Some Definitions
Meditation-that great and mysterious subject which in the past has always conjured up the image of the solitary Asian ascetic sitting in deep trance-is fast appearing in unexpected places throughout modern American culture. Secretaries are doing it as part of their daily noon yoga classes. Preadolescent teenagers dropped off at the YMCA by their mothers on a Saturday morning are learning it as part of their karate training. Truck drivers and housewives in the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center are practicing a combination of Hindu yoga and Buddhist insight meditation to control hypertension. Star athletes prepare themselves for a demanding basketball game with centering techniques they learned in Zen. [1]
Dhyana is the generic Sanskrit term for meditation, which in the Yoga Sutras refers to both the act of inward contemplation in the broadest sense and more technically to the intermediate state between mere attention to an object (dharana) and complete absorption in it (samadhi). [2] The earliest known reference to such practice on the Indian subcontinent occurs on one of the seals, a figure seated in the lotus posture, found in the ruins of the pre-Aryan civilizations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro which existed prior to 1500 BCE. Most of the orthodox Hindu schools of philosophy derive their meditation techniques from yoga, but superimpose their own theoretical understanding of consciousness onto the results of the practice. [3]
Meditation is also referred to as a spiritual practice in China. Chinese forms of meditation have their origins in the early roots of popular Taoism which existed long before the codification of Taoism as a formal philosophy during the seventh century, B.C.. However, there is no concrete evidence to prove that meditation first arose in Hindu culture and then spread elsewhere. Thus, for the time being the original meditative traditions in China and India should be considered as separate and indigenous. To further complicate the issue, analogies between meditative states and trance consciousness suggest that even earlier precursors to the Asian meditative arts can be found in shamanic cultures such as those in Siberia and Africa. [4]
As for modern developments, in trying to formulate a definition of meditation, a useful rule of thumb is to consider all meditative techniques to be culturally embedded. This means that any specific technique cannot be understood unless it is considered in the context of some particular spiritual tradition, situated in a specific historical time period, or codified in a specific text according to the philosophy of some particular individual. [5] Thus, to refer to Hindu meditation or Buddhist meditation is not enough, since the cultural traditions from which a particular kind of meditation comes are quite different and even within a single tradition differ in complex ways. The specific name of a school of thought or a teacher or the title of a specific text is often quite important for identifying a particular type of meditation. Vipassana, or insight meditation, for instance, as practiced in the United States is derived from the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, and is usually associated with the teachings of the Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadaw; Transcendental Meditation is associated exclusively with the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose tradition is Vedantic Hinduism; and so on.
The attempt to abstract out the primary characteristics of meditation from a grab bag of traditions in order to come to some purified essence or generic definition is a uniquely Western and relatively recent phenomenon. This tendency should be considered, however powerful and convincing its claim as an objective, universal, and value-free method, to be an artifact of one culture attempting to comprehend another that is completely different. [6]
At the same time, however, Western styles of meditation have long existed in the form of contemplative prayer, and contemporary interest in Asian practices has kindled a resurgence of interest in Western parallels. Orison, the repetitive and devotional meditation on Christ, repetition of the Holy Names, the spiritual teachings of St. Ignatius, and the Eastern Orthodox practice of the philokalia are examples from the Western contemplative tradition that come nearest to meditation as it has been cultivated in Asian countries. Indeed there is an unbroken tradition of mysticism which can be said to embody forms of meditative practice in the West-from the NeoPlatonists such as Plotinus, through the medieval mystics both early and late-Johannes Eriugena, St. Bonaventure, John of the Cross, St. Theresa, St. Bernard of Clarivaux-followed by such personalities as Robert Parsons, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Emanuel Swedenborg, to modern Christian contemplatives such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton, and now Schlomo Carlbach, Bede Griffiths, and David Steindl-Rast. [7]
But for purposes of carrying on a coherent discussion about the subject, while mystical awakening can be found in some form in all cultures, meditation per se should be taken as a uniquely Asian phenomenon which, wholesale, has only recently come to the attention of the West. In its new Western context, particularly in the United States, however, it has undergone a significant reformulation. In the US it has become indigenized, so that now one can say that Asian forms of meditation have become thoroughly American. [8]
The Americanization of Meditation
Ideas about the Eastern meditative traditions began seeping into American popular culture even before the American Revolution through the various sects of European occult Christianity that transplanted themselves to such new settlements as Germantown and Ephrata in William Penn's "Holy Experiment," which he named Pennsylvania. Early framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were influenced by teachings from mystical Sufism and the Jewish Kaballah through their membership in secret fraternities such as the Rosicrucians.
Asian ideas then came pouring in during the era of the transcendentalists, especially between the 1840s and the 1880s, largely influencing the American traditions of spiritualism, theosophy, and mental healing. The Hindu conception of Brahman was reformulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson into the New England vision of God as the Oversoul, while Henry David Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience arose out of his reading of Hindu scriptures on meditation, yoga, and non-violence. At the same time, spiritualists-those who believed that science had established communication with the dead through the medium of the group seance-also dabbled in Asian ideas. Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the International Theosophical Society, is usually credited with introducing Hindu conceptions of discarnate entities into American spiritualist circles. In this context, the Theosophists also translated Hindu texts on meditation and for the first time made them available in popular form to English-speaking audiences. Similarly, New Thought practitioners-followers of the healer Phineas P. Quimby-also included meditation techniques such as guided visualizations and the mantra into their healing regimes.
In general, by the late nineteenth century Americans appropriated Asian ideas to fit their own optimistic, pragmatic, and eclectic understanding of inner experience. This usually meant adapting ideas such as reincarnation and karma into a very liberal and heavily Christianized, but nevertheless secular, psychology of character development that was closer to the philosophy of transcendentalism than to doctrines in any of the Christian denominations. (Today, the same standard for interpreting Asian ideas persists but in the form of a neo-transcendentalist, Jungian, and counter-cultural definition of higher consciousness.)
The World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, was the landmark event that increased Western awareness of meditation. This was the first time that Western audiences on American soil received Asian spiritual teachings from Asians themselves. Thereafter, Swami Vivekananda taught meditation to the spiritualists and New Thought practitioners in New Hampshire and went on to found various Vedanta ashrams around the country in his wake. Anagarika Dharmapala lectured at Harvard on Theravada Buddhist meditation in 1904; Abdul Baha followed with a 235-day tour of the US teaching the Islamic principles of Bahai, and Soyen Shaku toured in 1907 teaching Zen and the principles of Mahayana Buddhism.
By then, the idea of comparative religions had caught on as an academic field of inquiry in the universities. Following the Sacred Books of the East Series, edited by F. Max Mueller, and major translations of the Theravada scriptures by the Pali Text Society in England, the Harvard Oriental Series appeared after 1900 under the editorship of Charles Rockwell Lanman. Meanwhile, the Cambridge Conferences on Comparative Religions, carried on by Mrs. Ole Bull in her Brattle Street home near Harvard University, and the Greenacre School of Comparative Religions, operated by Sarah Farmer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had been bringing ideas about meditation to interested New Englanders since the late 1890s.
During the 1920s, American popular culture was introduced to the meditative practices of the Hindu yogi Paramahansa Yogananda. Gurdjieff, the Georgian mystic who had toured the US in 1924, was spreading the gospel of meditation in action to American expatriates in Paris by the 1930s. A young Hindu trained in theosophy named Jidhu Krishnamurti had been touring the US around that same time. Settling in Southern California in the 1940s, Krishnamurti would soon be joined by English émigrés fleeing the European war, such as Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and Aldous Huxley, who were themselves writers and practitioners of the meditative arts.
During World War Two, Huxley, Heard, and others became disciples of the meditation teacher Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Together, they produced such influential books as Vedanta for the West and assisted in the popular dissemination of texts such the Hindu Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras. Meanwhile, on the east coast of the United States, Swami Akhilananda of Boston frequently met with leading university intellectuals in psychology, philosophy, and religion, including Gordon Allport, Peter Bertocci, William Ernest Hocking, and George H. Williams. One product of this liason was Akhilananda's Hindu Psychology (1946), with an introduction by Gordon Allport, a text on the philosophy and psychology of Vedantic meditation.
Another momentous event introducing Asian ideas to the West was the arrival in 1941 of Henrich Zimmer, Indologist and Sanskrit scholar, who had been a friend and confidant of C. G. Jung. Zimmer brought the young Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist and folklorist, to the attention of the newly formed Bollingen Foundation. Subsequently, the Foundation produced the English translation of Jung's collected works, as well as numerous books by Zimmer, which Campbell edited, among other titles. Perhaps the most influential product of this endeavor was the Bollingen edition of the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes. The I Ching was a Taoist oracle book revered in Chinese religious history as one of the four great Confucian classics. Translated by Richard Wilhelm with a preface by Jung, the work has continued to enjoy immense popularity since its first publication in 1947.
The 1950s represented a major expansion of interest in both meditation and Asian philosophy. Frederick Speigelberg, a professor of comparative religions at Stanford, opened the California Institute of Asian Studies in 1951, which highlighted the work of the modern Hindu mystic and social reformer Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Alan Watts, a student of Zen and former Episcopalian minister, soon joined the faculty and within a few years produced such best-selling books as Psychotherapy East and West and The Meaning of Zen.
It was also during this time that Michael Murphy first came under the influence of Speigelberg, was introduced to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, and began the practice of meditation. With the assistance of Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, Willis Harman, Aldous Huxley, George Leonard and others, Murphy would soon collaborate with Richard Price to launch Esalen Institute, which quickly became the world's premier growth center for human potential.
During the same period of the early 1950s, with the help of Watts, D. T. Suzuki came from Japan to California and introduced Zen to a new generation of Americans. Suzuki settled in New York, where he accepted a visiting professorship at Columbia. His seminars were open to the public and subsequently had a wide influence. Thomas Merton visited him. The neo-Freudians such as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm were his students. Suzuki even took Horney on a three-month tour of the religious shrines in Japan. John Cage heard him, as did J. D. Salinger. Soon, Suzuki was profiled in The New York Times, and many of his previous works on the history and philosophy of Zen, published in relative obscurity, were translated and reprinted for American audiences. Zen, embraced by the beat generation, had suddenly come to the West.
What occurred next opened an entirely new era of popular interest in meditation. This was the confluence of three major cultural events in the 1960s: the psychedelic revolution, the Communist invasion of Asia, and the rise of the American counter-culture, especially in terms of widespread opposition to the Vietnam War.
By the early 1960s, mind expanding drugs were being taken by a significant segment of the post war baby boom, a generation which numbered some 40 million people born between 1945 and 1955 who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This led young people in their teens and twenties to collectively open the doors of inward perception, experiment with alternative lifestyles, and question established cultural norms in Western society. An entire generation soon established their own alternative institutions which began to operate in defiance of traditional cultural forms still dominated by the ideology of their parents' generation. Subsequently, this was to have important political, economic, religious, and social consequences in the West, especially in the United States as enduring but alternative cultural norms began to take root in the younger generation of the American middle class.
