BEFORE YOU BECAME YOU, your entire being was wrapped up in just two cells: your mothers egg and your fathers sperm. Yet the dance between these two resulted in an embryo, a ball of cells that differentiated into specialized cells that would grow to become your heart, your gut, your fingers, and all your other parts. The

The reason for such cooperation comes down to a cellular form of intelligence, says evolutionary biologist and physician William B. Miller, Ph.D. Hes co-author of the book, The Sentient Cell: The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness, published in January 2024, which proposes a radical new way of thinking about some of lifes tiniest components.

Miller is among a small but growing group of scientists who believe we should no longer think of cells as passive robots that automatically follow a code of instructions, carrying out orders from our genome like mindless drones. Instead, they say, the roughly 37 trillion cells that make up our own bodies are consciousand that life and consciousness began at the same time.

Its a revolutionary idea, Miller tells Popular Mechanics, but assuming cells have a form of consciousness can give us a better understanding of complex processes. These include cellular communication and decision-making, and even the motivation behind an embryonic cell specializing into a specific organ. While its not widely accepted among scientists, this concept of existential consciousness will profoundly transform the way we approach cellular bioengineering problems like tissue regeneration, provide a different perspective on finding cures for diseases like cancer, and even help us survive on Mars, Miller says.

Now, in a May 2024 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Miller and his fellow authors argue that random chance did not govern the concept of natural selection; thats what the 1850s naturalist Charles Darwin, known for establishing the theory of evolution, thought. Instead, the authors contend that a form of cellular consciousness actually drove lifes evolutionand its the reason behind all of lifes existence.

CONSCIOUSNESS, AT THE LEVEL OF THE CELL, cannot produce a human beings own, complex thoughts, feelings, and sensations; a cell doesnt have the capacity for abstract thought. But heres how it does work, says Miller: Imagine a typical situationdaylight in a cells environment hits the cells external membrane and passes through it. The cell measures that light signal internally, forming a piece of information about the light. Because it has to analyze it internally, that becomes an experience as the cell analyzes the light to support the state it prefers to be in [to fulfill its function], Miller says. While that example is of a bacterial cell, all cells absorb various data from their surroundings, analyze them, and make decisions about the actions they should take, such as producing a hormone, or moving in a particular direction, perhaps toward the light.

From early in lifes history, cells of all kinds have combined their skills to further a common goalto keep on living and reproducing. Cells have formed colonies. Its very much like a city that we humans might engineer. It has nutrient channels, an outside and an inside, a collective metabolism, Miller says. For example, microbes collaborate with each other. Theyre codependent, trading resources as well as competing. In order to make this ecology flourish, each of these cells is taking intelligent action. Theyre communicating with one another, and both individually and collectively deploying resources. Thats problem solving and decision making. Thats cognitive action, and its one element of consciousness, he says.

Its still a hard concept to swallowthat bacteria and other microorganisms are conscious on any level. To animals like us, consciousness is due to a complex nervous system.

However, Miller and his fellow authors see this higher, human form of consciousness as a natural property our cells createtogether with the more than 10 trillion essential microbes that are a part of our bodies. Every aspect of the consciousness that Im experiencing is a simultaneous aggregation of the consciousnesses of all of my body cells and all of those microbes working in tandem, coordinating so seamlessly that I feel like Im one individual, he says.

Before exploring that idea further, its important to understand one thing: We are holobionts, because we consist of our own host cells and the ones we live with in symbiosis, or mutual cooperation. In particular, we live in symbiosis with a bacterial, viral, and fungal population of cells. In other words, our cells and our microbes mutually benefit one another.

The evolutionary science of the hologenomethat we co-evolved with our microbiomesays that evolution led those first cells to continue forming different kinds of habitats in order to survive and thrive; hence, the development of plants, animals, and fungi. Were a constellation of habitats, says Miller, who spent decades studying the human microbiome and has written several books on the hologenome. He compares human bodies to a successful engineering project for ever more complex groupings of diverse cells living together and adapting to changing environments over millions of years. A form of cellular consciousness has been with us since life first emerged, 3.5 billion years ago. They were able to multiply into abundant varieties of bacteria, amoeba, and then more complex organisms because of their particular awareness. Today, your brain, microbiome and the cells of your gut work together as a community of cells to create your sense of consciousness.

We are a rich, wonderful, delightful environment for cells, he says. So, we bear a resemblance to the first biofilm [microbial colony]. We are one end result, along with every other creature that can be seenwe are a particular solution to a set of biological cellular problems.

The authors of The Sentient Cell arent alone in hypothesizing that our microbes, the bacteria and viruses in us, have a great deal to do with our consciousness. Various studies show that our own cells communicate with our microbiome, and that our brain, gut, and microbiome are deeply entangled, forming a complex system. Besides being responsible for our health, these complex interactions contribute to our higher level consciousness, according to a 2020 paper in the peer-reviewed Inquiries Journal.

HOWEVER, NOT ALL SCIENTISTS who study the biology of life are convinced that cells are conscious. Cells respond to both chemical and physical signals, including pressure from surrounding cells. The cells of a developing embryo know, for example, when their number has grown to 400. At this exact point, the group begins to separate into three axes that determine the bodys final orientation: front and back, left and right, up and down. They know how to differentiate themselves into the tissues that will become your organs and other parts. Cells are the architects of the organism, cell biologist Alfonso Martnez Arias, Ph.D., tells Popular Mechanics.

His work shows that a persons genome is a toolbox for the cell to use as it may. Yet we cannot presume that a cells behavior is due to consciousness, says Martnez Arias, who spent 40 years at the University of Cambridge researching how a fertilized egg can become an individual with billions of specialized cells.

While cells exhibit behaviors that you could call a sort of intelligenceresponding to other cells and their environmentthe crux of the problem is that its hard to define consciousness, he says. With cells, there is some kind of computation going on, with an output that can be predicted. I think increasingly, there is evidence that cells have capacities that are not encoded in the genome. For instance, the ability to pick and choose from the toolbox of genes that give us our ultimate characteristics. Through experiments, researchers have been able to study cell responses to different chemical and physical stimuli, such as exposing them to a chemical compound that would cause the cells to produce a different compound. So we are able to communicate with them, but we do it badly. But I think we are learning their alphabet, were learning their language, Martnez Arias says. He hopes that continuing such investigations will lead us someday to knowing what makes cells tick.

Conventional resistance to labeling cells as conscious comes from defining consciousness from a human point of view, Miller believes. We compare our own consciousness to the capacity of other animals, such as the mosquito or the lion. And the more you look, the more you realize that our form of consciousness, with its own intelligence, is different from other animals, [so our view is skewed]. A cells consciousness is more elemental, a simpler form of cognition, he says.

Heres a practical reason to treat cells as conscious, Miller says: Once we realize that cells are creative and intelligent problem-solving materials, we can treat them as partners in designing better biomedical therapies and solutions. By studying their motivations and decision-making, well find more ways to manipulate cells, such as interrupting their processes. For example, cancer cells communicate with each other and with non-cancer cells in the body. We are finding promising cures for some cancers that break down the communication cancer cells use in their efforts to propagate and form tumors. This type of directed immunotherapy leaves patients own healthy cells undamaged, unlike chemotherapy, or radiation, which damages healthy cells too.

Were already taking advantage of cell behavior to engineer microbes that eat plastic. Such creative solutions in the future wont be possible if we treat cells as robots without preferences, Miller says. Well even understand how to explore space better. For example, the radiation levels on a journey to Mars are too high to survive. One of the solutions could be figuring out a way to strengthen our cells against dangerous radiation. Miller believes a study of how cells themselves could engineer an adaptation to radiation would help.

Before joining Popular Mechanics, Manasee Wagh worked as a newspaper reporter, a science journalist, a tech writer, and a computer engineer. Shes always looking for ways to combine the three greatest joys in her life: science, travel, and food.

