For many years His Holiness has dialogued with western scientists, psychologists and meditators, under the name ‘Mind and Life’, examining the parallels between ancient Buddhist understandings of mind and the more recent scientific findings made since scanners and electrodes for monitoring and measuring brain function became available to researchers. The first conference took place in 1987, a relatively small event in Dharamsala and findings were published in an edition called ‘Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind’ [1].
One of the most notable pioneering contributors to those conversations was Francisco Varela, brilliant biologist, neurophysicist and philosopher from Chile who, with encouragement from the Dalai lama, along with self confessed ‘meditation junkie’ B Alan Wallace, and Professor Richard Davidson steered the dialogues towards research into the affects of long term meditation, revealing scientific evidence of a natural human predisposition to ‘brain plasticity’, hence the possibility that meditation techniques can literally ‘change the mind’. These dialogues have come to be known as the ‘Mind and Life Dialogues’.
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