At the same time, the increased Soviet influence in India, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Communist Chinese takeover of Tibet and Mongolia, and the increased political influence of Chinese Communism in Korea and Southeast Asia were key forces that collectively set the stage for an influx of Asian spiritual teachers to the West. An entirely new generation of them appeared on the American scene and they found a willing audience of devotees within the American counter-culture. Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, Swami Satchitananda, Guru Maharaji, Kerpal Singh, Nayanaponika Thera, Swami Rama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Muktananda, Sri Bagwan Rujneesh, Pir Viliyat Kahn, and the Karmapa were but a few of the names that found followers in the United States. While there remain numerous contemporary voices, such as Guru Mai, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Maharishi, and Sogyal Rinpoche, there can be little doubt, historically, that the most well known and influential figure in this pantheon today remains Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
As a result of such personalities, there has been a tremendous growth in meditation as a spiritual practice in the United States from the 1960s to the present. This phenomenon remains largely underestimated by the pundits of American high culture who see themselves as the main spokespersons for the European rationalist tradition in the New World. In the first place, from a socio-cultural standpoint, it is clear that from the 1920s to the 1960s, Freudian psychoanalysis was the primary socially acceptable avenue through which artists, writers, and aficionados of modernism gained access to their own interior unconscious processes. For a new and younger generation of visionaries, however, psychoanalysis was soon replaced by psychedelic drugs as the primary vehicle for opening the internal doors of perception. This occurred as a result of experiments undertaken in military and university laboratories associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA was interested in developing mind-control drugs for potential use in psychological warfare. At the same time that the CIA began testing substances such as LSD on unsuspecting populations of soldiers, businessmen, and college students, some of these chemicals came into the hands of the scientific and medical community. Researchers themselves began ingesting mescaline and LSD. Soon, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the psychiatrists' couches in Hollywood to the hallowed halls of Harvard University, the youthful and educated elite of the American middle class began to experiment with psychedelics in ever-increasing numbers.
The counter-culture movement that followed was considered a revolution in consciousness, driven by mind-expanding drugs, as well as defined by spiritual teachings from Asian cultures, each creating the conditions for expansion of the other. As the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s subsided for the post-war baby boomers maturing into the 1970s, meditation, and all that it implied, then became fixed as an enduring ethic of that generation. The belief was that meditative practices not only cleansed consciousness of psychedelics, and confirmed the commitment to pursuing alternative lifestyles, but they also informed the socio-cultural direction that the lives of many young people would soon take in establishing new and permanent forms of lifetime spiritual practice. Now, after thirty years, these developments have produced advanced Western practitioners, who themselves are qualified senseis, roshis, swamis, and tulkus. We known them as Ram Dass, Sivananda Radha, Jiyu Kennet Roshi, Maureen Freidgood, Jack Kornfield, Robert Frager, Richard Baker Roshi, and others. They have begun to teach these Asian traditions to Western audiences. In so doing, they are also partipating in their modification by forming new lineages of meditation practice that, while informed by Asian influences, turn out to be uniquely Western. Such teachings are already being transmitted to a second and third generation of younger people in the United States and Europe as well, altering irrecoverably the shape and direction of spiritual life in contemporary Western culture.
Not the least of these influences has been renewed interest in the Western contemplative traditions. Examination of Western mystics had increased dramatically since the 1960s. Witness, for instance, establishment of the Classics in Western Spirituality Series, published by the Paulist Press, or the appearance of the newly formed Mysticism Study Group within the American Academy of Religion. At the same time, popular books on Christian meditation are clearly linked to the spiritual awakening that has occurred in the counter-culture. Avery Brooke's Learning and Teaching Christian Meditation (1975), Joan Cooper's Guided Meditation and the Teachings of Jesus (1982), and Swami Rama's Meditation in Christianity (1983) are but a few of the titles that have enjoyed continuous printings since they first came out. There is also a case to be made for the idea that the fundamentalist revival in the Christian right has been a direct reaction to the larger upsurge of spirituality that has occurred in the American counter-culture.
Perhaps the most significant opportunity to arise out of the new stream of Western meditation practitioners has been heightened awareness of Asian cultures, especially in terms of their unique integrity and outlook. While the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western European and Anglo-American tradition continues to export its beliefs and values into other cultures on a grand scale, the Asian worldview is also fast asserting itself as a competing economic, political, and social force. But is a clash of world epistemologies inevitable? Perhaps. Meanwhile, Westerners within a new and younger generation have appeared who are fast becoming skilled interpreters of these non-Western traditions as legitimate worldviews in their own right. Their vehicle, the practice of meditation, could, instead of the predicted clash of cultures, potentially set the stage for an exchange of ideas between East and West that may yet turn out to be unprecedented in the history Western thought.
Meditation as a Scientific Study
Within this context scientific interest in meditation has grown significantly over the past quarter of a century. This has occurred partly on the justification that science might be able to show us objectively what meditation is and what its effects are, but also because the scientific method represents one of the few ways in which our culture can peer into the depths of another culture so radically different from our own. To objectively study meditative practices, however, requires that they be taken out of their subjective context. One quarter claims that science produces objective truth independent of cultures, while another maintains that the scientific attitude has its own implied philosophical context, so all we are really doing is taking the subject out of its original frame of reference and putting it into one we can more easily understand. The methods and theory surrounding the practice of meditation techniques thereby undergo a radical change.
According to this second view, no more quintessential example exists of the Westernization of an Asian idea than the scientific study of meditation. Science, the product of Aristotelian thinking and the European rationalist enlightenment, now turns its attention to the intuitive transformation of personality through awakened consciousness (and other such Asian meanings of the term enlightenment). This means that the faculties of logic and sense perception, hallmarks of the scientific method, are now being trained on the personality correlates of intuition and insight, hallmarks of the traditional inward sciences of the East.
To grasp what meditation is has proven to be no easy task. The underlying and usually hidden philosophical assumptions of traditional, rationalist science do not value the intuitive. They do not acknowledge the reality of the transcendent or subscribe to the concept of higher states of consciousness, let alone, in the strictest sense, even admit to the possible existence of unconscious forces active in cognitive acts of perception. Meditation, therefore, is a topic that characteristically would not be taken up by mainstream scientists. One would expect that research funding would be scarce, peer review difficult, and publication channels limited. The evidence shows that, at least until recently, this has been exactly the case.
The essential difficulty here is not just the reformulation of meditation techniques to fit the dictates of the scientific method, but rather what might be called a deeper, more subtle, and potentially more transformative clash of world epistemologies. It is not simply that meditation techniques have been difficult to measure but rather that, in the past, meditation has largely been an implicitly forbidden subject of scientific research. Now, however, major changes are currently underway within basic science that presage not only further evolution of the scientific method but also changes in the way science is viewed in modern culture. An unprecedented new era of interdisciplinary communication within the subfields of the natural sciences, a fundamental shift from physics to biology, and the cognitive neuroscience revolution have liberalized attitudes toward the study of meditation and related subjects. Meanwhile, the popular revolution in modern culture grounded in spirituality and consciousness is having a growing impact on traditional institutions such as medicine, religion, mental health, corporate management strategies, concepts of marriage, child rearing, and the family, and more. Increasingly, educated people want to know much more about meditation, while our traditional institutions of high culture remain unprepared as adequate interpreters.
The First Edition
As a result, when it first appeared, predictably, The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation drew wide attention within the meditation community and eventually sold out. Its authors, Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan, leaders in the American growth center movement and themselves seasoned meditators, presented their bibliography as a project of the Center for Exceptional Functioning, a newly founded program within Esalen Institute. Esalen, which Murphy had co-founded with Richard Price in 1961, was, for many, the premier growth center for personal development in the United States.
Interest in meditation actually began out of the earliest programs at Esalen. Alan Watts, the well-known interpreter of Zen to the West, and Al Huang, a Chinese Tai Chi master of movement meditation, both taught meditation-related workshops when Esalen first opened. Throughout the years, figures such as Suzuki Roshi, Baker Roshi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Lama Anagarika Govinda, and various Tibetan Buddhist tulkus introduced different forms of meditation into the growth center environment and helped to shape the basic theme of the Esalen program. This theme Murphy conceived as nothing less than the transformation of personality.
The immediate impulse that launched the bibliographic project, however, was publication of Murphy's speculative fiction Jacob Atabet (1977). This was a tale, set in modern San Francisco, about a writer, Darwin Fall, who had been investigating various miraculous events for the Catholic Church in Rome and doing research into all kinds of transformative phenomena. Fall meets and begins to chronicle the story of Jacob Atabet, who is actually in the process of transforming every cell of his body into the higher spiritual light. Atabet, for his part, finds in Fall someone who at last understands what he is going through. In the course of the novel, Atabet needs to be instructed in the contents of the massive text summarizing Fall's not yet complete research. The monumental tome, given to Atabet in outline form as a work in progress in that fictional account, later actually became Michael Murphy's voluminous The Future of the Body (1992).
Meanwhile, scientific publications and other material collected in the course of putting together The Future of the Body became the basis for the first edition of the annotated bibliography in meditation research, which appeared in 1988. Before the advent of the revolution in personal computers, before managed care took over the health care industry, and before the full impact of rapid developments in the cognitive neurosciences were felt, Murphy and Donovan had collected a database of some 10,000 articles on various aspects of human potential and higher consciousness. Out of this cache they extracted 1253 scientific and literary studies on meditation which formed the core of the first edition. They introduced their bibliography with a series of essays to make a statement on the physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects of meditative practice as was understood in the Western literature. To this analysis they brought a meditator's reading of both the Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, which provided insightful comparisons to the slow but steadily growing study of meditation according to the methods of Western science.
The first edition clearly indicated that the scientific study of meditation was fast becoming a growth industry. In the wake of its publication, Esalen, in cooperation with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and with financial assistance from Marius Robinson, launched an annual series of invitation-only conferences on advances in meditation research. These conferences, held annually at Esalen from 1988 to 1996, brought practitioners of meditation together with scholars in comparative religions and scientists interested in experimental and clinical investigation in order to generate cross-disciplinary dialogue about the experience and the effect of meditative practice. One fruit of those conferences has been this second edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography.
The Present Update
In the eight years since the first publication of their work, basic experimental studies on the subject of meditation have steadily increased, while outcome research in clinical settings has grown at an even faster rate. At the same time, when compared to what had gone on in the field in the fifty years preceding 1988, the total rate of increase between 1988 and 1996 in articles in scholarly and scientific journals as well as trade books has been nothing short of spectacular.
The second edition, in keeping with the first, chronicles mainly scientific and scholarly works, revealing several key trends and changes. Since 1988, not only has government sponsored research increased, but meditation is now a category on the National Library of Medicine's list of computer search subjects. There also has been an increase in the number of studies reported by researchers outside the US, especially from Asian countries. While more studies are being undertaken overall, the majority of research programs appear to be conducted by practitioners of meditation who are also skilled in the techniques of modern experimental methods. Finally, and perhaps most important from the standpoint of basic science, investigation has moved from the level of gross physiology to more detailed points of biochemistry and the voluntary control of internal states. From a philosophical standpoint, these studies have also raised a number of issues about the role of spiritual experiences in both psychology and medicine.
TM and the TM-Sidhi Project
As Murphy and Donovan pointed out in their first edition, and as the present update of their work has confirmed, the most prolific research on meditation in the United States in sheer numbers of published studies has been and continues to be on Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation is the specific introductory program taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a Vedantic meditation teacher originally from Madhyapradesh, India, to thousands of disciples, most of whom are in the West. Meanwhile, the TM-Sidhi program (an anglicized version of the Sanskrit siddhi, meaning supernormal powers) represents more advanced training in the Vedantic interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The experimental research program into the effects of TM is carried on largely at Maharishi Mahesh International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa (now called the Maharishi International School of Management), but there are other centers and individuals engaged in TM research as well.
Over the past two decades, David Orme-Johnson, one of the key investigators at MIU, and his colleagues have complied and edited 508 studies on TM in five volumes under the title Scientific Research on Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Program: Collected Papers (Orme-Johnson and Farrow, 1977; Chalmers, Clements, Schenkluhn and Weinless, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c; Wallace,Orme-Johnson and Dillbeck, 1990). These studies are arranged approximately in chronological order in each volume under the headings of physiology, psychology, sociology, and then either theoretical or review oriented papers. Experimental studies reported are about evenly divided between articles in refereed journals and those from TM conferences and in-house TM publications.
