The Secret Life of the Universe by Amy Corzine

Author:Amy Corzine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2012-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Healing with the mind

A new type of neuropsychology known as contemplative neuroscience, which examines how meditation affects the mind, is being pioneered by the Mind and Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Adam Engle, its chairman and co-founder, says ‘people are now realizing you can change your brain, and they want to know what factors or mental events cause these changes’.

Can we change our brains by changing how we think? Can we train our minds to be more attentive and focused, and better at decision-making? Dr Richard Davidson, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, put the French Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine to videotape the functions of his brain. Inside the machine, while the monk meditated on compassion, he showed a dramatic increase in activity in the areas of his brain connected with enthusiasm and joy.

This result was magnified in a follow-up study where Davidson charted the normal, emotional states of the brains of 150 people, including Ricard. Most people fell into the middle ground between positive and negative emotions. But Ricard, who had been deeply meditating on compassion when his brain was scanned, nearly soared off the chart of positive emotions. He had the highest level of happiness ever documented.

Ricard describes meditation as a tool for mind training. It helps you to cultivate certain inner qualities that he says change your ‘inner conditions’ to those of happiness. He says you must stop putting your hopes and fears into outer consciousness so that you can identify what inner factors can contribute to your deep sense of wellbeing. Once we realize the fundamental nature of our mental toxins, they become lost in the space of inner mind. Negative emotions are ‘stains on the cloth of the mind’ and once we recognize them for what they are, they lose their ability to stain, and the ‘I’ shines through. But it takes practice to get to know this luminous ‘I’.

If 10,000 hours of violin practice can have the effect of teaching or training the mind, muscles, heart, etc., to play beautiful music, imagine what 10,000 hours of ‘compassion’ [meditation] practice could do to the human heart.

Characteristics like happiness and the capacity to focus attention can be improved with training, Dr Davidson says. ‘You can change your mind by changing your ... thoughts. You can intentionally cultivate positive emotions and transform how you react to events in your life.’

Scientists now believe that happiness is a skill that can be learned, just like playing a musical instrument. This idea is being embraced by Christians like Father Thomas Keating of Snowmass, who is pioneering a form of Christian meditation that he calls ‘centring prayer’. He has participated in the Mind and Life Institute’s dialogue between scientists and the Dalai Lama, building bridges between contemplative religious practice and modern science. MRI experiments at Princeton University (New Jersey) on longtime Buddhist meditators have proven that the human brain does respond to different kinds of meditative practice, he says, adding:

Science is part of revelation .

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