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[narrator] Eighty-five years ago, in a remote corner of Tibet,
a little boy was born to a poor farming family.
One day, miraculously,
he was discovered
to be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama,
and he was soon carried away to the capital city of Lhasa,
to become the next political and spiritual leader,
of the vast kingdom of Tibet.
But the little boy had a secret,
locked inside his heart.
Since my childhood, I love technology.
If I had not become the Dalai Lama
and I still remain in my native place,
then eventually so I may be
engineer or electrician. Since childhood,
always a curiosity.
Something, new things to see,
I always developed the question,
Why? Why? How? How? Always happen.
I think real introducer about technology
is some small toy,
small machines.
Then I play a few moments,
and then out of my curiosity
I always open, dismantle.
I think maybe fifty/fifty chance to re-assemble.
Fifty failed.
And then, actually not much interest for study.
I'm really very, very lazy student.
I always prefer play.
One movie projector which belonged to 13th Dalai Lama --
because it's now quite old so,
quite often you see, broke down.
Small dynamo, produce electricity.
Then I begin to realize AC, DC, how it works.
So then gradually, you see, developed
interest about science.
I have a keen interest about cosmology.
My telescope,
I used to use it to look at the moon.
Then I found some rock mountains.
Western side, shadow there.
East side, no shadow.
Moon, no light.
But light only from sun.
Clear.
One full moon night,
I arrange my telescope.
And I invited my tutors,
"Please look whether light come from sun."
So they seriously watch,
and then agree, "Yes."
"Moon -- no light. Light come from sun."
So then, 1954, when I was in Peking, China,
we visit huge hydroelectricity factory.
I have sort of keen interest
and then asking some questions to those engineer,
or electrician, electrician right?
About the differences of AC and DC, and these things.
And then also you see different sort of factories.
I think I was the only person
fully alert to see how it work.
The Communist Chinese army entered Tibet
in 1950, and despite the many months
that the young Dalai Lama spent in
high level meetings in Beijing,
when he returned to Lhasa,
negotiations with Chinese government leaders
soon began to fail,
and tensions started to rise.
In 1959,
rumors of a Chinese government plot
to kidnap the Dalai Lama caused
300,000 Tibetan people
to surround the Dalai Lama's palace,
creating a human wall to protect him.
The Dalai Lama was able to secretly leave
in the middle of the night in a daring escape.
Four days later, the Chinese army took action
to disperse the crowd around the palace,
and fighting broke out in Lhasa.
This fighting soon spread across Tibet,
and thousands died in the aftermath.
Many Tibetan families escaped from Tibet
to join the Dalai Lama in India,
where Prime Minister Nehru had granted him land.
At the age of sixteen, I lost my freedom.
At the age of twenty-four, I lost my own country.
And yet, over time,
he was able to create one of the most
successful refugee communities in the world,
run by a democratically elected
Tibetan government in exile,
with the rebuilding of the monasteries,
now in India,
and with the preservation of Tibet's
unique Buddhist science,
philosophy, spiritual traditions,
language and culture.
Gradually, the Dalai Lama began
to have opportunities
to begin meeting with leading scientists.
David Bohm,
Von Weizsacker,
and some other,
great scientists.
These people become my friend,
and not only friend,
but Von Weizsacker and David Bohm,
I consider my own teacher of physics,
generally, and particularly quantum physics.
But science is always seen as measurement,
is that no longer true?
Well, science is whatever people make of it.
You see, science has changed over the ages,
and it's different now from a few hundred years ago,
and it could be different again.
Now, there's no intrinsic reason
why science must necessarily be measurement.
This is another historical development
which has come about over the past few centuries
that is entirely contingent and not absolutely necessary.
And when Einstein produced his special theory,
which The Times newspaper of London
dismissed as being nonsense, um,
was he moving towards wholeness?
Yes. He definitely was.
As he moved eventually toward
a view of field theory where everything
was one field, all the fields merging.
So, it was a step toward wholeness
although not, you know, it was a limited step
but still it was the beginning.
David Bohm and Carl Von Weizsacker
explained that the great minds
which created the current field of quantum physics
at the turn of the century,
Einstein, Bohr, and others,
created their groundbreaking theories
through thought experiments alone,
not by carrying out experiments in the lab --
thought experiments which were similar
to those created by leading scholars
in the various schools of Tibetan science.
Physics, like quantum physics,
very similar
the Madhyamaka philosophistic view.
Nothing exists objectively.
Wonderful.
After that visit,
the Dalai Lama met with a new group of scientists.
I met His Holiness in '83 at an international conference.
Immediately the charm, his keen intelligence,
and totally unassuming,
just pure interest,
I was very touched by that.
And we were in the middle of this conversation
and his assistants were pulling him by the arm,
"Your Holiness, let's go."
And then he said, "Why don't you
come to Dharamsala
and we can continue these discussions."
It was in February of 1985
that a phone rang, "I'm Francisco Varela,
I'm calling from Paris.
I understand that you're trying to put together
a science meeting with the Dalai Lama."
I was a friend of Francisco Varela's
and Adam Engle came down to the Ojai Foundation
and met with us and we sat under this big oak tree
and we discussed connection between interests
that Francisco and I had
and what Adam and Michael Sautman wanted to do.
And I remember really clearly he said, "Adam,"
he said, "don't do physics, do cognitive science."
It was a really good fit between Adam and Francisco.
They had complementary skills
and so the whole thing began to unfold.
It was very, very extraordinary to watch it.
I mean it happened.
The most interesting things that happen in evolution,
and therefore the most useful things to explain
the diversity of life are internal factors
rather than selective pressures.
Yes, it is true that if the planet goes very cold
animals have to change.
But, how they change,
how they go about it,
is the result of internal factors,
much more so than external factors.
It is as if external factors
impose very broad constraints
but do not, cannot possibly
determine what will happen.
And I find this very interesting because
it's an exact parallel of what we saw
in perception that, yes, we need light
and we need some stimulation in the retina.
Those are the constraints.
But, what we see depends on the internal factors
and the two together give rise
then to some kind of a stable perception.
Well, here it seems to be much the same thing.
The environment gives some kind of constraint on
internal factors, then species and evolution.
His explanation, very clear,
I think very precise.
Very helpful.
A person who have real authority
in certain scientific field,
at the same time,
personally practicing Buddha Dharma,
that's I think quite rare.
So, you see, he can explain
with a more fuller knowledge of both fields,
science and Buddhist philosophy,
so that's very useful, helpful.
Certainly.
There was actually like a huge comet,
but of such dimensions that the just the collision
evaporated the seas so the next,
what was it? I don't know, many years.
It was purely in terms of clouds.
That meant that you know the dramatic impact of life,
at that point, life virtually was abolished.
