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and i would like to then invite you to ask all your questions if you have questions during the talk you are more than invited to put them into the little chat which you can find down in the
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lower bar and we'll come to them afterwards um one practicality for the duration of the talk although it's lovely to see all the faces from all across europe i would
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like to ask you to turn off the video for the duration of the talk only so that we can make sure we have all the bandwidth needed for the talk and afterwards we are kind of daring to go
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one step further turning on all the videos as far as you want to so father francis tease if you would also like to already start your video so we can see you we
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are very glad very grateful to have you with us tonight for our next emily friends webinar i will not even try to present your full
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bio to the extent that you could probably do for for a long time but i think it is pretty remarkable that born in in new york
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being a new york native here now based in italy having earned a master of divinity degree at harvard university a doctorate from columbia university and union theological seminary with a
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special specialization in buddhist studies today your talk as the title indicates is on rainbow buddy and resurrection and you already indicated in the small
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description of the talk that some authors and you put it nicely here have proposed that artificial intelligence may offer a way forward in human evolution but that there are others who raise objections to
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this and those of us who were lucky enough to also participate in our european summer research research institute could already get some really interesting insightful perspectives from
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you on that and maybe some of that will come up now and i thought it was interesting that in one of your emails to me in the exchange we had beforehand
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you wrote that you're reworking materials bringing about a balance among the study of contemplative practices involved in the rainbow body entertainment the anthropological aspects and the
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neuroscience possibilities so if that's not enough i think we are all more than curious to hear your insights on that and i want to hand it over to you the stage the floor is yours thank you so
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much for being here with us today you need to unmute yourself well your wonderful presence also during the seminar the summer seminar that was an amazing tour de force uh
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i'm going to plunge right in because i know our time is limited this afternoon i'd like to introduce our mind and life friends to the work i've been doing on the rainbow body that emerges
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in the tibetan schools that practice the system known as zogchen or the great perfection those who are familiar with some of the websites and youtube channels dedicated
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to tibetan buddhism are probably already aware of the claim that some masters of meditation at the time of death manifest various signs of accomplishment one of these called
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involves a prolonged state of meditation warmth around the heart and in corruption of the body for as long as three weeks in fact i just received today a preliminary study on took down
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from antoine lutz who's another one of our mind and life scientists several instances of this particular attainment have been cited in recent reports on the web
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the attainment known as the rainbow body is even more astonishing since it involves the shrinkage and disappearance of the material body over the course of about a week after death in some cases a much
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diminished body remains for veneration as a relic of the deceased master in other cases hair and nails remain these two are kept as relics in the case of the great meditation
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master kenpo who passed away in the summer of 1998 nothing at all remained a week after the moment of his death the news of this dramatic event reached
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my spiritual teacher the benedictine monk brother david steinurast a longtime mind and life advisor in 1999 knowing of my interest in tibetan
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studies he entrusted me with a project to interview the eyewitnesses of kenpo achoo's death i began immediately to plan an expedition to eastern tibet the present
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people's republic of china province of sichuan which was accomplished in the summer of 2000 exactly two years after the death of the kenpo
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the eyewitnesses reported that even before the moment of death there were rainbows of unusual dimensions above the hermitage where the kenpo lived after the last breath
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mingled with the mantra [Music] the body was covered with the yellow monastic robe and laid out on the meditation bed where the kenpo spent most of his day in
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meditation disciples observed that the body diminished in size under the cloth in the course of the following week there were no signs of decay at all
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after the eighth day the robe was removed and there was absolutely no trace of the deceased's body moreover during the week rainbows appeared in the sky celestial music was
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heard perfumes surrounded the hermitage while disciples performed the customary funerary rites a large crowd cloud of intense light was seen over the hermitage from over 100
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kilometers away some disciples such as one in retreat at a distance from the hermitage received paranormal visitations from their deceased teacher
