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While Christian leaders in the
US fight against the
teaching of evolution in our schools, the leader of the Tibetan
Buddhist community embraces modern science.
Winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace
Prize, the Dalai Lama
has joined forces with MIT and the Mind and Life Institute to study the
effects of Buddhist meditation on human cognition, mental imagery and
emotion.
"(T)he Dalai Lama has said that
the nature of Buddhism
is open to exploration and change. And should the collaboration with
science disprove the benefits of meditation, he has said, he would
always be willing to rethink thousands of years of Buddhist tradition.
"If science proves facts that conflict with
Buddhist understanding,
Buddhism must change accordingly. We should always adopt a view that
accords with the facts," he wrote recently in the forward to a book
about the most recent scientific collaborations." (link to story)
Now results of the studies are coming out,
and it's clear that a
habit of meditation effects one's mental abilities positivitely. In
fact, " long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony
during mental practice" (whatever that means!)
The Dalai Lama is clearly secure enough in
his spirituality that he
needn't feel threatened by advances in scientific understanding. Would
that more people did likewise.
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