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Every Single Cell in Your Body Could Be Conscious, Scientists Say. That Could Rewrite Everything We Know About ... - Popular Mechanics

The work done by Canadian singer/songwriter Kathleen Edwards has been consistently exemplary, even if her career trajectory has been a bit atypical. We could reach into her catalog and find any number of stellar songs worthy of a deep dive, but Asking for Flowers, the title track of her outstanding 2008 album, feels like a particularly dizzying high point.

What is the song about? And what inspired Edwards to write it? Lets take a look back at the meaning and story of Kathleen Edwards Asking for Flowers.

Go through music history and youll find many examples of an artist or a band hitting a peak on their third album. Its not to say Kathleen Edwards first two albums (Failer in 2003 and Back to Me in 2005) were slouches. But Asking for Flowers found her on the improve in just about every way, which is why you can put it on the short list of best albums in both the singer/songwriter and alt-country genres of the past quarter-century or so.

Working with producer Jim Ross, Edwards delivered a rich and varied set of songs. She could be rollicking and funny, as on Ill Make the Dough, You Get the Glory. But she could also tackle the most serious of subjects, as on the true-life tale of Alicia Ross.

At the emotional center of it is Asking for Flowers, a mid-tempo meditation that touches on relationship angst and depression with striking accuracy and heartfelt empathy. Edwards explained to the blog Aquarium Drunkard what inspired the song:

Asking for Flowers was a song I wrote for one of my really close friends. She actually, during this time off I had, was going through a really tough time and has struggled for years with physical and emotional problems. I went to see her at probably one of her hardest times and she told me that her life had been like asking for flowers with some of the judgments and feelings of inadequacy that she had lived with all these years. That the idea of giving somebody compassion and giving them their time without judgment, living a life of asking for flowers. I asked her what that meant and she said being with somebody who just wants to bring them to you and you shouldnt have to ask for them. Someone should want to just bring them to you.

While the song and album should have been a springboard for Edwards, she only released one more LP before going on a hiatus where she contemplated quitting music. Luckily for fans, she returned in 2020 after an eight-year break with the album Total Freedom, which showed he had lost nothing off her fastball.

While Asking for Flowers may have been inspired by the struggles of a friend, Edwards gets deep inside the character like only the best songwriters can do. The first line, Its complicated, seems simple enough, but it sets an important tone. It establishes the difficulty the narrator has in explaining her feelings, and perhaps even some reticence to open up like shes about to do.

Edwards doesnt treat this characters plight lightly. Thats the right move, because its a message that we should never take these situations with a grain of salt when we encounter them in our own lives. Its like a noose around my life, the protagonist complains about the departure of the person who was supposed to be her biggest confidant. Its a devastating betrayal.

In the throes of her sadness, she starts to lose her connection to anything that might properly orient her: Now Im trying to remember / All the names of the faces I loved. She also carries around some blame, perhaps misplaced, for her role in all this, calling herself A walking declaration / Of everything I couldnt get right.

The refrains are reserved for the narrator running down the list of all the efforts shes made to meet the person shes addressing halfway: Every pill I took in vain / Every meal for you I made / Every penny I put away. In the final chorus, she adds a few more items: Every card I signed my name / Every time I poured my heart out. She repeats the last item, which highlights the disparity in the relationship, for emphasis: Every cruel word you let just slip out.

By this point, Edwards voice is quivering with anger, but she returns to a more restrained mode to deliver her final argument: Dont tell me youre too tired / Ten years Ive been working nights. That last phrase is likely both literal, in terms of an actual occupation, and figurative, in that shes worked so hard in vain for so little in return.

So many songs attempt to highlight the resilience of a character, and thats surely admirable. With Asking for Flowers, Kathleen Edwards details that point in someones life when even resilience might not be enough, when suffering is unavoidable, and the help of others is required. How brave of her to take us into that head and heart space.

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Post-Millennial Classic: The Mid-Tempo Meditation "Asking for Flowers" by Kathleen Edwards - American Songwriter

Mindfulness Meditation Counseling Market

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Exponential Growth Expected for Mindfulness Meditation Counseling Market With Complete SWOT Analysis by ... - openPR

Death Is Not The End's 333 series is back with another dig into the catalogue of the NYC-based Flames label on this reissue of a highly coveted Revolutionaries LP, Meditation in Dub.

One of reggae music's most famed session bands, The Revolutionaries were an often r/evolving cast of some of the finest session musicians on the island during the roots and early dancehall periods of the mid/late 1970s and early 1980s. These would include Earl 'Wire' Lindo, Radcliffe 'Dougie' Bryan, Ansell Collins, Bobby Kalphat, Lloyd Parks, Uziah 'Sticky' Thompson, Bongo Herman, Stanley Bryan, Bo Peep, Eric 'Bingy Bunny' Lamont, Errol 'Tarzan' Nelson, Skully Simms, Robbie Lyn, Mikey 'Mao' Chung amongst many others. The enduring core of the group, however, was undoubtedly in the coming together of the legendary rhythm section of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare - with the formation of The Revolutionaries marking the first time that this often unparalleled duo worked together.

The group laid down these rhythm tracks at their base at the storied Channel One recording studio, Maxfield Avenue, Kingston sometime in the mid 1970s - under the arrangement of one of reggae music's great undersung figures, Ossie Hibbert. Early in 1975 Ossie was to move to Maxfield Avenue just as Jo Jo & Ernest Hookim's studio was starting up. A well-respected session musician himself through the late 1960s and early 70s (he played keys for Bunny 'Striker' Lee and Keith Hudson and would also form part of another foundational session band, The Soul Syndicate) he was initially summoned by Jo Jo to be a band member for The Revolutationaries but quickly assumed the role of producer, engineer and talent scout for the studio, responsible for selecting the artists to bring into the studio.

These tracks were recorded by Hibbert around this time for Winston Jones, the original singer and composer of Stop That Train (later made world-famous by Keith & Tex's version) with his Spanishtonians for Prince Buster's label in the early 1960s. Jones had moved from JA to NYC in the early 1970s where he established and ran the Flames label. The imprint would go on to form a core part of Brooklyn's reggae scene from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, though Jones often employed the use of Channel One, Hibbert and The Revolutionaries back home in the recording of rhythm tracks for his productions. Thus the Meditation in Dub LP is essentially formed of stellar dub versions to many of the early Flames labels 45s, produced and released by Jones throughout the mid to late 1970s, including crucial takes on a great many popular rhythms of that period. One of any self-respecting dub LP collectors' holy grails, with originals going for up to 400, it is issued here under license from the now Texas-based Jones with the kind assistance of RB at DKR in sourcing the audio for this new cut.

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Meditation in Dub | The Revolutionaries | Death Is Not The End - Bandcamp

When was the last time you tried to build a fire? There is a lot that goes into the success of such a project. Whatever is used for kindling must be flammable, dry, and the right size. You need a protected space in which to build the fire, that will allow it to catch and then grow. Oxygen is necessary, but the quantity has to be proportionate. In order for a baby fire to become a strong blaze, capable of producing heat and light, it needs to be carefully attended until it is well established. If you are trying to build your fire on a damp, misty day, you will discover that flames are sensitive to the quality of the surrounding air. That was what I found out last year.

In my enthusiasm to provide our small girls camp with meals cooked over a firepit, I didnt put a lot of thought into a contingency plan, in the event of rainy weather. And, sure enough, we had rainy weather actually, it was only drizzly and wet, no full-blown rain drops, for the most part. It was just tolerable enough for me to pursue my goal of campfire cooking, which, thankfully, didnt end up being impossible only really challenging.

Thursday I spent most of the day trying to get the baby flame to eat its food so that it could grow to be big and strong. The little flicker was not eager to cooperate. It wanted the kindling to be chopped up into very small pieces before trying to eat it (with zero concern for my lack of an ax). Even then, the heavy moisture in the air that day was such a problem that I practically had to build a shelter over the small flame before it could concentrate on consuming fuel. Hours were spent on this kindling project, but eventually, with patience and perseverance (and after a couple of close shaves with asphyxiation from smoke), the fire began to burn in earnest, and I was able to cook dinner over it. That was Thursday.