Who stayed?
As I mentioned yesterday, our little friends.
They were untouched.
We might wipe ourselves out of the planet,
with atomic bombs,
and that probably wouldn't end life on the planet.
So, in fact, from that point of view you can reverse
the tree and put the bacteria on top.
They are the best.
We are very so/so
because in fact we have made our environment so fragile.
So, the result --
I mean these serious discussion with scientists,
then it became clear, this kind
of discussion with scientists is mutual benefit.
And then after it was over,
I looked at His Holiness again
and I said, "well you want to do it again?"
And he said, "yes."
On the day of the second meeting,
we got a call from Oslo, Norway.
The Dalai Lama had just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
...and I will call on you as you raise your hand.
We're open for questions.
Why do you think you were chosen for this prize?
And don't be humble.
I think as I mentioned earlier
I think last thirty years,
become refugee,
you see,
desperate situation.
Yet, I follow
strictly, with my own, how do you say,
according to my own principle --
non-violence.
I think that is the main reason.
Later on,
I learned that some of his advisors
had said, "you have to cancel
this science conference,
because this is a great opportunity."
But, he refused to do so.
His commitment was to the scientists.
Here he was,
he'd just won the Nobel Prize,
and he was still perfectly present,
calm,
steady,
impressive.
The vast majority of scientists were skeptical.
Now when I first sat down with the Dalai Lama,
it was actually quite surprising.
See, I had the stereotyped vision
of an Asian spiritual master
as kind of floating on a cloud.
They're going to be transcendent.
Eyes half closed,
occasionally saying perhaps inscrutable things,
but, here I'm sitting down across from him,
I had this feeling I was across from a wrestler,
intellectually.
He was taking my ideas and he was grabbing them,
and testing them.
Now, I would like to show
experimental evidence for the atom.
Are there techniques, like a microscope,
or some technique which will allow
us to see even a single atom.
Now, until very recently this was impossible.
But, within the last ten to fifteen years we now have
very interesting evidence.
There's a laser which comes in
shines on the atom, illuminates the atom.
And then the light is given off.
And we can see it.
You see a tiny, tiny pinpoint of light
from this single atom.
So this looks --
It is through the telescope?
Or through a microscope?
No, it's with the naked eye.
Naked eye.
It's so bright --
it's so bright.
Yeah, it's very small
but extremely bright.
Does it move?
No, it's localized in a very small region
a very, very small region.
It's an ion trap.
He would ask something
and throw something back at me
and back and forth.
He's like this, he's got his arms
a little bit outside,
and he's going,
"Hum. Hum."
Hum.
Isn't it the case that the atoms are always
in a constant dynamic flux?
You can ask, "Is it possible
when one comes to an absolute zero temperature,
and you can go no further,
are the atoms completely still?
Classically, the answer would be yes,
in classical physics.
In quantum mechanics, it turns out the answer is no.
Because, quantum mechanically the atoms
must always have a small motion.
This is --
Yeah.
This is an experimental fact now.
You can watch the motion decrease
until you reach a threshold
and then it flattens out
and the motion continues at that level
no matter how cold you go.
Um, in terms of the Big Bang,
doesn't there need to be something
to kind of ignite the Big Bang?
If it really is a bang of sorts,
then there needs to be something
that ignites that Big Bang.
But, if prior to the Big Bang there is,
it is absolutely cold, then how
could there be any ignition?
How could it be anything to catalyse?
I expected somebody who was kind of disconnected
from reality
and in a spiritual fog.
What I found was a person completely present.
Surprising.
Since over thirty years,
we develop serious discussion
with many scientists,
mainly from America.
Five fields -
cosmology,
quantum physics,
psychology,
neuroscience,
then biology.
The dialogues focused in detail on cosmology.
George Greenstein
who is a colleague of mine at Amherst College.
When thinking about the origin of the universe,
we have a lot of facts that we know,
but they lead us to a gigantic question --
we do not know how to deal with all matter
occupying exactly the same space.
And, we also do not know how to deal
with all matter having infinite energy.
Was the big bang creation,
or was it simply a stage in the evolution of the universe?
Did the universe exist prior to the Big Bang
and pass through this state
and then come into the current state,
or was the universe created at that instant?
So, what do you mean by creation here?
I mean, prior to the Big Bang there was nothing.
After the Big Bang, there was a lot.
So, would you say something
that has caused the event is a creation?
If you say that
the universe is, comes from a cause
would that be considered a creation?
I want to ask you that question.
A third possibility --
the universe existed, contracted to a bounce,
expanded, stopped, contracted to another bounce,
and this way endlessly.
An endless series of cycles.
Beginning-less.
So to relate this story
in that you told us the different options
that speculations that physicists have
come up with, the Buddhist position
seems to be much closer to the third option
where there is this constant expansion
and shrinking and then coming into being again.
This repeated dissolution
and the origination of the universe.
One thing that we need to bear in mind
is that this idea in a repeated kind of dissolution
and origination of the universe
does not necessarily suggest that
the same kind of universe will come
into existence over and over again.
And also same sort of elements as well.
So, you can envision
a new universe with whole sets
of new properties and elements
that may not be the same
as the one that existed before.
And here of course from the Buddhist
point of view, karma has a role to play.
One thing I would like to mention, however,
is that the idea of our planet
being the center of the universe,
this anthropocentric, was never in the picture.
From the Sutras,
they speak from the beginning
of billionfold universe.
Ours is a small unit.
A thousand of those being a secondary unit.
A thousand of those secondary units
being a tertiary unit,
that means a billionfold universe.
They speak of universe
being like curtains of lights.
Like horses spouting fires.
Wheels of light.
All these beautiful images
that you seem to be already
looking the Hubble Telescope.
But still, the idea that there was
almost infinite possibilities, universes.
And I know for beginning-less also
there is another thing --
there must have been life.
There must have been consciousness
in all those billion universe.
So, in a way, our Big Bang
is a very, very small part of history
from that perspective.
His Holiness says that,
he has a hundred percent support
for Matthieu when he contrasts
the problems, the concept,
the imagination problem versus the logical problem,
with respect to beginning
and beginning-lessness.
So, the idea that
we can imagine...
it's easier for imagination when we say
that there is a beginning.
But, logically, we have more problem,
but it's harder to imagine when you say,
"it's beginning-less",
but logically that seems to be
more in tune with the reason.
The knowledge
about cosmology, Big Bang,
these things,
in principal,
Buddhist sort of cosmology explanation,
quite similar.
The dialogues also focused on Quantum Physics.
What you see here is a little laser,
which emits light.
These particles go in one after the other,
one after the other, okay?
There's a contradiction here.
On the one hand we have individual particles,
which can go through one slit only at a time.
On the other hand, we have the stripes which indicate
that there are waves which go through both slits.
