The Dalai Lama: Scientist (2019) - full transcript

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.

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 levels of reality.

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 that nothing exists,

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 if something exists,

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.

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.

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 field of neuroscience.

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

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 and 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.

And that has been studied with these techniques,

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.

Wonderful.

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 many scientists,

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 is 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.

Neuroscientist Amishi Jha

was awarded a Varela Grant in the year 2005.

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 calling of nature.

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.

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.