One of the final techniques we learned at the Slvan Mind Control training was how to help those that were sick. Wired News has several articles on the subject.
"I was amazed a couple of years ago when I discovered Thong Len. I had a burnt hand, and (when I used) that technique, it was like an anesthetic had been injected into my arm," said Jack Pettigrew, a renowned Australian physiologist, at a Science and the Mind conference that was attended by the Dalai Lama.
Thong Len is a meditative technique developed by Tibetan Buddhists almost 800 years before the discovery of anesthesia. It's explained in that classic of Tibetan Buddhist thought, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It works by imagining someone else's pain, like a burn, and drawing it into oneself. As you take the pain from others, your own hurt disappears.
Adepts of the technique are constantly practicing Thong Len, every minute of the day, drawing pain from those around them and enhancing their own sense of well-being. They've been described as "(pain) filters," taking negative energy out of the world and replacing it with positive.
"You can explain what might be happening when you anesthetize your own arm," Pettigrew said. "But people in a room with a Thong Len practitioner have also said they feel better. How do you explain that?" Scientists don't know, but they know it works, powerfully.
Pettigrew believes Western science could use Eastern introspection, or meditative techniques, to deepen its understanding of how the brain works and to provide practical help to people in distress.
In a host of fields, Tibetan practices have subsequently proven valid when science finally developed technology sophisticated enough to test them.
A recent experiment proved this. Subjects were asked to watch a video of two teams passing a ball. One team wore white shirts, and one black, and subjects were asked to count how many times players in white shirts passed the ball to each other.
What subjects didn't notice was the man in a gorilla suit who walked on screen, waved at the audience and walked off again.
This established that humans perceive only what they are looking for, not what's there. Oh, and Buddhists figured this out 2,000 years ago, while modern science caught up in the last two decades.
The Science and the Mind conference, held last month in Canberra, Australia, explored areas of possible contact and cooperation between Tibetan Buddhism and modern science.
"Truly great advances of any kind are about making leaps ... that explode on you seemingly from nowhere," said Allan Snyder, keynote speaker at the conference, who is working on a thinking cap using magnetic pulses to access the creativity of the non-conscious mind.
He added that altered states of consciousness, such as Tibetan meditation, could achieve the same end, and it is time for science to explore the synergies between the two traditions.
The issue is not that modern science is dumb and Tibetans are smart. Rather, Tibetans have discovered many scientific truths through empirical observation. They also have many other techniques that still mystify scientists, but seem to work, like Thong Len.
Max Bennett, professor at the University of Sydney and one of the world's top neurologists, underlined the issue, explaining that it is possible to relieve the suffering of some stroke victims using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. "But I have to emphasize, we haven't got a clue what's going on," he said.
Worse, the problem is potentially huge: "Goodness knows what's happening (when we apply magnetism) to the 100,000 million neurons that make up the brain, each of which has about 10,000 connections with other neurons. We dealing with figure of 10 to the power of 15 connections, and we haven't got a clue which ones are turning off, which ones might be excited by this stimulation.
"It's a phenomenon. But in one sense, it does indicate that there are a lot of things that we know nothing about in Western science."
He added, however, that neuroscience is on the threshold of an exciting era of discovery with the identification of the human genome.
"We know by the year about 2020, the greatest disabling phenomenon for the health of the human race will be depression," Bennett said. "Not cancer, not heart disease, but depression."
See: Wired News or http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,53820,00.html for more information about the mind and healing.
Posted by philcutrara1
at 12:21 PM EDT