The content of the collected papers indicates that, historically, TM researchers began by positing the existence of a fourth state of consciousness-a hypometabolic waking state which their physiological measures suggested was distinctly different from either normal waking consciousness, the state of sleep with dreams, or the state of deep sleep without dreams. Studies then began to show effects when TM was applied to medical conditions such as asthma, angina, and high blood pressure. Personality variables became a focus of research. These included measures of intellectual problem-solving ability, thinking and recall, creativity, field independence, sense of self-esteem, and self-actualization. Researchers then moved into applied social situations, looking at the effects of teaching TM to the police, the military, and such populations as juvenile offenders, incarcerated adults, high school students, and athletes, as well as managers in the corporate environment. Meanwhile, more subtle biochemical measures of blood chemistry were also undertaken. These included endocrine levels, effects on neurotransmitters such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin, and the measurement of altered cell metabolism. TM was also examined in the context of various psychiatric disorders.
By the late 1970s studies began to appear testing the abilities of advanced meditators in the TM-Sidhi program on numerous variables during deep meditation and during what they described as yogic-flying. Along with individual studies, TM researchers also began reporting evidence for an inverse correlation between the amount of meditation going on and sociological variables such as the local and national crime rate for a given period. This has been labeled the Maharishi Effect. Finally, there are numerous papers on TM and world peace.
After almost a quarter of a century of scientific investigation, TM researchers now describe their findings in theoretical terms referring to "Vedic psychology" and "Vedic science." Their system clearly acknowledges the reality of the transcendent and subserves materialist methods of Western scientific investigation under the larger domain of spiritual experience within the philosophical and religious context of Hindu monism. Their expertise with certain aspects of Western science has become quite sophisticated, however, creating an altogether new avenue of investigation at the interface between science and spirituality. In the new and more open scientific climate toward research on the subject of meditation, TM researchers have successfully been able to master the blind peer review process and were recently awarded some $2,500,000 in research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Their studies will look at the large scale application of TM in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse and in such conditions as hypertension. [9]
Their preliminary research has shown that, with regard to drug dependence, the traditional single-cause-for-a-single-illness model is unworkable. Instead, addiction is viewed as a progressive behavior pattern involving a complex of physiological, psychological, and socio-cultural variables that can be successfully influenced by meditative practice at key points. In the case of hypertension, they have shown that psycho-pharmacology is still the preferred medical intervention but remains complicated because of toxic side effects, issues of patient non-compliance, and the fact that drugs work well on preventing stroke but not coronary heart disease. Their previous studies have confirmed that meditation works better than drug placebos, but is slower acting than pharmacologic agents, leading them to confirm the current recommendation that TM is most effective when used in combination with other therapies.
Herbert Benson: The Mind-Body Medical Institute
Another of the most visible research projects into the effects of meditation originally reported in the first edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography has been going on under the direction of Herbert Benson, cardiologist at Harvard Medical School. In the late 1960s, Benson began studying Transcendental Meditation practitioners. He has since expanded his work by looking at Tibetan Buddhist meditators, and generic forms of relaxation capable of being elicited by the general population.
His first major work, a trade book entitled The Relaxation Response, appeared in 1975. In it, he described procedures he believed were generic to the onset of meditation and other contemplative practices. The conditions necessary to evoke the relaxation response involve a quiet environment, repetition of a sound or phrase, a passive attitude, and relaxed watchful breathing. Meanwhile, in the medical literature he had identified the relaxation response as a natural reflex mechanism which, when practiced twenty minutes a day, reduced stress and physiologically had the opposite effect of the fight-flight reflex.
Beyond the Relaxation Response appeared in 1984, and combined Benson's research into both the relaxation response and the placebo effect. This text emphasized the role that harnessing physiology can play in improving quality of life and character. Benson followed in 1987 with Your Maximum Mind, a text that clearly associates the positive physiological effects of the relaxation response with the hopefulness of the patient's own religious beliefs and values.
Since publication of Your Maximum Mind, Benson has launched the Mind-Body Medical Institute, a for-profit research and training initiative in behavioral medicine, in conjunction with the Deaconess Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Medical School. Two major streams of Benson's work on meditation are carried on at this Institute. One involves ongoing programs in scientific research, while the other is dedicated to community education.
Since 1967 Benson has been working on identifying the physiological and neurochemical underpinnings of the relaxation response, which he defines as a hypometabolic state of parasympathetic activation, that is, a state of deep rest. Early work showed the effect of the relaxation response on lowering conditions such as essential hypertension, headache, and alcohol consumption. Studies then moved to show the effect of the relaxation response on various forms of heart disease, serum levels in the blood, and on psychiatric disorders such as anxiety. Other studies compared the relaxation response with other forms of relaxation such as hypnosis.
The next major phase was to assess the effects of the relaxation response in a variety of clinical situations. Women experiencing moderate forms of PMS were found to benefit from the technique. Patients at a major health maintenance organization were found to utilize the facilities less and to report less illness over time when taught Benson's method. Recently, the Institute has inaugurated a successful relaxation curriculum for high school students.
At the same time, Benson has also been investigating advanced meditators. While he began with practitioners of TM, as work on the relaxation response became more sophisticated, Benson turned his attention to measuring the physiological changes in advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators, using monks who follow the Dalai Lama. These were on-site investigations at monasteries in Nepal in the Himalayas. Most recently, Benson and his colleagues have been testing out the physiological effects of different forms of practice, as well as assessing metabolic and electrophysiologic changes in advanced meditators.
On the educational side, The Mind-Body Medical Institute offers regular one-week training programs for health care practitioners in all aspects of the relaxation response. The Institute franchises out its model to hospitals and other health care facilities and periodically launches educational programs for the public.
In December of 1995, for instance, the Institute sponsored a major conference on "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine." The three-day program was aimed at clinical practitioners, including physicians, psychologists, nurses, clergy, social workers, allied health professionals, and health care administrators. Perhaps for the first time, scientists, and Western healthcare practitioners joined with scholars in comparative religions to assess the relationship between spirituality and health. Here presentations on scientific evidence as well as historical and thematic scholarship attempted to interpret the life-world of radically different epistemological frames of reference from those of the laboratory scientist. It also meant taking seriously the claims of faith traditions in the West such as Pentacostalism, the Charismatic Catholic movement, and Seventh Day Adventism which the scientific outlook normally rejects. As well, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist scholars took up the more difficult task of interpreting the spiritual traditions of non-western cultures as significant sources of healing. Thoughout the conference, the practice of meditation played a central role in these discussions.
More recently, Benson has released Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (Benson and Stark, 1996). In this text he renames the placebo effect "remembered wellness." By using this new term he takes the idea of the placebo, which carries a negative connotation in science as something "not real," and re-examines it as a new psychological tool in medicine. In the term "remembered wellness" he here redefines the old term "placebo" as the person's natural desire for health and the person's right to choose the kind of healing to achieve it. To pharmaceuticals and surgery, Western medicine must now add the patient's own capacity for self-healing. Expectations, beliefs, values, and the practice of meditation, Benson maintains, are among the new forces we must now harness for health and growth.

Jon Kabat Zinn
at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center
Another major program of research on meditation continues under the direction of Jon Kabat-Zinn in the Department of Medicine, Division of Prevantative and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Kabat-Zinn's program, primarily for patients with medical disorders, combines elements of Vipassana, a Theraveda form of Buddhist meditation from Burma, and Zen practices from Japanese Buddhism with Hatha yoga, a tradition from the Indian subcontinent, in a training regime identified as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The Stress Reduction Clinic takes referrals from all services throughout the hospital and elsewhere and deals with a wide range of referred conditions, including hypertension, heart disease, cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, HIV and AIDS, as well as disorders of stress and anxiety.
Each patient is interviewed individually prior to enrollment in the program. The course includes eight weeks of classes, two two-and-a-half hour classes per week. Each class contains between twenty-five and forty members. Home study is required as well. Six days per week, with the help of audiotapes, patients practice meditation and yoga for forty-five minutes on their own. At week six, they attend an all-day seven-hour silent meditation. All participants in the six to eight concurrently running classes (approximately 240 people) participate in this silent weekend meditation retreat together. Following the program, each patient meets individually with the instructor. Three eight-week cycles of the course are held each year.
Patients are taught a basic regime of stretching and relaxation, plus different forms of seated meditation that they can continue to practice at home. They are also taught a method of body scanning, which entails following the path of the breath through different parts of the body as a guided visualization. In groups, they also discuss issues of formal meditation practice and ways to integrate what they learn there into their daily lives.
The program has enjoyed considerable success and notoriety. Kabat-Zinn has summarized his work in two popular trade books, Full Catastrophe Living (1990) and Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994). In 1993, the work of the clinic was prominently featured in the PBS series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers. In addition, over 100 centers in the US and abroad started by colleagues trained by Kabat-Zinn now conduct research as well as deliver clinical services. Beoynd this network, in Massachusetts alone, MBSR training is presently offered bilingually, in Spanish and English, in neighborhood health centers and taught to both inmates and staff as part of an ongoing prison project. Also, training programs are offered for first and second year medical students, corporate executives, and staff at local HMOs.
While Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have undertaken extensive outcome studies of their program on meditation, recently they have moved into more basic research that tries to refine the identification of specific biological markers that show the effects of meditation on the body.[10] Currently, the key variable of their investigation has been melatonin, a hormone which is produced in the pineal gland and thought to be a scavenger against cancer cells, acting to inhibit cancer growth at certain intermediate stages of cell proliferation. Melatonin is known to be photosensitive and is produced in greatest quantities in the body at night. Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues suggest that ist is also pychosensitive, in other words, that psychosocial interventions can also increase its production. In a recent study employing graduates from their program, for instance, Massion, Teas, Hebert, Wertheimer, and Kabat-Zinn (1995) demonstrated a significant increase in melatonin levels among meditators. Because the oncology literature provides support for the concept of psychophysiological interactions in survival among cancer patients, the Worcester group suggested not only that melatonin might be a marker for other types of psychosocial interventions, but that meditation might be relevant in the treatment of certain types of cancer, especially of the breast and prostate.
Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have several research projects on meditation currently underway that are in their preliminary stages and have not yet been published. One is the effect of guided meditation on psoriasis. Another, funded by the US Army, will look at the effects of behavioral interventions such as nutrition and meditation in patients suffering from early-stage breast cancer. In another experiment, just completed and not yet published, Kabat-Zinn joined colleagues A.O. Massion, J. Teas,. J.R. Hebert, and M.D. Wertheimer replicating their original findings and once again found a positive relationship between intensive meditation practice and increased melatonin levels.
Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches in Psychology
In an important new development, academic psychologists in the tradition of cognitive behaviorism have launched experimental research programs in meditation. William Mikulas (1981) at the University of West Florida has pointed out that, when analyzed in detail, meditation practices can be broken down and understood in terms of traditional constructs in experimental psychology, such as vigilance, attention, and concentration. As well, the new trend in cognitive therapy applying principles of classical and operant conditioning in order to inhibit or facilitate both mental images and thought processes has brought experimental psychologists a step closer to the type of instruction typical of various Eastern meditative practices. The continuing obstacle is, according to Mikulas, that cognitive psychologists have overemphasized a mechanistic model of the mind as a computer instead of expanding their definition of behavior.
To rectify this situation, Mikulas has outlined a program to study what he called "Behaviors of the Mind" (mind, a decidedly unbehavioristic term, he defines as the subjective center or agent of mental activity). [11] Three such behavioral variables relevant to the study of meditation that he has studied are concentration, the ability to focus attention on an object for varying periods; mindfulness, a generalized state of alertness where the mind remains unfocused but is prepared to attend to any potential stimulus; and clinging, the tendency of the mind to attach to and to dwell on specific thoughts or objects.
