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I saw a TED talk about the happiest man on the planet. It was a French molecular biologist who became a Buddhist monk and spent 25 years meditating. They test
by jraby3 4y ago
I saw a TED talk about the happiest man on the planet.
It was a French molecular biologist who became a Buddhist monk and spent 25 years meditating.
They tested his brain with an fMRI machine and found that he was 4 standard deviations above the average when it came to the place in his brain where they suspected happiness stemmed from.
IMO he’s qualified as a happiness expert. Not sure about these writers though.
- anonymousnotme 4y agoI would think a lot of long time meditators are much more in touch with reality and accept the past and don't worry about the future. So, I would expect them as a group to be much more likely to be happy. I would expect all enlighted individuals to be happy.
- javier123454321 4y agoYou are right, there's actually two and a half millenia of people in eastern traditions dedicating their entire lives to 1. Achieving happiness, and 2. Developing a methodology for achieving that state to others. It's called Buddhism, and if anyone, they are the happiness experts. The western scientific tradition is just starting in this journey (about 50 years of scientific studies exist on people that are considered high meditation achievers). One of the main ideas of buddhism lacks a good translation, but it is in the fact that understanding something intellectually is NOT the same as understanding something experientially. That's apparent in the way this article is laid out. Just because you have been studying happiness doesn't mean you experience it. This difference in types of knowledge is key, and so foundational at the highest levels of buddhist tantra that working with the intellect is often seen as an impediment. That's why Buddhism is seen as a practice above a religion or philosophy.
- neaden 4y agoCategorizing Buddhism as achieving happiness doesn't seem accurate to me at all. Enlightenment is in some ways similar to happiness but they are distinct things and getting too attached to happiness wouldn't help you get enlightened. For instance Buddhism traditionally teaches that reincarnating as a god after accumulating good karma is an overall negative thing since the happiness of being in heaven will keep you from pursuing Buddhism and ultimately be transitory.
- javier123454321 4y agoAnother mistranslation. However, the state of enlightenment (at the tantra level) can be described as a state of joy or bliss that is orders of magnitude beyond any transitory happiness that we might feel when we're not enlightened. But to your point, you are right, looking for transitory moments of happiness is not the same as working towards enlightenment.