“THE SPH participates and encourages scientific researchers to derive…”

THE SPH participates and encourages scientific researchers to derive evidences for meditation and healing through meditation. Dr. R. Murali Krishna, President, COO Integris Mental Health and James L Hall Junior, Center for Mind, Body and Spirit, Oklahoma, in US, and his team invited Nithyananda to derive scientific evidences for meditation and the state of his enlightenment. When Swamiji came, I had requested him to do one thing. I asked him “Would you be willing to undergo some scientific investigation of the meditation process?” He very cheerfully agreed. Without one complaint, he went for three repeat sessions for PET scanning, and three repeat sessions for quantitative EEG sessions. These are really not very easy tests to go through, it requires a lot of patience and a lot of willingness to do that. So, we did that because if the meditation process is doing something to your brain, we should be able to detect that. Scientific findings are verifiable, they are replicable, you can replicate them, duplicate them. So Swamiji went through those sessions, and we found some interesting findings. In PET scan they inject a radioactive dye which goes and sits in parts of the brain that are active. In the normal, non meditative state, the brain is very active and when we are seeing someone, the rear end of the brain, the visual cortex is very active, as shown in the diagram. Usually the brain is so active, there are 100 billion brain cells there. But what meditation does is something very interesting! It shows the frontal lobes getting more active. The frontal lobe is where you have judgment, wisdom, reasoning. Here are some of the brain scans I’m going to share with you. This is alert, non-meditative state. The second one is 30 minutes into meditation, look at the frontal lobes – how they light up, they lighted up big time. Sixty minutes of deep meditation, and here is the deep, deep level of meditation where it lights up significantly right there, right in the middle, probably an inch or a half to two inches deeper. What’s interesting was Swamiji was inside - that’s part of that one – see that light right here. So what’s interesting is that I’ve never seen that before in my life, so, the other parts I’ve seen - may not be to the extent that Swamiji showed. But this is something interesting. There is something called Dopamine which is a chemical our brain is involved in. Dopamine is produced mostly in this area and when you have any pleasurable feeling in your body it is mediated through Dopamine - it’s a nerve receptor; it’s a chemical that transmits messages of pleasure, basically evokes pleasure. This is the same thing that is produced with all the pleasures you have – beautiful people, beautiful scenery of nature, whatever gives you pleasure, it is mediated through Dopamine. Everything that human beings experience involves Dopamine. But what’s interesting is that you and I have the potential to create our own Dopamine in a big way. So I named it for lack of a word in the past, the “D-spot” which is the “Dopamine spot”. If you can discover your “D-spot” you got it made in life! The “D” really stands for “Divine” spot! The “D” also stands for “Delight” and the “Dopamine spot”! What’s also interesting is that He could at will go in and out of those states. Those are some of the findings I wanted to share with you. There is so much more to talk about: the physiology of the mind, the brain and the body. It’s a fascinating field! You know, this is something that all human beings can relate to, can apply in our own lives, not only to get knowledge, but these things have applications in daily life for all of us. Nithyananda system of free healing, known as Nithya Spiritual Healing has been baffling the medical world curing diseases from migraine to cancer. Qualified people are also initiated to become healers. The complete report of the research conducted on Nithyananda’s neurological system can be found in the book “Mystic Phenomena, Scientific Data”.