Such constructs, Mikulas believes, can be operationalized as a way to understand meditation from a cognitive-behavioral perspective. Moreover, this addresses what is actually going on at a mental level in a much more sophisticated way than just studying physiological measures or a single experimental variable. [12]
Another cognitive-behaviorist, Jonathan C. Smith, at Roosevelt University in Chicago, has developed an extensive research program on meditation as part of his Stress Institute (J.C. Smith, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1978, 1984a, 1984b, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993). Thinking along lines similar to Mikulas, Smith had already begun his own research by conceiving meditation as just a special form of relaxation. Psychologists have numerous relaxation strategies available to them, including progressive muscle relaxation, yogic stretching, guided mental imagery, contemplation, a focus on the gross aspects of the body, and a more refined focus on subtle body functions. Yet another is meditation, which can be either focused, as in Transcendental Meditation or Benson's relaxation response, or open and unfocused, as in Zen practice or Buddhist mindfulness.
His empirical research, relying heavily on factor theory, has more recently caused Smith to revise his thinking about theories of relaxation. In a complete reversal, he now considers relaxation a subset of meditation (J.C. Smith et al., 1996). In the old Benson model (one that still largely prevails), relaxation was confined to measurements of reduced physiological arousal. Another explanation that has been most popular among traditional stress researchers, such as Davidson and Schwartz (1984, 1976), defines relaxation in terms of cognitive-somatic specificity, i.e., there are two kinds of relaxation, physical and mental, which require two different sets of techniques, physiological and psychological. Then there was Smith's approach which saw all types of relaxation as the refinement of cognitive skills involving passivity, receptivity, and focusing. As more research results came in, Smith then came to believe that, in addition to just cognitive skills, relaxation was most successful when it included supportive cognitive structures, such as those found in personal philosophies of life.
Now, his research has further indicated that relaxation is composed of four separate effects: 1) the initial evocation of the relaxation response, which is purely physiological (which accounts for only 5% of the variance of relaxation); 2) tension release, the combination of physiological relaxation plus positive thoughts and feelings (as when one describes oneself as limp, melted, soothed, peaceful, calm); 3) disengagement, which is an attentional effect, creating the sensation of being distant, detached, forgetful, and becoming less aware of the world; and 4) engagement, opening up to and becoming more aware of the world, but in a passive way.
He has further operationally refined engagement by defining it as an advanced level of relaxation, having four subcategories. The first is engaged awareness, feeling aware, clear, focused, strengthened, and energized. This can be attained through yoga and breathing. The second is engaged prayerfulness, being open not just to the world, but to a greater world, in the sense of feeling reverent, spiritual, or selfless. Meditation is the key to attainment here. Third is engaged joyfulness, meaning a rainbow of feelings (feeling simultaneously loving, thankful, inspired, warm, healed, and infinite.) (He suggests that joyfulness accounts for 40% of the variance of relaxation, and further, that while progressive relaxation does not evoke it, yoga, breathing, and meditation do). Finally, the final subcategory he defines as mystery, the experience of mystical feelings. He claims that initially he did not have enough subjects to measure this variable, that it was identified only by a small statistical effect, and that more study will be needed in the future to confirm it.
In addition to his empirical research, Smith has also developed an applied program. Here, he demystifies meditation, takes it out of its Asian context, and packages it as a training course that covers all the generic forms one can find in both Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, making meditation accessible to the common reader.
The significance of work by such researchers should not be underestimated. Programs such as these, the new cognitive-behaviorists believe, have greater potential for connecting traditional systems of Asian psychology with basic science than the more experiential approaches of humanistic or transpersonal psychotherapy. At the same time, interest in the subject by cognitive-behaviorists indicates the extent to which meditation has penetrated into the mainstream of American academic psychology as a respectable research subject.
Health Psychology and Complementary Medicine
Another important development in the field of meditation research has been alternative or complementary medicine. The historical evolution of the alternative medicine movement in the United States is long and too detailed to go into here. However, the main point can still be made that beginning in the 1960s and '70s, with the emergence of humanistic and transpersonal psychology as major forces in the human potential movement, the clinical practice of psychology and medicine began to fuse with a more sophisticated understanding of spiritual growth affecting certain key areas of modern culture. Now, after more than thirty years of personal and scientific experimentation with encounter groups, sensitivity training, psychedelics, somatic body work, parapsychology, guided imagery, yoga and meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and the like, alternative, or what is now being called complementary, medicine has emerged as an important challenge to Western reductionistic approaches to healing. Western medical science radically separates mind and body; complementary medicine unites them. Western medical science focuses on the physical symptom; complementary medicine looks at the symptom in the context of the whole person. Western medical science presumes that it is science that heals the sick; complementary medicine presumes that it is our manipulations that harness the patient's own resources for self-healing.
Complementary medicine, first of all, is now being defined by a new generation of scientist-practitioners. Those who before were but the mere students of their subject matter have now become both advanced meditators and recognized scientists capable of carrying off sophisticated research. We remember the pioneering work of Arthur Deikman and Charles Tart, done twenty-five years ago. Then we listened to Herbert Benson and Robert Keith Wallace. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s we heard from Dan Goleman, Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, Roger Walsh, Dean Shapiro, Elmer Green, Alyce Green, Michael Maliszewski, and Michael West, Today, we read Charles Alexander, Robert Orme-Johnson, Richard Freidman, Mark Epistein, and James Spira. [13] The trend began as a study of meditation as an isolated practice, whereas it is now viewed in the much larger context of complementary medicine and one's overall sense of health and well-being.
Complementary medicine is complementary because it interfaces with scientific and medical reductionism. It not only advocates a combined approach to healing, but also points to the importance of holistic change. One does not merely take a pill and then return to the same lifestyle that contributed to the creation of the problem in the first place. The practice of meditation, as well as the pursuit of other forms of complementary medicine, means an alteration of basic attitudes, dramatic and positive lifestyle changes, and perhaps even radical overthrow of old, habitual ways of perceiving on the part of the person being healed.
Complementary medicine also reflects the major social revolution now going on at the interface between popular middle-class culture and the delivery of clinical services in the health care professions. A recent issue of the Sharper Image Catalog, for instance, advertises tapes, videos, and books by physician Dean Ornish of the University of California at San Francisco, who has pioneered in the treatment of heart disease using diet, meditation, and lifestyle change. [14] The Wall Street Journal and Forbes have carried articles on the therapeutic application of meditation in corporate management for stress reduction, new product development, and team building, while the November 1994 issue of Psychology Today indicated that meditation practice is at the heart of a contemporary spiritual awakening affecting not only pastoral counseling within traditional Christianity but also a large segment of the psychotherapeutic counter-culture.
In addition, there is clear evidence for the rising influence of complementary medicine within other traditional institutions of modern culture. One sign has been the recent founding of the Office of Alternative Medicine within the National Institutes of Health. The OAM, working on a small budget, has commissioned individual investigators to run clinical trials on alternative therapies such as meditation that can be used in conjunction with traditional scientific medical practice. They have also recently established a network of research centers throughout the United States targeting specific experimental problems in complementary medicine. [15] Another sign has been the launching of several new journals, the most successful of which has been Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. [16] Edited by Larry Dossey and Jeanne Achterberg and sponsored by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, Alternative Therapies regularly reports on advances in meditation research in the context of other approaches such as homeopathy, vitamin therapy, hypnosis, biofeedback, and psychoneuroimmunology.
The Qi Gong database
In addition to the inclusion of meditation in complementary forms of medicine in the United States, research on various forms of meditation is also occurring in other parts of the world. The Qi Gong database, a report on one aspect of meditative practice in China, is made available through the East-West Center for the Healing Arts in California and was assembled by a team of researchers led by Kenneth M. Sancier. [17] It contains some one thousand abstracts of unpublished papers delivered at a series of international conferences on Qi Gong and traditional Chinese medicine held since the late 1980s in China. Paradoxically, the Chinese Communist government wants to promote traditional Chinese medicine to the world at the same time that it severely restricts the ability of Chinese researchers to communicate freely with other investigators. The bibliography is therefore valuable as one of the only large scale sources of information available on the practice of Chinese meditation techniques related to Qi Gong; at the same time it suffers from a certain lack of oxygen because the material is presented in a contextual vacuum which presumes that traditional Chinese medicine is automatically testable by Western scientific methods.
Qi Gong is the traditional Chinese practice of meditation upon the chi, or life force, which is believed to continuously circulate throughout the body and which regulates the daily and seasonal functioning of the person in dynamic relation to the environment over the entire life cycle. The internal form of Qi Gong can be practiced as a seated meditation, while its external aspect may take the form of different movement disciplines. Qi Gong is the mother of tai chi, for instance, the most familiar style of Chinese health movement known to the West.
The database clearly indicates that there is a continuously growing body of information on the positive clinical application of Qi Gong therapy. [18] However, to really appreciate the information presented requires a detailed knowledge of the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang and the five elements, a knowledge of acupuncture, acquaintance with the philosophy behind the important Chinese works a such as the Book of Songs and the Book of Changes, and a knowledge of the major classics in traditional Chinese medicine. Western scientific medical practitioners will therefore find it difficult to assess the clinical significance of unpublished studies presented only as abstracts and based on an epistemological system so radically different from the Western analytic tradition that the very frame of reference used in of many of the discussions will to them remain incomprehensible. For the knowledgeable researcher, however, the hermetically sealed quality of the research at least gives an internal consistency to the one type of meditation studied.
Yoga Research in India
Scientific research on yoga and meditation appears to be going on all over India, but only a fraction of this work makes its way into the Western scientific and medical literature. An effort has recently been made by the Yoga Biomedical Trust, a non-profit research organization in Cambridge, England, founded in 1983 to collate more of this normally unavailable information on yoga and meditation. [19] Principally, their bibliographic references have come from yoga centers, private collections, specialist publishers, and researchers themselves, in addition to scientific conferences held periodically in India, the Indian social science literature, and the international medical research literature, which includes references normally unavailable to Western investigators.
In the Trust's primary publication, the Yoga Research Bibliography: Scientific Studies on Yoga and Meditation (1989), Monro, Ghosh, and Kalish present over 1000 citations ranging from essay-commentaries to clinical applications and pure empirical research. Again, however, as with the Qi Gong database, the Yoga Research Bibliography will be appreciated most by individuals trained in scientific research who also have an extensive knowledge of the classical texts in yoga and the philosophy behind the techniques, as well as a detailed experiential knowledge of specific yogic practices and their Sanskrit names. Again, the trend is clearly toward a mounting body of evidence showing the efficacious use of yoga techniques and Hindu meditation practice in specific disorders such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, cholesterol regulation, alcoholism, anxiety disorders, asthma, pain control, and obesity. As compared to studies in the Chinese database, the level of scientific expertise in various experimental studies on yoga and meditation is quite sophisticated by Western standards. There is a much more subtle empirical demonstration of the relation of brain states to mental states in this yoga literature by Indian researchers than has yet to be demonstrated by non-Indian researchers.
The International Meditation Bibliography, 1950-1982
The only work comparable to the present text is the International Meditation Bibliography, 1950-1982, authored by Howard Jarrell and commissioned by the American Theological Library Association. [20] Its linguistic breadth is somewhat larger, in that it contains articles in English, books in English and German, with some titles in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and dissertations in both English and German. The total number of entries (just over 2,200) is also somewhat larger. There are 937 journal and magazine articles, all of which are briefly annotated, over 1000 books, 200 doctoral dissertations and master's theses, titles from 32 motion pictures and 93 recordings and a list of 32 societies and associations. In addition there is a title index, an author index, and a subject index.
