Last Updated on December 30, 2025 by pg@petergamma.org
Matthieu Ricard
After Matthieu Ricard presented these scientific studies about meditation 20 years ago:
Matthieu Ricard reviews among other this PNAS paper from 2004 in the above video:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101
Ricard was entitled by some newspapers as „the happiest man in the world“. And did Matthieu Ricard not invest a lot of time in his wiki page as well?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthieu_Ricard
And did a lot of writing? He wrote best-selling books, and many more publications. But what exactly is his identity now? Does he not have multiple identities? And did he not many things in his life?
But what happens 20 years after the studies Ricard reviewed and participated which where about meditation?
Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org had do invest a lot of time to find out? But what was the result of this?
Who does research about meditation in the year 2025? Is Antoine Lutz the only scientist who is left who sustainably publishes papers about meditation?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=biXgcqQAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
And do the papers Antoine Lutz writes about meditation strike you? And if so, which one exactly? Antoine Lutz was the first author of the PNAS paper from 2004 mentioned above.
And does not all of this not make us all suffer? To make suffer those who are looking for a progress in meditation research during the last 20 years? Matthieu Ricard makes us personally suffer. On the other hand we love Rita Riniker for her straightness:
Ven. Losang Palmo (Rita Riniker)
which was born in Switzerland
She grew up in Switzerland, and took ordination as a Buddhist nun in 1991. She lived for about 15 years in India at Tushita Meditation Centre, Dharamsala. Dharamsala is the place where the Dalai Lama live in India. And Rita Riniker became one of the of the Tushita Meditation Centre primary teachers, before she came back to Switzerland.
And is there something to complain about Rita Riniker since 1991? Isn t her curriculum vitae is very straightforward, as well as her personality? She is an excellent teacher who is appreciated in Switzerland, Israel and in many more places around the world.
But finally, we do not doubt that research about meditation will be a success sooner or later. But should research about meditation not be done with people such as Rita Riniker? Riniker who spent 15 years of her life to become a teacher? Isn t it better to study the brains of Rita Riniker s in a brain scanners and with other methods more in detail, than to study people who meditate only for 20 min a day? Or in other words, isn t better to study the world champions in mind training more in detail, since should we not learn from the best people in their discipline which are available?