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this research followed up by additional interviews with eyewitnesses dwelling at mindrolling monastery in northern india in 2001 should support the claim that
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extraordinary phenomena can and to accompany the death of some dzogchen practitioners in my book there are a number of other instances that are cited now one of the monks interviewed lama
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akum of yatche gompa who at the time was living 200 kilometers west of the kenpo's hermitage claimed that he too would manifest the rainbow body at the time of his own death
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this indeed took place in 2008 and he did leave behind a much reduced body that was enshrined in a stupa this is about 20 centimeters uh
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long this this relic this gompa has unfortunately since been destroyed by the government but i have reason to believe that the relic has been rescued a photo of this master taken in the dark
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while he was still alive sometime before the year 2000 shows his body haloed by rays of light this photo is visible on the rainbow body website that is circulated in the
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ningmapa order of tibetan buddhism the evidence presented by these photos and others available in various sources plus the interviews give us reason
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to hypothesize that the dzogchen contemplative system brings about extraordinary results that merit further research now to summarize chen in a paragraph or
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two is of course impossible but i'll try to give a brief idea of what are the basic ideas here the basic view of great perfection is that everything is pure from the primordial beginning this is
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the famous expression it's okay pure from the beginning and that every moment is an emanation of an a temporal origin or source
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the conjunct the king that creates everything right this primordial a temporal source this means that the perceptions of literally every moment of time give a
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trained contemplative direct access to the utterly free and pure origin of all perceived phenomena how is such a contemplative to be trained
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i'm now going to give an example from the bunpo atri system which has 15 steps of training in order to orient us a little bit there are many systems of training but this one is a pretty good
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summary first of all the first level of training is to bring the immature unripe mind to maturity all right squindy so that if somebody comes into
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a process of following a master the first part is this bringing of the immature confused mind to a degree of contemplative maturity and focus the second
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bringing the mature mind to liberation right and the third is bringing the liberated mind to perfection reaching its objective in which awareness expresses itself
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to itself in the form of lively consciousness or salu one and two the maturing of the mind constitutes the check chunk or cutting
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through phase of training in which the entire body-mind complex is purified and made sensitive to the more subtle energies that activate our awareness as conscious beings
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number three is itself a prelude to the further development of consciousness in the leap over practices turgal by means of such practices as solar and lunar
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gazing prolonged retreat in a completely dark environment thus we have a very highly developed system designed to overcome the limitations in ordinary human perception
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enabling the yoga to look directly into the very essence of the biochemical processes of life in the cells of the body by looking directly at what we are the yogin directly experiences the
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connection between instantaneous processes and their metaphysical origin over time perhaps as long as 60 years we were told the yogan develops paranormal abilities
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such as clairvoyant clairvoyance telepathy distance healing sympathetic communication with animals by location and related cities that are well known to yoga in
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general consciousness penetrates the processes that support embodied life bringing about direct access to their essence and meaning thus becoming the eyes
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of a universal cognitive process which becomes conscious in the unbounded awareness rigpa of the yogan the attainment of the rainbow body is a manifestation of the completion of this
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long journey of transformation now let's have a look together at some of these processes as illustrated by the famous lukang wall paintings that were
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probably executed in lhasa in a small temple behind the potala palace during the 1680s they are attested uh by the jesuit priest ipolito desideri who
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visited them in the 1700s in spite of water damage and erroneous methods of preservation they still exist and can be seen let's see if we can do this on our share
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screens okay great we can see the image how can i go up yeah do this very quickly this is a picture of uh
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the ken kokenpo which he passed away in his early 80s a remarkable figure who combines ningma and gerupa teachings
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here's an example of the letter ah all right above the head of the yogan from the lukon paintings showing how one is to visualize that letter in a white
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field surrounded by rainbow light here you can see the yolk and doing solar gazing this is usually done at sunrise or sunset and it is part of the process of moving
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beyond the trek road into the togal set of trainings here we have an example of a yurt that has been set up as a dark retreat center alright so a person could go into
