Drying Wet Towels On Naked Bodies At -25 Deg C : g-tummo Meditation
Drying Wet Towels On Naked Bodies At -250 C: g-tummo Meditation
The mind – body connection has been an enigma defying human understanding for millennia of years. So it conveniently became a fertile field of imagination for mendacious mendicants as well as serious minded philosophers. While everything connected with the body seems to have a definite physicality and solidity to it, the mind stuff persists to be vague, diaphanous and ungraspable by our senses. No wonder the ancient people of almost every school of thought hypothesized the existence of a mental world made up of mind-stuff situated beyond or interpenetrating the physical world. A few even placed the mind and mental activity inside the heart.
The Indian philosophers were no exception. They too believed in a mental world composed of material that was finer than that of the gross physical world. They extended the concept further postulating the existence of subtler bodies to the individual who was supposed to reside and move around in those bodies after the death of the physical body. The dream world is said to provide a glimpse of the way we live in and interact with others in the mental world.
The dream world and the mental world reinforced the mystery of each other and remained as unfathomable phenomena for centuries eluding any scientific investigations. Both stayed outside the scope of any objective observation or measurement until a few decades ago. Thanks to the latest scientific knowledge, we are able to tease out the complexity of mind - body connection by reframing it first in terms of mind – brain relationsip.
Brain is quite a unique organ in the sense that its actions are influenced by the very same electromagnetic and chemical force fields it creates through its activity! Brain, thus, works both on feed-forward and feedback mechanisms. Unless we are able to discern and study the various components of its activity carefully at minute levels many of its functions appear to be mysterious and sometimes even other-worldly.
The Mind and Brain in Dreams:
Dreams, luckily, began to yield their secrets to science a handful of decades back. Scientists are now pretty confident that in a few more years, we will have gadgetry that can enable us to watch the dream escapades of a person on our computer screen .
In 2008, Dr. Y. Kamitani and his colleagues showed that they could “decode” a volunteer’s brain activity of visual perception in terms of the actual objects seen by him (See Fig. 1). Dr. B. Pasley of the University of Berkeley and his group demonstrated in the beginning of 2012 that the auditory pattern of waves from the temporal lobes of the brain could similarly be reconstructed into words heard by the volunteers.
In a unique study the Neuroscientists from a hospital in Paris could find that the rapid eye movement (REM) associated with dreams corresponded to the visualizations of dream objects by the dreamer during his dreaming. For example, if the dreaming person dreamt of kissing someone to the left, his eyes looked to the left. All other body parts usually get immobilized during the sleep of a normal person. Some people having a certain sleep disorder, however, lack this natural paralysis and act out physically their dreams. The movements of their entire body while sleeping bears a close relation to their dream scenes. Here is an interesting record of a subject, “an ex-smoker, who dreamt of putting out a cigarette in an ashtray and mimed the motion with his hands and head while sleeping.”
The Link: http://bcove.me/o3t8q4sl
[Note: The glowing light near the fingers of the subject in the Video is not a cigarette, but an oxygen sensor.]
Dr. Jack Gallant and his team took advantage of the brute power of modern computing techniques to “compare the film trailers frame by frame with fMRI images recorded as those trailers were being watched inside the MRI scanner machine, and looked for correlations between the two. They then fed their computer 5,000 hours of clips from YouTube, and asked the computer to predict, based on the correlations they had discovered, what the matching fMRI pattern would look like.”
The Scientists then created new footage of brain wave pattern as recorded by fMRI by watching a fresh set of trailers. They used the computers to pick up YouTube footage which would match with their brain scans. Fig. 2 shows a few snap shots from the actual video clips that were watched and the matching images that were picked up by the computer. The pictures selected by the computer do show a recognizable simulacrum of the original. This study establishes clearly that the neuronal activity pattern in our brain is closely correlated to our perception and that we can ‘train’ a computer to interpret the brain waves in terms of related physical objects .
