Since early childhood,

I have been interested in the mind,

in consciousness,

in understanding reality,

and through that, help others.

I was wondering

if anybody of you

has not ask these questions to themselves:

What is consciousness?

What is reality?

Well, for me this has been my life long passion.

And, I've been inspired by that

and I have been having that motivation

to find out more.

In order to understand these fascinating topics,

I thought I had to decide between

either studying physics,

or medicine or maybe philosophy,

but that was not a hard science,

or psychology.

So, I decided to study pharmacology

because I knew that there was the whole

range of fascinating substances

that had an effect on the mind.

I thought that by studying these substances,

I will have a better understanding of

what is the mind

and how it works.

Little did I know.

After finishing my studies,

I worked many years with people

who had addictions, depressions,

anxieties, fears,

and other mental illnesses.

We were very skilled at defining

mental disorders and dysfunctions.

But what is a healthy mind?

A mind that flourishes

that is actually happy.

We had no clue.

We were giving these some

strong substances, but they rarely helped

with the mental causes that

triggered these dysfunctions in the first place.

Addictions, for example,

do not begin with a physiological dependency.

They are actually triggered

by other mental causes that lead to

that, such as craving and desire

for pleasures and happiness.

Following my work with people who

have these challenges with mental disorders,

I then signed up with an organization

called Pharmaciens sans Frontieres,

which is an organization like

Médecins Sans Frontières but for

pharmacist. And I worked in Asia

with people who had leprosy,

tuberculosis and parasites,

serious cases of parasites.

And it really struck me

and I was really surprised to see these people

that had actually physical disintegration.

But they were in many ways more happy

than the people I was working

back in Switzerland where it's clean.

These people in Switzerland had

physical well-being but

were actually disintegrating mentally.

These really confused me.

I was looking and I was trying to find

scientific explanation of what that cause was.

Why that happened?

With the tools that I had learned,

I was not able to describe

these actual experiences of these people

who were disintegrating mentally

or were different because

they were disintegrating physically too.

So even less could I understand them.

I was really confused and was looking for

a scientific explanation.

It's during that research

that I encountered the Buddhist teachings

and its systematic methodology

of analyzing reality through actual experience.

While in modern science,

we look at reality as if it were out there,

as if there is something out there

independent of our way of perceiving it.

Some schools in Buddhism,

they take mind as the center

of experienced reality.

In many ways,

when I discovered that,

this was the missing link between

these two worlds,

a science of the mind par excellence,

I was hooked and accordingly I spent

the next eleven years in Dharamsala

in India among the Tibetan community

in exile.

I first learned Tibetan,

and then in Tibetan,

I studied philosophy,

Buddhist dialectics,

practice, and also debate.

But it's there that I met

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

and met a group of scientists

who were coming up to Dharamsala

every two to three years

to hold dialogues with him around science.

These were the mind and life dialogues.

I had the privilege to join this group.

And after few years, I had the honor

also to moderate some of the proceedings.

These meetings have been going on since 1987.

At the beginning were behind close doors.

They were the private exploration of topics

such as sleeping, dreaming and dying

or destructive emotions

or quantum physics

as well as craving, desire, and addiction.

over the years, these gatherings have also

taken place in public.

And, many of these dialogues

in these proceedings have been

actually published as books

and have been translated into

many languages.

On the YouTube,

you can also even find some

of the dialogues directly as

they were filmed during the proceedings.

All of these meetings were arranged by

the Mind and Life Institute

and hosted by His Holiness the Dalai Lama,

who is also the Mind and Life honorary chairman

and co-founder of this institute.

Mind and Life Institute seeks to

bridge and integrate contemplative wisdom

and practices with modern research capabilities,

and then, use the resulting knowledge

to catalyze and initiate programs

to alleviate suffering and

promote human flourishing.

And here it's important to differentiate that

we are not talking about pain,

we are talking about mental suffering.

During a meeting in the year 2000,

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

challenged the scientist present and said,

"All these dialogues are very interesting,

but what can we do for society?

Can you with your tools,

prove that what we think is beneficial

to really be of benefit?

And if it's beneficial,

then we should make it available to everybody."

This unleashed the whole new range

of basic research

what we nowadays call contemplative science.

One question that I was having is,

"how can such dialogue unfold

when you have world views that are so different?"

It was helpful for me

to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama

defining three parts of Buddhism.

Buddhist science,

Buddhist philosophy,

and Buddhist religion.

These dialogues focus on the first two:

Buddhist science and Buddhist philosophy,

which His Holiness encourage us to take out religion

because after all,

this is one's individual choice.

So, when we talk about science,

it might be important and helpful

to understand the English word science

comes from the Latin word 'scientia'

meaning knowledge.

So science is defined as a systematic

enterprise that builds and organizes

knowledge in the form of testable explanations

and predictions about the world.

It is important here to note that

it doesn't say how this knowledge is acquired,

only that it needs to be testable,

it needs to make explanations,

and that it needs to make predictions about the world.

So accordingly one method to gain knowledge

is by looking inside

and explore the inner world.

This is something that contemplative practitioners,

psychologists, and psychoanalysts

have been doing.

This is what we call the first person exploration

of the inner world.

On the other side,

by looking outside,

and explore the outer world,

you can also gaining knowledge.

This is what science has been doing

since let's say Galileo Galilei.

It's an observational of the external world

and is therefore called the third person

perspective of the world.

It is my conviction that

these two ways of acquiring knowledge

do not need to be mutually exclusive.

There are many aspects that speak to that

combination such as the exploration

of actual experience,

such as what are you experiencing right now?

This is something only you can

actually access.

I can't.

Nobody else can.

And also the effect of mental training.

To me, this combination

can be seen in this iconic image

of the Yogi in the lab.

The Yogi is the long-term practitioner

that has dedicated his life

to really understand the inside

of his mental world.

There several ways how this image

can be interpreted.

And this image has also been featured on

National Geographic and on

Time Magazine by the way.

On the one side,

there is the science of meditation

where meditation become the object of investigation.

We call this the science of meditation.

On the other side,

meditation itself can be a method

to explore and gain knowledge.

So meditation as science.

Through this, one gains insight

into the mental process

and to actual experience.

Research in consciousness therefore require

an integrated research method,

a method that includes multiple disciplines,

and scientists from neuroscience,

from clinical science,

from philosophy,

and most important from contemplative traditions.

So over the last twenty years,

a lot has changed

in regard to the scientific study of consciousness.

New tools, new methods, and

new insights were combined

and have led to much

ground-breaking understanding.

First steps were taken in that direction

in 1992 when a group of scientists came

to Dharamsala in India,

and visited several hermits

high up in the Himalayas.

But the rest research methods as you can see here

were very limited and basic.

Adding to the limited tools was the challenge

of a clash of cultures.

I remember when this group of scientists

came to my school,

the Buddhist dialectic school,

and were showing how the research

is being done.

They put the cap with many electrodes

on one of those scientists,

in this case, Francisco Varela.

And when my schoolmates saw him sitting

there with his blue cap,

they all burst out laughing.

And asked,

"Why would you research the mind up here,

when everybody understands that

the mind is here?"

In the meantime,

the tools have become more

sophisticated and powerful.