Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate

A new study shows that meditation opens the gateway to compassion

(Scientific American)

By David Biello

Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one’s family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy.

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

Lutz and his colleagues, including neuroscientist Richard Davidson, director of the university’s Waisman Center for Brain Imaging where the study was conducted, took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators as well as 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests. During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and negative connotations.

When engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another’s emotional state.)

And when these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another’s emotion…

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Here is some absolutely ridiculous news from England! What will we humans think of next? I know, how about we impose a rating system on dreams?

Uncertain future for spiritualists

By Grant Woodward

FOR centuries spiritualists have asked that spine-tingling question, ‘Is there anybody there?’.

But soon they could be enquiring, ‘Is there anybody there… who is vulnerable, a sceptic, or likely to sue?’.

New consumer laws mean psychics will have to add disclaimers before they attempt to make contact with ‘the other side’.

Plans to repeal the Fraudulent Mediums Act next month and replace it with the new Consumer Protection Regulations have got the industry in a bit of a tizz.

Promises to raise the dead, secure good fortune or heal through the laying of hands are all at risk of legal action from unhappy punters.

Mediums say they will now be forced to add riders before they begin communicating with the spirit world.

One way round the new legislation could be to issue a disclaimer proclaiming it to be ‘a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed’…

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The battle continues: Recent news on China/Tibet…

A Day After Offer to Meet, China Assails Dalai Lama

By Jill Drew

Washington Post Foreign Service

BEIJING, April 26 — Less than 24 hours after China offered to meet with an envoy of the Dalai Lama, state-controlled news media on Saturday kept up their campaign of denunciations of the Tibetan spiritual leader.

“The behavior of the Dalai clique has seriously violated fundamental teaching and commandments of Buddhism, undermined the normal order of Tibetan Buddhism and ruined its reputation,” the Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper reported.

China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, published an interview with Lahlu Tsewang Dorje, a Tibetan who fought on the Dalai Lama’s side in a failed 1959 uprising, according to the paper, and later became a top political adviser to the Chinese Tibetan authorities. “I think the Dalai clique is our enemy and we should fight until the end,” he was quoted as saying.

The tone of the articles raised questions about China’s seriousness in preparing for negotiations with the Dalai Lama over restoring stability to Tibet, which has essentially been under government lockdown since deadly rioting in Lhasa, its capital, on March 14.

Rather than stepping back from its hammering of the “Dalai clique” for instigating the violence in an attempt to split the country and sabotage this summer’s Olympic Games, China continued to hit hard. “The Lhasa March 14 incident is another ugly performance meticulously plotted by the Dalai clique to seek Tibet independence,” said the Tibet Daily, another Communist Party newspaper.

The Chinese government has been under intense international pressure to begin talks with the Dalai Lama, who is honored in the West as a man of peace and who denies advocating violence or trying to divide the country or jeopardize the Beijing Games. Global leaders are facing growing calls to boycott the Games’ opening ceremony on Aug. 8 if Beijing refuses…

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