matthieu ricard: being happy in isolation simply doesn't make sense

08 Aug 2017

lately, i’ve been really jamming out on this whole “all reality is interconnected” trip. i know it has a lot to do with listening to on being (i wonder if this is in their plans somehow?) but so many guests on the show talk about this idea.

one of my favorite quotes was shared with me by curtis ogden:

When a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is found by connecting with more of itself. — francisco varela

and given the current brokenness of the world, it makes it seem even more important and urgent to me that connection is the work i/we need to be doing.

the latest addition to the growing concept of interest comes from (surprise, surprise) another guest to on being, matthieu ricard. below is a long excerpt from the episode, but here’s two short quotes that illustrate what stuck with me:

Relations co-define an object. Like take a rainbow in the sky. Well, it looks very beautiful, very, very vivid and clear. You would think that that rainbow is something existing on its own. Now behind you, you mask the rays of sun, and there is not a speck of existence of that rainbow that remains. It’s all gone, because you remove something, an element of a set of relations that crystallize that rainbow somehow as a phenomenon. The idea is the same for every single phenomenon — nothing exists on its own.

 

If you think of separate entities, well, I am a separate entity, as well. So what do I do? I create a small bubble, a self-centered bubble, and I take care of my own happiness, because after all, I’m this separate entity, so I just have to build my own happiness. And that’s fine, and everyone will become happy in their own bubble, and then the world will be fine.

Well, if it would work, OK, but this is not working. Why? Not just because of moral issues, because it’s bad to be self-centered — because it’s dysfunctional, because it’s at odds with reality. So it doesn’t work.

lately, i’ve been building out theories of change for different areas of my work and i’m starting to think that i need to just do one for my life in general. one of the parts of being a theory of change is both understanding a goal as well as understanding resources and strategies you currently have access to in order to move towards that goal. of course, doing this effectively also requires a sufficient understanding of how the world works (i’m thinking of complexity here). but assuming you have that understanding, in order to move towards a liberated world (which is what i’m interested in), understanding that all things are interrelated is a key factor.

as ricard says, if people try to make themselves happy in isolation, it doesn’t work, not because of morality or anything else. it doesn’t work because it’s at odds with reality.

i wrote a few weeks ago about how we need to learn how to work more with reality and so i guess this is another hat tip in that direction.

to reality!

longer excerpt

Mr. Ricard: So it was another great encounter. I met Trinh Xuan Thuan in Andorra, in the Pyrenees. We were both invited to some summer university. And immediately, he said, “I’m born in Vietnam, born a Buddhist. I always wanted to have a dialogue about Buddhism and astrophysics, or modern science.” We did that. It was wonderful. The most fascinating thing I learned through this dialogue was precisely about something very deep about the nature of reality, related to interdependence and impermanence. And interdependence, of course, in modern physics is slightly different. There’s non-localization, the fact that if one photon or particle split into two, and they shoot out at basically any distance in the universe, they still remain part of a whole. So there is something there that is still not separate. So that was an incredible insight for me, because interdependence is not just the fact that things are related but also that, therefore, they are devoid of a totally autonomous, independent existence.

Anything — beautiful, ugly, I don’t know, red, blue — any characteristic comes to relation. Relations co-define an object. Like take a rainbow in the sky. Well, it looks very beautiful, very, very vivid and clear. You would think that that rainbow is something existing on its own. Now behind you, you mask the rays of sun, and there is not a speck of existence of that rainbow that remains. It’s all gone, because you remove something, an element of a set of relations that crystallize that rainbow somehow as a phenomenon. The idea is the same for every single phenomenon — nothing exists on its own. And that has profound repercussions in Buddhism, not only as a philosophical idea but also the way we grasp to the world. If you grasp to something as being “mine,” therefore, that object exists on its own.

Ms. Tippett: And I mean would you also say that a human analogy would be this phenomenon of globalization?

Mr. Ricard: Well, and at least to what the Dalai Lama calls the “sense of universal responsibility.” I know more and more leaders are speaking of interdependence, and I hear that word again and again about “the world is interdependent.” And it is true. We are interdependent, even, I would say, even more deeply than what we mostly think. But that leads to, also, the sense of — interdependency is at the root of altruism and compassion.

That’s one of the consequences of understanding interdependence. If you think of separate entities, well, I am a separate entity, as well. So what do I do? I create a small bubble, a self-centered bubble, and I take care of my own happiness, because after all, I’m this separate entity, so I just have to build my own happiness. And that’s fine, and everyone will become happy in their own bubble, and then the world will be fine.

Well, if it would work, OK, but this is not working. Why? Not just because of moral issues, because it’s bad to be self-centered — because it’s dysfunctional, because it’s at odds with reality. So it doesn’t work.

words / writing / post-processing
308w / 11min / 14min