The Transcendental Meditation people seem to have had more than a passing hand in creating it, as there is a eulogistic preface extolling the benefits of TM, although the editors may have been simply trying to reflect the fact that the majority of experimental studies reported up to 1983 involved TM techniques. The work also does not discriminate between trade literature and more scholarly, academic or scientific publications, but rather presents them all as part of the greater bibliography. The impression that gets reinforced, quite accurate in my historical opinion, is that in the United States, at least, the majority of interest in meditation has come from popular culture, rather than from the universities or the scientific establishment, which have remained largely reactive. [21]
The Historic Significance of Murphy and Donovan's Text
Murphy and Donovan have done the field of meditation research a valuable service on several fronts. Perhaps the most important of these has been to highlight the epistemological differences between those who meditate and those who do not as a crucial determinant of how and under what circumstances scientific research into this new subject can be conducted. They have also raised the issue of what a new science that takes meditation seriously might look like in the future. This issue is the same we have raised earlier: namely, how can the methods of science be applied to a subject whose full understanding may transform the very foundation upon which reductionistic science is based? Murphy and Donovan produced their first edition during a time when there was fast-growing and widespread cultural interest in the subject, but great resistance from the basic science community. They not only collated a vast wealth of information on scientific research when the subject of meditation was less acceptable than it is today, but they also emphasized the importance of meditation for understanding the larger issues of how we actualize our human potential. Now there has been a significant change in outlook and such issues are being taken more seriously by a younger generation of thoughtful leaders in modern culture. From an analysis of recent history, the Murphy and Donovan bibliography in its first edition contributed significantly toward advancing this discussion because it was a milestone that marked the current cultural revolution focusing on spirituality and higher consciousness. Two historical examples suggest this conclusion; the first was an episode that took place within the profession of psychology, while the second has occurred within the wider area of government-sponsored research in the medical sciences.
Psychologists Debate the Issues
Twenty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association recognized the need for controlled experimental research when it called for an in-depth study of different types of meditation and their positive effects on health (mentioning also that we should be investigating their potential "dangers"). [22] Then, just before the first edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography appeared in 1988, a significant exchange on the experimental evidence underlying certain claims about meditation took place in the pages of the American Psychologist, main organ of the American Psychological Association.
The controversy began in 1984 when David S. Holmes, a staunch behaviorist in the tradition of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, who was from the University of Kansas and who had studied a few Transcendental Meditation practitioners, challenged a large mass of previously published experimental literature by claiming that there was no evidence that meditation reduced somatic arousal (Holmes, 1984). Holmes came to this conclusion through a few studies of his own and through a review of the research literature. From this literature, however, he excluded consideration of all studies that were merely case reports and all those that involved subjects who had first acted as their own controls (within subjects designs) on the assumption that such research represented bad science. This left only studies which had used separate experimental and control groups. He then evaluated these remaining few and concluded that none showed meditation as producing a significant lowering of arousal different from simply resting.
A year and a half later, the editors of the American Psychologist devoted an entire section of their June 1985 issue to criticisms of Holmes' article, including responses from Holmes.
John Suler from Rider College maintained that on purely methodological grounds Holmes had invoked a fairy tale definition of psychology as an exact science in order to discount studies on meditation, and that Holmes had limited himself to studies on TM which were not generalizable to other types of meditation (Suler, 1985).
Michael West, from the University of Sheffield, England, researcher, practitioner, and author of a well known text on meditation, believed that Holmes did not look carefully enough at the research literature so that his conclusions were overgeneralized and unwarranted (West, 1985). Needed instead, West maintained, was a more complex discussion of evidence and more double-blind, randomly assigned experiments controlling for expectation and group differences. He believed that someone also needed to undertake longitudinal studies of meditators and a big picture needed to be constructed that included case reports and within subject designs.
Deane Shapiro, clinical psychologist, meditation practitioner, and researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who has been one of the key pioneers in the field, waded in and concluded that Holmes had not looked at all the literature, that what he had looked at he had completely misinterpreted, and that conclusions drawn from Holmes' experiments using laboratory subjects were not automatically generalizable to clinical populations anyway.
Ignoring Suler and West, Holmes replied only to Shapiro, since in all likelihood he saw him as the more formidable opponent (Holmes, 1985a). He asserted on grounds of scientific rigor that Shapiro's own review of the meditation literature, which Holmes himself had originally ignored, contained numerous errors. Further, he clearly stated that Shapiro did not know how to conduct or analyze scientific research.
Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson and SUNY psychologist Robert Freidman, practitioners, teachers, and researchers of the relaxation response, then joined the chorus of voices. Benson and Freidman's point was that the relaxation response was common to all forms of relaxation, including rest and meditation, so that Holmes' distinction of meditation from rest was purely artificial (Benson and Freidman, 1985). Further, the trophotrophic response as a complex of opposite physiological reactions to the fight-flight reflex had been established in physiology since the time of Hess (et al., 1947; Hess, 1953)-for which Hess had received the Nobel Prize-and the relaxation response had been experimentally established in the medial literature as an extension of Hess's work. Benson and Freidman then pointed out other numerous errors in Holmes' work, suggesting not only that Holmes did not know his basic physiology, but also that he did not know how to conduct and interpret a scientific experiment.
Holmes (1985b) responded by implying in his opening paragraph that Benson and his colleagues did not know anything about meditation, physiology, or science, and then proceeded with an essay of some 3,000 words to deliver a barrage of rhetoric about what constitutes legitimate data in reductionistic science and what were the criteria for legitimate designs of various experiments in psychology, meanwhile having nothing much to say about meditation per se.
The final word was given in another issue of the American Psychologist a year later. This last comment that the editors permitted on Holmes was delivered by Jonathan C. Smith, cognitive-behaviorist and meditation and stress researcher from Roosevelt University (J.C. Smith, 1986a). Smith, theoretically in a reductionistic camp closer to Holmes than anyone else who had responded, maintained that the recent studies by Holmes on meditation and Roberts on biofeedback (see Roberts, 1985) that claimed no evidence for a reduction of somatic arousal were based on outdated assumptions concerning the nature of relaxation. Psychology had actually progressed from a 1950s definition of overt observable behavior as simply stimulus-response connections to a more sophisticated picture demonstrating control of mental and physiological operations. According to Smith's own model, both stress and relaxation were complex cognitive and interactive responses. Simply comparing meditation, biofeedback, and other relaxation techniques to each other is not sufficient; one must get at the extent to which each technique enhances the subject's skill at deploying attention in a focused, passive, and receptive way. Even so, Smith suspected we would then find that genuine relaxation is not necessarily always associated with changes in arousal. [23]
This exchange tells us that within psychology as an academic experimental discipline there has been significant movement from reductionistic modeling that does not even acknowledge the reality of consciousness-the position of the radical behaviorists who controlled much of the methodological dialogue in the discipline since J. B. Watson's infamous proclamation of 1913-to at least a consideration of those aspects of meditation that can be operationalized. It further suggests that scientists who are also practitioners are not only more active in cross-disciplinary research, but by the 1980s were ready to engage in discussions with their more reductionistic colleagues on issues of method and interpretation. Subsequently, history has shown that the discussion has not only moved out into the wider field of medical science, but continues to develop in the direction set not by the reductionists but by the scientist-practitioners of meditation.
Governmental Research and Medical Science
More recently, in this regard, an assessment of meditation has emerged in several statements made by investigating agencies of the United States government. Between 1988 and 1991, the National Research Council, in a project commissioned by the Army Research Institute, issued a series of findings on the assessment of techniques believed to enhance human performance. [24] These included, among numerous other topics, such approaches as self-help groups, subliminal tapes, and meditation. The overall conclusion of the investigators regarding the effect of meditation was widely disseminated in the public press as the official position of the NRC. Their assessment of the available scientific research led them to the conclusion that meditation seems to be no more effective than established relaxation techniques; and it was therefore unwarranted to attribute any special effects to meditation alone.
More than this, however, the overall tone of the entire research endeavor was negative and skeptical to begin with. Numerous criticisms emerged afterward of misinterpretation of data and false conclusions even from established experimentalists. As well, the analysis of the experimental literature on meditation was undertaken by two psychologists who had no expertise in the area of meditation research, although, somewhat ludicrously, they attempted to launch a definition and explanation of what they considered to be the different types of meditation/ They compared a few specific studies that had no basis for factual comparison according to the experimental standards they themselves had set, and they based their overall analysis of all experimental studies undertaken on meditation by reading a single outdated summary that had been commissioned some years earlier from a single researcher. To underscore the fact that their conclusions were based on a philosophical bias rather than basic research, they even included an epistemological coda admitting that to be the case. [25]
In October 1995, a more positive and forceful recommendation was made in a joint statement issued by agencies within the National Institutes of Health. The recommendation was based on the outcome of a major technology assessment conference that attempted to integrate behavioral and relaxation approaches into the treatment of chronic pain and insomnia. [26] One of the major interventions considered was that of meditation. The sponsoring agencies for this conference included The Office of Medical Applications of Research and the newly founded Office of Alternative Medicine. These groups were then backed by co-sponsoring agencies that included the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Dental Research, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute on Aging, The National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Combining meditation under the same heading as autogenic training and progressive muscle relaxation, and determining that these were deep rather then merely brief methods of standard relaxation therapy, the conference members concluded that "the evidence is strong for the effectiveness of this class of techniques in reducing chronic pain in a variety of medical conditions." [27] They recommended the commitment of funds to research trials that tested these combined forms of therapy and the integration of alternative medicine with traditional scientific medical practice.
Here again we have the classic differentiation between the attitudes of laboratory versus clinical researchers. Basic researchers believe that they are doing the real science and only what comes out of the laboratory should be applied to clinical situations. Clinicians, on the other hand, faced with the real live complexity of human problems, maintain that most of what comes out of basic science is done to prove some theory, while what they say they really need is data on concrete, workable interventions for immediate life situations. While there is a revolution now going on in the neurosciences affecting how basic scientists communicate with one another, a completely different revolution is going on at the level of clinical services, one that has deep roots in values and attitudes, lifestyle choices the patient alone can make, alternative forms of healing, and an appeal to the spiritual dimension of human experience. Consequently, the National Research Council has had its say on the scientific validity of studying meditation, which has now been superseded by the more recent conclusions of the National Institutes of Health.
As this brief overview indicates, in their first edition, Murphy and Donovan gave us a summary of meditation research that anticipated, among other trends, the rising influence of psychology in general medicine, the increasingly important role of beliefs and values in the healing process, the possibility of a new dialogue emerging between science and religion framed in terms of spiritual experience, and the potential impact that different models of consciousness might have on our understanding of character development. Presciently, as the current update suggests, these still seem to be rising trends for the future.

Chapter 1:
Scientific Studies of Contemplative Experience: An Overview
by Michael Murphy

Scientific studies of meditation and other forms of contemplative experience have only recently become a subject of scientific interest within the last half century. In 1931 Kovoor Behanan, an Indian graduate student in psychology at Yale, was awarded a Sterling Fellowship to undertake what has since been recognized as the first empirical study of yoga and meditation. Supported in this research by Walter Miles, an eminent professor of psychology, Behanan wrote a book about yoga that described quantitative studies of his own yogic breathing. During 72 days of experiments at Yale, he found that one breathing exercise, or pranayama, increased his oxygen consumption by 24.5%, a second by 18.5%, and a third by 12% (Behanan, 1937, Miles, 1964). This study helped stimulate interest in meditation research by showing that the physiological effects of yoga could be examined in the laboratory (Behanan, 1937). Unlike many tales by travelers to the East, Behanan's straightforward, well-observed account of his laboratory research was free of exaggeration and mystification.
