On May 7, 2009, at 8:27 AM, raunchydog wrote:
If modern meditation research is any indication, one of the things
that is notable and actually helpful is research which shows random
people compared to experienced meditators and then presented with
some sort of averse stimuli: the screams of a women in extreme
distress, pictures of a burn victim having their dead skin peeled
off, a child with a terrible deformity -- interspersed with lovely
scenery, pictures of ice cream, etc.
In most people, the prefrontal cortex,the most evolved part of the
human brain, simply shuts down and "goes dark". They retract into
some instinctive, approach/withdraw circuitry of fear and paranoia;
basic programming; survival mode. Advanced meditators however are the
*opposite*, their prefrontal cortex lights up and the areas
associated with compassion instinctively "light up". One type
instinctively "embraces" differences and strangeness, the other
instinctively retracts.
In current humanity, most people's "circle of compassion" is very
small: their immediate family, some relatives, some close friends,
their animal companions. Maybe that's part of the problem. A future
humanity--or for homo sapiens to survive--we may be required to
develop of style of functioning where we instinctively embrace more
and more, to the point on non-object referral embracing (nondual
compassion). Retraction and fear and paranoia, being parts of the
more reptilian and primitive centers of the brain will have less and
less sway over such a future Man. We've been out of Natural Selection
for many centuries now, yet we still are responding to patterns of a
being living in the "the strongest will survive, the weak shall die"
level of functioning. It's time to grow up or we'll actually kill
ourselves and take a huge chunk of the biosphere along with us.
Citation, please. Link to study.
Hi RD:
I'm sorry, I don't have one handy in my pile of research PDF's. I'll
have to look for one because it is interesting and important cite. A
couple of places I've gabbed about it before here with instances and
references to this protocol: the first place I heard about it was in
the documentary Monks, In the Lab, which is a film of scientific
investigation into yogis. Since I took down my webpage on it, it's
reappeared on the web (search for the title in double quotes, you'll
find it). (It's also interesting because it's the documentary where
they first rediscover the EEG signature for samadhi--although this
time in a westerner (the previous time was from yogis of the Patanjali
tradition).) You see some of the imagery these yogis are being tested
on.
The knowledge of compassion from a scientific POV was presented a year
or so ago at the Seeds of Compassion conference, scientists meeting
with HHDL brought out this knowledge over five days in Seattle.
The other reference was a recent post, which the shortened video I
have here. It is by Dan Siegel, the psychiatrist who was a pioneer in
human attachment/attunement (and attachment disorders). He spoke on
this at a conference late last year.
Incidentally, this same protocol, exposing meditators to extremely
averse materials interspersed with relaxing imagery, has been
replicated on two recent groups of "yogis in training". It has been
repeated on new meditators who spent 3 months meditating during the
Shamatha Project, the most complete longitudinal research on
meditation in homo sapiens ever. The terabytes of data will come out
over the next couple of years.
BTW, I believe the Seeds of Compassion website is still up.
