Scientific Explanation Of Enlightenment

[BHL_20]

http://www.andrewnewberg.com/research/

"When we scanned the brains of Tibetan Buddhist meditators, we found decreased activity in the parietal lobe during meditation (lower right shows up as yellow rather than the red in the left image). This area of the brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our orientation in space and time. We hypothesize that blocking all sensory and cognitive input into this area during meditation is associated with the sense of no space and no time that is so often described in meditation."

I would like to know what some of the more enlightened members here think of this. Does knowing that there may be a biological reason behind your experiences undermine in any way the conviction that you experienced the Truth or not really?

[Henri]

There`s no biological reason but there can be a biological reaction to meditative experiences. Mind over matter so to speak.

So your question is a wrong question.

[BHL_20]

50 minutes ago, Henri said:

There`s no biological reason but there can be a biological reaction to meditative experiences. Mind over matter so to speak.

So your question is a wrong question.

Another article on the subject puts it this way:

"Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of long-term practitioners of Buddhism while they were meditating and compared them with images taken when they were not. Newberg saw that blood flow to the posterior superior parietal lobe decreased during meditation. This area of the brain determines the boundaries of one’s body in relation to the environment and allows us to navigate a complex three-dimensional world without bumping into things. “We know that the posterior superior parietal lobe plays that particular role because there are patients with damage in this same region who literally cannot move around without falling,” Newberg reports. “They’ll miss the chair they intended to sit on, and generally have a fuzzy understanding of where their body ends and the rest of the universe begins.” He says that when people have spiritual experiences and feel they become one with the universe and lose their sense of self, it may be because of what is happening in that area of the brain. “If you block that area, you lose that boundary between the self and the rest of the world.” Were the Buddhist meditators merely experiencing an odd side effect of submitting their brains to unusual conditions?"

Of course it may be possible that the causation chain is the opposite of what it would seem. But why do you think so? Especially with a lot of people deriving enlightenment experiences for drugs, it's difficult to assert that enlightenment is purely a mental state. How could drugs act directly on a person's mental/spiritual state? 

[Extreme Z7]

Enlightenment cannot be observed through external observations. We are talking about a subjective experience and realization when we speak Enlightenment. The biological or scientific observation is nothing more than just another map of what can be observed empirically with your consciousness. It is not reality itself.

"The biological or scientific observation is nothing more than just another map of what can be observed empirically with your consciousness"

I hope the above sentence does not get misinterpreted/ignored because I think it's very important to understand so I wrote it twice.

[Henri]

For more than twenty years cardiologist Pim van Lommel has studied near-death experiences (NDEs) in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published a study on Near Death Experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. He, then, wrote the Dutch bestseller Endless Consciousness in 2007; over 100.000 copies were sold in the first year.
The NDE is an authentic experience which cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis or oxygen deprivation. After such an profound experience, patient’s personalities underwent a permanent change. In Van Lommel’s opinion, the current views on the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too narrow for a proper understanding of the NDE phenomenon. The author provides examples and ways that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions; that consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body. (copy)

The copy above is just an example of a different view from a person who started from the same point you`re starting from.

To have the proper answers to your questions you have to start to study non-duality philosophy and also go follow the path of developing yourself, gain experiences. When having a scientific mind I would suggest you start with the integral stuff by Ken Wilber, especially his work Marriage of Sense and Soul.  The topic is to massive to quote just a few lines or beliefs or experiences. To gain the answers here you need to be able to think in a integral way in stead of the old fashioned reduced way.

One answer from me will give rise to ten or more questions from you...

Jai Guru Dev  

[abrakamowse]

I think there's always a relation between the mind and the body, we are training our body to have the experiences we need to be enlightened.

It's like a miracle, even if the science some day explain how a miracle is done, in my opinion it will be still a miracle.
I'm not sure if I am being clearly enough, it's a bit complicated to understand.

 

Science think that if they explain how the big bang was created, there's no god. Something like that. Even if we know how God works or how things are created, anyway it continues amazing me.

:-)

 

[Leo Gura]

Enlightenment is definitely made possible by deactivating regions of the brain. This has been demonstrated by neuroscience. The error, though, made by rationalists is thinking that this demonstrates that enlightenment is unreal. Just the opposite! Actually, what it demonstrates is that a region of the brain must be actively firing in order for a sense of self to exist. Which means that the sense of self is just mind-activity. Which means it's false. Which is exactly what enlightenment demonstrates. So these studies support enlightenment rather than refute it.