Behanan also studied Indian yogis. He was guided in this work by Swami Kuvalayananda, who promoted yoga research at a center for meditation practice he founded in the 1920s at Lonavla, a hill station near Bombay. Kuvalayananda developed a system of physical culture that included asanas and pranayamas, and he established a yogic therapy for many afflictions. His work was supported by several Indian states, two provincial governments of British India, Indian health agencies, and American foundations. For many years, the results of his laboratory research were published in a quarterly journal, Yoga Mimamsa, which also provided instruction on postures, breathing exercises, and other disciplines. Many people interested in yoga research visited Lonavla, among them psychologists Basu Bagchi of the University of Michigan Medical Center and M. A. Wenger of UCLA, who gave new impetus to meditation studies in the 1950s. From the 1920s into the 1960s, Swami Kuvalayananda did much to promote the scientific study of yoga.
In 1935 a French cardiologist, Therese Brosse, took an electrocardiograph to India and studied yogis who said they could stop their heart. According to Brosse's published report, readings produced by a single EKG lead and pulse recordings indicated that the heart potentials and pulse of one of her subjects decreased almost to zero, where they stayed for several seconds (Brosse, 1946). Her finding was criticized, though, by Wenger, Bagchi, and B. K. Anand in their later, more thorough studies of yogic adepts (see below). Brosse also studied a yogi who was buried for ten hours, and described other examples of self-control she had witnessed. Like Behanan and Swami Kuvalayananda, she helped promote the idea that yogic feats could be studied with scientific instruments.
The instrumented study of yogic functioning was expanded by Bagchi, Wenger, and Anand. Anand was then chairman of the Department of Physiology at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. Their landmark studies during the late 1950s were reported in American scientific journals. Along with studies of Zen masters by Akira Kasamatsu and Tomio Hirai in Japan (see below) the Indian studies gave new momentum to meditation research. For five months in 1957, Bagchi and Wenger traveled through India with an eight-channel electro-encephalograph and accessory instruments to record respiration, skin temperature, skin conductance, and finger blood-volume changes. During their trip they established experiments in Calcutta, Madras, Lonavla, and New Delhi, and conducted further tests in homes and a mountain retreat (Bagchi and Wenger, 1957; Wenger and Bagchi, 1961; Wenger et al., 1961; Bagchi, 1969). Among the subjects they examined, one could perspire from his forehead upon command in his freezing Himalayan retreat; a second could regurgitate at will to cleanse himself (Wenger & Bagchi, 1961). Three others altered their heartbeats so that they could not be heard with a stethoscope, though EKG and plethysmographic records showed that their hearts were active and their pulses had not disappeared. [28] In tests to compare relaxation in a supine position with seated meditation, Bagchi and Wenger found that four yoga students had faster heart rates, lower finger temperatures, greater palmar sweating, and higher blood pressure during meditation, though their respiration rates were reduced. Five yogis given similar tests exhibited even faster heart rates, lower finger temperatures, greater palmar conductance, and higher blood pressures during meditation than the students, though their breathing was slower. Such differences suggested that for these yogis meditation was an active rather than a passive process (Wenger and Bagchi, 1961).
Bagchi and Wenger also studied the effects of breathing exercises and found that some of their subjects, especially experienced ones, could produce bidirectional changes in every autonomic variable that the experimenters measured. Though the two psychologists found that their subjects exhibited some dramatic physiological changes, they were cautious in drawing conclusions about yogic claims in general. "Direct voluntary control of autonomic functions is probably rare among yogis," they wrote. "When such control is claimed, intervening voluntary mechanisms are usually employed." They made this qualification, however: "We have met many dedicated yogis who described experiences to us that few Western scientists have heard of and none has investigated. It is possible that the mere presence of a foreigner precludes optimum results"(Wenger and Bagchi, 1961).
Other researchers have confirmed the discovery by Bagchi and Wenger that some subjects exhibit more than one pattern of physiological activity during their yogic practices. N. N. Das and H. Gastaut studied seven Indian yogis, who registered no muscular electrical activity during periods of complete immobility though their heart rates accelerated in almost perfect parallel with accelerations of their brain waves during moments of ecstasy. The most accomplished among these seven subjects, moreover, exhibited "progressive and very spectacular modifications" in their EEG records during their deepest meditations, including recurrent beta rhythms of 18-20 cycles per second in the Rolandic area of the brain, a generalized fast activity of small amplitude as high as 40-45 cycles per second with occasional amplitudes reaching 30 to 50 microvolts, and the reappearance of slower alpha waves after samadhi, or ecstasy, ended. In summarizing their study, Das and Gastaut concluded that:
The modifications [we] recorded during very deep meditation are much more dramatic than those known up till now, which leads us to suppose that western subjects are far from being able to attain the yogi state of mental concentration.
It is probable that this supreme concentration of attention . . . is responsible for the perfect insensibility of the yogi during samadhi; this insensibility, accompanied by immobility and pallor often led people to describe this state as sleep, lethargy, anesthesia, or coma. The electroencephalographic evidence here described contradicts such opinions and suggests that a state of intense generalized cortical stimulation is sufficient to explain such states without having to invoke associated processes of diffuse or local inhibition (Das and Gastaut, 1955)
Das and Gastaut's conclusion does not contradict the widespread findings of subsequent meditation studies that many or most meditators experience the trophotropic or relaxation response described by E. Gellhorn, W. Kiely, Herbert Benson, and other researchers (Gellhorn and Kiely, 1972; and Benson, 1975). Most subjects in meditation studies do not experience yogic ecstasy and so do not exhibit the cortical excitement that Das and Gastaut observed. Furthermore, different kinds of religious practice produce different types of experience accompanied by different types of physiological change. Kasamatsu and Hirai's Zen masters, for example, exhibited high-amplitude alpha and theta waves, not beta waves, during their deepest meditations (see below).
Further evidence that contemplative practice produces different physiological profiles was provided by B. K. Anand, G. S. Chhina, and Baldev Singh, who found that four yogis exhibited persistent alpha activity with increased amplitude during trance. These four yogis exhibited no alpha-wave blocking when they were bombarded with loud banging, strong lights, and other sensory stimuli, and two of them showed persistent alpha activity while holding their hands in ice-cold water for forty-five to fifty-five minutes (Anand, Chhina, and Singh, 1961a). The yogis in this experiment exhibited physiological differences during meditation from at least two other groups of accomplished meditators. They did not exhibit alpha blocking in response to strong stimuli, in contrast to the Zen masters studied by Kasamatsu and Hirai (see below). Nor did they exhibit the beta waves that appeared on the EEGs of Das and Gastaut's subjects. The difference from the Zen masters probably resulted from a basic difference in focus between the two groups, the yogis having withdrawn their attention from external stimuli, whereas the Zen masters remained aware of their external environment. Their difference from Das and Gastaut's yogis, on the other hand, might have been due to differences between their styles of meditation, the conditions of the experiments, or the qualities of their experience. The strong stimuli Anand gave his subjects, for example, may well have prevented the more ecstatic absorptions experienced by Das and Gastaut's yogis. The published reports of the Das-Gastaut and Anand-Chhina-Singh experiments do not provide enough detail to fully explain their different results, but they remind us that there are different kinds of contemplative experience. Roland Fischer, Julian Davidson, and other researchers have proposed some ways in which internal states might be correlated with different physiological profiles (Fischer, 1971; and Davidson, 1976).
In a study published in 1958, the Indian researchers G. G. Satyanarayanamurthi and B. P. Shastry described a yogi whose heart kept beating for thirty seconds even though his radial pulse could not be felt and his heart could not be heard with a stethoscope. This yogi's EKG showed no abnormalities, moreover, and finger plethysmography showed that his pulse was present though greatly reduced. The two researchers claimed that fluoroscopy conducted while the yogi was lying down showed that for several 30-second periods the beating of his heart was just a "flicker along the left border below the pulmonary conus and in the apical segment of the left ventrical." They concluded that he achieved this control through the Valsalva maneuver. [29]
Elmer and Alyce Green, with their colleagues at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, also observed exhibitions of yogic heart control. Their subject, Swami Rama, while sitting perfectly still, produced an atrial flutter of 306 beats per minute that lasted for sixteen seconds. During a fibrillation of this kind, a section of the heart oscillates rapidly while its chambers do not fill and its valves do not work properly, but Swami Rama gave no sign that the maneuver caused him any pain or heart damage. The swami also produced an IIF difference between the left and right sides of his right palm. While he did this, the left side of his palm turned pink and the right side gray (Green and Green, 1977).
Yogis frequently use abdominal contractions to slow their heart rate rather than intervening more directly through the central nervous system. Curiously, though, an earlier study had examined a man with no yogic training at all who could stop his heart without such maneuvers, simply by relaxing and "allowing everything to stop." By this procedure, he could induce a gradual slowing of his pulse until he started to faint, at which point he would take a deep breath. When EKG tests showed that his heartbeat did indeed disappear, the doctor who examined him concluded that the man's cardiac arrest was induced through some mechanism which, although under voluntary control, is not known to the patient himself. Careful observation did not reveal any breath-holding or Valsalva maneuver. Apparently the patient simply abolished all sympathetic tone by complete mental and physical relaxation (McClure, 1959).
Like heart stopping, the live burial of yogis has excited the interest of several researchers. A physician, Rustom Jal Vakil, published an account in the British journal Lancet of such a confinement that was witnessed by some 10,000 people near Bombay in February 1950. According to Vakil, an emaciated sadhu named Ramdasji sat cross-legged in a subterranean 216-cubic-foot cubicle and remained there for sixty-two hours. His pulse remained steady at eighty beats per minute; his blood pressure was 112/78; and his respiratory rate fluctuated from eight to ten breaths per minute. Though he had some scratches and cuts, Vakil wrote, Ramdasji appeared "none the worse for his grueling experience.'' (Vakil, 1950).
In June 1956, a more closely observed study of yogic confinement was conducted under the auspices of the All-India Institute of Mental Health in Bangalore with a Hatha yogi, Krishna Iyengar. Hoenig, a psychiatrist from the University of Manchester, witnessed the experiment and described it in a review of yoga research published in 1968 (Hoenig, 1968). According to Hoenig's report, a pit some two by three by four feet was dug on the institute's grounds and covered with wire meshing, a rubber sheet, and cotton carpet. An electrode junction box connected to an EEG and an EKG was placed in the pit along with instruments to measure temperature and concentration of gas. The yogi was confined for nine hours. When he was released he immediately walked about the grounds, according to Hoenig's firsthand account, and demonstrated athletic feats including a headstand with his legs in the lotus position. The percentage of carbon dioxide in the air in his enclosure, which was 1.34% at the beginning of the experiment, was only 3.8% at the end, lower than would normally be expected. Iyengar's heart rate gradually slowed from 100 to 40 beats a minute in recurring twenty- to twenty-five-minute cycles, but his EKG record did not register any other abnormality and the cycles did not coincide with his breathing or brain-wave patterns. The yogi's EEG showed a normal waking record for the full nine hours, characterized by a stable alpha rhythm of 50 microvolts with no evidence of sleep or interference caused by physical movement. From these records, the experimenters concluded that their subject lay motionless and wide awake, without the active cognition that would have reduced or eliminated his alpha rhythm. Iyengar said he had maintained the shavasana, or corpse pose, using ujjaya breathing while remembering the names of God. He was surprised that his heart had speeded and slowed, and could not explain why it had done so. It beat normally, however, after the experiment.