On Friday morning, the weather did not look too much better. But, before rolling up my sleeves to tackle the breakfast fire, we took the girls to Mass for the feast of the Sacred Heart. As I was preparing myself for the Holy Sacrifice, reading through the antiphons of First Vespers, I was surprised by these words at the Magnificat: I am come to cast fire upon earth, and what will I, but that it be kindled? Our Lord seemed to be speaking directly to me. Naturally, after the ordeal with kindling a fire the day before, I was perfectly primed to take this message to heart. Two questions presented themselves, front and center: What was the fire that Our Lord was referring to? And how does one go about kindling it?

Regarding the first question, the use of the above mentioned antiphon for the feast of the Sacred Heart suggested to me that Our Lord was talking about the fire of His love. When the theological virtue of charity is infused at Baptism, it elevates the heart of man to a whole new order of love, making him capable of loving God (and then his neighbor for Gods sake) with Gods own love. And it makes perfect sense for Our Lord to call this love fire: I am come to cast fire upon earth. His sanctifying love gives light and heat, consumes all things, and spreads as fire does. He wants the fire of His love to burn in us. It is not something merely to be studied objectively or acknowledged logically; we are meant to feel it and be moved by it. Dom Gueranger puts it this way: The heart of a Christian is not made to be cold or indifferent; it must be affectionate and devoted; otherwise it can never attain the perfection for which God, who is love, has graciously created it. (The Liturgical Year, vol. IX, pg. 356)

The second question was actually a whole series of questions relating back to the previous days firepit adventure. How does Dear Jesus want me to kindle the fire of His love? What things will feed this precious fire of charity? What does it need to be sheltered from and sheltered by? Is there any dampness present, working against the growth of this flame?

The rest of Friday was spend meditating on these things as I went about kindling the material fire in front of me. There were thoughts on how knowledge fuels love, and how in order to love God more, we must get to know Him better (at which I point I distinctly heard Deborah Kerrs voice in my head singing, Getting to know you, getting to know all about you. . .). Certainly, I had many ideas on how to learn more about God, how to dispose myself to His gift of faith: reading the lives of saints, studying in the school of nature, watching Him in the Gospels and mysteries of the rosary, to name only a few. Then, too, I saw how a love of temporal things can draw our hearts away from eternal things. Worldly treasures, honors, comforts, and conveniences can be so many mists, threatening to extinguish the fires of charity. And yet it is not the world that is the problem, but the love of the world, when that love is out of right order. Our affections and delights can and must be directed. It is not enough for us to deprive ourselves of worldly pleasures as we look after them with longing. We must strive to enkindle a desire for the infinitely greater goods of eternity with energy and determination.

At the same time, its essential to remember that it is God alone Who actually has the wisdom and power to inflame our hearts. Enkindle in us the fire of Thy love! He invites us to participate in this work, in the same way a mother might allow a toddler to help her make dinner.

All these were merely my considerations. But there is so much more to be gained from your own meditation on the subject. Particular lights that God wants to give you, specifically. I highly recommend taking a little time to build a fire, if the local burning regulations allow it. Ask Our Lord to come and join you as you consider His words: I am come to cast a fire upon earth, and what will I, but that it be kindled? You can have the meditation be as structured or spontaneous as you like. Some might find it helpful to use all of the who, what, where, when, why and how questions to jumpstart the conversation with Our Lord, others may not. The real point is to ask Dear Jesus to grant you a deeper appreciation and understanding of His holy love, to show you the connections between feeding natural flames and fostering supernatural charity. What better way to delight and repair the Sacred Heart of Jesus, so wounded by coldness? What better way to dispose ourselves to receive the rich treasures of His tender Heart, which He so dearly wants to give us?

Heart of Jesus, glowing furnace of charity, have mercy on us!

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Feeding the Fire: A June Meditation - Catholicism.org

A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology sheds light on the distinct neural correlates of two primary types of meditation concentrative and analytical using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers found that these meditative practices result in different patterns of brain activity, providing insights into how meditation affects cognitive and emotional regulation. This study involved monks from the Sera Jey Monastery in India, offering a unique glimpse into the neurophysiological effects of long-term meditation practice.

The researchers aimed to investigate how different forms of meditation influence brain activity. Despite the growing popularity of meditation in both clinical and secular contexts, there remains a lack of clarity regarding the specific neural mechanisms underlying various meditative practices.

By focusing on concentrative and analytical meditation, the study sought to delineate the distinct neurophysiological profiles associated with these practices. The researchers hoped to address gaps in the literature, particularly the need for more nuanced and contextually rich examinations of meditations effects on the brain.

Although I have been Professor of Electronics at the University of Pisa for over 40 years, the science of the mind and the investigation of consciousness have always been at the center of my interests and curiosity, explained study author Bruno Neri.

The first time I read about the Dalai Lama was in an adventure book when I was 14 years old: this figure of political and spiritual guidance of his people marked by boundless compassion struck me deeply. His reincarnation, and his return after each lifetime to continue leading his people, has always fascinated me. These two interests merged into a single thread when I found myself completely by chance at the Lama Tsongkhapa Institute, the largest center of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, about 40 kilometers from Pisa.

For this reason, a few years later, when the Dalai Lama, during a visit to the Institute that I had been attending for some time, asked the director to establish contacts with the University of Pisa and the Director spoke to me about it, I jumped at the chance occasion by promoting collaboration agreements both with the Institute itself and with the Tibetan Monastic University of Sera Jey in India.

The study was conducted over 12 weeks at the Sera Jey Monastery in India, involving 23 monks who varied in their meditation experience. The monastic university, located in Bylakuppe, is a prominent center for Buddhist learning and practice. It was reestablished by monks who escaped Tibet following the Chinese occupation in 1959.

The University of Sera Jey was destroyed 60 years ago due to the Chinese invasion and rebuilt in India: this is a great test of resistance, maturity and perseverance in peace on the part of a people who have never reacted to violence with violence and show how the aptitude for non-violence can be developed by educating the mind, Neri explained.

The participants were divided into three groups: beginners, intermediates, and advanced meditators. The researchers collected EEG data from these monks as they engaged in both concentrative and analytical meditation sessions. The sessions were not time-restricted, allowing each participant to meditate naturally and without external pressure.

The researchers found significant differences in EEG patterns between concentrative and analytical meditation. Concentrative meditation, which involves focusing attention on a single object (like the breath or a mantra), showed more pronounced changes in brain activity compared to analytical meditation. Specifically, concentrative meditation was associated with increased power in alpha and theta brain waves, particularly in frontal and posterior regions. These changes suggest enhanced attentional control and reduced mind-wandering during concentrative meditation.

In contrast, analytical meditation, which involves reflecting on specific concepts or teachings, showed less dramatic changes in brain activity. While both types of meditation led to some alterations in EEG patterns, the effects of concentrative meditation were more robust and consistent.

Neri was impressed by the monks ability to voluntarily induce different mental states that are easily recognizable with objective measuring instruments.

We must approach these people with great humility and the desire to learn from them, leaving typical Western arrogance at home and avoiding making them feel like guinea pigs.

The researchers also observed a unique phenomenon in advanced meditators: the presence of a marked peak in the beta frequency range during some sessions, which was not present in beginners. This suggests that long-term meditation practice might enhance specific cognitive and attentional processes.

The research highlights how a multidisciplinary contribution Western Neuroscience on the one hand and Contemplative Practices that have developed continuously for almost 3 millennia in the great Eastern traditions on the other is indispensable to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles to the understanding of enigma of consciousness, Neri told PsyPost

While the study provides valuable insights, it also has several limitations. The sample size was relatively small, and the distribution of participants across different levels of meditation experience was uneven. This makes it difficult to generalize the findings to all meditators. Future studies should aim to include larger and more balanced samples.