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this yurt and practice the advanced meditation uh visualizations and the spontaneous visions of togal in this kind of an environment here we're beginning to see some of the
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images that may arise spontaneously in dark retreat here we have a kind of lattice work that suggests perhaps something with crystal formation
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here we have a string of spheres of different colors all right that would be indicative perhaps of some kind of contact i mean i'm just speculating now
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this is pure hypothesis but my sense is that these are very much related to what we see inside the cells in other words cellular biochemistry
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this was also suggested by some of the yogans that i interviewed in south india who meditate in the system devised by the great master of the 19th century ramalinga
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here we have another example of the fluid presence of the spheres on a string here we have serpent-like forms again indicating energy patterns
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here we begin to see spontaneous visualizations in the sphere of rainbow light with actual objects manifesting and you also see a string of
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beads down to the lower right and here we begin to see uh the various buddha families again in the field of white surrounded by rainbow light
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and here we begin to see a dissolution process occurring at the very nucleus of the field of white surrounded by rainbow light okay so let's go back from there
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a great deal more could be said of course about those just to interrupt you could still uh stop your screen share so we could see yes all of you excellent very good
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is the rainbow body therefore to be considered the fruition of a technique or is it a miracle matthew kapstein is willing to call it a miracle he was writing about
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light in tibetan buddhism and he says this the problem that we confront here of course is that unlike many types of religious experience such as visions and mystical experiences that can be interpreted as events
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occurring within the subject's consciousness alone the rainbow body purports to describe a physical event it belongs to the class of miracles who
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are we to say that it never occurs what must surely complement is another type of story altogether a story about the religious and not the physical nature of light
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here let me emphasize only that for the tibetan buddhist tradition generally intensive visions and experiences of light are regularly associated with some types of yogic and contemplative practice and
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may sometimes be induced by contact with persons places and objects thought to be imbued with great spiritual power it is i think in the convergence of all the factors i have been reviewing that
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tibetan belief in its own terms becomes plausible now that is an argument in favor of miracle uh we could of course be more precise in defining a miracle uh miracle is an
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unusual startling or extraordinary event that is in principle perceivable by any interested and fair-minded observer and that's exactly what uh dr capstein is saying but it is also an event that finds no
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reasonable explanation in human abilities or in other forces that operate in our world of time and space and this does seem to be different from what we're seeing with rainbow body
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and three it is an event that is the result of a special quote act of god doing what no human power can do could it be that the dissolution of the body observed in the rainbow body
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attainment is a technique and not a miracle if so it is an extreme case of the exploitation of what is possible to the human body-mind complex
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this possibility might explain some of the salient differences between the resurrection and the rainbow body which we have explored in the book rainbow body and resurrection
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now from an anthropological perspective the rainbow body is an important response to the dislocation that death precipitates in a community or family
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is considerable value in investing in a high quality death a miraculous death such as that of a rainbow body yogan approaches the highest level of anthropological value as does the
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resurrection in christian theology in our anthropological survey from 2017 we observed the rainbow body research project engaging claims of spiritual
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attainment and personal transformation enables us to examine critically many key features of anthropological research our engagement with communities of discourse exposed aspects of the
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artificial emic etic divide that is the insider outsider perspective allowing the anthropological study of religion to propose methods in religious studies
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as a whole the study of paranormal phenomena cannot be isolated from social contextualization in this instance a study of death and dying contextualized in a traditional
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community like that of kenpo acha required unique features of engagement for the researcher who wishes to observe the social dynamics surrounding the death of a person of high repute
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the challenge here is to develop a methodology of research that can meaningfully be employed teetering on that balance between scientific objectivity the testing of hypotheses
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and the insider perspective of contemplative practitioners it should be apparent that a similar fine line is a constant challenge for those engaged in the scientific study of
