PureInsight | November 28, 2005
[PureInsight.org] When it comes to meditation, people tend to associate it with relaxation or inner peace. According to a New Scientist magazine's article entitled "Meditation Builds Up the Brain" on November 5, 2005, doing meditation has more benefits. It will actually improve one's health and even brain structure.
According to the report, some people who regularly meditate claim that they feel more energetic or require less sleep. Scientists from Kentucky University did a study to validate such claims. They had a way to check whether one is fully awake and examine one's mental acuity. Ten volunteers participated the study. "They were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions." [1]
It is a known fact that 40 minutes or one hour of sleep will make a person feel more energetic. However, it takes some time for a person to become fully awake from sleep.
What astonished the scientists is that meditation is the only method that leads to immediate improvement of performance. None of the test subjects has tried meditation before.
According to the researchers, every tested subject benefited from doing meditation although the researchers still have no idea why meditation yields such an improvement.
What is more interesting is that New Scientist magazine published another article titled "If Meditation is Good, God Makes It Better" on September 2, 2005. It was discovered in a study that, while meditation is relaxing, practicing spiritual meditation is more relaxing.
According to the report, the researchers divided college students who volunteered for the study into three groups. The first group concentrated on a phrase such as "God is love" or "God is peace." The second group concentrated on a phrase such as "I am happy" or "I am joyful." The third group was told to simply relax. It turned out that the subjects in the spiritual meditation group experienced superior improvements in their mental and physical health than the other two groups. Measures of their psychological pressure and even physical pain were reduced.
This trying and noisy secular world exhausts our mind and body. If only we could clear a pure land in our mind through spiritual meditation, we might be able to find a new world that transcends the secular one.
There is a Chinese idiom: "Instead of standing next to a pond and hoping for fish, one had better get a fishing net and go fishing." Why don't you try spiritual meditation such as is part of Falun Gong?
Bibliography:
[1] NewScientist: "Meditation builds up the brain" http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn8317.html
[2] NewScientist: "If meditation is good, God makes it better"
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725154.300
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2005/11/21/34675.html
