Cultivating compassion

Mr. Ricard: [Happiness] can encompass every mental state except those who are just opposite which is like despair, hatred, precisely the mental factors that will destroy inner peace, inner strength, inner freedom. If you are under the grip of hatred, you are not free. You are the slave of your own thoughts. So that's not freedom, therefore, this is opposite to genuine flourishing and happiness.

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Ms. Tippett: So I imagine that people ask you how do I become happy? What do you say? How do you respond to that?

Mr. Ricard: Well, clearly by first saying yes, outward circumstances are important, I should do whatever I can. But I should certainly see that at the root of all that, there are inner circumstances, inner conditions. What are they? Well, just look at you. Now if I say, OK, come, we'll spend a weekend cultivating jealousy, now who is going to go for that?

We all know that even though that's part of human nature, but we are not interested in cultivating more jealousy, neither for hatred, neither for arrogance. So those will be much better off if they were not — didn't have such a grip on our mind. So there are ways to counteract those, to dissolve those.

I mean, you cannot, in the same moment of thought, wish to do something good to someone or harm that person. So those are mutually incompatible like hot and cold water. So the more you will bring benevolence in your mind, at every of those moments there's no space for hatred. It's just very simple, but we don't do that. We do exercise every morning 20 minutes to be fit. We don't sit for 20 minutes to cultivate compassion. If we want to do so, our mind will change, our brain will change. What we are will change. So those are skills. They need to be, first, identified, then cultivated. What is good to learn chess, well, you have to practice and all that. In the same way, we all have thoughts of altruistic love. Who didn't have that? But the common goal, we don't cultivate them.

From The Happiest Man in the World - http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/happiest-man/ the latest On Being interview with "Matthieu Ricard is a French-born, Tibetan Buddhist monk and a central figure in the Dalai Lama's dialogue with scientists." Photo today from an online exhibition about Geoffroy Tory at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. http://expositions.bnf.fr/tory/index.htm