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all kinds of meditation practices and their effects on the human body mind complex in further research i've attempted to survey the literature on the scientific study of meditation
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in order to open up a conversation about how such research might contribute to an understanding of the dissolution phenomenon particularly if it indeed turns out to be a technique and not exactly a miracle
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in my book on the rainbow body focusing on the case of kenpo acha it was possible to present research based on eyewitness accounts of postmortem bodily dissolution of a master of meditation
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this research and other credible accounts indicate that there is now evidence anthropological evidence to justify further research on this phenomenon
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it's very difficult however for science as we know it to explain coherently how meditating under conditions of sensory deprivation on spheres of light sounds and intensified
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mental focus might have an effect on cellular biochemistry in a paper i wrote in 2019 i proposed some directions for scientific research
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that might be constructive on the basis of the neuroscientific research surveyed that's already present in other words in the literature how might it be possible to formulate a
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hypothesis for solving the plausibility problem of the rainbow body can some forms of meditation bring about the paranormal phenomenon of bodily dissolution that is biochemical dissolution within
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the spectrum of energies available on the cellular level a short time after death some of the scientific avenues for research that have opened up in recent decades include telemetric research
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on basic forms of buddhist meditation we know this so well in our mind and life research however other fruitful perspectives are emerging in the field of biophotons for example
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in studies of light phenomena among meditators in discoveries related to synesthesia and in new technologies for analyzing cell biochemistry and genetics
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moreover there is now eeg and mri research on more complex forms of meditation corresponding closely to the anthropological context that we've been talking about
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in line with this research that we've surveyed we have proposed an anthropologically consistent method of meditation that enhances attention and intensifies various states of contemplative
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absorption since some forms of meditation entail discursive reflection on luminous visualizations it seemed helpful to employ the phenomena of synesthesia in
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designing these experiments now synesthesia is sometimes considered to be a kind of a borderline mental problem but even as a child i noticed that
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numbers always seem to be accompanied by a halo of a certain color and it never changed and i was always astonished about that over the years until i saw some interesting paintings that indicated that some
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contemporary artists had also had similar experiences in any case a person perceives objects through their senses in an unusual way such as color
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perceived as sound or numbers associated with colors or perceiving colors through contact with the skin in order to connect the mind to the cells consciously we offer three forms of discursive
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synesthesia to develop skills in attention enhancement and coherent luminosity the first one involves visualizing numbers encircled
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or haloed by certain colors the second involves imagining polygons of certain colors moving through space and the third associating colors with
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sounds as is done with sanskrit seed syllables in a number of different methods of meditation all of these practices are known and developed even
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in hatha yoga certainly in tibetan forms of meditation visualization adriana while this is well known the practices described are designed to enhance mental concentration develop
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mental flexibility and expand the capacity to visualize objects in the field of perception as we saw in the paintings of the lucon thus expand the capacity of the
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meditator to visualize objects and to move the observer into a deep state of contemplative absorption without specifically religious prompts this method may enable us to test
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various hypotheses about the nature of consciousness whether the working model is brain-based or not in the meditation practice proposed a certain set of correlations between
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numbers and colors is employed this has been done on the basis of the experience of synesthesia which has the advantage of entailing the kind of brilliant luminous colors associated
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with the prismatic separation of the colors of the visual spectrum the practice described has been tested in small groups during retreats with promising qualitative results
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it should be possible now to set up an experiment in which a group of experienced meditators work with a discursive meditation sequence while being tested telemetrically
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to analyze the ways in which this meditation sequence may have a biological effect the researchers will eventually need to measure biophotons and their relative coherence eeg and mri will also provide valuable
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data on changes in blood flow and brain waves a perceptual deprivation chamber fitted with body scanning eeg equipment could be used for testing energy fluctuations
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throughout the bodies of these meditators this has already been tried by some researchers in israel and central italy in this way the experiment occupies the interface between contemplation and