The researchers suggest that future studies should explore the long-term effects of meditation, particularly how sustained practice over years might lead to lasting changes in brain structure and function. Investigating the impact of meditation on specific clinical populations, such as individuals with anxiety or depression, could also provide valuable insights into its therapeutic potential.

The thing that fascinates me most are some types of esoteric meditations that allow practitioners to go to the roots of the mind/body relationship, showing a cause/effect relationship opposite to that recognized in the dominant vision of neuroscience, Neri said. It is not consciousness which presents itself as an epiphenomenon of the brain that generates it, but is itself capable of managing its relationship with the body.

An example of this is the g-tummo meditation in which the mind controls the body temperature until it reaches almost 39C. Another is the Mahamudra meditation through which meditators simulate the detachment of the mind/consciousness from the body by surprisingly lowering their metabolism until they appear dead. The next step will be to look for these two types of expert meditators during the next research mission to Sera Jey which will begin in a few weeks.

Francisco Varela understood the indispensability of combining the third-person approach, objective analysis, with the first-person approach, subjective analysis through contemplative practices, to progress in the investigation of consciousness, Neri added. Unfortunately he died prematurely. My experience with an ancient and authoritative tradition like that of Tibetan Buddhism showed me that Varela was right.

The study, Report from a Tibetan Monastery: EEG neural correlates of concentrative and analytical meditation, was authored by Bruno Neri, Alejandro Luis Callara, Nicola Vanello, Danilo Menicucci, Andrea Zaccaro, Andrea Piarulli, Marco Laurino, Ngawang Norbu, Jampa Kechok, Ngawang Sherab, and Angelo Gemignani.

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Study with Tibetan monks reveals how different types of meditation affect brain activity - PsyPost

Some of the rhetoric around meditation can get pretty extreme: awaken us from the illusion of selfhood, dissolve the mental habits that generate suffering, and maybe merge with the primordial oneness that our thinking minds make us feel separate from.

But of the 35 million Americans (as of 2017) who find some crevice of their day to practice some kind of meditation, including the sort of quick mindfulness meditation that tops app-store charts and bestseller lists, its unsurprising that many wind up concluding the hype is mostly bullshit or at least seriously overblown.

Instead of the deep psychological transformations detailed in Buddhist traditions, 10 minutes or so of meditation often gives rise to a sort of balmy uneventfulness that leaves the mind feeling like its had a nice, light massage. It has its effects: A growing heap of studies is finding these basic mindfulness practices can do all sorts of relatively beneficial things, from helping with depression to reducing blood pressure. But your basic understanding of how your mind works? That can remain relatively unchanged.

In the past few years, though, the study of more advanced meditation than basic mindfulness has been developing. So far, its most robust finding is that our scientific understanding of just how deep meditations effects can go has hardly scratched the surface.

In most circles, meditation is billed as this thing thatll help you relax a little bit, said Grant Belsterling, a machine learning engineer at Nielsen and avid meditator with a six-year practice. But there are a lot of states of meditation that blow anything you can get in the regular world of everyday life out of the water in terms of how pleasurable, meaningful, or absorbing they can be.

One series of eight meditative states the jhnas, often described as successive states of absorption into bliss, rapture, or ecstasy is now beginning to rise from obscurity, raising a powerful example of meditations more transformative potentials into mainstream attention across academia, tech, social media, and Western meditation communities. The jhnas are detailed in the Theravda Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia and have their own particular meditation instructions, which typically involve sustaining attention on feelings of pleasure in the body.

Its a completely different mode of consciousness, said Paul Dennison, a former psychotherapist and meditation teacher who published a book about the jhnas in 2022. The sense of time disappears temporarily, the sense of why youre doing anything disappears ... and when you come out of that, the mind is so clear that you can get a lot deeper understanding of who we are and how we get caught up in the patterns that lead to suffering.

Neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet, who leads Harvards Meditation Research Program, published a study in January that stuck an advanced meditator with 25 years of jhna experience inside a massive fMRI machine to create a more robust map of what jhna experience looks like in the brain, homing in on changes in blood and oxygen flow. When I toured the lab earlier this year, he explained that while the study was just a first step, they found distinct patterns in brain activity that distinguished jhna meditation from non-meditative control states.

Activity decreased in the brain region that includes the prefrontal cortex, which drives complex functions like planning and self-referential thinking. At the same time, activity near the back of the brain increased, in older regions like the brainstem and visual cortex, which regulate more basic functions like awareness and arousal.

Sacchet emphasized to me that we still dont know much about the jhnas from a neuroscience perspective. But his findings support a growing theory in meditation research that some deeper meditative states like the jhnas cause a reduction in top-down processing, and gradually deactivate the minds habits of weaving narratives, orienting around goals, and keeping cognitive control over experience. As the theory goes, that allows for attention to more directly behold sensory experience as it is, rather than as the mind has evolved to construct it.

This is one of the biggest secrets on the planet right now, said Stephen Zerfas, who along with Alex Gruver is a co-founder of Jhourney, a meditation startup focused on bringing blissful meditative states like jhnas to the masses. Access to the jhnas is shockingly available to folks with all kinds of meditation backgrounds.

Neuroscientists, novice practitioners, established meditation teachers, and apparently Jhourneys angel investors all seem to agree that the mind can learn how to launch itself into deep states of unparalleled bliss basically on command. If thats indeed the case, instructions for doing so have been lying around for at least 2,000 years, and presumably longer in oral traditions. Because the Western mindfulness movement derives from Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions that largely ignore the jhnas, they are only now beginning to spread beyond yogic traditions and monastic chambers to reach wider audiences.

There are at least two very exciting things to note about the jhnas. The first is that basic mindfulness does not exactly topple ones understanding of how consciousness works the jhnas, however, do. Bliss is not forever elusive, but a trainable skill, and the mind is capable of far more than we yet understand.

Second, even though that the jhnas do seem to live up to their often hyperbolic reputations absorptions into boundless consciousness, for example most skilled meditators who learn to access them wind up moving on to explore other practices (like non-dual meditation). Meditators seem to lose interest in bliss alone because experiencing the jhnas makes a fascinating question come alive: If the mind can do this, what else can it do?

A particular understanding of the jhnas is crystalizing across Western interest today, largely inspired by the work of software engineer and longtime meditator Leigh Brasington, who was authorized to teach the jhnas by Buddhist Theravda nun Ayya Khema. In 2015, he published Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhnas, one of the first books dedicated to teaching a wide, Western audience how to access the jhnas.

But it takes very little digging to find that within and across Buddhist traditions, people disagree on what the jhnas are like and how long it takes to enter them. Some Theravda interpretations, like Bhante Vimalarasis Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM), suggest that the jhnas can be entered relatively quickly. You could fit them into your half-hour morning meditation before heading to work. Others, like Pa-Auk Sayadaw, maintain that it takes highly specific conditions and hours of sitting before getting anywhere close to something like even the first jhna.

Daniel Ingram, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and the longtime meditator who Sacchets lab at Harvard stuffed in the neuroimaging machines when they wanted to study the jhnas, said he prefers to think about them dimensionally. Each of the eight jhanic states ranges from shallow, accessible entry points to deeper ends of absorption that require more time and preparation.

David Snyder, author of a number of books on Buddhism and founder of the Dhamma Wiki, has a usefully sparse list drawn from the Aguttara Nikya of the Pli Canon, a collection of Theravda Buddhist scriptures.

First jhna: Delightful sensations

Third jhna: Contentment

Fourth jhna: Utter peacefulness

Fifth jhna: Infinity of space

Sixth jhna: Infinity of consciousness

Seventh jhna: No-thingness

Eighth jhna: Neither perception nor non-perception

While each jhna seems to grow a little more difficult to describe than the last, even the first is not a mellow starting point. Descriptions range from a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurable electricity, similar to a sustained orgasm, to MDMA therapy without the drugs.

Reporting for this piece, I got the sense that the jhnas, like psychedelics, are things you cant really understand without having the experience for yourself. So I took on a jhna-specific practice for the first time (with about 10 years of not-always-consistent other meditation experience). I still dont know what to make of what happened.

