Session 13

The Science of Happiness, Session 13

Eastern Promises, Buddhism

There are tremendous differences between East and West

The effects have been established, Shotgun fired near a Buddhist monk

-          The case of the Buddhist  burning to death and not moving a muscle-

-          Thích Quảng Đức

-          many have immolated themselves

-          When human beings are startled, we raise our shoulders and close our eyes. Our blood vessels constrict, and our pulse quickens. The startle response is a well-documented phenomenon; one of the first studies to examine it was published in 1939

-          An involuntary reaction to, say, a very loud noise is thought to be deeply primitive and impossible to overcome. Try to stifle it, and you will almost certainly fail.

-          Unless, perhaps, you’re a Buddhist monk with 40 years of experience in meditation like Matthieu Ricard. Born in France, a son of the philosopher Jean-François Revel, Ricard has a doctorate in cell genetics and serves as the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.

-          Researchers decided to see if Ricard, with decades of meditation under his belt, would respond differently to being startled than those of us with decades of being generally anxious under our belts. They put him in a room and asked him to meditate. Then the researchers played a 115-decibel “burst of white noise,” equivalent in volume to a gunshot. It was loud.

Matthieu Ricard had almost no reaction, no muscle moved as opposed to other participants

And among others that were tested we find policemen, Secret Service agents who are used with gun fire

Policemen and agents have reacted much more strongly than the famous Matthieu Ricard

-              In another case scientists ran a simple experiment on eight “long-term Buddhist practitioners” whose had spent an average of 34,000 hours in mental training. They asked the subjects to alternate between a meditative state and a neutral state in order to observe how the brain changed. One subject described his meditation as generating “a state in which love and compassion permeate the whole mind, with no other consideration, reasoning, or discursive thoughts.”

-              Placed under MRI brain imaging, Tibetan monks have shown to experience far greater happiness and are more emotionally balanced than any 'average' person. Scientists can gauge happiness by the amount of activity in the frontal lobe related to positive emotions. (There's also a section of the brain related to negative emotion, and criticism, which remains relatively dormant.)

-          Meditation helps in many ways

Outliers

-          The rice plantations

-              Impossible to argue with a practiced meditator

-              Coals from the fire and anger

-              Wow so many things in supermarket

-          We shall see…

-          the man from Charlie Wilson’s War

Maybe include this

You will have the opportunity to access our series on Happiness in Practice and also join our other alternative programs…The Happiness Club, where we will try and get deeper into this issue and others