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science each carefully held in equilibrium so that one does not eclipse the other the actual boundary between the two does not collapse now in scientific literature
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contemplative is a word that refers to those activities that intensify mental attention possibly in enabling energy transformations on the cellular level by
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means of discursive meditation however the state or mood that may be called contemplative is not automatically generated by discursive mental exercises
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a certain innate aptitude seems required experimental subjects therefore should be energy tested for individual aptitude we also need to be respectful of the
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fact that what can be observed in the laboratory even under the best of conditions should be classified as intentional contemplative practice and not contemplation at the highest level
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as known to the great contemplative traditions how am i doing with time dude yeah you're still working because i got a humor a few more minutes to go
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we should be able to do it there's now enough evidence to suggest that some forms of meditation can alter mental function and impact bioplasticity and neuroplasticity in particular
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some forms of meditation also induce subjectively reported light phenomena in some contemplative traditions advanced meditators experience death and the postmortem state in unusual ways
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including persistent warmth at the heart visible light emanation extreme reduction of body size ambient paranormal phenomena working with a significant number of advanced meditators who have a cultural
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background favorable to scientific research it may be possible to design and carry out experiments to test enhancement regime regimens on biophoton
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emanation eeg mri and biochemical assays of bioplasticity in the hope of disclosing significant aspects of the biological
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basis for the attainment of the rainbow body and other post-mortem manifestations of the attainments of contemplative practice i'll leave it at there i have a grandiose conclusion that goes farther
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but let's open up to questions and that gives people a chance to engage in some dialogue on this topic thank you great thank you so much
00:30:07
it's very insightful we have at least one question coming up and i want to invite all of you who have been listening to if you would like to turn on your videos so we can even better
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engage in a dialogue i will do so too let's see how are we going to do with the bandwidth we have in the meantime i hope that was okay shared the link to your book and also to some
00:30:33
of your research articles because people had asked about that i think any blog you had a particular question about a reference on the study of took them maybe father teaser you can
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tell us more about that or what the reference is there yes uh anton lutz who just popped in he's been doing that work uh in connection with richard davidson's
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laboratory a few years ago one of richie davidson's uh anthropological forensic experts stopped in and we had a wonderful day going over this research
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the material that antoine sent me today is of suggested value it's really a methodological uh challenge right there that uh antoine presents for us and we're hoping
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we're hoping that we'll get some more data it's not easy of course to catch somebody at the moment of death all right anyone much less a highly experienced meditator but some effort
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has been made to overcome the traditional issues that will be involved with that for example training monk assistance in the technology that would be involved
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and also inventing body vests that could be worn by the dying person that would be non-interfering with the process of dying and the
00:32:03
concentration that is part of the process thank you so much okay let's see miraculous you want to ask a question directly okay yes um thanks for this intriguing
00:32:27
talk um i enjoyed it very much and i was wondering whether you found some some natural science analysis of the relics of shrunken bodies nails hair and what do they tell us about this phenomenon
00:32:41
right this is of course kind of a next step in this whole research uh project because of course it's uh you know this is a venerated object and uh people are uh very protective
00:32:53
of relics uh i actually asked if i could uh look more closely at the relics of duja rupert in bodhinath you know in kathmandu and i was not able to convince the monks to
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allow me to get any closer but if you go on the web you'll see a lot of things i mean there's a lot of material on the ring cell uh and i believe some people have done some research on the ring cell these are
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little sphere glass like spheres that emerge from the cremation box that is used to cremate the body of the masters when
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when cremation is the chosen method for the disposal of the body okay now the rainbow body phenomenon doesn't involve cremation of course all right there the
00:33:46
body dissolves without cremation and the body is not supposed to be touched and in fact in some cases it's preferred that it remain in a tent or in a cave outside of the
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eyesight of anyone even disciples the case of kenpo acha is particularly interesting in that they covered the body and were able to observe the shrinkage under the cloth
00:34:12
all right there are a number of other features of the kenpo action case that make it particularly rich for our research purposes other questions eric you're raising your hand i can see
00:34:37
here do you want to ask a question yes hello father francis eric um i was wondering because in the title you you really said you know it's rainbow body and resurrection to what extent actually do you uh think it's you know
00:34:51