The key that you're missing is that enlightenment is NOT mind activity. It is not a sense experience or a thought! Imagine that! It is literally absolutely Nothing, for which a brain is not required.

The brain has hardware and software in it that keeps you locked in a cage. Drugs and mediation can break this cage. Sometimes I speak of jailbreaking the mind. And that's literally what you're doing when you do enlightenment work. You're hacking the bios and stopping those sub-routines that create a sense of self, space, time, and everyday life. You're hacking the Matrix.

Consider this: when the brain is totally destroyed, what remains? Certainly no notions of the self you presently believe you are. And yet if the true you is not that conceptual self, then it is unaffected! This is such a radical possibility most rational people neglect it. But if you are already literally Nothing, then destruction of the brain cannot destroy you. The brain is actually the only thing that's obscuring this reality by projecting a false self-image. The brain is like a projector while the true self is like the room in which the projector exists. Eventually the projector will break. Except you were not the actor the projector had projected on the screen. You were the room the whole time and didn't know it!

Now that's quite the mind fuck.

[30secs]

I remember phenomena and nomena video, that's explained all.

[jimboJones]

On 17/02/2016 at 9:11 PM, Leo Gura said:

The key that you're missing is that enlightenment is NOT mind activity. It is not a sense experience or a thought! Imagine that! It is literally absolutely Nothing, for which a brain is not required.

The brain has hardware and software in it that keeps you locked in a cage. Drugs and mediation can break this cage. Sometimes I speak of jailbreaking the mind. And that's literally what you're doing when you do enlightenment work. You're hacking the bios and stopping those sub-routines that create a sense of self, space, time, and everyday life. You're hacking the Matrix.

Consider this: when the brain is totally destroyed, what remains? Certainly no notions of the self you presently believe you are. And yet if the true you is not that conceptual self, then it is unaffected! This is such a radical possibility most rational people neglect it. But if you are already literally Nothing, then destruction of the brain cannot destroy you. The brain is actually the only thing that's obscuring this reality by projecting a false self-image. The brain is like a projector while the true self is like the room in which the projector exists. Eventually the projector will break. Except you were not the actor the projector had projected on the screen. You were the room the whole time and didn't know it!

 

This claim is unfalsifiable. I agree that decreasing activity in certain parts of the brain via meditation/drugs/surgery/disease will give you the feeling that you are the world and not the self but there is no way you can say anything further. If you are saying the brain is a filter then damaging it or committing suicide should be the fastest way to enlightenment, yet people aren't doing that. It seems to me that a feeling of nothingness requires an active brain with a specific part deactivated. 

The gain from understanding no-self is still as great as ever. You get the benefit of knowing there's no self to die, I just don't think you can claim that without a brain enlightenment exists.

The room and actor exist only when the projector exists. 

[SkyPanther]

On 3/14/2016 at 8:31 PM, jimboJones said:

This claim is unfalsifiable. I agree that decreasing activity in certain parts of the brain via meditation/drugs/surgery/disease will give you the feeling that you are the world and not the self but there is no way you can say anything further. If you are saying the brain is a filter then damaging it or committing suicide should be the fastest way to enlightenment, yet people aren't doing that. It seems to me that a feeling of nothingness requires an active brain with a specific part deactivated. 

The gain from understanding no-self is still as great as ever. You get the benefit of knowing there's no self to die, I just don't think you can claim that without a brain enlightenment exists.

The room and actor exist only when the projector exists. 

This does not explain this:

No Brainer.

For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.

It is alive but empty, with a cavernous fluid-filled space where the brain should be. A thin layer of brain tissue lines that cavity like an amniotic sac. The image hails from a 1980 review article in Science: Roger Lewin, the author, reports that the patient in question had “virtually no brain”. But that’s not what scared me; hydrocephalus is nothing new, and it takes more to creep out this ex-biologist than a picture of Ventricles Gone Wild.

What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126

Source: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

 

Besides which, there are two assumptions. Which event goes before the other. The "mind" or the brain.  They are dependent on each other. 

Is the mind acting on the brain to show the difference on the EEG, or is the brain acting on the mind to make you "feel" like you are not there.

 And besides that, check out:

Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (by Roger Penrose)

http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Mind-Missing-Science-Consciousness/dp/0195106466

And this is backed up by this:

Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' corroborates theory of consciousness

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-microtubules-corroborates.html

 

Existence is not as cut and dry as materialists wish it to be.   And I say that as an Agnostic that used to be a pure materialists.

Edited March 18, 2016 by SkyPanther

[Son of leo]

lets check it for ourselves