, and experience is experienced as the first person.
You cannot know what experience is by describing everything from the outside or what kind of neurons have been activated, what kind of area of the brain, even you knew the function and the activity of billions of neurons.
When you are angry or see the color red or feel loved, that will tell you absolutely zero.
So what it feels to experience love or anger.
So modern science now tells us that meditating or training your mind for a relatively short window of time can create pretty big changes in behavior and outcome.
But what if you actually spent somewhere between 40 and 60,000 hours in meditation?
Well, that's the life that today's guest, Mathieu Ricard, has lived growing up in France.
The son of a renowned philosopher and an acclaimed painter, he started to stake his claim as a scientist in molecular genetics when he decided to actually make a pretty fierce left turn and found himself living in a hermitage in Nepal, studying Buddhism.
He eventually took his vows and became a monk and has lived there ever since full time, devoting himself to the study and the practice and relieving of suffering along the way.
He has started a foundation called Karuna Sechin, which now serves.
It helps educate and provide healthcare for some 300,000 people.
And he has written a series of books, the latest of which is a really fascinating dialogue between him and a friend of his is wolf Singer, who is a neuroscientist around how classic buddhist practices rewire your brain.
It's called beyond the self.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Mathieu as he was here in New York for a brief amount of time before returning to Nepal.
And we went deep into both his own personal journey, how he made decisions, like leaving sort of popular mainstream life as a rising scientist to become a monk in Nepal, to how all of these different practices profoundly changed him and his life, and how it has also inspired him to then return to a certain extent and participate in the evolution of science around these practices and also begin writing again and sharing and publishing books and also heading up this foundation.
Karuna Sechen, so really excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan fields, and this is good life project.
I'm fascinated by you, by your story, by your work.
And what I'd love to do is sort of touch down in different parts of your story.
Grew up in France in a family that seems like it was very steeped in scholarship, in philosophy, and from what I know, you're dad was a philosopher, your mom was at one point, she's.