How can something go through one slit
and through both slits at the same time?
This is now a very important point,
which is new in modern physics,
is that the
observer/experimentalist decides which
of the two features, particle or wave, is reality.
So, the observer has a very strong influence on nature.
There is no reason why in this run of the experiment
you get this result.
And this is really the first time in physics
that you see something like that --
that we see events
for which we cannot build a chain of reasoning.
Some people even say that what we observe
in the individual quantum event
is a spontaneous act of creation.
So, with this I think I have finished my exposition
of the quantum physics of individual particles.
And as the next one,
I would like to go through the quantum physics
of two or more particles,
which also has its own
deep, deep, uh, mysteries for us.
The notion which we use to describe
connectedness of two particles,
the name is entanglement.
So, the idea is that these two particles
even if they are separated over very large distances,
they always remain one system;
they are not really separated.
So, when you're talking about --
dependency here, the fact that what happens
here on one side seems to be dependent
on what happens on the other side,
we're not talking in terms of causal dependence, are we?
That is a very deep question.
A little illustration --
suppose you have two dice and then at some time
you throw a die and your friend throws a die.
And it turns out that even as both of them
are completely random they always keep the same number.
How can that be?
So the idea is that these two particles,
even if they're separated over a very large distance,
they're always, they always remain one system.
They're not really separated in a deep sense.
I'm sorry, are you implying that
the entire universe is internally entangled?
Well that is a nice idea,
but I would not want to take a position on that
because as an experimentalist
I would not know how to prove that.
His Holiness was saying,
probably someone who can prove it
will have to be able to live very long
to see the whole thing.
Exactly. They would need a lot of money.
They continued to meet.
You might ask whether everything is the same
or whether something has changed in quantum physics,
and there are actually two important changes.
One change concerns a technical thing happening.
And I know that Your Holiness,
you love technology,
so, I will mention that,
that is the fact that based on these
fundamental questions which we discussed already,
people are developing a new technology
for information and that is really a big surprise.
Now, this is a picture which tries
to indicate the entanglement of many qubits.
Each blue point is supposed to be a qubit
and you have many connections here.
Now, if I measure one qubit
then it changes the whole state.
It does not only change the one I look at,
it changes all the other ones.
When I measure another one,
another qubit, and that changes the rest.
And I keep going
and if I keep going the right way,
in the end I have the solution I want.
This is a completely new way of thinking
about computation, it is different from any computation
people have been talking about.
So, in a sense it's a first technical application of wholeness.
I think this sort of subject is very important.
In any case is it those subjects which often,
you see, create more confusion
that itself is showing it's more complicated.
So really worthwhile, a further discussion.
And I think a discussion between
scientists or specialists in this
particular field and Buddhist,
I prefer young scholars.
They are your team.
Yes. My team, my team, yes.
Now the second point which happened,
which was actually in part encouraged
if not inspired by our earlier discussion,
is some new ideas which we are developing
on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics.
We are simply asking, maybe knowing,
maybe knowledge is as fundamental,
or maybe even more fundamental than reality.
We can very well handle these kind of paradoxical situations,
we have been talking about, mathematically,
and we can confirm them in experiments
with very high precision.
But, we still do not know conceptually what is going on.
Why is the world so strange?
And, what I want to see some day
before I pass away that someone explains
to me why it is so strange.
So, I want to, so I want to learn
new concepts and this is a place,
and there were some new concepts brought out
in your discussion which are very interesting
for me, and where I have to think more
and where I hope I learn something
which might even be relevant in helping to understand
some of these phenomena in physics.
So here I will insist on the critique
of the idea of intrinsic existence
and of the idea that they have intrinsic properties.
So to begin with, science made a momentous step
forward as soon as it
understood that certain explanations
have to be given in terms of relations,
rather than in terms of absolute properties.
First example, the Schrodinger cat.
You have a box, and inside the box
the bottle contains poison.
You have a big piece of radioactive material
that has the probability one half
to disintegrate.
The state of the piece of radioactive material
is in the superposition between being disintegrated
and not being disintegrated.
And according to quantum mechanics,
the cat should be half dead and half alive.
But this sounds absurd,
because when you open the box
and see in the box it is not the case,
you see either a dead cat or a cat which is alive.
So, there is a paradox.
And, can I just say, maybe we should add
that there is no cruelty involved here,
because this is a thought experiment.
Thank you, John. Yes this is perfectly right
and I must say I've personally gone to Schrodingers' house.
I've seen in his house that he had many cats
and so he loved cats.
So hopefully not experimented on cats.
Yes, fortunately it's a thought experiment.
Experimenting on cats.
No.
Never!
Perhaps you remember,
we met six years ago at Stanford,
and we had a discussion with a few other people
for morning and lunch
and that was a very important event in my life.
And since coming here I've learned a great deal.
I hope to start by addressing this question
about the nature of matter
and the nature of life.
Now, the single most important thing we know
is that the world is made of atoms.
This is a picture of iron atoms put on a surface
of a piece of metal.
Each of these little bumps is one atom.
You have to get it very, very cold for them to stay.
So, maybe it's too cold to move?
Frozen.
Atoms are made of other particles such as electrons
around the outside.
This is very strange.
Our current understanding of these particles
is they have no size --
infinitely small,
and we describe the particle
in terms of these field lines, these fields.
If the atom were the size of the earth,
the size of this electron
would be smaller than one millimeter.
So we know it must be smaller than that.
Now, how do we know that?
We actually take electrons
and we throw them at another electron.
And if the electron had size, these particles
of electrons would bounce from them differently
than if the electron was just a point.
And we can mathematically predict which is which
and what we see -- no size, just point.
Whether there is anything,
that is, do they provide any kind of obstruction
to an incoming entity.
And my impression from what you just said is yes,
and that is you can collide two electrons
but they collide as if they were pure points
rather than having any type of spatial dimensionality.
You are absolutely correct.
When we speak of simply the existence of things
in our shared world,
when you posit this, what is actually
the nature of the electron itself independently
of its own parts, that type of ontological analysis,
you don't find it.
So, then you are left with a couple of options,
again you can either say, well, these elementary particles
and so forth all these things that we identify,
they do things.
So to say as they're doing things and things
are done to them that they don't exist is foolishness.
Every property that I know of -- it depends.
So when we say the electron
has these intrinsic properties,
we don't say it has an intrinsic property,
we're not going to talk about the electron as a being.
It also includes the interaction,
we have to include the interaction.
Because that's the observation.
Because in order to even observe the electron
we need some interaction.
So in that respect,
I don't think it conflicts with the Buddhist philosophy.
All the others are a matter of the observation it has,
which means it intimately
is connected with the rest of the world.
I don't see a conflict, quite frankly.