The scientists of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, led by Y. Kamitani have taken these studies a step further to interpret the mental imagery taken while dreaming to visualize the dream scenarios experienced by the dreamer.
As per their work reported a couple of weeks back, the researchers first asked “volunteers to report their sleep imagery during brief awakenings. The scientists then compiled large lists of image types and their accompanying brain activity, as read by a brain scanner.
The investigators next checked whether the same brain activity occurred when people were viewing images from the same categories while awake. It turned out this was largely true as they reported.
Next, the scientists “trained” a computer using machine-learning technology to match brain activity to image categories.
Finally, the investigators trained the machine on sleeping subjects again, and found out that they could predict what the people had seen with 60 percent accuracy.”
Robert Stickgold, a neuroscientist and dream expert at Harvard Medical School called this study “incredibly robust.” He also added, “this is probably the first real demonstration of the brain basis of dream content.”
From these studies it is evident that “a means to uncover the subjective contents of dreaming using objective neural measurement” is not any more a speculation but a reality.
The Mind and Brain in g-tummo Meditation:
Ever since Dr. Herb Benson brought to the notice of the scientific world in the eighties, the amazing capacity of some of the Tibetan Buddhist Monks in drying up wet towels spread on their naked bodies in the sub-zero temperatures of the Himalayas, the scientific community was quite intrigued by this phenomenon. Some cursory research showed that slight increase in the extremities of limbs like finger tips could be achieved through meditational practices.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Maria Kozhevnikov from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore recently investigated the technique of g-tummo meditation using which the Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns were able to raise their core body temperature.
g-tummo is a Tibetan word (transliterated in English) for a type of Yoga. g-tummo literally means ‘fierce’ and perhaps derived from Candi in Sanskrit. This Yogic practice aims at controlling the “inner energy.”
The g-tummo meditation is considered to be “one of the most sacred spiritual practices in the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Vajrayana Buddhism and Bon. It is also called “psychic heat” practice since it is associated with descriptions of intense sensations of bodily heat in the spine. Monasteries maintaining an extensive practice of g-tummo are quite rare and located mostly in the remote Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan (the eastern Tibet).”
The researchers carried out two distinct studies. One study was done in the remote monasteries with expert meditators performing g-tummo practices while monitoring their body temperatures and electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in the brain. Because of the inherent difficulties in such studies as these, only ten meditators (7 of them ladies) could be recruited in the program. The meditators were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather of -25 degree Celsius. A second study was carried out with Western participants as a non-meditator control group.
The g-tummo practice has two components – one, a specialized somatic breathing technique called ‘vase breathing’ and two, neurocognitive ‘visualization of flames at specific locations in the body accompanied by intense sensations of bodily heat in the spine.’ Vase breathing comprises ‘isometric muscle contractions, where after inhalation, during a period of holding their breath (apnea), the practitioners contract both abdominal and pelvic muscles so that the protruding lower belly takes the shape of a vase or pot’ (See Fig. 3).
“Vase breath” causes thermogenesis, which is a process of heat production. The other technique, concentrative visualisation prevents heat losses. ‘Both techniques work in conjunction leading to elevated temperatures up to the moderate fever zone.’ It was found that the magnitude of the temperature increase significantly correlated with the increase in alpha power during the Vase breath meditation.
Assoc Prof. Kozhevnikov says, “Practicing vase breathing alone is a safe technique to regulate core body temperature in a normal range. The participants whom I taught this technique to were able to elevate their body temperature, within limits, and reported feeling more energised and focused. With further research, non-Tibetan meditators could use vase breathing to improve their health and regulate cognitive performance.”
The researchers add that “the temperature increases during g-tummo meditation are neither solely a by-product of meditation nor its goal, but instead may be a means to facilitate the achievement of “deep meditative states”. The g-tummo meditators may use the Core Body Temperature increases as a vehicle to enhance their attention and focus their meditative performance (which may in turn facilitate a further increase in their temperature through meditative visualization).”