it's been uh also the case in other traditions or any trace of that of course you know with jesus but uh you know the traditions of of that you know uh
00:35:02
rainbow body phenomena we're getting accounts which need to be followed up and examined from some early medieval middle eastern
00:35:17
instances of hermits whose bodies disappeared we are hearing things that possibly some bulgarian uh contemplatives also have dissolved the body of course
00:35:29
the uh the famous case of uh the virgin mary you know the assumption of mary is considered a kind of uh rainbow body or resurrection phenomenon so we have to look at some of these things but of course the beauty of the
00:35:43
tibetan research is that we have contemporary instances that we can follow up and actually talk to eyewitnesses to verify some of the details and the practices
00:35:54
i did travel to monastic romania in 2002 to see if i could follow up with any uh evidence for bodily transformation at the time of death and i was not able to get any information
00:36:09
beyond the peculiar features of the relics of some of the monks and nuns who had passed away in conception of holiness and these people usually have fragrant
00:36:22
relics fragrant bones or the bones may acquire a particular coloration right but again we're talking about normal decomposition followed by the emergence of a perfumed
00:36:35
relic okay and so that's not quite the same thing as the rainbow body but i hear from people in bulgaria that there have been some instances of shrinkage or disappearance
00:36:46
yeah a lot of the work in my book covers uh reports of mystical phenomena that were shared among uh sero-oriental monks in other words monks who worked in the
00:36:59
aramaic christian tradition all right and it's so it's not quite just subjective experiences these are experiences that were discussed among masters and disciples in the
00:37:12
monasteries of persia qatar central asia and so forth and the accounts have been handed down to us and we have some remarkable accounts there
00:37:24
of light phenomena uh inedia uh bodily transformation and various other uh phenomena so the fact that they actually see spontaneous spheres of light very much
00:37:37
like those described for the dzogchen practitioners is already interesting but it gets even more interesting when we compare the texts of these christian mystics with the texts we get from chan
00:37:51
and also dzogchen practitioners and that's covered at great length in the rainbow body book thank you in the meantime we've got two more questions one by annie block and one by
00:38:05
tonka nicolova andy do you want to start with your question first hi thank you very much i just want to ask um because i'm also from bulgaria i was very curious which bulgarians are
00:38:23
that and i would like to also research yeah i i have to nail that down a little bit more tightly i got an email from someone who was familiar with bulgarian orthodoxy and who reported this to me
00:38:39
only a couple of weeks ago actually and so i want to you know follow through on that see who they're talking about and whether this was recent or a long time ago but it does seem to be at least an oral tradition that such things have
00:38:52
happened in uh orthodox bulgaria uh yeah so we'll try to follow up on that and i'll try to get that information and you're always welcome to write me an email about this you know if you have
00:39:05
additional questions no problem but i'll get to it thank you very much thank you so we've got another question by any block any do you want to ask your question
00:39:20
yes uh there are some rings there which uh multiply by themselves and this is fairly very frequent has there been any
00:39:32
research and analysis on them from them a great deal has been published but and so far not any i have not seen any scientific you know type you know like say spectrograph
00:39:44
studies or anything like that i do know some people have made efforts to detect uh things like brain waves in the area around relics and have come
00:39:57
up with some interesting results which need to be tested i i still consider it you know the method itself is a hypothesis but i think it would be very uh very important to try to detect
00:40:10
a certain level of electromagnetic energy or some kind of change in maybe say the biophoton production of persons who were near the
00:40:23
relics because that might give us a connection with the the bioplasticity of people who are healed by relics you know i mean that's that's the kind of thing that we want to look at uh it requires a certain amount
00:40:35
of equipment and uh so i i always say my laboratory is my body i'm looking forward to somebody who has a more uh you know uh well
00:40:47
supplied laboratory to do some of this additional work there's a fellow named daniel p brown who has been doing some very very valuable and very detailed work on brain waves and meditation and
00:41:02
i've cited his work in my 2019 article which you can find on academia.edu all right taking the next step in rainbow body research thank you
00:41:16
eric you're still raising your hand is that another question you have not that we missed that maybe maybe not maybe there are other questions
00:41:37
you can either raise your hand virtually up with them in the chat to catch that yes yeah marika you have another question
00:41:52
um yeah i'm i'm curious how um your work is received by religious study scholars in general um because i think this position that you take um is um relatively unique from my outsider's
00:42:05
perspective in the sense that um what i feel is a lot that this kind of research and paranormal phenomena is usually still put off as something yeah we know that it doesn't exist although you should of course not judge but i feel it
00:42:18
often happens in religious studies that it does get judged as something that is not happening and we observe it from this let's say outsiders perspective so um and you seem to be very yeah very open about allowing for the possibility
00:42:30
of this being something that happens so i'm curious what what responses are from from colleagues and and yeah how they how they perceive your work on the rainbow body phenomena
00:42:41
i'm very happy to say that for the most part the book has been well received by my religious studies colleagues for example also i'm seeing for example
00:42:54
the one of the first talks i gave on this subject was at the institute of noetic sciences in petaluma california and they are dedicated to research on paranormal
00:43:05
phenomena so of course with that group of people scientists and lay people there was a great deal of openness but even uh you know among friends of mine who are teaching and who got their doctorates at columbia or
00:43:18
fordham or other places that uh are you know close to me and in my own track record uh they've uh really received this book very generously uh and i think that what i've tried to do in the book is be
