In 2016, while trekking in New Zealand’s Fjordland National Park, my wife and I were inundated by three straight days of rain. It made for a grueling trek; our gear was soaked through, our packs weighed down by water, and every part of our bodies was sore. Each day we wondered aloud if it would have been better to have…
Cultivating self-control through mindfulness practice can help us become more compassionate people.
Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this conversation, which appears in the recent book Beyond the Self: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience, Matthieu Ricard, a…
For four billion years, life on this planet has been ascending to higher and higher levels of organization. First there were just bare, self-replicating strands of information; then they encased themselves in cells; then some of these cells got together and formed multicellular organisms; then some of those organisms developed complex brains, and some species of brainy organisms became highly…
The Buddha said that the origin of all suffering is craving — we either don’t get what we want or we get what we don’t want. But what is the origin of our craving? In his recent New York Times best-selling book, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright argues that the process of…
Does meditation work? I got interested in questions like this through an unusual project I helped develop: the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. Back in the early 2000s, the Dalai Lama asked Emory University to develop a sustainable curriculum in modern science for his Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile in India. As you can imagine, this was (and still is)…
According to paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, we can learn a lot about what it means to be human today by looking back to when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. In his first book, Why Dinosaurs Matter, he makes the case that geological literacy and an understanding of deep time can help us consider “the multiple, simultaneous existential crises facing humanity.” Lacovara recently…
“In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.” That enigmatic riddle comes from Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet’s eminent twelfth-century poet, yogi, and sage. Matthieu Ricard unpacks Milarepa’s puzzle this way: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way…