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Researchers Crown Buddhist Monk the World's Happiest Man
concealment writes in with a story about a man who has been crowned the world's happiest. "Tibetan monk and molecular geneticist Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The 66-year-old's brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never before reported in neuroscience. The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — 'never reported before in the neuroscience literature,' Davidson said. The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain's left pre-frontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe."
when reading this, my brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never before reported in neuroscience!
I know when I can get Enlightenment to compile I am very happy, too.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2569 ... :-)
It isn't about ignoring the negative in life. It is changing your mind so that you react to life (whether its good or bad) in a healthy, positive way. Does a negative experience send you into a crushing depression, or do you find a way to move on (or even find within that negative experience seeds of motivation to improve your life)?
The article itself hints at the applications - the research focused on emotional balance. We have a growing problem with depression in the US. If we can find a reliable way to alter brain chemistry through meditation - that provides a very compelling alternative to medication. Even if the impact isn't strong enough or reliable enough to use instead of medication - it might improve one's prognosis when used in tandem with medication or traditional therapy. Exciting research with practical use.
Make me happy. You would like me when I'm happy.
Happiness = Perceived Life / Expected Life
Perceived Life = Actual Life x Perception
Therefore, to be happy, either a) improve your life, b) reduce your expectations or c) change your perception. Looks like this guy went for a mix of (b) and (c). At least that's my take on it.
> Happiness comes about from satisfaction and being content, why get satisfaction and feel content if you have failed in helping others?
You're starting off on the wrong foot, there. If you accept your first statement, you won't find happiness.
Happiness is its own reward, it's its own before-and-after. There's no prerequisite for it other than consciousness.
Knowledge that shit happens in the world and you can have very little effect on that is part of it - acceptance of your part as a small piece of all reality. Attempting to rationalise what doesn't have prerequisites or conditions will always lead you down a path away from it.
So - be happy. trust. let go of a set of rules someone taught you (through words or actions or whatever) and you'll find that discovering your own happiness without putting caveats on your experience of it ("I must help people a certain amount" to "I must earn so much" or whatever) will make you all the more useful as a help to others.
It comes naturally, effortlessly, and is kinda surprising when it does - and it's oddly inexplicable too. But there it is
(fwiw I used to be like you - unconsciously I thought the same way. Then I noticed how I thought, then I made some changes, and then they accelerated to the point I found happiness and contentment and it never left me. 38 years of hell, followed by four years and counting of bliss - and being just plain happy has a profoundly positive effect on people I come in contact with, and makes me all the more responsive to their needs.)
Nobody should be overly happy, not when there are so many sad things happening in the world. [...] Of course what I have said will anger many people, but it's truth.
"Angry" doesn't even begin to describe it. I've seen people I loved so down that they tried to kill themselves. Do you want to know what I think about people who deny others happiness? They should be taken out back and shot. Twice. Right now.
You are making a dramatic, serious and inexcusible mistake there. You confuse happiness with apathy. You think that people who are happy have no desire of helping others. You think that compassion means feeling horrible because someone else does. You think that people who are happy don't care about others.
And nothing could be further from the truth. People who are unhappy are the ones who stop caring about others. People who are depressed are more likely to fall into apathy than people who are in joy. People who share the feelings of others too much are less likely to be able to help them and more likely to drag them down even further.
Now you will probably argue that you said "overly", but that's a strawman. Who is going to decide on what level of happiness is fine and which is too much? You?
If everyone would be as happy as this dude, the world would be a much better place. Sure, we'd still have hurricanes, but we'd have a lot less war, poverty and inequality.
Now, please take yourself out back and put you out of your misery. We have way too many people like you on this planet, who begrudge other people's happiness.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I contest that every human being is either inherently ENTIRELY selfish, or have something wrong with them (i.e. insanity). Even those ultra-religious types that beat themselves violently in repentance for sins are doing it on the promise of eternal happiness in heaven. If they truly believed that there was no afterlife, or that they'd suffer for all eternity; they wouldn't do it.
This is the sort of libertarian nonsense that leads philosophers and psychologists to utterly detest randoids.
The problem with egotism, is it rests almost entirely on tautology. When almost any action can be "explained" by a circular reference to "because its in my self interest" (Why? Because I want to? Why do I want to? Because its in my self interest, ad nauseum) its a theory with no predictive powers, and frankly it runs completely at odds with everything we know about psychology and neuro-biology.
We know we have other drives other than self interest, and they are not underwritten by "self interest" either, just biology and if you explain biology by motive, you end up with mystical reification of processes. Just because we have evolved in our reproductive interests that is not the same as the claim of *intentions*. A mother throwing herself in front of a car to save her child might be acting in her species self interest, but she's not under any circumstances acting INTENTIONALLY in her OWN percieved self interest .
We have extensive networks of mirror neurons that give us the ability to empathise with others.
We have deeply wired structures in our brain that cause us to give up comfort for our children.
We are succeptable to ideological configurations that lead us to place the national interest over our own, and no dying in a kamikase attack in no way advances our personal wellbeing, because our brain design (for want of a better word) allows us to decide that the interest of the nation is more important to our personal interest.
And no, claiming that this is "irrational" doesn't help us here, because if rationality can only be defined (by the egotist creed) as self interested behavior, and self interested behavior is that, according to the randian, which is rational (by the same creed) then we are back into tautology territory again.
I could go on.
So we are stuck with a situation of a thesis about human behavior that can't be justified philosophically without committing fundamental logical errors. We can't justify it psychologically without engaging in fundamental ignorance of over a century of psychological research. We can't justify it scientifically because the evidence directly contradicts the thesis.
And to be honest, the hardest task, is to justify it politically because it seems to demand behaviors that go against everything we know about the proper running of a civil society.
Why do people persist in believing such hogwash? Its mystical solipsist randian nonsense.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Good talk on this.
http://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html
Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern!
Once you start thinking that improving your life is the key to happiness, you'll never be happy. Anything can always be improved, whether it's your annual salary or how much your kids love you.
This is irrespective of the assumption that it is either possible or desirable to be happy in the first place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it