Theres a variety of paths toward the jhnas. Most run through what Buddhists call pti, a sort of bodily zest. Belsterling described it as champagne bubbles, or like the feeling of goosebumps, except throughoutyour entire body, not just the surface of your skin.

In the past, Ive noticed random tingles in my body while meditating, usually in my hands or feet. I always figured I was just losing circulation. Id shift my body a bit and try to ignore them. But it turns out this was just me repeatedly ignoring the doorway to the jhnas because I didnt know any better.

The first time I was in the first jhna, I felt like I got dropped off a roller coaster, that sense of full-body exhilaration, said Belsterling, whod been meditating for about six years before trying jhna practice

Jhna instructions say that after reaching a stable degree of concentration, maybe through focusing on your breath, a mantra, or loving-kindness, youll begin to notice that tingling pti growing stronger and more stable. And if your foot is not in fact just falling asleep, that means the decisive moment has arrived. Instead of ignoring it, you shift your attention onto the pti.

I managed to find this on-ramp to the first jhna, and it was profoundly strange. The tingling sensations leaped from my fingers to envelop the entire frame of my awareness, like going from a few stray drops of rain on my hands to being fully submerged underwater, where I began to feel myself almost literally absorbing into a sort of vibratory expanse (this is what I mean by not being able to understand it unless you experience it).

Thats about as far as I went. Since the whole ordeal is so bizarre, lapses in concentration keep knocking me off the onramp. Apparently, getting a little too excited and losing the concentration that keeps things moving forward is pretty common in the early days of practicing jhna.

But if you manage to keep cool while the jhna ramps up, at some point, it can just take off like a rocket, said Zerfas.

The first time I was in the first jhna, I felt like I got dropped off a roller coaster, that sense of full-body exhilaration, said Belsterling, whod been meditating for about six years before trying jhna practice. It was super overwhelming, and I got dropped out of it immediately. But once he learned to stabilize it, the drop would lead to dwelling in a state of relaxed presence and unification, accompanied by tremendous joy and physical rapture.

While this probably all sounds strange (it should; the jhnas are), the mechanism may be a familiar one for many. Getting into the first jhna is like having a panic attack but for joy.

You can think about [the jhnas] as a positive feedback loop between attention and emotion, said Zerfas. When anxiety begins to set in, you can feel it. Your chest pulls tight or your palms go moist. If you focus on or obsess over any of these sensations, you might make them more intense. The most surefire way to sweat through your shirt is to become hyperconscious of the fact that your body is starting to go damp. The first jhna is a similar process but in the opposite direction.

Rather than focusing on the physiology of anxiety, you do enough concentration meditation that youre able to notice the early signs of a physiology of joy, or pleasantness, in your body: pti. Then you focus on it, and by doing so, make it more intense.

At this point, you may think meditators have really weird ideas about what feels pleasurable. But as this process escalates, so does the bliss.

Which, traditionally speaking, is beside the point. According to Theravda Buddhist texts like the Pli Canon and Visuddhimagga, the aim of doing jhna practice is to develop the mental clarity and concentration skills to go even further in insight practice, which, unlike the jhnas, is what actually leads to spiritual awakening. The jhnas are like an optional training program, and the bliss stuff is just a side effect that contemplative traditions have urged practitioners not to get caught up in. What matters is liberation from suffering, not vacations into rapture.

But if the jhnas gain traction in the West, they may well follow the path being forged by the mainstreaming of psychedelics, where wider spiritual and religious contexts are stripped away. What remains, whether drugs or a particular set of meditation instructions, gets packaged as a psychological treatment for a culture mired in mental health crises.

New treatments arent necessarily a bad thing. People with conditions like PTSD or depression (not to mention cluster headaches) are in urgent need of better medical interventions than what weve currently got. Psychedelic therapy can do serious amounts of good here, provided its done in ways that dont harm the cultures that have stewarded many of these substances for so long. Same with the jhnas and this whole business of being absorbed into bliss states. Even if the jhnas are decontextualized away from their traditional goal enlightenment learning access to blissful states could still deliver important benefits.

It is very possible that we might see the jhnas fitting into hospitals, clinics, and perhaps the public in general, said Sacchet.

While concerns about decontextualizing the jhnas leading to yet another sacrilegious Western perversion of long-running spiritual practices are important to engage with, the jhnas have this interesting quality of pointing beyond themselves. Among the Western meditators I spoke with who are trying them out, I encountered no so-called jhna junkies. You might suspect that one could become obsessed with unconditional access to bliss. And its not impossible. But for the few who do, I can think of worse compulsive habits. And for the others who dont, they wind up developing a natural curiosity toward the wider possibilities of the mind, which is conveniently aligned with the traditional context anyway.

Ancient Theravda texts can give the impression that the jhnas are really difficult to learn and that very few who try will succeed. That depends on your definition of jhna, but observations from this century suggest that at least the shallower ends of jhna are surprisingly accessible.

When I spoke with Ajahn Sona, a Theravda monk for over 30 years who runs the Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery in British Columbia, he said that at retreats he leads, hes seen people reach the first and second jhnas in as little as the fourth day of their first-ever retreat, though some may struggle to reenter the jhnas consistently (meditators may spend anywhere from six to 16 hours meditating per day, depending on the retreat).

Zerfas said that Jhourney is finding similar benchmarks at its retreats. After roughly 40 hours of meditation, some students begin reporting experiences that match descriptions of the first jhna. Its worth noting, though, that these are very rough approximations. Development along the meditative spectrum isnt always linear. The amount of time to reach various states differs across people. Not to mention that our methods for verifying whether someone actually went into a jhna mostly come down to a teachers intuition, or comparing someones subjective report of their experience to existing jhna descriptions.

Still, if jhna meditation can propel even novice meditators into incomparable states of bliss, it may seem strange that mindfulness practices claim the majority of mainstream attention. The global market for mindfulness meditation apps is booming, while theres comparatively zilch for the jhnas.

The absence of the jhnas in todays meditation discourse is made even stranger when you look back across Buddhisms history, where they played a major role. Few strategies are as central to the Buddhist path, and as little known to Westerners, as those called the jhanas, writes Mary Talbot, former executive editor of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle.

So why did Buddhisms spread across the West in the 20th century leave the jhnas out?

From the historical Buddhas time of roughly 500 BCE until the 19th century, Theravda, the oldest branch of Buddhism, taught two aspects of meditation practice: samatha (or concentration, which includes the jhnas) and vipassan (or insight). The two work together and were not generally considered separable. Samatha practices sharpen concentration, while insight practices wield that sharpened concentration to penetrate deeper into the nature of the mind.

By the early 20th century, reform movements had swept across the Theravda traditions of Thailand and Myanmar (then called Burma). Influential teacher Ledi Sayadaw taught vipassan as a style of meditation that could be separated from samatha and the jhnas. Vipassan was emphasized while samatha was not, in part because the reforms intended to make meditation practice available to laypeople living outside of monastic traditions, and the jhnas had acquired a reputation owing largely to a fifth-century text, the Visuddhimagga as being difficult to achieve.

The reform movements created a dry vipassan model dry, because as Dennison put it, it isnt moistened by the joy of jhna which saved meditators from the hard task of cultivating the jhnas but kept the road toward enlightenment offered by insight meditation. By the mid-1960s, any organized teaching of the old samatha practices had all but disappeared, writes Dennison. The new face of Buddhism had become vipassan.

Yet even while mindfulness began to take root as the Wests most common form of meditation through the end of the 20th century, a handful of teachers continued teaching the jhnas

And when the generation of American seekers who would eventually return to spread mindfulness across the West Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein went off to Asia in search of God or liberation or whatever esoteric interests impelled Americans to seek out meditation in foreign countries, they found teachers from this Burmese tradition of dry insight. These were practitioners like Mahs Syadaw (who taught in Burma) and S.N. Goenka (born in Burma but who taught primarily in India), whose meditation schemas became the blueprint for much of what came back to the US.

