The Tibetan Monks Who Surprised The Scientists

Herbert Benson was a cardiologist and celebrated professor of medicine at Harvard University. He spent a lot of time studying Eastern cultures in the 1960s. It was a worrying issue for some people at the same time. So Benson waited until after midnight before smuggling the 36 Tibetan monks into his laboratory.

Benson wanted to find out for himself how much myth and truth were hidden behind the stories that people told about the Tibetan monks . Bruce Lee was ubiquitous on television at the time. In addition, transcendental meditators were seen as having superhuman abilities. However, Benson was a scientist. So he didn’t believe anything that couldn’t be scientifically proven.

What he discovered that night changed his life forever. In fact, he later wrote a book three years, became a bestseller: The relaxation response (AKA: The Relaxation Response ). But that was not all, because an alternative form of medicine emerged from it. One that says belief can heal as the placebo effect has great therapeutic power.

What Benson found out about the Tibetan monks

What Herbert Benson and his team found was that the Tibetan monks did indeed have skills that contradicted previous scientific knowledge.

For example, a group of these monks who meditated using the tummo technique were able to raise the temperature in their hands by up to 8.3 ° C. So far there is no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, but the Harvard Gazette has reviewed this and the following experiments.

In addition, the Tibetan monks can raise their body temperature so much that they can use their bodies to dry wet sheets. But that was not all. Benson also found that experienced meditators using the Sikkim technique can slow their metabolism by up to 64%.

Some theoretical approaches

The article “Ciencia y Meditación” (in German: “Science and Meditation”) by Professor Ana María Krohn of the Antonio Nariño University states that there have been more than 500 studies on the physiological, psychological and sociological effects of the Tibetan traditions Monks inspired transcendental meditation there.

She also mentions that the first study on this was published in the 1970s in the journal Science . In it the author states that they were able to determine a different state of consciousness in the monks.

Science talks about dreams, deep dreams, and wakeful consciousness. But apparently there was a fourth state among the monks, which was a combination of calm and mindfulness.

In 1971 Daniel Goleman, the founder of the concept of multiple intelligence, wrote an article entitled “Unstressing”. In it he postulated the existence of a fifth state of consciousness. One in which there is not only calm and mindfulness at the same time, but also action.

Swami Rama

The question of the superior abilities of Tibetan monks and other transcendent meditators is one of the topics that are always on the border between fact and fiction. It is therefore not surprising that verified information as well as myths and legends can be found. However, the distinction is not always easy.

An example of this is the case of Swami Rama. He is the author of

However, there is no evidence that this is actually true. But the Menninger Foundation did some studies on him.

Doctors Elmer and Alyce Green studied his “powers”. Their results showed that Rama was able to generate the same brain waves in his waking moments as in his sleep. They also observed that he had deliberately stopped pumping his heart for 17 seconds without it stopping.

Although the media publicized this phenomenon at the time, they stopped following the issue. But the results of the studies were published in Beyond Biofeedback (German title: Biofeedback, a new way to heal ) by Elmer and Alyce Green.

Perhaps all of this is nothing more than a rather subtle and ingenious scam. Or maybe the mind is just incredibly wonderful and people are only just beginning to discover it.