00:43:32
respectful to all sides of the argument uh these the anthropological and the religious uh in trying also to sort out the theological reflection from the
00:43:45
actual observation of what's going on in a community that is trying to deal with a remarkable death right and i think that that also makes it accessible to people because very
00:43:57
often in courses on religious studies we want to look at how communities deal with death and dying and certainly this particular study helps us a great deal and understanding how a remarkable
00:44:10
teacher is perceived at the time of death and subsequently there is now a pilgrimage you know that goes to the place where the kenpo manifested the rainbow body and there's a great deal of
00:44:24
veneration but i was particularly impressed with the people that i met back in the year 2000 who really did merit the the study of a religious anthropologist people who were answering
00:44:38
questions cogently and coherently who indicated at the same time profound devotion profound expression of their own commitment to practice it was really a
00:44:49
very rich experience for a researcher and of course in my case also a priest you know and someone who was practicing uh you know my own in my own tradition for a long time so you see a lot and you pick up a
00:45:03
uh a context which makes further research possible in fact i really regret i did not get enough grant support to be able to do a follow-up set of interviews but i did meet with
00:45:16
the great uh lopan tenzin nandak who is a bunto master at swambo in in kathmandu and he and i had 10 days together to work through a lot
00:45:28
of this material with his guidance and while we were there another instance of postmortem phenomena took place and that's a whole other story that's in the
00:45:41
book so that we began to feel at home in the anthropo anthropological world of people who are within the tradition and who are
00:45:52
practicing and who see these things as not metaphors but as really happening so thank you being mindful of the time with
00:46:04
12 more minutes left and uh three questions in the chat and i see elena you're raising your hand so let's try to get it all done philip do you want to pose your question first it came up
00:46:18
first so my question was uh so with your christian background do you see parallels to the phenomena around jesus's death yes this is part of the challenge of the
00:46:30
book in fact brother david was particularly interested in that and that's why he urgently asked me to do this research brother david was convinced that there
00:46:43
were phenomena in the history of religions that would tend to support uh the idea not just the idea but the historicity of the resurrection of christ
00:46:55
so it is interesting that uh in trying to work with this material i had to look at things like the shroud of turin which some people you know we collected over 800 pages of printouts
00:47:09
from the web on the shroud of turin and if you and i interviewed several people who have intimately researched the shroud and almost all of them are convinced that
00:47:21
the shroud really does represent an extraordinary post-mortem phenomenon you know of course they're very cautious about saying whose post-mortem phenomenon it is but of course the the
00:47:34
13th century dating for the fort carbon 14 test is almost certainly wrong and so now we're back to the drawing board with research on the shroud but what the shroud does give us is a high-energy
00:47:47
manifestation of a post-mortem phenomenon that looks like it was connected with jesus of nazareth okay but certainly the crucifixion as depicted on the shroud
00:47:58
is a crucifixion that is not entirely supported by other archaeological evidence for crucifixion in other words it's a worse crucifixion it's a more thorough going
00:48:12
process than of killing somebody than you usually see in the archaeological fragments related to other crucified people so it's a remarkable document one could say
00:48:25
so we could connect our research with the shroud by talking about energy right and a burst of energy in the case of the shroud whereas with our rainbow body
00:48:37
manifestations we have a longer unfolding of a process that is clearly also energetic but seems to be closer to biological rather than physical
00:48:49
processes okay so that's why i'm proposing biological type research to try to unpack what's going on in the cells uh of people who are doing dzogchen uh
00:49:03
and togal practices okay that will help us see what's going on on the biological level and uh this is of course also what the took down people are trying to unpack as well so it's a collaborative effort
00:49:16
but i think what's also interesting is that um in the centuries in which the christian contemplative tradition emerged we have an emphasis on contemplative
00:49:29
practices involving light that do lead to bodily transformation if not the dissolution of the body in all cases obviously there you have people who
00:49:42
recount what is happening to them we have texts that speak about this and this particular tradition is exactly the tradition that eventually crossed central asia and encountered tang china
00:49:57
in the 8th century so that another part of my research which is very exciting if you think about it is this amazing encounter of civilizations christian muslim buddhist
00:50:08
hindu chinese many different civilizations encountering one another and discussing well when you see light what happens to you okay and that you know was a shining
00:50:22
moment i think in the history of human spirituality when people were actually sitting down and comparing notes about some very profound experiences okay and i think the time has come for us to
00:50:34
maybe look at that period again and i hope replicate it maybe bring the scientists as well thank you so i promised three people to be able to
00:50:47
ask their questions let's tackle that challenge within our seven minutes left so there's one question by wolfgang then angela angela and then elena maybe wolfgang you want to
00:50:59
start with that kind of quick round although it probably deserves way more time than we have right now you um yeah maybe just quickly um
00:51:11
stating it as a follow-up to the question that you just addressed um are there also any connections you're aware of to the dialogue or deloc phenomenon of
00:51:23
people apparently dying for a certain amount of time and they kind of specify beforehand how long it might take and then return to life with profound and meaningful messages for
00:51:36
so yeah yeah this could really take a lot of time wolfgang but i'm just going to be very fast about that we you know i did a lot of field work in dolpho and there is a very famous case of the dayloc
00:51:48
