Most of us have heard that it is wrong to think only of oneself, they say it through morality, religion and family customs, however, as in any contract, there is a message hidden between the lines, we feel that the human being is selfish. and must fight it to be more virtuous.
We have shown that the subject is different through the development of neuroscience. It is not so much about virtue but about the very needs of human survival. The ability to see beyond oneself is a trait of evolved intelligence. And, as a result, it has also recently been shown that increasing Serotonin increases the feeling of happiness.
“The only acceptable egotism is for everyone to agree to feel better. -Jacinto Benavente-
All this is stated by Matthieu Ricard, a French molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk, the son of the celebrated European philosopher Jean-Fran’ois Revel, a celebrated scientist. He participated in a prestigious brain research conducted in the United States, then moved to Nepal, adopted the lifestyle of the place and stayed there.
Matthieu Ricard is convinced that selfishness is first and foremosm a source of misery. The fact that you expect it so long “I” forces the person to take a paranoid position. Inadvertently, the person has to constantly think about how to preserve that?Or how to exalt him, how to make him prevail over others.
The result of thinking only of yourself is that you are full of fear. To love is to break with this “I”, allowing it to dissipate in others. Self-centeredness leads you to build barriers. It puts you on the defensive, you feel threatened and only to a certain extent.
If you spend a lot of time circling ideas that revolve around you, you also end up limiting your perception of the world, this custom makes it difficult to look at reality from another point of view, it protects you from surprise. This makes your emotional experience very limited and easily numbs you.
For Matthieu Ricard, the human being is a two-faced wolf, on the one hand there is a cruel wolf, who only thinks of himself, on the other, a wolf working for his herd, which one wins?The one who’s best fed.
For this Buddhist monk to think only of oneself leads to indolence, imagine also how easy it is to go from indolence to cruelty, in this state only thoughts of indifference or hatred appear, the person begins to hate others as a strategy to get excited. . The rest is bad and good. The rest is desperate, only she sees the light.
When the person is trapped in this dynamic, the smile goes out and boredom becomes a normal mood. The rest is not a source of joy, but a source of lament. Everyone gets irritated, everyone gets in the way; all those who do not fulfill the function of satisfying their own ego. In these conditions, bitterness is one step away.
In his laboratory, when he studied the brain, Matthieu Ricard was able to show that helping others makes people very happy; In fact, being more supportive is a method used to boost the morale of people suffering from depression.
Solidarity is the opposite of selfishness, the more altruistic the person, the more the world is sensitized, the mind and heart are open to understanding the reality of others and this makes the person more receptive and intelligent. see the world from different points of view and enrich the emotional world of the person. Thus, it is also possible to build better relationships.
For Matthieu Ricard, the high level of solidarity is called compassion. This monk draws attention to a historical fact. The world has progressed in increasingly sophisticated forms of compassion; human rights, women’s rights and, more recently, animal rights, are proof of this development.
For this Buddhist monk a great revolution has already begun in the world: that of compassion, he says that in the short term this will create the conditions for economic improvement, in the medium term will lead to an increase in the quality of life and, in the long term, preserve the environment. It assures us that, little by little, we will realize that humanity has only one way to continue to exist: cooperation.