The Neuroscience of Meditation, and the Virtues of Shutting Up
(Our articles on meditation are specifically curated or otherwise written to help you become more aware of the depth of the meditative process.
Here in an article from Time Magazine we read of one persons exploration of meditation and in particular their exploration of the neuroscience that accompanies their search.
It never ceases to fascinate me as to how much we want to scientifically validate meditation, to put it in a box, to quantify and to manage the parameters. The more one seeks to do that the less disposed they are to entering into the inner world and having the unregulated inner plane experience.
It is when one does the latter that full meditation benefits start to arise. The health benefits are copious and recorded now for decades. However, the great benefits expand to those who do not need to measure the changes. Here what one is dealing with is the ascendancy of inner knowing that arises from inner plane expansion.
Move inward more and the outward measures become less and less important until they lose all manner of importance. That is unless someone else wishes you to validate their own experience so they can measure their success in meditation against your own. Nigel)
by Zoe Schlanger,
It was 5:30 in the morning on my third day of silent meditation when I noticed something in me take a sharp turn left.
I was groggy, frustrated by my inability to sit still and hungry for the breakfast that was still an hour off. I got up from the spot on the floor of my bedroom where I’d been attempting to meditate and walked outside, to the new-growth woods behind the residential quarters at the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was springtime, and the outdoors seemed spring-loaded with potential: The buds on the trees were sharp little things, and hundreds of fuzzy fiddleheads dotted the forest floor, curled snug.
I walked down a little looping path that stopped unsatisfyingly soon; “course boundary” signs curtailed my meandering to an area of the woods the size of a soccer field. Exercise, like so many things here, was not permitted.
For the past three days, a brass bell had woken me up at 4 a.m., along with the 129 others who had committed to this 10-day silent saga. We meditated, with guidance, for roughly 10 hours a day, broken up by meals and “free time,” which was free only in the sense that we weren’t meditating. We weren’t allowed to read or write, speak to one another, make communicative gestures or even look at one another in the eye. So we all paced the small loop in the woods, staring at trees, careful not to acknowledge one another’s existence. No nodding, no smiling.
During free time after lunch, I walked outside to find a cluster of women standing in the courtyard stock-still, eyes closed, faces tilted toward the sun, looking posed for alien abduction. One woman wore a Nirvana band T-shirt, presumably unironically. I began to giggle aloud, a major transgression, but I couldn’t help it. It all seemed so ridiculous. What the hell was I doing here? There’s no way, I thought, that this silent sitting around, this utter lack of mental stimulation, could be benefitting my brain. I briefly entertained the idea that this was all one massive 2,500-years-running placebo effect. I went over my last few days in my mind. I looked back at the cluster of women. Is this what it felt like to be brainwashed? Was I mid-brainwashing? Would someone being brainwashed question whether she was being brainwashed? No, I finally told myself, I wasn’t being brainwashed; I was being silly. I turned away and stood outside in the sun for a while, in silence, and resigned myself to the idea of another week of this. Read more…
Photo credit:VALERIA MAMELI/FLICKR OPEN/GETTY