Yet even while mindfulness began to take root as the Wests most common form of meditation through the end of the 20th century, a handful of teachers continued teaching the jhnas, often surreptitiously. In the past decade, the teachings have started to spread across meditation communities, social media, and academia.

In 2013, the first EEG and fMRI academic study on the jhnas was published in the journal Neural Plasticity by Michael Hagerty and co-authors (including Brasington), focusing on changes in blood and oxygen flow in the brain regions associated with sensory and reward processing. Hagerty posits that meditators can internally trigger the brains dopamine reward system through sustained attentional skills, whereas ordinarily, pleasureful dopamine spikes have an external component, like chomping on a sweet doughnut or having sex.

Six years later, Dennison published his own EEG study of the jhnas in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, hypothesizing that EEG spindles little spikes of electrical activity and remarkably slowed brainwaves showed how the jhnas elicit a progressive disengagement from the human default consciousness. Then in the past year, Jhourney (the meditation startup Zerfas co-founded) was founded, and Sacchets lab published their paper on the jhnas, joining a swell of research on advanced meditation more broadly.

All of this raises questions without clear answers. Is there something perverse about turning deep meditative states into clearly defined goals that Americans will, inevitably, try to optimize? Will the drive to commodify ancient practices defile them? Are there risks to jhna meditation? The jhnas may offer something more powerful, interesting, and compelling than basic mindfulness does which makes the stakes of integrating and navigating them in a new cultural context that much more important.

We dont aspire to teach 1,000 people jhnas, Zerfas told me, we aspire to teach 10 million people jhnas. Which may encounter some obstacles.

First, no matter how much more accessible the jhnas may be than traditionally thought, 10 minutes of meditation a day probably wont get you there. Even if that 40-hour benchmark holds up, dividing it into 240 10-minute increments isnt a very promising strategy. Even for practiced meditators, it can take at least 10 minutes just to reach the kind of concentration you need to get started (Brasington calls this access concentration). Longer increments of practice are better, which is why retreats make for an easier place to start.

Thats still a remarkably low bar for learning to dwell in boundless ecstasy. But good luck scaling that commitment 40 or so tightly clustered hours across millions of Americans.

The first way to cut down on the time-to-jhna is simply to teach them directly something that until recently has been rare in the West. Jhourney approaches jhna instruction as Engineers, not Dharma Teachers, tinkering to find what methods seem to be most effective.

That may sound like a classic narrative of Western optimizers lifting spiritual practices from their traditional contexts, oblivious to the harms born of what they leave behind. But even Ajahn Sona, the abbot of the Birken monastery, told me that anyone seeking to spread the jhnas to more people needs to systematically plot out the optimal preconditions for getting into them. The Theravda texts still offer one blueprint for doing so. But its also possible that in the 2,000-plus years since they were written, as both new technologies and cultural sensibilities have developed, there might be some value in revisiting what those preconditions are and whether any new tools could help optimize them further.

If this acceleration of mainstream interest continues, the jhnas will likely face a similar gauntlet of questions that mindfulness began to wrangle with decades ago

While monks of old used singing bowls and monasteries as technologies to support meditation practice, Jhourney figures, why not neurotechnology? Why not, for example, strap a skullcap and sensors on advanced meditators in the jhnas, train algorithms on their biometric data, develop a consumer headset that can track the brain activity of novice meditators, and then use the algorithm to run a neurofeedback training program that helps guide users, via gentle audio cues, toward the jhnas, hopefully cutting down on the time it takes to get there? Jhourney is currently in the first phase, collecting data from experts while holding retreats to test what instructions seem to work best.

I think the real thing that stops us from taking this to true scale is good data, Zerfas said. If we can get the right quantitative tools ... then we may have what we need to share this thing that could be the well-being intervention of a generation.

If this acceleration of mainstream interest continues, the jhnas will likely face a similar gauntlet of questions that mindfulness began to wrangle with decades ago. And if we successfully developed technology that would allow anyone 10 million people to speed-run their way to the jhnas without first going on retreats and studying under teachers for years, a number of traditional harm reduction strategies could be lost.

You may not have access to a teacher who can monitor how things are going, and you may not be part of a meditation community that can offer you peer support and understanding, rather than Prozac, if you begin to experience what psychologist Willoughby Britton has called dark nights of the soul, or destabilizing meditation experiences that can last for months.

Its tempting to think that since the jhnas are bliss states, the risks are negligible. Whats so risky about teaching everyone how to access a mental state of extraordinary well-being? While there are increasingly well-known (and still generally rare) risks to meditation, theyre often associated with insight practice. But if 10-day vipassan retreats can prompt psychotic breaks, or deep and unwavering anxiety that lasts for months afterward, is jhna meditation really immune?

Ingram feels that the separation between jhanic bliss and destabilizing insight makes sense in theory, but it doesnt hold up in practice. Anyone on the path of jhna is risking insight. Which from a certain point of view is a beautiful thing. Except in the short term, every single one of the risks from insight applies, he said.

No one I spoke with felt that the jhnas hold any greater risks than other meditation practices. But scaling them means even rare consequences are meaningful at population levels. Ingram worries that the infrastructure to communicate informed consent, risks, benefits, and alternatives that can support millions of people getting into this territory at scale is dangerously lacking. Just like a bottle of aspirin provides risk estimates (one in a thousand people may experience ...), bringing advanced meditation to the masses should come with both clear information and clinical literacy for supporting those in need.

Ingram now runs an organization, the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC), thats working on getting informed consent and clinical support to become the norm for states like advanced meditation experiences.

Then theres capitalism. Ingram also worries about profit as a motive underlying advanced meditation research and technology. This needs to be open source, open tech, open collaborative science for public benefit, he said.

Sacchet, who runs the Harvard lab, is conflicted by the tensions inherent in promoting the jhnas. On the one hand, my research has contributed to the hype, he said. I am deeply committed to raising awareness of these altered states. But he worries that literally selling the jhnas risks leaning too heavily on promising something in exchange, contributing to the idea of meditation as a goal-oriented practice.

Striving is the antithesis of jhna, he said. Touting the practice and its esoteric benefits may be anathema to the practice itself.

For Jhourney, though, Zerfas wants scale. And scaling meditation is not something that even traditional Buddhist cultures really did. Most Buddhists throughout history did not meditate.

It requires a bit of a stretch to imagine academic research on advanced meditation or nonprofit jhna teachers reaching tens of millions of people. On the contrary, Headspace alone reports over 70 million downloads of its meditation app. This tension between scale and authenticity to the original framing of the practice is nothing new mindfulness has been contending with this debate for years, where the mass-market version is often criticized as McMindfulness.

But given that the jhnas usually take more time than basic mindfulness, I dont think they threaten any greater commercial success than what weve already seen in the mindfulness industry. And the jhnas themselves are not at risk of being enclosed behind private property rights. Instructions and information on the jhnas are already freely available, and thats not going to change. Instead, just as with mindfulness, were more likely to see the logic of capital at play in building goods and services around the jhnas. For example, proprietary algorithms built on private biometric datasets that power commercial neurofeedback headsets.

Publicly available datasets, algorithms, and tools would be great, but nothing is stopping others from building their own versions in the public domain (if they can get the funding). Sacchets lab is working on exactly that. He told me that his team is in the process of developing such programs to make these kinds of practices more accessible to everyone who might be interested. This paints a picture where capitalism isnt swallowing the jhnas whole. Instead, theres a diverse and growing ecosystem of institutions getting involved, which helps mitigate the shortcomings of any one alone.

On a video call, Ajahn Sona seemed genuinely excited by the rising interest in jhna practice, both within his tradition and beyond (hes even been posting talks about the jhnas on YouTube).

Jhna is just staggeringly important because nothing like it is taught in Western philosophy, or in any university, he said. I went through all that stuff myself, and there is nothing equivalent to it, whatsoever. Its the only place youre going to find this alternative way of using your mind.

