The Happiest Man Alive

Whilst scrolling through my feed yesterday I stumbled upon this captivating and intriguing headline that made me a bit curious.

The article tells about a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard who left his work, as a molecular biologists at a young age, to move to the Himalayas and meditate. Many describe him as being the happiest human in the world but Ricard does not believe so. >“I know happier monks,I really do. It’s absurd, source To prove that Ricard is indeed the happiest man in the world,neuroscientist Richard Davidson connected the monk to 256 sensors to test brain activities while he meditates. >Davidson discovered that Ricard’s brain produced a level of gamma waves - which are linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory - never before reported in scientific literature. source

Ricard is a close friend with the Dalai Lama

and once asked if he could go on a retreat to disappear from the attention but the Dalai Lama told him if the world wanted him to be the happiest man on earth, then he should be the happiest man on earth.

The first life lessons Ricard talked about in this articles was that happiness is not an endless succession of experiences. Happiness should not be exhaustive, it should be a way of being that overtakes all other emotional states. Secondly, Ricard mentioned that unlike pleasure, which fades as you experience it, happiness is something you learn and cultivate. It is a skill we all can acquire and we can start by letting go of ignorance in our lives. We can not be happy if obsession, hatred, envy, greed or pride are present in our minds. These are toxins we need to get rid of. The final lesson I took from the article was that if one is aware of the anger within, then it can not be sustained. The anger will have no fuel to keep on burning. By being aware you let the anger dissolve and not build like a ticking bomb until it exploids. >It's about realising that you not anger any more than you are the flu. source

I hope you enjoyed the post. You can read more about him here and on his personal website here.