Scientists have only recently begun to map the brain regions related to positive emotions such as empathy. But when Davidson observed Ricard meditating on compassion while hooked up to EEG sensors, he found a striking increase in gamma waves in the left prefrontal cortex, an area correlated with reported feelings of happiness. The findings furnish scientific support for something the Dalai Lama often says: A person meditating on compassion for others becomes the first beneficiary.
Compassion for others begins at home. "One who loves himself will never harm another," the Buddha is quoted as saying. A faithful meditation practice demonstrates compassion for oneself, since it involves conscious dedication of time and effort to improving personal well-being. The insights gained through such practice may make it easier to feel kindness toward others; by growing aware of how often you're swayed by emotions you may be slower to blame others for similar lapses, less inclined to interpret their actions as intentional slights.
Compassion can also help people manage their own suffering, since it's a reminder that others are also in pain. "After that, our pain does not feel as oppressive," says Ricard. "We stop asking the bitter question, Why me?" The link between compassion for others and for oneself may explain why recent studies connect altruism to health and happiness.
Happiness: Your Birthright
From best-sellers on finding joy to a Harvard course on "a fulfilling and flourishing life," happiness is a popular American pursuit. Of course, there's happiness and then there's happiness. Most of us hold in high esteem the hedonic variety of happiness: experiences of pleasure and, often, amassing material goods and wealth. But there's another kind, called eudaimonia, that rests on the realization of personal goals and potential. The ideal runs in a ragged line from Aristotle to Maslow to Sartre, paralleling Buddhism somewhere along the way.
Buddhism asserts that lasting happiness is your birthright. But it doesn't come from having; it comes from freeing ourselves of mental blindness and afflictive emotions. Once we have it, says Ricard, we can see the world without veils or distortions. "It is the joy of moving toward inner freedom and of the loving kindness that radiates towards others."
The tricky part: One of those veils is the very idea of an unchanging core self, or a soul. "We generate our own suffering by complex processes of self-identification," says Kabat-Zinn. "The ego contracts around things. Someone in traffic bumps my car. I tell him he has ruined 'my day.'"
We are fundamentally interdependent with other people and our environment, says Ricard in his new book, Happiness. Each moment between birth and death, the body undergoes innumerable transformations, with the mind the theater of countless emotional and conceptual experiences. "Experience" is simply the content of mental flow. Yet we assign permanence, uniqueness and autonomy to the self. Such self-importance and ego-grasping form the root of suffering.
Meditators find that when they stop taking their own emotional upheavals so seriously, the self drops away. They process the world more directly. Absorption, a state similar to what is known as "flow," increases. "People are hungry for this kind of authentic experience," observes Kabat-Zinn.
Urging seekers of happiness to not only shake off egoism but to understand the amorphous nature of the ego itself remains a subversive idea in the West, even though some leading neuroscientists have come to the same conclusion. Wolf Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, for instance, describes the brain as lacking any decision-making "coherence center." It's like an orchestra without a conductor.
It's a tremendously hopeful possibility that brains can change for the better—specifically, become sharper, nicer, happier. Ricard may be his own best argument. Many who encounter him are struck by the sense of well-being he projects.
More than a year after my personal nadir of parenthood—with that 911 call—I started meditating on my own. Today I occasionally meditate with my son, my not-quite-former fellow hothead. As we focus on developing compassion for each other and learning to be calm, he fiddles with the incense sticks.
As Kabat-Zinn says: "Awareness gives you your life back. You can then decide what to do with it."
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