And while the jhnas themselves are only one among a great variety of baffling meditative states, they may prove tractable and accessible enough to further advanced meditations march into the mainstream. That, in turn, can help build a richer understanding of whats going on in the mind of someone absorbed into an electrical beam of bliss, roping these uncommon experiences closer into the ordinary fluctuations of human psychology.

But perhaps the most exciting thing about the jhnas is that despite their offering of an apparently unparalleled sense of bliss that requires no external trigger, skilled meditators tend to leave them behind and explore other practices. Pure bliss isnt the end of the road. As Belsterling said, Theres no way you could be in jhna without questioning what else might be possible.

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What are the jhnas? The meditative state breaking through the mainstream, explained. - Vox.com

You might have heard of the term mindfulness,a commonly known practice that involves maintaining attention or awareness of the present moment without making judgments.

More broadly, mindfulness and meditation research are on the cusp of a new wave of sciencefocusing on the deep end of practice, what researchers call advanced meditation, or states and stages of practice that unfold with increasing mastery and often with time.

This includes states and stages that have been described in ancient wisdom traditions like Buddhism and include experiences of ecstatic bliss, insight into different aspects of the mind, compassionate and empathic states, and others.

In this Q&A, Dr. Matthew Sacchet an investigator in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging expands on a recently published letter in the journal World Psychiatry, one of the highest impact journals in medicine.

In the letter, Dr. Sacchet discusses how advanced meditation and related experiences and changes to ways of being offer new possibilities for improving health and well-being in clinical and non-clinical contexts.

Studying its historical and cultural roots, mindfulness may be understood as a practice of maintaining a moment-by-moment nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and the surrounding environment. Practitioners often focus on their breath or body to develop a stable and clear awareness.

Advanced meditation, however, takes mindfulness and mediation to a deeper level, incorporating practices such as advanced concentrative absorption meditation or ACAM, and advanced investigative insight meditation or AIIM.

Advanced meditation often involves protracted and more disciplined practice compared to conventional modern mindfulness practice. While mindfulness is generally focused on reducing stress related to daily life and work, advanced meditation is concerned with deeper and more profound meditative endpoints.

For example, the objective of advanced meditation may be to radically alter ordinary perception and to experience profound psychological transformation.

Self-transcendence is defined by ego dissolution, affective bliss, and a merging or softening of boundary between self and other/object (i.e., non-duality).

It is an experience that has been reported across many contemplative, philosophical, religious and spiritual traditions around the world, sometimes thousands of years ago. These types of experiences may foster compassionate behavior and reorientation of life goals to be more aligned with deeper, more altruistic values.

Self-transcendence may lead to profound sense of purpose and well-being, as individuals may experience a shift from self-centeredness to a broader perspective that includes a deep sense of connection and empathy with others and the world.

Studying self-transcendence and advanced meditation more broadly will inform mechanistic understanding and scientific models. These models can then be used to link to other fields of science and to develop treatments. Such models may provide important guidance for developing new, or improving existing, treatments for mental illness and practices for supporting well-being more generally. They may also be used to track change and determine best treatments.

Therapies centered on self-transcendence, such as meditation, may help patients experience fundamental transformation in how they perceive themselves and their place in the world. These therapies may foster states of unity and purpose that counteract feelings of isolation and meaninglessness that are associated with mental illness.

To develop therapies based on advanced mediation, including self-transcendence, interdisciplinary and foundational research is required. This includes neuroscientific studies to understand the brain mechanisms underlying meditative development and endpoints, psychological research to identify the most effective practices and conditions for inducing these states and stages, and clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of these interventions.

Longitudinal studies are also essential to determine long-term benefits, safe implementation, and potential risks.

Meditation, and particularly advanced meditation that is aimed at achieving deep states and stages of practice, including self-transcendence, may help patients to develop resilience, emotion regulation, a sense of peace, flourishing, thriving, meaning in life, and wisdom.

Moreover, advanced meditation may help individuals overcome difficult emotions and psychological suffering through directly processing these experiences. Through meditation, individuals may experience self-transcendence, a profound shift in perspective that may foster a deep sense of interconnectedness, unity, and empathy.

Growing evidence suggests that psychedelics may alter perception and mood, cognitive processing including the sense of self, and elicit therapeutic effects in mood and anxiety disorders.

Psychedelics may facilitate experiences of unity and self-transcendence (or what has been called ego dissolution in the psychedelic literature) that can lead to profound experiences toward understanding and healing deep-seated psychological difficulties. These therapies could complement existing treatments and offer new possibilities for interventions.

As our understanding of mindfulness, meditation, advanced meditation, self-transcendence, and the therapeutic use of psychedelics grows, psychiatry may continue to integrate these insights toward increasingly powerful approaches to conceptualizing and treating mental illness.

For example, conventional treatments, including behavioral and pharmaceutical approaches, may incorporate new insights from advanced meditation research toward more effective and comprehensive care.

The development of new models of mental health that incorporate concepts from advanced meditation, such as human flourishing and self-transcendence, may drive this transformation. Existing mental health models may be updated to integrate core concepts from the science of advanced meditation, perhaps emphasizing the importance of experiences that promote human flourishing such as self-transcendence and overall well-being.

Psychiatrists may increasingly incorporate mindfulness, or other forms of meditation and training, to facilitate self-transcendent and other types of experiences as part of clinical care.

These possibilities have the capacity to significantly transform mental health care, promising to improve patient outcomes and promote a more integrative approach to psychiatry, and to suffering and happiness more broadly.

Originally published on Mass General Research Institute's Bench Press on May 24, 2024.

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A Closer Look into the New Wave of Research in Advanced Meditation - Mass General Brigham

Warning! This post contains SPOILERS for Darth Maul: Black, White, and Red #2

Darth Maul's new "Sith Meditation" scene flips his iconic Star Wars duel in The Phantom Menace. As seen in Marvel's Darth Maul: Black, White, and Red anthology series, the newly released second issue depicts a brutal mission before the events of the Skywalker saga when Maul was still training and apprenticed under Darth Sidious. To that end, Darth Maul takes a moment at the issue's start to center himself within the dark side of the Force.

As seen in Darth Maul: Black, White and Red #2 by Mark Russell and Carlos Nieto, the titular Dark Lord of the Sith has been tasked by his master to take control of the remote Moonbender Colony, a remote settlement on the outskirts of Republic space protected by a group of former bounty hunters and mercenaries known as the Remainders. To that end, the beginning of the issue sees Maul sitting down and meditating on the dark side's power before unleashing his brutal skills on Moonbender.

Once the Remainders choose to fight this strange outside sitting at the doors of their fortress-like facility, Maul's Sith mediation comes to a dark end as the Sith apprentice prepares to bring every one of these fighters to their deaths.

What's the best way to watch Star Wars? Here's everything you need to know to watch in release or timeline order, and how to include the TV shows.

In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn takes advantage of the brief delay during his and Obi-Wan's duel with Darth Maul to meditate. This was due to the Jedi Master and Sith apprentice being temporarily separated by an energy force field. Kneeling and closing his eyes, Qui-Gon centered himself on the light side of the Force, seeking to restore his fatigue and gain greater focus while Maul simply stalked back and forth, impatiently waiting for the field to drop so the duel could continue.

Conversely, this new issue shows that Maul was indeed trained in the far darker art of Sith meditation. Drawing upon the darkest of emotions such as hatred, fear, and/or anger, a Sith Lord can focus that energy into a greater source of focused power in the dark side. They become stronger and far more ruthless, rather than finding peace and restoration as seen with Jedi meditation. As such, the same is true with Maul unleashing all his rage and fury in this new issue the moment his dark meditation is interrupted by the Remainders and their horrible decision to stay on Moonbender and fight him.

Despite being outgunned and outmanned, Maul systemically executes each member of the Remainders as he works his way through the facility, beginning with a magnetically sealed tunnel the Remainders hoped would have ended the Sith Lord following repeated waves of ricocheting blaster fire. Instead, Maul's power was on full display, cutting down all of his opponents before learning that this entire mission was a Sith trial designed by his master to test Maul's skills against a variety of different combatants. Regardless, it's impressive to see Darth Maul meditating through the power of the dark side, a Sith technique rarely seen in the canonical galaxy far, far away.

