I attended the recent Davos World Economic Forum as a speaker and was inspired by the voices that called for a greater sense of values and altruism in the world. In the session ‟Rethinking Values in the Post-Crisis World,” Mohammad
Archive du blog pour Matthieu Ricard
An Illusion of Freedom
‟When you look closely at life in a city, you have the impression that all the facets of individuals’ lives must be defined with great precision, like a screw that has to fit exactly in its hole. In one sense,
Meeting an old friend
A study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), showed that the Arctic tern, whose annual migration is the longest of any animal, travels 70,000 km each year during
A bird view of the Grand Prismatic
Last September, I was lucky enough to be taken on a small plain, early morning above the Grand Prismatic, at the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming
A photographer’s dream
Reincarnation is not the rebirth of a self (end)
In conventional terms, we can talk about an ‟individual” consciousness, even if the individual doesn’t exist as an isolated entity. The fact that there’s no such discontinuous entity being transferred from one life to the next doesn’t mean that there
The Short-Lived Triumph of Selfishness
Imagine a ship that is sinking and needs all the available power to run the pumps to drain out the rising waters. The first-class passengers refuse to cooperate because they feel hot and want to use the air-conditioner and other
Reincarnation is not the rebirth of a self
First of all, it’s important to understand that what’s called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some ‟entity” like an autonomous ‟self”. It’s not a process of metempsychosis.
As long as one thinks in terms
Magic hours in the Himalaya
This image was taken during late afternoon, in Nepal, this fall. To balance the sky and the earth, and restore why the human eye sees (but what the captor does not register because of the limitation of it’s contrast range),
Daniel Batson and the ‟Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis”
During the recent preparatory meeting for the Mind and Life Institute’s conference on ‟Altruism and Compassion in Economics” (to be held in Zurich in April, see www.compassionineconomics.org), I had the chance to spend time with Daniel Batson, an eminent American
Give Altruists a Chance
Recently, while preparing the ‟Mind and Life Institute” meeting that will be held next April (www.compassionineconomics.org), I had the opportunity to speak with the participants who will take part in this conference, including Ernst Fehr, the renowned Swiss economist. For