Because the earthen pits used in most yogic confinements leak oxygen and carbon dioxide, Anand, Chhina, and Singh tested a yogi named Ramanand in an airtight glass and metal box, once for eight hours and again for ten hours. The yogi's average oxygen use during the first experiment decreased from the basal rate of 19.5 liters per hour to 12.2, and during the second experiment to 13.3 liters per hour. His carbon dioxide output went down during both experiments. Ramanand, moreover, did not exhibit any rapid breathing or speeded heart rate as the oxygen in his box diminished and carbon dioxide increased. "Sri Ramanand Yogi could reduce his oxygen intake and carbon dioxide output to levels significantly lower than his requirements under basal conditions," Anand and his colleagues wrote. "It appears from this study that [he] could voluntarily reduce his basal metabolic rate on both occasions he went into the box." [30]
During a remarkable experiment reported by L. K. Kothari and associates, a yogi was buried for eight days in an earthen pit and connected by leads to an EKG in a nearby laboratory. After the pit was boarded up, the subject's heart rate sometimes went as high as fifty beats per minute, until a straight line appeared on the EKG tracing when the yogi had been in the pit for twenty-nine hours. There had been no slowing of his heart immediately before the straight line appeared, nor any sign of electrical disturbance, but the experimenters proceeded with certainty that their subject had not died. Suspecting that their EKG leads had been deliberately or accidentally disconnected, they checked their machine and continued to monitor its tracings. To their astonishment, it started to register electrical activity some seven days later, about a half hour before the yogi's scheduled disinterment. "After some initial disturbance," they wrote, "a normal configuration appeared. The [speeded heart rate] was again there but there was no other abnormality." When the pit was opened, the yogi was found sitting in the same posture he had started in, but in a stuporous condition. In accounting for his remarkable EKG record, the experimenters argued that a disconnection of the EKG lead would have produced obvious markings on the tracings in their laboratory, as they found when they tried to simulate ways in which the yogi might have tinkered with it.
Furthermore, the yogi was ignorant about such machines, and the pit was completely dark. If the machine had malfunctioned in some way they could not ascertain, it seemed an extraordinary coincidence that it started again just a half hour before their subject's scheduled release. Apparently, the yogi was operating with some kind of internal clock that did not depend upon the daily cycles of light and darkness, for the most likely cause of the straight line on his EKG tracing was a dramatic decrease in the activity of his heart. Kothari and his colleagues finally could not account for this remarkable cardiac record (Kothari et al., 1973).

Studies of Zen Buddhist Monks
In a study that attracted much attention among meditation and biofeedback researchers during the 1960s, Akira Kasamatsu and Tomio Hirai, physicians at the University of Tokyo, studied the EEG changes exhibited during meditation by Zen teachers and their disciples (forty-eight in all) from Soto and Rinzai centers in Japan. For experimental control, they studied the EEGs of twenty-two subjects with no experience at meditation. They made EEG recordings; recorded their subjects' pulse rates, respiration, and galvanic skin response; and tested their responses to sensory stimuli during meditation. The recordings on the Zen monks were made during a weeklong retreat, or sesshin, at a Zendo, except for a few tests at the experimenters' laboratory. The Zen teachers and their most experienced students exhibited a typical progression of brain-wave activity during meditation, which Kasamatsu and Hirai divided into four stages:
" Stage 1: Characterized by the appearance of alpha waves in spite of opened eyes.
" Stage 2: Characterized by an increase in amplitude of persistent alpha waves.
" Stage 3: Characterized by a decrease in alpha frequency.
" Stage 4: Characterized by the appearance of rhythmical theta trains (Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1966).
Not all four stages were evident in every Zen practitioner, nor in any of the controls, but a strong correlation existed between the number of stages a given student exhibited and that student's length of time in Zen training. This correlation was supported by a Zen teacher's evaluation of each student's proficiency. The teacher ranked the students in three levels, without seeing their EEG records, and his rankings correlated well with Kasamatsu and Hirai's assessment of their EEGs.
The Kasamatsu-Hirai study also revealed significant differences between four Zen masters and four control subjects in their response to repetitive click stimuli. Like the Zen masters, the controls exhibited a blocking of alpha when a click sound first occurred, but they gradually became habituated to such stimuli so that their brain-wave activity no longer responded when a click was made. The Zen masters, however, did not become habituated, but continued to exhibit blocking as long as the stimuli continued. This finding indicates that Zen practice promotes a serene, alert awareness that is consistently responsive to both external and internal stimuli (Kasamatsu et al., 1957; Hirai, 1960; and Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1963).
Difficulties of Research with Religious Adepts
Though people testified under oath before the Congregation of Rites that they had seen Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint Joseph of Cupertino defy gravity, no scientific studies have recorded instances of levitation. There are at least three possible reasons for this lack of evidence. First, of course, it might be that levitation has never happened. Second, the contemplative traditions might have lost their power to evoke the phenomenon. Third, levitation might only occur during rare and spontaneous ecstasies that cannot be programmed to meet the requirements of a scientific experiment. Superordinary lifting from the ground, if it in fact occurs, would require an improbable set of circumstances which a scientist would be lucky to witness. Levitation, like other holy powers, would have to be caught "in the wild." In a laboratory, with wires attached to his head and a thermometer up his rectum, a yogi or lama is unlikely to exhibit a capacity that is rare in any case. In studies of extraordinary functioning there is a trade-off between robust results and scientific precision. Uninhibited by recording machines and safety rules, for example, the Maharaja Runjeet Singh could bury Haridas for forty days. More recent studies of yogic confinement, however, have been constrained by procedural controls and humane considerations.
Furthermore, there is often a disjunction between a scientist's attitude toward exceptional powers and an adept's ideas about them. Elmer Green, for example, described differences he had with the healer Jack Schwartz in interpreting Schwartz's intuitive diagnosis of illness. According to Schwartz, the question was:
Are the auras one sees always radiatory patterns of energy from the human body . . . or are they automatic mental projections of one kind or another that are used psychologically to interpret a "knowing"? Sometimes when we "know" something in this way we tend to "see" it in the same way that we see a memory (Green and Green, 1977, p. 240).
Green was sympathetic to Schwartz, however, realizing that a scientist's constant doubt can inhibit or destroy a psychic's intuitions. This fundamental difference between scientists and psychics, Green wrote:
Need not cause problems if each takes time to understand the framework in which the other necessarily operates. If the psychic tries to pull apart every perception in order to find out if it is incorrect, so as to better determine the "truth," what is most likely to be pulled apart is the faculty of "seeing." The talent for perceiving might well fade away. On the other hand, if scientists stopped trying to find alternate explanations for the facts, they might get lost in a maze of [incoherent] ideas. For both scientists and mystics, however, the area of facts rather than interpretations is common ground. Excluding the opinions of fanatics, most of the arguments that we are aware of between the two camps have revolved around interpretations. Because psychics almost always have idiosyncratic factors in their frames of reference, scientists often do not understand them. And psychics do not understand what seems to them to be a destructive attitude on the part of scientists (Green and Green, 1977, p. 242).
Sympathy between scientists and adepts was evident in Swami Kuvalayananda's projects noted above, and in other experimenter-subject teams described in the preceding pages. Even the stern mutual challenge between Haridas and Maharaja Runjeet Singh exhibited an exemplary, if somewhat perverse, cooperation. Productive study of extraordinary functioning requires understanding between accomplished subjects and imaginative experimenters.
Contemporary Meditation Research
Meditation research increased dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the United States. This burgeoning effort was stimulated in part by the studies of yogis and Zen masters noted in the previous section, and in part by the publication of landmark studies by Herbert Benson and Keith Wallace in Science, the American Journal of Physiology, and Scientific American between 1970 and 1972 (Wallace, 1970; Wallace et al., 1971b; Wallace and Benson, 1972). The Transcendental Meditation Society supported much of this work, though its enthusiastic claims and advertising efforts caused doubts among some researchers about the highly favorable outcomes in studies it sponsored (Shapiro, 1982). These doubts led to further research, which has either contradicted, tempered, or confirmed the TM-sponsored claims. Since the early 1970s, more than a thousand studies of meditation have been reported in English-language journals, books, and graduate theses. The range of outcomes included in this research has grown considerably since the studies of yogis and Zen masters by Bagchi, Wenger, Kasamatsu, and Hirai. Cardiovascular, cortical, hormonal, and metabolic changes, several behavioral effects, and alterations of consciousness resulting from meditation have been explored in recent years. The medical instrumentation, psychological tests, and methods of analysis used in such experiments have been improved, and the range of subject populations has been enlarged to include different kinds of subject groups. This growth in sophistication of method is gradually improving our scientific understanding of meditation in ways that complement the insights contained in the traditional contemplative literature. However, the overall picture of results on the subject of meditation produced by modern research remains uneven. Some effects have appeared consistently, but others have not.
The apparent inconsistencies defining the effects of meditation can be accounted for in various ways. Some physiological processes, perhaps, are unaffected by meditation, no matter how proficient or experienced the meditator might be; or perhaps they are affected to an insignificant degree. For some changes, such as amino acid concentrations in the blood, there has not been enough research to establish a consistent picture, partly because there has not been as much interest in these variables as in the effect of meditation on blood pressure, heart rate, and other indices that have an obvious bearing on health. Taking blood samples during meditation, moreover, is harder to accomplish than recording blood pressure or skin responses.
Individual differences also present a special problem for understanding the results of meditation studies, because subject populations have included people of both sexes, all ages, various levels of education, and different kinds of social background. Many subjects have been college students with no previous experience at meditating; others have been recent converts to religious groups; but only a few have been highly skilled in spiritual practice. The incentives to concentrate during experimental sessions have also varied. Some subjects have wanted success for religious or other reasons, while others seem not to have been well motivated. And differences between meditation styles also complicate the results of such research. Though most studies have used some type of quiet concentration, some have used active methods such as rapid breathing. Julian Davidson, Roland Fischer, and others have distinguished between two classes of meditation, those that relax and those that excite, associating their effects with the trophotropic and ergotropic conditions of the central nervous system modeled by Gellhorn and Kiely (Davidson, 1976; Fischer, 1971, 1976; Gellhorn and Kiely, 1972).
The results of scientific research on the subject of meditation are accumulating now, forming a publicly accessible body of empirical data that can serve generations to come. Unfortunately, however, these data are derived mainly from beginning practitioners of meditation, and taken as a whole do not reflect the richness of experience described in traditional contemplative teachings. They are also limited by the conventional scientific insistence that results be repeatable. Certain important experiences occur only rarely in meditation, and a science that disregards them loses important empirical results. For these reasons, contemporary research does not illumine the full range of experience described in the contemplative scriptures and the oral traditions from which they come. Modern studies give us only a first picture of the foothills, with a few glimpses of the peaks. Still, what they give us corresponds in several ways with traditional accounts.

Chapter 2:
Physiological Effects
by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan

[While meditation can be considered as a cognitive strategy by which consciousness gains control over normally non-conscious states of awareness, including involuntary bodily processes, the physiology of meditation has received more attention than any other subject from Western scientists quite out of proportion to all other dimensions of meditative experience.
Historically, this is largely because, for three hundred years, the dualism of Descartes has required an absolute separation of mind and body, while its handmaiden and more recent dictum of research, scientific positivism, asserts mechanistically that what is immediately physical and material constitutes all there is to reality. Hence, the most visible and palpable form of a phenonenon is the only proper object of scientific scrutiny.
Modern researchers, by virtue of the fact that they are engaged in applying the methods of reductionistic science, even as they apply such methods to seemingly disreputable topics, cannot avoid these constraints. Thus the physiology of meditation has been the starting point and remains at the center of most research efforts. Ed.]
The Cardiovascular System
Heart Rate
Many contemporary studies have indicated that the heart rate usually slows in quiet meditation and quickens during active disciplines or moments of ecstasy, as we would expect from contemplative writings that describe the calming effect of silent meditation [31] and the stimulation of exercises such as Tantric visualization or devotional chanting. [32]
Most studies of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen Buddhist sitting, Herbert Benson's "relaxation response," and other calming forms of meditation indicate that meditating subjects generally experience a lowering of the heart rate. The results of such studies vary to some degree, since they depend on different kinds of subject groups and various experimental procedures, with some showing an average decline of seven beats or more per minute among their subjects and some showing two or three beats per minute among some of their subjects. Bagga and Gandhi (1983) found an average decline as high as fifteen beats per minute among some of their subjects. Some studies indicate that meditation lowers the heart rate more than biofeedback, progressive relaxation, other therapies, or simple sitting, while other studies indicate that these various activities have an equivalent effect on the heart rate. Once again, such differences in outcome can be accounted for by differences among subjects and experimental designs.