I think it may be worthwhile to explain
about basic structure of Buddha Dharma.
Now, I speak in Tibetan. Translate.
After the Buddha's enlightenment,
the Buddha was reluctant to actually give a teaching.
There is a beautiful passage in the scripture
which says that, "Because I fear that
no one will understand, I shall remain non-speaking
and remain in the forest."
All the teachings of the Buddha have been really presented
from the point of view of the two truths,
and he who does not understand the two truths
cannot understand the essence of the Buddha's teaching.
So what we are talking about here is the two
One is the ultimate level of reality which
is the emptiness where nothing can be found.
But there is also another level of reality
which is the conventional relative level
on which causes and effects and everything functions.
And this ability to distinguish between two levels
of reality and two truths
and understanding existence in terms of
these two becomes very important.
In other words Buddha is saying that it's not
but things don't exist in the way in which
we tend to assume they do.
They don't exist as they appear to us.
This is what quantum physics have also discovered;
as they go deeper into their understanding
of what makes up the physical world, they don't find anything.
So they have come to realize that there is nothing
that supports the objective reality of the material world
that we assume.
In some sense what the quantum physics
have come to is very similar to what
Buddhism has also come to.
And the assumption behind all of this is that
it should be findable.
Once you mentally deconstruct
what makes up what seems like an solid thing in front of you,
you'll come to recognize that nothing stands there as the true
referent to which you can point and say, this is it.
So therefore Buddha says that the form is empty.
And then the question arises, does that mean nothing exists?
Then the second presentation is made
which is that emptiness is form.
So you cannot accord a hierarchy of existence
to the matter and mind, both are devoid of intrinsic existence,
but they do both exist on the basis of designation
and causes and conditions.
So they have dependent origination
but they don't have intrinsic existence.
The scientific dialogues
covered the field of cognitive science, as well.
Emotion which is based on ignorance,
such as strong anger, hatred
and also attachment.
One of my American friends, one scientist,
Aaron Beck, he mentioned, when we develop anger,
the object which we feel angry at appears very negative,
but actually, ninety percent of that negative-ness
is mental projection.
What we find is that when we get a negative image
of somebody else and it stays on and on,
we start to attack the other person.
But actually we're attacking the image.
By attacking this image of the person
we're actually injuring a person
who may be nothing like the image.
So the more we have the negative image
of the person,
the more we're going to attack him.
But it's always the image that we're having
that is bothering us,
not the real person.
So we talked about delusion before,
in a way a lot of hatred is based on a delusion.
But it's also between countries, nations, ethnic groups.
They tend to have kind of an image,
a mental image of the other people
as some way subhuman.
Let's say when the Germans would have pictures
of the Russians during World War Two
they'd show the Russians as looking like beasts,
wild beasts.
Then of course the people found it's okay
to shoot wild beasts
because they're not human beings anymore.
So I think a similar Buddhist concept,
all these negative emotions
are based on ignorance or misconception.
Your Holiness if we just depart for one moment,
you mentioned about the broad perspective before,
and I think much of the unhappiness
that individuals have
is because they lose perspective.
And I thought I'd give you an example.
There was some time ago
I was asked to consult about a professor of physics
and he thought that he had made a very great discovery
which might give him the Nobel Prize.
And, um, he got passed over.
He did not get the Nobel Prize
and so he was depressed.
And so I said,
"Well, how important a part of your life was this prize?"
And he said, "A hundred percent."
So I asked him, I said,
"Do you have a family?"
And he said, "Oh yes."
And I said, "Well, how important is your family to you?"
So he said, "My wife -- twenty percent."
And I said, "Do you have children?"
And he said, "Yes, I have three children."
And I said, "How important are they to you?"
And he said, "Oh, I guess they're about forty percent."
And then I said, "Do you get to see your children very much?"
He said, "Well no. I've had so much time working
on my physics project that I really
haven't spent much time with them."
And I said, "How do you feel about that?"
And then he started to weep
and I said, "Why are you weeping?"
He said, "It reminded me when I was growing up,
that's just the way my father was to me.
And so now I suddenly realized
what I am missing out on,
my father missed out on it, and I'm missing out on it
and of course my children are missing out."
So, I said,
"Now how important are your children to you now?"
And he said, "eighty percent."
Anyhow, he left the office
and he wasn't depressed any more.
Oh, very wise. Wise.
I think that method, that method,
that we call exactly analytical meditation.
Oh, really?
Yes.
Sometimes, I express that compared
to ancient Indian psychology,
particularly Buddhist psychology,
modern psychology looks like the kindergarten level.
Well, I'm a secularist.
The only reason I met the Dalai Lama
was because of my daughter.
And I knew that if you got invited
to his palace in Dharamsala
you got to bring a single observer.
And I thought what a kick this would be for my daughter.
And so although I thought this was just another
one of the Bay Area fads, I figured, okay,
I'll make an exception. I'll go.
We start with Paul Ekman,
Professor of Psychology and Director
of the Laboratory for Human Interaction
at the University of California
medical school in San Francisco.
But what you really should know about him
is that he is a master of the face
and of emotions, and of reading emotions,
and he has more than thirty years
of world class research.
For inexplicable reasons,
he and I really connected.
I felt like I'd known him all my life.
And that the function of emotion
is to get us moving, active,
very quickly, without having to think.
But many, many, most of the things
we become emotional about are things
we have learned in the course of growing up.
And the issue which I will get to later
is can we unlearn some of them.
So what I have been doing is trying
to distinguish many different important states,
the emotions, the moods, resentment, hatred.
One of the reasons why we have
so much difficulty once we become emotional
is that the emotion itself enslaves us.
There is what I would like to call a refractory period,
that is a period in which new information
doesn't enter or if it enters it is, interpretation is biased.
Now a refractory period may be only a few seconds,
or it may be much longer.
As long as it's occurring we can't get out of the grip
of that emotion.
I want to say that after um,
spending more than thirty-five
years studying emotion,
I am impressed about how little we still know about it.
When we met and tried to think,
what do we mean by destructive emotions,
we came up with the definition:
emotions that harm self or others.
Your definition is
extremely subtle.
Your definition of destructive emotions
is what disturbs the calm of the mind.
Yes.
I'm Buddhist.
My ultimate goal is Buddhahood.
This is my business.
How can we educate our emotions,
by what means, without becoming Buddhists?
Yes, that's right.
[speaking in Tibetan]
[translator] So therefore, there's a possibility
here that even though the grasping
at the intrinsic reality of self or whatever it is,
the object, has arisen,
one could prolong the causal sort of process
between that instance of grasping
and the actual arisal of the affliction.
[speaking in Tibetan]
[translator] In terms of really a precise analysis of what takes place,
let's say in the first instance of apprehending a flower,
the very first instant you simply apprehend
the flower without reification.
