At the instigation of Fabienne Phillipart we went to a lecture given by Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and interpreter to H.H. the Dalai Lama. It was organised by the "Ligue des Optimistes du Royaume de Belgique", an organisation dedicated to combating the corrosive habit of negative thinking. It's difficult to argue with the basic idea that optimism is its own reward. There is clearly something profoundly unhealthy about the public's morbid predeliction for bad news. It must be that there is something smugly reassuring about the "Isn't it awful/I told-you-so" position. At the same time there is nothing quite so depressing as strained jollity - like a hats and hooters party on the Alzheimer's ward!

The lecture sought to address some of these questions from the point of view of Tibetan Buddhism. Matthieu Ricard was a fluent, natural and amusing speaker, touching very delicately on issues of profound existential import. You could criticise him for purveying a sort of user-friendly Buddhism "light", but for a mass audience he could hardly do much else. Why do the Tibetan Buddhists enagage in what is effectively a mass P.R. exercise? Apparently the Dalai Lama himself packed in some 20,000 in the Sportpaleis in Antwerp! They're hardly likely to recruit great numbers to an extraordinarily demanding monastic way. Presumably they do it out of a desire to offer some hope, some sustenance to the great mass of people, who instinctively sense that the Tibetan tradition remains one of the last genuine repositories of a spiritual way of life. Nevertheless, there is always a suspicion that it is Buddhism's aura of the exotic which constitutes its draw on the public, rather than the attractiveness of meditative practice as such. And after all the jokes and the discussion of the advantages of optimism over pessimism, the "take-away message" was that unceasing meditation on the reality of impermanence can bring the adept to the realization of Universal Love and Infinite Compassion.
And if you really wanted to get there, where would you start? Would you need to do as Matthieu Ricard, abandon everything to live in the Himalaya in a monastic community about the Dalai Lama? Isn't that just an exotic fantasy? Surely Reality is always Here, always Now, it's just that we cannot "realize" it.

It was interesting to see a number of familiar SCIC faces in the audience, slightly embarrassed perhaps at having revealed the fact of their search for the true meaning of life. How foolish! How ridiculous as to still have a question as to what it might mean to be a human being alive on this earth!