“Change your Mind, Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness” is the title of a lecture given at Google on March 15, 2007. I just found the full video (length: 60 minutes) on Google Video. It’s an entertaining and profound lecture of a wise man. Ricard is an active participant in the current scientific research on meditation and the brain. He emphasizes that we truly underestimate the power of transformation.

For Ricard, happiness is a deep state of well-being and wisdom that flourishes in every moment of life, despite the inevitability of suffering. Individuals can learn to minimize suffering in life by practicing moderation in all things, as well as meditation. Abstract of the lecture from the Google website: “If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.”

Matthieu Ricard has lived and worked in the Himalayan region for the last thirty years. He is a Buddhist monk and resides at Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he grew up among the personalities and ideas of Paris’ intellectual circles and worked for his PHD degree in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur. After completing his doctoral thesis Ricard decided to forsake his scientific career and concentrate on Tibetan Buddhist studies. For the last few years, Matthieu Ricard has spent several months a year in Tibet implementing charitable projects that build and maintain clinics, schools and orphanages in the region (more: Dilgo Khyentse Fellowship Shechen). Since 1989, he has accompanied the Dalai Lama to France acting as his personal interpreter.

Enjoy the lecture: Change your Mind, Change your Brain