"I was amazed a couple of years ago when I discovered Thong Len. I had a burnt hand, and (when I used) that technique, it was like an anesthetic had been injected into my arm," said Jack Pettigrew, a renowned Australian physiologist, at a Science and the Mind conference that was attended by the Dalai Lama.
Thong Len is a meditative technique developed by Tibetan Buddhists almost 800 years before the discovery of anesthesia. It's explained in that classic of Tibetan Buddhist thought, the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It works by imagining someone else's pain, like a burn, and drawing it into oneself. As you take the pain from others, your own hurt disappears.
Adepts of the technique are constantly practicing Thong Len, every minute of the day, drawing pain from those around them and enhancing their own sense of well-being. They've been described as "shit filters," taking negative energy out of the world and replacing it with positive.
"You can explain what might be happening when you anesthetize your own arm," Pettigrew said. "But people in a room with a Thong Len practitioner have also said they feel better. How do you explain that?" Scientists don't know, but they know it works, powerfully.
Pettigrew believes Western science could use Eastern introspection, or meditative techniques, to deepen its understanding of how the brain works and to provide practical help to people in distress.
In a host of fields, Tibetan practices have subsequently proven valid when science finally developed technology sophisticated enough to test them.
A recent experiment proved this. Subjects were asked to watch a video of two teams passing a ball. One team wore white shirts, and one black, and subjects were asked to count how many times players in white shirts passed the ball to each other.
What subjects didn't notice was the man in a gorilla suit who walked on screen, waved at the audience and walked off again.
This established that humans perceive only what they are looking for, not what's there. Oh, and Buddhists figured this out 2,000 years ago, while modern science caught up in the last two decades.
The Science and the Mind conference, held last month in Canberra, Australia, explored areas of possible contact and cooperation between Tibetan Buddhism and modern science.
"Truly great advances of any kind are about making leaps ... that explode on you seemingly from nowhere," said Allan Snyder, keynote speaker at the conference, who is working on a thinking cap using magnetic pulses to access the creativity of the non-conscious mind.
He added that altered states of consciousness, such as Tibetan meditation, could achieve the same end, and it is time for science to explore the synergies between the two traditions.
The issue is not that modern science is dumb and Tibetans are smart. Rather, Tibetans have discovered many scientific truths through empirical observation. They also have many other techniques that still mystify scientists, but seem to work, like Thong Len.
Science is unable to explain them and is loath to embrace Tibetan techniques in the absence of proof.
Max Bennett, professor at the University of Sydney and one of the world's top neurologists, underlined the issue, explaining that it is possible to relieve the suffering of some stroke victims using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. "But I have to emphasize, we haven't got a clue what's going on," he said.
Worse, the problem is potentially huge: "Goodness knows what's happening (when we apply magnetism) to the 100,000 million neurons that make up the brain, each of which has about 10,000 connections with other neurons. We dealing with figure of 10 to the power of 15 connections, and we haven't got a clue which ones are turning off, which ones might be excited by this stimulation.
"It's a phenomenon. But in one sense, it does indicate that there are a lot of things that we know nothing about in Western science."
He added, however, that neuroscience is on the threshold of an exciting era of discovery with the identification of the human genome.
The stakes are high. There is an urgent need to deepen medical understanding of the intimate operations of the brain.
"We know by the year about 2020, the greatest disabling phenomenon for the health of the human race will be depression," Bennett said. "Not cancer, not heart disease, but depression."
Progress has thus far been slow in the development of drug-based treatments.
"We're up against a deep problem, and I think the best illustration of that is that we've had 50 intense years of neuroscience, and yet the greatest contributions that were made to alleviation of mental suffering were made before neuroscience really kicked off (from 1950 to '52)," Bennett said.
Pettigrew, unsurprisingly, believes the Tibetans provide a clue to the solution. "If you go to Dharamsala (in India, home of the Tibetan government in exile), you go up through the fog in midwinter and you come out in the bright sunshine, it's like going to heaven. What strikes you immediately is the happy, smiling faces of the Tibetans, who don't have much, have been terribly deprived, and yet they are happy. Well, why are they happy?
"They work at it! They don't take their Prozac in the left hand and pop the pill. Monks have been studied by Richard Davidson, they are very positive, they've got no material possessions, it's a grind, it's cold, they don't have much food. But they are happy. They work at it."
That work is focused on introspective meditative practices that have been developed over thousands of years.
While Tibetan Buddhism and other ancient practices like Taoism have developed scientifically accurate explanations of some phenomena, the Dalai Lama has also said Buddhists can abandon scripture that has been reliably disproved by science. No creationist controversies here, then.
The Dalai Lama has an intense non-specialist interest in science, and he believes there are points of contact (with Buddhism) in cosmology, neuroscience, physics, quantum physics, and modern psychology. He has even opened a school of science at his monastery in India.
"I feel it is basically the Buddhist tradition to try to see reality. Science has a different method of investigation. One relies on mathematics; Buddhists work mainly through meditation. So different approaches and different methods, but both science and Buddhism are trying to see reality," he said.
"When I meet with scientists, it has nothing to do with religious faith. It's just theory or the experience of experiment. So, today's meeting is using reason only, not faith. I'm not trying to convert scientists to Buddhism, and they are not trying to convert me into a radical materialist!" (Someone who believes all phenomena are physical only.)
Problems remain, however. While Tibetan Buddhists are keen to embrace science along shared points of contact, scientists frequently remain uncomfortable with that kind of intimacy.
In the conference, for example, eminent Australian philosopher Frank Jackson sought an explanation to the Dalai Lama's rejection of radical materialism. "I guess most Western philosophers, and I suspect the neuroscientists on this panel, are probably kinds of materialists.... Why would you resist going down the materialist path?"
The Dalai Lama replied: "I believe that the nature of what we experience as mind is something that has to be understood in terms that have direct and intimate connections to our understanding of the wider world, the cosmos, the origin and evolution of the universe."
This an aspect of ontological debate, or arguing for God's existence using reason alone, but the Dalai Lama said he wanted to move away from issues of definition and look at routes for application.
"When we speak of consciousness and mind it is, conceptually, an extremely difficult problem. We find it extremely difficult to articulate. But at the personal level we all experience it on a day-to-day basis," said the Dalai Lama.
"So I feel that in this interface between the two different intellectual traditions, the two investigative traditions, there might be two levels of dialogue. One is for this issue of what exactly is mind, what exactly is consciousness? What is its nature? This is a hugely complex issue, and maybe we can for the time being bracket it, and seek instead what we can do to create happy minds."
It is a call echoed by Pettigrew: "I think that we can learn something from the Tibetans. I think that the answer's not just a pill. You can learn these techniques. The future is that we bring these worlds together."