dolpho which has been published and that phenomenon actually does exist in southern italian catholicism and there was a famous housewife back in who
00:52:01
passed away only a few years ago in calabria who would pass into the other lifetime and even one of my own ancestors had such an experience in the 18th century so
00:52:13
we know about these things it i would classify the dialogue phenomenon or the the um uh dying and rising you know within one's lifetime experience
00:52:26
as a kind of spontaneous mystical experience that gives rise to more intensive practice and this area of research is very
00:52:38
important also to brother david as you probably know the the idea of the prior experiences that lead us to want to do deeper practice
00:52:50
right and we want to look at that i think at greater depth in some other context because i have written about it and i have not published on it as yet but some material there needs to be developed and
00:53:02
uh perhaps shared among people who have had such experiences and have found that those experiences are the ones that got them going on the spiritual path thank you
00:53:17
so there's one more question by angela do you want to ask it yourself maybe thank you thank you very much for their fanciest um
00:53:29
i would like to ask you what about uh researchers that you mentioned about um physi at the nature of light in um in the field of
00:53:41
thank you yes all right there are a couple of things here that could come together and i would love to talk to anybody who has the lab equipment to do it but in switzerland
00:53:53
germany and the netherlands a great deal of work has been done on biophotons i cite a couple of key articles in that essay that i published at on
00:54:07
academia.edu about the next step in rainbow body research so biophotons are already being used uh in therapeutic protocols here in europe so you can detect
00:54:20
within the cell the production of extremely uh weak biophoton energy which however does seem to have a commanding role in the uh
00:54:33
biochemistry of the cells all right that from the uh nucleus from the dna spiral you get biophotons that seem to be key a key feature of the command
00:54:46
system that also involves rna right so that protein synthesis is also influenced and perhaps commanded by a photon energy coming out of the nucleus it's amazing when you think about it and
00:55:00
the articles that have been written about it are quite fascinating now if we can connect biophotons with the kind of visualization or excuse me spontaneous visions that we have
00:55:12
depicted on the walls of the lucon we've already begun to make a connection that would be very valuable with what happens in deeper forms of meditation right with that one
00:55:25
another article that i cited is a fairly extensive study of self-reporting about light phenomena during meditation reported by advanced buddhist practitioners
00:55:38
the light phenomena that are recorded are you know different types but some people will get flashes of light some people will feel that they themselves become light some people also will close their eyes
00:55:51
and see light which in my opinion corresponds to the pranas moving into the central channel of the subtle body all right so uh in fact uh those uh
00:56:04
well the the practice that i mentioned related to the bunpo the atri practices actually do help a person who has already got some background in meditation to move the
00:56:16
winds into the central channel and begin to experience a light phenomena so all of this uh you know of course is subjective as matthew kapstein pointed out you report on it but it is
00:56:28
interesting when you report on it in a community of practitioners who are on retreat together all right it starts to look like something more than just subjective spontaneous experiences but something related to the techniques of
00:56:42
meditation that are being employed and that needs to be looked at closely you know alan wallace is doing a lot of work with groups of trained meditators and that this approach i think is going
00:56:54
to take off uh in future research including on flight phenomena okay the life phenomena as i mentioned earlier are reported by the uh christian
00:57:07
monastics in egypt uh and in the ancient middle east as well as as far as china time china thank you so much so being today's moderator i've got the challenge to
00:57:21
handle the time and the questions and the great interest so it's one minute to seven we do want to be mindful of the time of all of our participants uh nevertheless maybe those who want to
00:57:34
stay let's say maximum five minutes longer can still of course join us when elena has her time for the question which i promised her to get so to speak but of course if you do need to hop off right now because
00:57:47
at seven o'clock we do uh understand that and already at this point thank you so much for joining us but i do want to give the chance let's say maybe five minutes on top of what we've already
00:57:59
have to um to pose your question elena thank you very much nina but i was actually going to use this time to ask father francis for permission to email him with my
00:58:12
question because i feel we'll just take five minutes to formulate it properly um and uh yeah i would like to have an opportunity to to give it justice and to give justice to uh francis jesus
00:58:25
replies well could i give you directly could i ask my permission great thank you very much it was very interesting thank you so thank you very very much
00:58:38
all of you for your time thank you father teaser for this yeah enriching inspiring talk i think the questions showed how much interest there is and i very much enjoyed and appreciated how
00:58:50
this really felt like a community of friends um being part of the the emily friends actually so thank you very much we will close this this meeting in one or two minutes and
00:59:03
this is just a small reminder that next week tuesday we're gonna have the first live webinar following our webcast the beyond confines webcast that will be with uh michelle pitbull you might have
00:59:17
seen the few lectures on philosophy already and next tuesday there's actually an interactive session where you can ask questions about that webcast and we also have another webinar coming
00:59:29
up on november 12th with richard davidson we have had some references to his work today already um so maybe you want to save the date so thank you everyone thank you father
00:59:41
teaser for your time for all your views insights and perspectives and to all of you have a great and wonderful evening thank you so much thanks nina thank you so much bye-bye
00:59:54
a lot bye-bye bye ciao enjoy the evening we will close the meeting in about in a minute so be well
01:00:11
stay stay safe set
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