Text: Subject: Zero-point energy in the human body Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2000 19:19:39 -0500 From:"Remy C" Organization: Prodigy Internet To: From: www.science-spirit.org I found this magazine on the newsstand and read this article in it. I went to their website where it was posted, but you need to loggin and get a password first. If we understood what is happening on a bioelectromagnetic level in what is described below, it would go a long way in understanding not only cold fusion, but all so-called "new energy" anomalies. Remy C. HappyY2K "Zen and Neuroscience: The Fire Sermon" By Sanjida O¹Connell Zen monks in deep meditation are able to keep their exposed bodies from freezing in the snow. What are the physiological changes associated with meditative states? Sanjida O¹Connell reports. In the early part of this century, the explorer Alexandra David-Neel described a scene in her book, My Journey to Lhasa: "I saw several of these masters practicing the art of tummo, sitting in the snow night after night, completely naked and immobile, and deep in their meditation, while the terrible ravages of winter spun and screamed around them. "I saw, in the brilliant clarity of the full moon, the fantastic examination that their disciples had to take: several young men were led, in the heart of winter, to the shore of a lake or a river where stripped of all their clothes, they had to dry sheets soaked in the icy water on their own flesh. Hardly had one sheet been dried than it was replaced by another. Stiffened by ice as soon as it emerged from the water, it was soon streaming on the shoulders of the [monk] as if it had been placed on a burning stove." What she describes is one of the more rigorous practices connected with Buddhist meditation. The mind, when trained in a particular way, is capable of altering the body¹s physiology. One man who has spent his life exploring the effect of Zen Buddhism on the brain is a neurologist, James Austin, now retired from the University of Colorado. He has recorded his personal voyage of discovery as well as detailing the impact meditative practices can have in his new book, Zen And the Brain. Zen is many things to many people, but the foundations of this faith are the four "noble" truths: firstly, life is full of suffering a dissatisfaction; secondly, our desires cause this suffering; thirdly, the way out of suffering is to relinquish our desires; and finally, it is possible to do this by changing one¹s thoughts and behavior through meditation. The purpose of meditation is to heighten awareness and decrease self-awareness in some cases to such an extent that it is possible to dry sheets on one¹s naked body at temperatures below freezing. John Crook, a psychologist from Bristol University, also a convert to Buddhism, describes how American scientists obtained permission from the Dalai Lama to carry out tests on meditating monks. "On the first night they had sat outside but the Americans, dressed in padded coats, found that without gloves their fingers became numb so quickly that they could not fix the electrodes to the body to obtain their readings. The tests had to be done indoors," says Crook. "Apparently they were very happy with their findings. What amused the monks very much was that the Americans had never asked them how to do it!" Even if the average Buddhist cannot dry damp sheets, most practitioners do experience certain physiological changes during meditation. One study by Dr. Ratree Sudsuang and his colleagues from the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, showed that serum cortisol levels, heart rate, blood pressure and lung volume all decreased. An increase in these levels is associated with stress, leading the researchers to suggest that meditation reduces stress. Certainly all the participants claimed they were in a state of tranquillity. EEG readings (which record the brain¹s electrical activity) show that during meditation, alpha brain waves tend to increase. These are the fastest brain waves that cycle up or down eight to 12 times a second. Patients who can watch their own EEG and learn to increase their alpha brain waves report a feeling of well-being. Protestants who pray for half an hour a day also increase their alpha frequency. The overall pattern of brain waves is remarkably like that produced during desynchronized sleep ‹ the kind of sleep in which dreaming sometimes occurs. Most practitioners are not actually dozing, says Austin. "The goal is to remain alert, aware, awake, and let thoughts drop out by themselves." Well-trained meditators can take as few as four to six breaths per minute. Most of us breathe three times faster. A slower rate of breathing quietens the brain by reducing the number of times nerve cells fire, which contributes to a calming sensation. After years of meditation, some Zen Buddhists experience "enlightenment" where the physical and mental self-awareness disappear and the practitioner feels at one with the universe. Austin attempts to describe it: "It is a singular state, this sensate loss, combined with an awareness amplified to brilliant intensity. No such mixture is possible to imagine. A person must have been there and returned." Enlightenment is characterized by a lack of spontaneous thoughts, an intensified, internal awareness, an expansion of awareness into space, the disappearance of self, sight and sound and a feeling of deep serenity. What causes a person to have these sudden flashes of insight is usually a sudden event ‹ anything from the caw of a crow to the crash of a china teacup. Austin thinks that what happens is that the meditating brain is in a quiet, but active state. A noise or sensation creates an "overshoot" ‹ a massive surge of chemicals released into the brain: acetylcholine and glutamate, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. These chemicals have a cascade effect on the rest of the brain. First, they inhibit gabba nerve cells. Gabba nerve cells normally inhibit networks in the front and inner part of the brain that deal with attention and association formation. If the gabba nerve cells are knocked out, these networks are no longer inhibited and are capable of responding in an unusual way, creating the sensation of enlightenment, or kenshosatori. Buddhism (despite the Dalai Lama¹s warning to stick to your own religion) is becoming increasingly popular. Austin says: "We are living in an artificial age of Information Overload. Our Cro-Magnon-era brains were not truly designed to process all this unwanted junk, nor to be stimulated into all the possibilities of so many trivial pursuits. Accordingly, human beings have come to discover a deep, instinctual yearning for extended moments and hours of information unload. This leads many persons to reach out toward more meaningful paths ‹ call them spiritual if you wish ‹ which seem to help them appreciate this present moment: things as they really are." Cro-Magnon these brains might be, but as Scandinavian scientist Gosta Ehrensvard wrote: "Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility." © Sanjida O¹Connell. Reprinted by permission from The Guardian. Zen and the Brain: Towards an understanding of meditation and consciousness by James Austin MIT Press (release in paperback October 1999).

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