You're simply apprehending the flower itself.
In the next instant...
And that is a valid cognition.
But normally speaking,
in the second instant then there's the reification
of the flower.
As soon as that reification of the flower takes place,
then you're into a false cognition.
And so His Holiness concludes here
it is to be seen whether you can find
the precise neural correlate of the mere apprehension
of the flower, versus the very next instant
of the reification of the flower.
And so it would be very interesting
to see whether by studying the brain,
you will be able to discern the difference
between a valid cognition and an invalid cognition.
In addition, the dialogues focused on the
Neurobiology -- oh wonderful.
I think if we properly sort of study
these and get some knowledge,
I think it can serve seven billion human beings.
The Dalai Lama invited me to come meet with him
because he was interested in catalyzing
serious neuroscientific research on the mind
and brains of Tibetan practitioners
that spent years cultivating their minds.
And in fact on that momentous day in 1992,
he was quite stern in a way,
and challenged me and he said,
"You've been using the tools of modern neuroscience
to investigate depression and anxiety and stress and fear.
Why can't you use those same tools
to study kindness and compassion?"
And for me it was a wakeup call.
I didn't have a very good answer other than,
that it's hard.
Scientific collaboration
and research began in earnest,
even though neuroscientist Francisco Varela
became seriously ill.
And a conference on neuroscience
was organized in the year of 2000
for the presentation of their results.
I wanted to tell you,
you know, Francisco got very ill in 1997
with the cancer and then after that he had
to make the decision to have the transplantation
of the liver.
He had to decide to die or to live.
And at that time he was thinking
that he did not want to do the transplant.
Then he received a fax from you where you said,
"You must do everything to get healthy
and keep working and practicing and doing science."
And he said,
"this is a message to me
to make the right decision, to live."
And he made the right decision.
Thanks to you.
Strong feeling of reunion.
Thank you.
One of my oldest friends. Great scientist.
Your Holiness,
this afternoon or now,
what I'd like to turn to is the theme
of the meeting on destructive emotions,
and talk about some antidotes
to destructive emotions and how we can think about
those antidotes in neuroscientific terms.
And one question which we have pursued,
whether meditation will have effects
in a long term way on this area of the brain.
A more formal experiment
that we have recently completed
with Jon Kabat-Zinn,
who presented to Your Holiness
at a previous Mind & Life meeting.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
has been developing methods to
use mindfulness meditation
in a large variety of populations,
including medical patients,
employees in the workplace;
he conducted the training himself.
We wanted to explore the extent
to which these factors of
brain activity can be changed
in normal lay people.
The logic in this experiment
was to see whether antidotes to stress,
meditation,
can have a beneficial effect
on the immune system.
So, at the end of the study, the participants
got the vaccine.
The finding that we are actually the most
excited about because it's so unusual
and it has never been demonstrated before,
and that is when we vaccinated them
with the influenza vaccine,
we actually find that
the meditation group shows
a stronger response to the influenza vaccine
compared to the control group.
We will be repeating this study with
measures using MRI
which allow us to look deep within the brain
so that we can actually look at the amygdala.
We are energized with vigor
and zeal to pursue this
in the future and we hope to
continue this kind of collaboration.
Um, Your Holiness, like my colleagues before,
just a little, a little, thought before we begin.
It seems to me truly wondrous
that I am here again with you once more.
We have done experiments with audition,
with memory,
with conflict of attention between
visual and auditory.
The answer is always the same --
the transitoriness of mental factors,
it is like they come and they go.
And what we have here
is a correlate in this green stuff.
That was for me the big discovery,
that the brain actively undoes itself,
so it creates like gaps,
where you know the transition
from one moment to the next
is actually marked.
So, you have recognition
and then action, but they are punctuated.
It's like you know saying,
perception, comma, action.
You don't just put them in a flow,
in a continuum.
This is again what we were talking
about the other day --
that time lasts a
little bit, and in fact it lasts,
here you can see the first moment
of time of the recognition
is about a third of a second,
then another same, similar moment
when you do an action,
which is pushing the button.
This is systematic.
We've seen this in all kinds of different conditions.
His Holiness is interested to see whether you agree
that this corroborates a point of Buddhist psychology,
and that is in the first moment
it is purely visual perception
which is not conceptual.
And the second moment,
whatever that moment whatever the duration
of that moment happens to be,
then the conceptual mind
apprehends, this is this.
Absolutely.
You cannot compress a moment beyond typically
normal conditions 150 milliseconds.
Even if It's something almost immediate,
it's about 150 milliseconds.
This moment of arising is another whumph.
So the brain works by these whumps.
And whatever it is,
whether it is visual perception of the field,
whether it is the close your eyes
and you have a mental image,
it is the same thing.
Now to really conclude, Your Holiness,
my point is that this was done with somebody
who is not really highly trained,
but we, know what we want to do
is to take highly trained people
like meditators who can actually
go into much more finer detail,
what was the moment of experience?
And for example,
we want to work with the monasteries
in Dordogne in the south of France,
and in May, for example,
we hope to have Matthieu come to the lab
and do these kinds of experiments.
So, if we can find differences
even with ordinary people,
then with more expert people we should
be able to really go into much finer detail.
So with that thought I wanted to conclude,
because this is where, to me,
there's a true possibility of collaboration,
not just in principle
but in a very concrete sense.
Thank you very much, Your Holiness.
Francisco Varela, Richard Davidson and others
invited scientifically trained Matthieu Ricard,
who had received a PhD in Molecular Genetics
before he became a monk,
to help them craft the experimental design.
All this scientific sort of research work.
Oh wonderful.
Now you bring into the laboratory
somebody like Matthieu,
complete stable mind,
no distractions, no thoughts.
So when the stimulus comes, he's always ready.
And the results are completely different.
Meditators who are experienced,
are masters of precisely
being able to become aware of what happens in their minds.
And these first person methods are a radical
departure from classical science.
One is disembodied, impersonal.
The other one is fully embodied, totally situated.
So here we have an occasion
to really bring very much into the hard core
of research in science that idea. Why?
Because it is interesting for science, the question
of how to study consciousness.
Both of them can give us knowledge.
In both of them,
you can have good science.
They found certain sort of knowledge,
oh wonderful,
is not just speculation,
but they actually found through,
or proved through, experiment.
This is an image of her brain,
if we split the brain in half, like that.
Now we are going to do a demonstration for you,
Your Holiness.
So you can, you can see actually that the areas
are much more extensive during mental activities.
Yes, yes, that's right.
[speaking in Tibetan]
Well, actually, in dreaming, the brain is very active.
And that has been studied with these techniques,
and there is activation in all of the sensory areas.
So actually, that's very true.
