Topic awaiting preservation: Groundbreaking results in health care : free, 0 side-effects..

Immediately accessible, dramatically effective.

New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/special/heal-thyself

7 leading US universities and laboratories
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/15/7-fascinating-facts-about_n_899482.html

Free food, energy, shelter, climate change mitigation are next.
Using the same technology, and with no side effects.

HuffingtonPost -> moving to other silliness.

and there is no such thing as '0 side-effects'.
Everything has side effects.
Sooner or later somebody is going to doze off during meditation and hit his head.
Guess what, that's a side effect in the medical sense.

And 'free energy' by definition has the side effect of increasing entropy.

Nope, the latter is not true. It is true IF the Universe is limited to a physical context, good luck to prove that
since, as these results indicate clearly, just as other manifestations such as black holes remind us of, it is not the case.
There is at least a temporal context, and in all theories of physics, there is more : we're past thermodynamics, past visible sources,
but their effect is visible.

If someone manages to doze off while laying back on a flat bed and hurt themselves, then it's not a side effect, it's a Darwin Award.

Speaking of which, this is your future, and trusting others, apparently, a step forward in self-care. So, assuming you like to spare money while
feeling good, take note, stats and benchmarks like this tend to become valuable assets.

Finally, the best results of the last decade in medical research have little to do with philosophy.
Everything to do with a collapsing economy, a planet Earth rumbling under you feet, for
this is pristine science. Notice that one of the experiments confirms that meditation is the ONE known way to
limit, possibly, stop, aging altogether.

(Edited by argo_navis on 08-30-2011 16:15)

Yes, if you meditate deeply enough, you will stop aging...and die.

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

@ws stop= s at the top....die=1/2 e

~Sig coming soon~

One might wonder why elder Natives dedicate sweat lodges to trance states, but no wonder when "discussing" with Webshaman,
let me just tune down to kindergarten days again. I empathize with language and intellect limitations, meditation is even good for that.

So :

quote:

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Telomeres -- the protective caps at the end of our chromosomes -- are the new frontier of anti-aging science. Longer telomeres mean that you're also likely to live longer.

Research done by the University of California, Davis' Shamatha Project has shown that meditators have significantly higher telomerase activity that non-meditators.

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Now, enhancing telomerase activity is the dream of genetic researchers : final evidence that telomerase
regrows telomeres is the culprit. But GE is incapable of doing this. Incapable of creating this very activity :
the one and only valid tool is meditation.

You know, it's pretty sweet to stay at the age of 30 physically. You should give it a try.

(Edited by argo_navis on 08-31-2011 19:15)

Argo, have you heard of Higher Balance or Eric Pepin?

Actually, AN, my post was reference to those who meditated until they actually died.

quote:

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self-mummification was practiced by Japanese Shugendō monks as the ultimate act of self denial. Shugendō is a form of Buddhism that originally combined elements of Buddhism, animism, Old Shinto, mountain worship, and Taoism, among other religions. ?Shugendō? itself means something to the effect of ?the way to spiritual power through discipline?.

The culmination of some of the Shugendō monk?s lives was to voluntarily choose to mummify themselves, a process called Sokushunbutsu. This ritual lasted around nine years, six of which the monk would be alive for. The payoff for monks that achieved self-mummification was that they were seen as a Buddha and were then supposed to be placed in a temple for others to see and honor. Failed attempts, which seems to have been the case a large percentage of the time, resulted in the bodies simply decomposing.

As you might imagine, mummifying one?s self is a process that is excruciatingly painful, hence why individuals who were successful were considered to have achieved a state of perfect enlightenment. The monks would begin by ceasing eating any food except various nuts and seeds, with some accounts stating that they were also allowed to eat fruits and berries. They would also begin a regimented program of heavy physical exercise, which they would continue throughout this first period that lasted one thousand days.

During the next one thousand days, the monks would further restrict their diet by only eating bark and various roots, again with some accounts stating that they were also allowed to eat a limited amount of fruits and berries. Near the end of this period, they would drink regular draughts of a drink made from the sap of the Urushi tree. This tree?s sap is mildly poisonous and is normally used as a natural lacquer. Ingesting the drink caused the person consuming it to vomit frequently, further restricting the body?s ability to obtain nutrients from the sparse diet they ate. They would also rapidly lose bodily fluids due to vomiting. This sap also has the mummifying side-effect of acting as a preservative.

