Myswizard

Dalai lays stress on scientific progress

Varanasi, February 7 -

TIBETAN SPIRITUAL leader Dalai Lama said on Tuesday that the welfare of the world and peace was possible only when human beings co-existed with love and affection.

“ The present era of globalisation in reality has existed since centuries in our society with the concept of ‘ Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam’, he said.Chairing a programme ‘ Dialogue Between Indian Philosophical Traditions’ in the central library of the Tibetan Institute for Higher Studies here, Dalai Lama focussed on the various aspects of Buddhism in India. He said Buddhism had almost declined in the 11th century, causing philosophical discussions in society to come to a halt. The whole world had deviated from the Buddhist ideology then.

With the passage of time, later, a new period of rejuvenation of Buddhism came and scholars re-established the Buddhist ideology in practice through thorough discussions. This tradition should be continued forever to establish an atmosphere of fraternity, peace and love among human beings, he said.

Commenting on the scientific revolutions and race for inventions in the world, he said that despite claims of adequate scientific development across the world, science was still in its childhood. The Dalai Lama dwelt at length on the importance of Shepa (Knowledge) and science and said science and knowledge were being expanded not only in India but throughout the world in an unlimited manner. No society and nation could attain progress by disassociating itself from the pace of science and knowledge.

“For the progress and prosperity of the world, it is the need of the hour to attain scientific progress along with religion, philosophy and spirituality” he said.Indian Vedic philosophy stresses on soul while Buddhism talks about ‘ Shepa’, consciousness and cognition.

Director of the Central Tibetan Institute for Higher Studies, Prof N Samteng, Prof Joy Garefield, Vetina Bomer, SR Bhatt and Raja Ram Shukla also addressed the function.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The hot new frontier of neuroscience: meditation!

Richard Davidson, 54, is at once a distinguished scientist and an avid spiritual seeker. He became fascinated with meditation in the ’60s. As a graduate student at Harvard, he channeled that interest into the study of psychology and neuroscience. In his spare time, he hung out with Ram Dass, Timothy Leary’s former LSD research partner turned mystic. Davidson traveled to India for a meditation retreat, then finished his doctorate in biological psychology and headed to the University of Wisconsin, where he now directs the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior.

The Dalai Lama learned of Davidson’s work from other scientists and in 1992 invited him to Dharamsala, India, to interview monks with extensive meditation experience about their mental and emotional lives. Davidson recalls the “extraordinary power of compassion” he experienced in the Dalai Lama’s presence.

A decade later, he got a chance to examine Tibetan Buddhists in his own lab. In June 2002, Davidson’s associate Antoine Lutz positioned 128 electrodes o­n the head of Mattieu Ricard. A French-born monk from the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Ricard had racked up more than of 10,000 hours of meditation.

Lutz asked Ricard to meditate o­n “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion.” He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity - brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second - indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.

The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students’. In addition, larger areas of the meditators’ brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.

Davidson realized that the results had important implications for o­ngoing research into the ability to change brain function through training. In the traditional view, the brain becomes frozen with the o­nset of adulthood, after which few new connections form. In the past 20 years, though, scientists have discovered that intensive training can make a difference. For instance, the portion of the brain that corresponds to a string musician’s fingering hand grows larger than the part that governs the bow hand - even in musicians who start playing as adults. Davidson’s work suggested this potential might extend to emotional centers.

But Davidson saw something more. The monks had responded to the request to meditate o­n compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain’s ability to produce “attention and affective processes” - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson’s study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.

Davidson and his team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2004.

WIRED Magazine