With the MRI we get spatial resolution,
so very fine spatial resolution.
With the EEG we get time resolution,
things that are very fast.
With this we're after chemical resolution
and chemical selectivity.
That's the real advantage of using this particular
imaging versus something else.
We can be very selective
about the chemistry that we look at.
Then the instrument itself, also wonderful,
very sophisticated,
oh wonderful.
Must be very expensive.
Unexpectedly,
just months before they were to meet again in person,
Francisco Varela's health failed him for the final time.
He lost his long struggle with liver cancer.
He became terminally ill.
Our last conversation,
not face to face,
but through modern technology,
through video,
from Madison to Paris, isn't it.
That's very moving.
Good morning
my dear friend.
And in some sense I also consider
you as a spiritual brother.
I was with Francisco when the Dalai Lama called.
He could no longer move.
He could no longer talk.
But he was watching so strongly the screen
with the Dalai Lama speaking to him,
that I thought he was going to dive into the screen,
as if it were a swimming pool.
He was in the screen with him.
And it was a very, very moving moment
for everyone who was there.
So I wanted to express my,
uh, deep feeling to you,
as a human brother.
And your contribution
in science --
I think you made,
especially in neurology
you made great sort of contribution.
And then also in our work,
some kind of dialogue
between science
and Buddhist science of mind,
and also some other field,
I think you made great contribution.
So we never forget that.
Until my death,
I will remember you.
One year later Francisco's wife and son met
with the Dalai Lama, in remembrance.
How old are you?
Ten.
So, before you come to this world,
I already know your father.
So great, really great.
The Dalai Lama told me
that he always has this photo of Francisco with him,
and that he takes it with him,
whenever he travels,
wherever he goes,
to this day still.
And then, the Dalai Lama reaffirmed
his personal commitment to driving forward
the collaboration between Buddhist science
and western science,
in the years ahead.
In 2003,
the Dalai Lama opened
up his conversations
with scientists to the public,
with a groundbreaking conference
at one of the most prestigious
scientific research universities in the world --
MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology].
In 1998,
we added collaborative research
to our mission.
And by that what we had in mind
was a true collaboration
between Buddhism and science,
where scientists and Buddhists
would stand shoulder to shoulder
and design the scientific protocols,
recruit the subjects,
execute the research,
analyze the results together,
and publish together.
All of our public meetings
have been co-sponsored
by major research universities,
starting with MIT
and then with Georgetown
and Johns Hopkins Medical Institute,
Emory, the Mayo Clinic,
the University of Zurich,
that really has gotten credibility
and acceptance.
I'm going to explain
a few things
about how mental imagery is being used
as part of a,
an effort of personal transformation.
I'll be talking about introspection
and mechanism in mental imagery,
but let me start off by pointing out that
I have to be extremely humble.
Um, that was
a fantastic talk we just heard,
and it reminded me of
how little we know
in the scientific community,
just how narrow
and focused we've been.
Hopefully we're starting to build a brick
that can contribute to the wall
but we really must be modest.
So with that preface.
Let me talk about
what we've discovered --
The Dalai Lama spoke
before an overflow crowd of 14,000
at the annual meeting
of the Society for Neuroscience,
despite a petition started by
some Chinese neuroscientists
to ban him from speaking.
And in 2014, the Dalai Lama was invited to speak
at one of the world's foremost medical research centers,
the National Institute of Health,
where he was greeted with a standing ovation.
I don't think I can recall
ever seeing this auditorium this full,
and I've been at NIH for twenty years.
So that says something about the person
who is sitting to my left,
who I think all of you want to hear from,
His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
His Holiness saw a demonstration just a few minutes ago,
of a thirteen year old girl with cerebral palsy
who is in our rehabilitation lab,
with some very high tech
analyses of how her motor problems
connect with what's going on in the brain,
and how training on the elliptical
and some other things they're doing
is improving her leg's functioning,
and maybe reprogramming
the motor part of her brain.
The controller is here,
so controller damaged,
and then this movement difficult.
So now I learned,
training here, can change the controller.
Ultimately, scientific research should
bring some benefit to humanity.
The company or concerned people
who made this,
I really very much appreciate.
And you, now you see,
can tell them how useful this is.
And then,
I think in Europe,
I think comparatively better, better facilities.
But look at Africa.
Yeah.
Many poor people.
And then less developed countries,
the suffering is immense.
During the 21st century scientists,
technologists really
develop wonderful sorts of inventions.
So you can see, you can touch.
Cold hand.
That's this device here.
You see how the Vagus nerve here.
Yes. And it works?
Great sort of result, out of scientific research,
and technology also.
Wonderful.
[narrator] The Dalai Lama collected a prestigious award today
for his unique contribution in engaging
with multiple dimensions of science.
The John Templeton Foundation
stated that for decades
the Dalai Lama has focused
on the connections
between the investigative traditions of science
and Buddhism, specifically
by encouraging scientific reviews
of the power of compassion
and its potential to address the
world's fundamental problems.
The Templeton award,
which was established
over forty years ago,
claims to be the world's largest
yearly monetary award.
The Dalai Lama
says that he intends to donate it
to help impoverished children in India,
and also to fund further
scientific research and investigation.
The Dalai Lama continued to collaborate with
including Richard Davidson.
If it weren't for these dialogues,
I think I wouldn't have found some key insights.
It's been deeply important and meaningful.
And I think that it will transform science.
Neuroplasticity simply means that the brain changes
in response to experience and in response to training.
Most of the time the brain is changing unwittingly.
Recent evidence suggests that
the average American adult spends
forty-seven percent of her
or his waking life,
not paying attention to what they're doing.
Now what you see,
here, is the expression
of high amplitude gamma oscillations.
These gamma oscillations
when they are seen in normal human
beings are typically very brief,
less than one second in duration.
But we observe them continuously at high amplitude
in these long term meditation practitioners.
These are oscillations which are associated
with states of focused attention,
as well as periods of insight when different elements
of a percept
or an idea come together
in a kind of momentary insight.
Then you see a burst of gamma.
Now, this is very interesting --
we have for the very first time a technology
which allows us to actually look at epigenetic changes
in human brain tissue.
We can take a blood cell,
and we can convert that cell
into a pluripotent stem cell.
We can then turn it into
any other kind of cell in the body.
And one of the things that we can do, in a dish,
is that we can turn it into any kind
of neuron that we find in the human brain,
and then we can look at the gene expression
in that neuronal stage.
And so this is going to usher in a whole new era of investigation
that enables us to look with much greater specificity,
at the brain, than ever before.
It is also important to know that there are three major
periods of increased plasticity in the brain --
one is right around birth;
the second is around the onset of schooling
between the ages of five and seven years;
and the third is around adolescence.