Darth Maul: Black, White & Red #2 is available now from Marvel Comics.

Darth Maul: Black, White & Red #1 (2024)

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Darth Maul's Sith Meditation Totally Flips Episode I's Duel of the Fates - Screen Rant

Of all the pillars of internet content, surely one of the strongest is the genre where people outline their morning routine in grave and sanctimonious detail. They exist in every medium, in every platform, among every internet subculture.

TikTok has its Get Ready With Mes, where influencers chat over their plethora of skin-nourishing unguents and artful makeup products. Beauty YouTube has the more glamorous cousin, Vogue Beauty Secrets, in which dewy-skinned celebrities walk us through the many things they do to their faces every morning.

Artist blogs swap tips about the best way to keep Morning Pages. Powerful women, titans of their respective industries, tell the Cut How I Get It Done. And on LinkedIn and YouTube, lifehackers share their morning tricks for maximizing productivity.

The productive morning is the one really taking off these days, beloved by the wellness world and the rise-and-grinders alike. The reigning king of the productivity ritual is Andrew Huberman, the controversial Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster whose routine is always being described in vlogs as scientifically perfect.

Hubermans morning routine straddles the thin line between sounding idyllic and torturous, depending on your proclivities. He awakens within an hour of sunrise every day, and then he goes outside for a 10-minute walk (30 minutes if its overcast) for optimum morning light exposure. He drinks electrolytes (for hydration) but abstains from food or caffeine while he performs 90 minutes of deep work (no emails, lots of in-depth research). Then he caffeinates, exercises vigorously, and cold plunges. (Cold showers will work too, he says). He doesnt eat until lunchtime.

At the beginning of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal of the human body wants nothing more than to doze comfortably in bed

This routine is internet catnip. Social media abounds with videos and essays about people following Hubermans routine for a day or a week or a month or a year and documenting the results. In one, the vlogger even tests his testosterone levels before and after his month-long experiment to prove that Hubermans protocols raised his levels. (Its worth noting at this point that not all of Hubermans ideas hold up to scrutiny.)

Hubermans ritual is intense, but the fascination it commands is not uncommon or new. Human beings have always been fascinated by the right way to spend a morning, and how everyone else is (allegedly) doing it. At the beginning of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal of the human body wants nothing more than to doze comfortably in bed. Perhaps because getting up is so difficult, it has become powerfully associated with virtue.

The association is telling. After all, how we spend our mornings determines how we intend to spend our days, and consequently our whole lives. Our aspiration for those sacred early daylight hours gives us a glimpse into what we actually value.

The idea that sleeping late is sinful has deep roots in Western culture. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius spends much of The Meditations the notes he wrote to himself across his second-century reign, newly popular among tech bro enthusiasts chastising himself for his flaws. Those include having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. In the morning when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present I am rising to the work of a human being, he instructs himself. While its true that lying in bed is more pleasant, after all, Do you exist then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion?

Jonathan Edwards, the influential early American theologian, agreed with Aurelius. I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early, he wrote in a diary entry in 1728; he himself got up at 4 am to devote 13 hour days to the study of Christ. When Benjamin Franklin plotted out his ideal schedule in his 1771 autobiography, he recommended waking up at 5 to pray, wash, have breakfast, and plan the day well.

You can see why so many of us have come to believe that mornings are more virtuous than afternoons or evenings and that its more important to spend the morning correctly than any other time of the day. The hours have a strict moral ranking kind of like the old saw that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (which, it turns out, was a myth propagated by cereal lobbyists and religious sects).

Thats more or less the logic behind the never-ending deluge of modern morning routine content, too: You have to optimize your morning, not your afternoon, because the morning is when its essential to (some would say ostentatiously) flex your discipline.

A morning routine is one of the most powerful ways of impacting your long-term success, a blog post for the AI productivity coach Rize explained in 2022. Morning hours are when you have a clean slate and are yet unimpacted by the days events. This means you can pick actions more consciously, deciding what serves you.

Many of us are busy, have a lot of responsibilities and obligations, and often feel strapped for time, admitted the wellness site VeryWell in 2023. Having a great morning routine can make all the difference in being productive, achieving goals, feeling organized, and doing all of this with confidence.

Or, as one Redditor put it, I want to have some productive routines I can follow to give me a reason to be up every morning.

There is some evidence for the idea that the way you spend your morning will influence the rest of your day. A 2024 Stanford Medical School study found that going to bed and rising early is associated with better mental health than going to bed late and rising late. Meanwhile, a 2016 study in Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that customer service representatives who started the day in a good mood usually stayed that way throughout the day, even when they had to deal with terrible customers. (Horrifyingly, the HBR takeaway is that managers should send their employees morale-boosting messages in the morning. Was there ever a surer way to kill a good mood than to hear that Steve in the C-suite wants you to have a terrific morning crushing those numbers?)

But do we really have to optimize the morning to maximize wellness so we can be better at business? Is being scrupulously healthy productivity machines what we actually want?

The routines of famous artists, which get repeated over and over again like little myths, tend not to be focused so much on cheerfulness as on cultivating intense emotional states. As such, they typically involve either monk-like asceticism or the ingestion of many, many stimulants. The idea with this sort of routine was to either discipline yourself into creativity or to evoke it by any chemical means necessary.

In his 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey reports that author Patricia Highsmith, to make writing as pleasurable as possible, would begin her day writing in bed, supplied by cigarettes, coffee, vodka, donuts, and a saucer of plain sugar. Proust, he says, fueled his own work with opium, coffee, caffeine tablets, and then barbital sedatives to counteract the caffeine.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Currey tells us that the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would awaken at 5:30 am and knock out three hours of work at his desk before he had to go to his day job at the post office. Beethoven woke at dawn, counted out precisely 60 beans from which to make himself a cup of coffee, and then sat at his desk to work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, periodically reviving himself with walks outside.

The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both indulgence and capitalist virtue

Todays most famous morning routines have landed in between the Beethoven and Highsmith camps. They focus heavily on wellness and self-care: the elaborate ritual patting in of skin care, the daily workout that has become as universally mandatory as bathing.

Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey all do some combination of meditating and gratitude journaling. Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston drink lots of water. Everybody exercises. (No really everyone: Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Jack Dorsey, Tim Armstrong, Karen Blackett, Hans Vestberg, Vittorio Colao, Tim Cook, Barack Obama, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Martha Stewart, Giorgio Armani.)

The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both indulgence and capitalist virtue. By taking time to tend to your physical body and mental health first thing in the morning, the theory is, you will be able to do more later. That, in fact, is why Andrew Huberman does all that stuff: to optimize his productivity. (Could it be that some of these people are not being 100 percent transparent about their perfectly plotted morning routines? The thought has crossed my mind.)

A lot of times, people say, How can I lift more, focus better, remember things better? Huberman explains in one video. And its like, Well, lets think about the foundation of that. His morning is set up to make him better at lifting, focusing, remembering which is to say, doing work.

Ten years ago, morning routines were also about the rise and grind, but differently so. CEOs would report getting out of bed at 4 am and getting right to their emails. I cant stand having any not done! one CEO told the Guardian of her email routine in 2013. At the time, there was no mention of the wonders of screen-free mornings, the meditation, and the journaling that have become fundamental to todays high-productivity routines.

Perhaps our current moment is what rise and grind looks like a few years after the combined traumas of the Trump era and the pandemic sent everyone in search of new ways to cope, without betraying the capitalist imperative to achieve ever more. White-collar workers spent the better part of two years not allowed to do much of anything besides work and obsess over their health. Now we obsess over our health in order to work more.

Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value right now, it seems, is trying to keep our harrowed minds and bodies together, and to still give as much as we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What more can we manage in a single mornings work?

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Why morning routines ranging from meditation to cold plunging are so popular - Vox.com