A decline in heart rate is more pronounced among experienced meditators, according to a few studies, though here too the evidence is not unanimous. The only generalization we can make safely now is that some subject groups demonstrate an average lowering of heart rate during meditation, and that some experienced individuals may achieve a permanent lowering of the heart rate with continued practice.
In studies involving active methods such as rapid breathing, though, the heart rate has risen. Such studies suggest that patterns of physiological activity are specific to particular practices.
Julian Davidson (1976), Roland Fischer (1971, 1976), and other researchers have distinguished excitatory from relaxing forms of meditation, associating their effects with the ergotropic and trophotropic conditions of the central nervous system modeled by Gelhorn and Keily (1972). Fischer (1971) has said that the extreme trophotropic state of samadhi sometimes triggers an extreme ergotropic reaction, which may be ecstatic, so that the physiological effects of contemplative activity show wide variability.
The following studies show a decrease in heart rate during meditation. Bono (1984) found that the reduction of heart rate during TM was greater than the reduction resulting from sitting quietly with eyes closed. Delmonte (1984f) found that heart rates were slightly lower during meditation than rest for fifty-two subjects. Holmes et al. (1983), however, found that while meditators had lower heart rates while practicing TM, they did not experience lower arousal than control subjects who were simply resting. See follow-up discussion, particularly Dillbeck and Orme-Johnson (1987), Morrell (1986), and Holmes (1984).
Bagga and Gandhi (1983) compared groups of six TM practitioners and six Shavasana practitioners (relaxing while lying on one's back) with six controls, and found significantly reduced heart rates for both experimental groups versus the control group. Cummings (1984) observed reduced heart rates for those practicing a combination of meditation and exercise. Throll (1982) found that a Transcendental Meditation group displayed a more significant decrease in heart rate than a group using Jacobson's progressive relaxation.
Pollard and Ashton (1982) divided sixty subjects into six groups in a comparison of heart rate decrease obtained by visual feedback, auditory feedback, combined visual and auditory feedback, instructions to decrease heart rate without biofeedback, sitting quietly, and abbreviated relaxation training. A comparison group of meditators with a minimum of six years of experience was also studied. The results indicated that there was no advantage of a heart rate decrease task for subjects receiving visual, auditory, or combined biofeedback, though all groups showed evidence of a decline in heart rate over the testing session. The meditation group showed the greatest overall decline, with a decrease in heart rate of approximately seven beats per minute, versus three beats per minute for the groups using biofeedback techniques.
Cuthbert et al. (1981) had results demonstrating clear superiority for meditators using Benson's relaxation response versus heart rate biofeedback, especially when the subject experimenter relationship was supportive. Lang et al. (1979) placed the heart rate decrease for advanced TM meditators with more than four years of practice at 9%. Bauhofer (1978) found that the heart rates of experienced TM meditators were lowered by TM more than those of less experienced TM meditators. Corey (1977) and Routt (1977) reported that Transcendental Meditation appeared to decrease heart rate under nonstress conditions. Glueck and Stroebel (1975), Wallace and Benson (1972), Wallace et al. (1971c), and Wallace (1971) found that the heart rate decreased from three to five beats per minute during Transcendental Meditation. Reports of reduced heart rates during meditation extend back to Paul (1969), Karambelkar et al. (1968), Anand and Chhina (1961), Wenger and Bagchi (1961), Bagchi and Wenger (1957), and Das and Gastaut (1955).
Kothari et al. (1973) reported the case of a yogi who was confined to a small underground pit for eight days and continuously monitored with an EKG. From the second day until the eighth, EKG activity was below a recordable level, indicating that the yogi had either stopped his heart or greatly decreased its electrical activity. The authors believe that the yogi could not have tampered with the EKG leads without creating an obvious electrical disturbance.
Some studies indicate that heart rates increase under certain circumstances, such as deeply absorbed trance (samadhi) [see Lehrer et al. (1980), Parulkar et al. (1974), Wenger and Bagchi (1961), and Das and Gastaut (1955)]. Other research shows no consistent changes in heart rate with the practice of Ananda Marga Yoga or progressive relaxation [see Gash and Karliner (1978), Elson et al. (1977), Travis et al. (1976), Wenger et al. (1961), and Bagchi and Wenger (1957)].
We could not find accounts in the traditional literature describing the number of heartbeats one should expect during meditation, with which we could compare the numbers in modern studies. Contemplative masters did not share the scientific passion for quantitative analysis and generally appreciated the differences in physiology and temperament among their followers. They also did not have the means to measure bodily changes precisely, and generally wouldn't have used them if they had.
Redistribution of Blood Flow
Blood flow is directly or indirectly manipulated for mental clarity, health, increased energy, or the promotion of religious emotion through hatha yoga postures, breathing exercises, prostrations, tai chi movements, dervish dancing, and other activities associated with the contemplative traditions. Traditional teachers could not measure blood flow with scientific exactness, of course, but some of them could skillfully guide their students' practice through empathy, intuition, and kinesthetic feel, and in doing so they sometimes looked for bodily signs related to blood circulation, such as flushing of the face and chest and changes in skin tone and complexion. [33] The picture of meditation's effect on blood flow provided by modern studies is quite preliminary, though. Most of it comes from TM-sponsored research.
Delmonte (1984f) tested fifty-two subjects and found that meditators showed a significantly greater increase in digital blood volume during meditation than rest. Jevning, Wilson, and O'Halloran (1982) studied muscle and skin blood flow and metabolism during states of decreased activation in TM. They concluded that acute decline of forearm oxygen consumption has been observed during an acute, wakeful behaviorally induced rest/relaxation state. This change of tissue respiration was not associated with variation of rate of forelimb lactate generation. Since forearm blood flow did not change significantly during this behavior, the decline of oxygen consumption by forearm was due almost solely to decreased rate of oxygen extraction. Decreased muscle metabolism was a likely contributor to these observations. The occurrence of sleep was not related to the metabolic change. The lack of coupling between the metabolic and blood flow changes during this state of decreased activation suggests limitation of the hypothesis of obligatory coupling between systemic and/or regional cardiovascular and metabolic function.
Earlier, Jevning and Wilson (1978) reported that TM increased cardiac output among twenty-seven subjects by an average of 16% (ml/min measured by dye dilution methods), decreased hepatic blood flow by an average of 34% (ml/min measured by clearance methods), and decreased renal blood flow by an average of 29% (ml/min measured by clearance methods), suggesting an increase of approximately 44% in the nonrenal, nonhepatic component of blood flow (versus an increase of approximately 12% for an eyes-closed rest-relaxation control group). Increased cerebral or skin blood flow may account for part of this redistribution.
Jevning et al. (1976) found an average 15% increase in cardiac output, an average 20% decline in liver blood flow, and an average 20% decrease in renal blood flow among a group of six meditators practicing TM. A control group of six showed no change in cardiac output and liver blood flow, and a significant decline in renal blood flow. The authors believe that decreased skin and muscle blood flow was suggested by other, indirect data, and that since cardiac output increases and all measured organ blood flows decrease, it is possible that cerebral perfusion increases markedly during TM. Jevning et al.'s findings were a surprise because earlier studies had indicated a decrease in cardiac output of 25% during TM (versus a decrease of about 20% in deep stage-four sleep) [see Wallace (1970)].
Wallace et al. (1971a) speculated that the fall in blood lactate during meditation might be due to increased skeletal muscle blood flow with consequent increased aerobic metabolism. These researchers referred to Riechert (1976), who recorded forearm blood flow increases of 30% with unchanged finger blood flow (using a plethysmograph). Jevning and Wilson (1978) found that frontal cerebral blood flow increased an average of 65% during TM for ten teachers of the technique (five to eight years of regular practice), and remained elevated afterwards, with brief increases up to 100-200% (measured by quadripolar rheoencephalography). Levander et al. (1972) measured forearm blood flow (using a water plethysmograph) in five subjects 180 times and reported that the pretest period mean blood flow of 1.41 ml/100ml tissue volume/min increased to 1.86 ml/100ml tissue volume/min during TM, and returned to pretest values during post-testing. Wallace and Benson (1972) found an increase in forearm blood flow of 32% for their TM subjects.
Blood Pressure and Hypertension
There is strong evidence that meditation helps lower blood pressure in people who are normal or moderately hypertensive. This finding has been replicated by more than nineteen studies, some of which have shown systolic reductions among their subjects of 25 mmHg or more. In some studies a combination of meditation with biofeedback or other relaxation techniques proved to be more effective than meditation alone for some subjects. Several studies, however, have shown that relief from high blood pressure diminishes or disappears entirely if meditation is discontinued, and few people with acute hypertension have experienced lower blood pressure in experiments of this kind.
At the time of this writing, speculation regarding the mechanisms mediating meditation's beneficial effects on high blood pressure appears to be inconclusive. Meditation often helps relax the large muscle groups pressing on the circulatory system in various parts of the body. It might also help relax the small muscles that control the blood vessels themselves; when that happens, the resulting elasticity of blood vessel walls would help reduce the pressure inside them. Other mechanisms may be involved, which further research will reveal. The following studies explored meditation's effect on blood pressure and hypertension:
Cort (1989) It was hypothesized that the large the variability of results in different studies on the effect of meditation on hypertension may be due to differences in compliance to the meditation regimens. This study of fifty-one black adults supports the claim that greater compliance to a meditation program leads to greater decreases in blood pressure.
Delmonte (1984f) Forty nonmeditators and twelve experienced Transcendental Meditators were randomly assigned to four experimental cells devised to control for order and expectation effects. All fifty-two (female) subjects were continuously monitored in seven physiological measures during both meditation and rest. Each subject was her own control in an experiment comparing meditation to rest. Analysis of variance on change scores calculated from both initial and running (intertrial) baselines revealed small but significant condition effects for all variables except diastolic BP. With respect to systolic BP, the nonmeditators showed a significantly larger drop from initial baseline during meditation than during rest. With respect to running baseline, the meditators demonstrated a significantly smaller increase in systolic blood pressure with the complete trial data and a greater decrease with the end-of-trial data during meditation than during rest.
Wallace et al. (1983b) This study measured systolic blood pressure using a standard mercury sphygmomanometer on 112 transcendental meditators. The subjects had a mean systolic blood pressure 13.7 to 24.5 less than the population mean. The analysis also showed that meditators with more than five years of experience had a mean systolic blood pressure 7.5 lower than meditators with less than five years of experience.
Bagga and Gandhi (1983) The authors studied a group of eighteen people who were equally divided into a TM, Shavasana (relaxing while lying on one's back), or control group. After twelve weeks of practicing, the TM and Shavasana groups showed significant declines in systolic blood pressure as high as 10 mmHg, whereas the control group demonstrated no decline.
Hafner (1982) Twenty-one hypertension patients who had been randomly assigned to eight one-hour sessions of either meditation training, meditation plus biofeedback-aided relaxation, or a nontreatment control group were studied. Statistically significant falls in systolic and diastolic blood pressure occurred after both training programs, although overall reductions in blood pressure were not significantly greater in either program than in the control group. Meditation plus biofeedback-aided relaxation produced falls in diastolic blood pressure earlier in the training program than did meditation alone. All patients practiced meditation regularly between training sessions, but the amount of practice did not correlate with the amount of blood pressure reduction after training.<