These are periods where the brain is radically reorganized,
and these are all opportunities for intervention.
The Dalai Lama also worked closely
for many years with other scientists, like Paul Ekman.
In 2016,
they launched their comprehensive
map of human emotions.
If I heard you correctly, Your Holiness,
you are talking about a map of emotions.
Yes.
We human beings,
this marvelous intelligence,
either you see becomes a source of happiness,
or a source of worry.
You have all the facilities, but at the same time
can be very, very unhappy person.
We met every week for almost two years,
trying to figure out
how can we use graphics
to give us insight into our emotions?
How can we map them?
The process of creating the map,
of answering the questions that he kept raising
about how to do it, how it should be shown,
made me think about emotions in a way I hadn't
thought of up until then,
after fifty years of studying emotion.
Because of emotions we may starve ourself to death,
because of emotions we may take our own life,
but the fundamental drives are puny compared
to the power of emotions which override them --
they are what drives life.
We must, sort of, utilize
a deeper level of our ability
to think,
to tackle our emotions.
The scientific dialogues continued, and they covered
molecular biology and genetics.
What I'm going to talk about essentially
is how parents
alter the activity of genes
in the brain and how that influences the way
their children respond to stress,
and in particular what I'd like to talk about,
and that component that may be somewhat new,
is how it is that the influence of parents can persist
potentially over the entire lifespan.
The idea is,
that as I mentioned, parental care alters
the activity of genes in the brain,
and that these effects are very specific.
Then the second component of this --
these parental effects actually involve a form of plasticity.
But this plasticity is different.
It doesn't involve connections between neurons.
The modifications actually occur
at the level of the gene itself.
And that there is an organization of the chemical
environment in which the gene operates,
and that is the effect
that then sustains itself over the lifespan.
They began to collaborate.
And what was so
impressive I think was the overlay between
Buddhist philosophy
and cognitive behavioral therapy,
and what I wanted to do was to try to bring
that into a particular context.
What we're understanding is that many forms of illness
and disease is shaped first by events that occur
early in life.
And second, it is shaped by
various forms of family experience.
And I'd like yourself and members of the audience
to simply imagine life as a child,
growing up in a family with
drug abuse, unemployment,
financial stress,
and physical and sexual abuse.
And emotionally they then become people
who are very sensitive to threat.
For these children their anger is not wrong.
It is very adaptive.
We've created an environment
in which the child must normally be angry.
And one of the problems that we face in medicine,
in particular in psychiatry,
is how do we reach out to those children.
How do we deal with that form of anger?
Of course, you know, related to this is the question
which His Holiness was saying that he has
been often asking and interested,
that as a result of changes at the brain level,
there is a manifestation of changes
at the psychological and emotional level.
Yes, that's uncontentious.
But can one also imagine
the reversal process,
where as a result of a thought process,
change in the thought process,
one could see a change on the brain level, as well.
The optimism here is that these can occur,
and that the dialogue involved in
cognitive behavioural therapy
or in Buddhist philosophy
can, there is the prospect,
of changing at the level of the gene itself.
There is the prospect.
I think a lot of our problems,
not necessarily created by technology itself,
but by anger, hatred, fear.
I had the honor to spend a week in Dharamsala
at the invitation of His Holiness
for a remarkable meeting,
"The Nature of Life",
and it was a truly remarkable experience.
It was a discussion we were having to do
about embryonic stem cells.
And it was offered
from the Buddhist perspective
that the Abhidharma mentions that
through the meeting of two regenerative substances
of the mother and the father,
consciousness enters and the being then becomes sentient.
From which you might reason that the being
becomes a sentient immediately at fertilization,
and that there would therefore be very serious problems
with working with such a cell.
And that was the opening position, the opening thought.
And as more scientific discussion went back and forth
about this point, it emerged that yes,
but if you took embryos and separated the cells
you got two people, not one.
And if you implanted an embryo it was no guarantee
that you would even get a single person,
you might get none,
because most embryos spontaneously abort.
And so maybe it wasn't so simple. And maybe in fact --
and it was just a remarkable
moment for me as a scientist
hearing the Buddhists and His Holiness discussing this.
Maybe, in fact,
there was a different interpretation there,
and maybe there was no negative karma associated
with experimentation at that point.
I think our
knowledge about consciousness,
as time goes, time passes,
I think will increase,
this is my feeling.
Right now in the west, people
are trying to write about
the ethical questions in genetics.
And I hope that the monks here and yourself
don't feel like you have to wait.
I know several of the monks have said,
"Well, I have so much to learn and so much to learn."
You also have so much to teach.
Still a lot of things to further develop.
So combination of discussion, you see,
helps to extend knowledge,
and the field of scientific research
also now can expand.
The Dalai Lama supported opening the field
of contemplative neuroscience
to a new generation.
I'm a neuroscientist, and I did my PhD
and postdoctoral work at Emory University.
And they suggested that I go to the Summer Research Institute.
And then following on that I was able
to get a grant to do a research study,
a neuroimaging study on meditation,
and so that really launched my career
into a different direction.
The Summer Research Institute is
really instrumental in this whole field.
They bring in a lot of the senior researchers and scholars,
and a lot of the younger graduate students and postdocs
that are coming up,
and the idea is to really foster our development.
Young scientists who attend
the Summer Research Institute are eligible
to apply for a $20,000 Varela grant.
More than sixty-three million in follow on grant research funding
in the field of contemplative neuroscience
has been raised as a result.
If you put out a request for papers to a conference,
who should be allowed to speak?
You know, if you're a young person
and you're just getting your feet wet you may
actually be making a fool of yourself when you get up
and give your poster paper or your presentation,
but actually that's part of growing into the field.
There's a nurturing that you can do of a community
through inclusion in a conference.
Amishi's lab was awarded
a Varela Grant in 2006.
Hello, everyone. Can you hear me? All right.
Can you see my face? OK.
The Dalai Lama's intervention allows me to take very seriously
the wisdom that comes from the Buddhist texts.
Even in the conversation I had with him directly
during this meeting,
it was clear that
this terrain he knows well.
And in some sense my results were so familiar
to him that he almost thought there were obvious.
That's sort of shocking because it's taken us
about seventy years of attention research in
the field of cognitive neuroscience to really
come to a clear answer to some of these questions.
And to him it was what he predicted and it's what
he was happy to see, but he wasn't surprised by it.
It's definitely helped me feel like I have a whole
other goldmine of thought to lean on
for motivating hypotheses in our studies.
So Buddha himself, you see, made clear --
all my followers, monks, scholars,
should not accept my teaching out of faith,
but rather a thorough investigation and experiment.
Today we have the great privilege of exploring
what is one of the greatest mysteries of all,
the nature of consciousness, the nature of the mind.