In the final stage of self-mummification, the monk?s body would be little more than skin and bones. If the monk survived to this point, he would lock himself into a stone tomb that was just large enough for him to fit in, sitting in the lotus position, which is a position he would not move from until he died. The tomb itself contained an air tube, so that the monk could live for a time after being entombed. It also contained a bell, which the monk would ring on a daily basis to let those outside the tomb know he was still alive.

While in the tomb, the monk would sit in the lotus position and meditate until death. Once the monk died and, thus, no longer rang the bell each day, the breathing tube would be removed and the tomb sealed for the final thousand day period of the ritual. At the end of this period, the tomb would be opened to see if the monk was successful in mummifying himself. If he was, the preserved body would be put on display in the temple. Having successfully demonstrated mastery over the physical, the priest would also then be declared a Buddha.

This practice continued until around the 19th century when it was outlawed by the Japanese government. While the bodies of these monks were supposed to be removed from their tombs after the final thousand day period, archeologists have unearthed some of these self-mummified monks very recently, implying that, for whatever reason, this removal did not always happen, perhaps because the body was not seen to have been preserved well enough, so was simply left where it was. The latest such self-mummified monk discovered was in July of 2010 in Tokyo.

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An interesting book on this - Living Buddhas: The Self-Mummified Monks of Yamagata, Japan

I would expect one versed on this to know and realize this...

I guess I should of realized that you would "jump" at the perceived chance to post something derogatory at me *sigh*

I thought you were somehow above all that now?

This seems all so familiar...

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

(Edited by WebShaman on 09-01-2011 10:57)

Argo, that [ 1 ] is a rather weak study that contains quite a bit of confounding effects:

3 months of meditation retreat vs 3 months of regular daily life does not measure the effect of meditation only.
A reasonable control in my book would have them sit around about the same amount of time each day, with mental activity, but without meditation/introspection. Say a 3 month classroom setting on any university level subject)

Not to mention that the control group was regularly flown in for the assessments, while the meditation group did not fly during those 3 months.

Finally on the statistical front, they had very small group sizes for effects in humans (17 in retreat, 25 in control group that they could analyze), and excluded one further control sample that was much higher than the others (this sample would have completely covered the described telomerase effect).

Biologically, a 1.3 fold increase in their 'telomerase units' is a tiny effect. 10.000 of the blood cells they extracted have about the telemerase activity of 11 cancer cells (and there's a cell that is basically immortal in the aging sense. It has about a about 1000x fold increase compared to these blood cells).

Blood mononuclear cells typically aren't dividing cells either, though monocytes (a subgroup) might still divide a couple of times. So they're not supposed to have a decent telomerase activity in the first place, less they create a leukemia...

Last, but not least, while running out of telomers does kill cells, it is a poor proxy for aging because the link between them is neither straight forward nor well established.


To sum up my point:
Meditation might affect aging, but Shamatha's study can not show it by its very design.
The effects they show are statistically weak, heavily confounded with other variables besides meditation, and biologically most likely irrelevant.

(And I haven't even started at the very heavy biased self-selection of participants...)

So long,
->Tyberius Prime

[ 1 ] Jacobs, T.L., Epel, E.S., Lin, J., Blackburn, E.H., Wolkowitz, O.M., Bridwell, D.A., Zanesco., A.P., Aichele, S.R., Sahdra, B.K., MacLean, K.A., King, B.G., Shaver, P.R., Rosenberg, E.L., Ferrer, E., Wallace, B.A., & Saron, C.D. (Accepted for Publication). Intensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychological mediators. Psychoneuroendocrinology PDF

PS: On the subject of aging, not on the subject of meditation, consider http://www.jumbojoke.com/i_rest_my_case.html


Edit: Fallen into my own linking automatics.

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 09-01-2011 18:33)

(if you read the study, they even discuss some of my points under section 5.5 'limitations and future directions').

Money quote:

quote:

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The lack of [...] require that our findings be regarded as tentative. These findings should be replicated in larger studies

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