Professor Christof Koch, who's a professor of biology
and engineering at Caltech.
He is also the chief scientist
at the Paul Allen Institute
for Brain Science, a remarkable new initiative.
Your Holiness, I have the great responsibility
of representing 2,300 years of Western thought
on this in one hour.
This tradition reaches back all the way
to the Greeks in Western thought.
It's this tradition that stresses the empirical
You can think about things but ultimately
you have to test them against reality,
and your theories including theories of
consciousness have to be testable,
otherwise they are not scientific theories.
When I spent a week with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
I was struck by how often he talked about
the need to reduce the suffering of all conscious creatures,
not just all people.
That highly organised matter such as my brain,
such as your brain, such as the brains of other creatures,
comes with conscious experience.
I was struck by particular types of meditation.
You can have what Buddhists call a naked awareness,
pure experience, sheer experience,
when you're conscious, so you're not asleep,
you're conscious, but there's no content,
there's no desire, no dream,
no fear, no ego,
no sensory messages,
but you're still conscious.
Pure consciousness, very interesting.
[narrator] More and more there was strong and
growing support for the concept
of allowing young Buddhist scholars
who had mastered these techniques of controlling
their own minds to also
be trained as scientists themselves.
I think now more than ten years we
start selected monk students
and in a special sort of class for science.
I will just make a brief outline
how we are overseeing
many of the science initiatives
that are taking place
due to the guidance of His Holiness.
The science for the monks
is an initiative since the year 2001.
That was followed by the
secular science leadership.
The leadership program came into being because
we felt that was important not only to give the basic
science education but also to create a network
of science teachers or others who do the fieldwork
in different monasteries.
Many science teachers,
they very much impressed.
These monk students
do not know English,
do not know math, mathematic.
But their way to thinking, to analyze,
you see, very sharp.
In 2006,
when Your Holiness invited us
to collaborate with the library,
of Tibetan works and archives,
to develop this program,
it was a great honor for Emory University .
Certainly a program like this is
its aim is not only
to impart modern science education
for the Tibetan monks and nuns,
but His Holiness' vision
here is to prepare
the future contemplative collaborators with
the science so that
new knowledge can be formed
which can have a
tremendous benefit for the humanity at large.
And then monk students
themselves also gradually,
they really found
not only just interest
but something very useful.
Extensive science curriculum
has been created and translated.
Many Tibetan monks have been trained
over years at Emory University
to become science teachers
for the project,
and new science centers have been created
at all of the leading Tibetan monasteries in India.
For the first time
in two thousand years,
a dramatic change has been made
in Tibetan monastic education.
Science has officially become
a required course of study.
And if we can implement knowledge from
Buddhist science and Buddhist philosophy,
then we can create a collaboration
of knowledge which can
have a very positive outcome.
Although the outcome
may not appear immediately,
in the long run
they will be great results and
great progress.
And I see it as a contribution
to the future generations,
and, ah, humanity as a whole.
The Dalai Lama also encouraged the development
of new scientifically based education curriculum for youth.
A conference was held in 2018 for the
presentation of some model programs.
And so your office extended an invitation to individuals
around the world to think about building curricula
that have an ethical dimension to them.
And this is where Jennifer Knox and her colleagues
in the group at Emory have been doing some
really fundamental work.
Their program is called, the SEE Program,
social, emotional, and ethical learning.
Three focuses of inner focus and emotional intelligence,
other focus, social intelligence,
and outer focus, systems intelligence.
Many individuals who are in our culture
have experienced trauma
and so without developing
some fundamental skills of
regulating the nervous system,
the students are not
often able to even
move into a meditation and the breath
can often be a trigger
for that former trauma.
So we've built in an entire chapter
based on building
skills of resilience.
Scientifically based on the breakthroughs
that have been made in the fields
of cognitive science,
epigenetics,
and neuroscience
over the past thirty years,
the SEE program teaches
effective coping skills,
strategies that can used to regulate emotion,
and strategies to gain focus.
Now the modern knowledge,
education,
not adequate to bring happy society.
We create some problem, disagreement,
then the solution,
we put the responsibility of the solution on gun.
Totally wrong.
The SEE program has been translated
into twelve different languages
and in April of 2019
the Dalai Lama launched
the program worldwide.
This is our thirtieth dialogue.
Thirty occasions where we have sat with His Holiness,
scientists, philosophers, scholars
and contemplatives,
investigating the relationship between
Buddhist science and modern science.
We also want to acknowledge
your dear friend Francisco Varela
whose vision
made it possible in a very powerful
way for all of us to be together
and to greet Amy Varela.
Where are you Amy?
Who is president of the board of Mind & Life Europe.
Creating bridges through dialogue
is not a quick
and straightforward process.
To participate in a true dialogue,
you must bring to it
the whole of yourself.
You must expect that building a bridge
may be slow, difficult,
even threatening at times.
Its essence is in its dynamical
and open nature,
which is a necessary condition
for something really new
to emerge from it.
And the active ingredient
in the production of something radically new
is personal commitment.
Absolute presence
through compassion and friendship.
Gentle bridges, a true dialogue between
the Western and the Buddhist traditions
for investigating
the nature of reality.
The Dalai Lama continued to push for
the expansion of dialogue with
other scientists from many
other parts of the world.
From Africa,
to Japan.
With Russian scientists,
and with Chinese scientists.
Now we are going to have one meeting
with Chinese scientists.
This is first time.
So there is real potential
Now here we are a few people.
But we are representing billions of people. OK.
And that's, not academic,
but world passing through some kind of
crisis of emotion,
that emotion will not go,
go away by prayer
but training our mind.
In order to train our mind,
we should have fuller knowledge
about the whole system
of our emotion and mind.
We will certainly welcome you in Taiwan
and we are initiating continual discussions
in Taiwan sometime.
Thank you.
On his eightieth birthday,
the Dalai Lama publicly reaffirmed
his commitment to stand
shoulder to shoulder with scientists
as they tackle the toughest issues
facing humanity.
I'm a simple Buddhist monk,
but at the same time
eventually I become very close with scientists.
In our training,
reason become very important.
So this scientific way,
it compels us.
Now think,
how to utilize their sort of findings,
translate into action.
New ideas.
New way.
Scientists really showing,
I think, genuine interest in
trying to make a better world.
So this is the sign of progress.
So therefore, remain a little bit skeptical.
Then, skepticism brings doubt.
Doubt brings investigation.
Buddha stated,
all my followers,
monks, scholars,
should not accept
my teaching out of faith, out of devotion,
but rather thorough investigation
and experiment.
Through that way,
once you're convinced,
then you accept my teaching.
So, this is quite, sort of, scientific way.
So, therefore,
my body,
this person,
half Buddhist monk,
half scientist.
♪