Transcendental Meditation, Sydney

Suffering is dominating life everywhere. Tension and stress and strain are increasing in every country. Whether it's an affluent society, or a developing nation. But suffering is everywhere. It is possible for every man to go deep within and saturate his conscious mind with inner happiness. With that unlimited intelligence that dwells at the source of thought. The principle of Transcendental Meditation is simple. Being is bliss in it's nature. It's infinite happiness. Mind is always moving in the direction of greater happiness. It is the experience of everyone, wherever the mind goes, it goes in the direction of greater happiness, and because the nature of inner being is bliss, infinite happiness, therefore, the mind during Transcendental Meditation takes that inward course in a most spontaneous manner.

In this meditation, we do not concentrate or control the mind. We let the mind follow its natural instinct towards greater happiness, and it goes with it and gains bliss consciousness in the Being. The technique is, we take a specific thought which suits us. It's called a mantra, or a suitable sound for us, which we get from the trained teacher of Transcendental Meditation, and these teachers are found everywhere in the world. I have trained them properly, and they give a suitable word, and the man experiences the thought of that sound and starts minimising that thought to experience the finest state of that thought, until the source of thought is fathomed and the conscious mind reaches the transcendental area of Being. So from gross thought, to the subtle state of thought, to the subtler, to the subtlest state of thought, this is the path of Transcendental Meditation. Until the mind, conscious mind, reaches the bliss consciousness, or transcendental consciousness, or pure consciousness, or the state of Being. Here in this state of Being, the mind becomes absorbed with energy, intelligence, and great happiness. With it, it comes out and performs and experiences the world much better than before.

So this meditation, we believe, can help a lot of people. And it's important to understand exactly how it affects stress, which of course impacts your physiology, in particular, how TM (Transcendental Meditation) reduces stress and stress related disorders. So I'm going to walk you through a couple of important steps. This first image is my office. And like many of you, I sit in my office day in and day out, thinking about what the heck am I doing wrong. Churning up the waters, but on that surface, that ripply water, in a canoe, and not doing so well. So let me explain to you, because I'm a heart surgeon, how I see stress in the heart. And this is an animation that I think will bring it alive pretty nicely. This is the middle of the heart. See this rupture in that crack? That little crack leaves a raw surface on the inside of the heart vessel, and that vessel starts to heal itself over. It puts a scab on it. And that scab gets larger and larger like it would anywhere in the body, but in the heart, it does something catastrophic. Kaboom! Right there, it closes over the artery. And when it closes over the artery, what you just saw, was the leading cause of death in the western world.

Now what can Transcendental Meditation do about that? It's a remarkable process, I'll show it to you real quick again. You've got a scab inside the artery, a plaque ruptures, and it's not the plaque that kills you, it's the scab on top of it. And that arterial surface, that tube that's causing less sustaining blood, in this case, to the major vessel of your artery, is what causes death. Now, lets scroll forward and talk a little bit about how it works. If you look at what it fundamentally does, Transcendental Meditation... this is a study done with subjects with high blood cholesterol. It's a one year study, looking at people who practiced TM for that year. And it was associated with a significant reduction in total cholesterol by about 10%. That's 30ml of cholesterol. Now if you were on medication for cholesterol, we hope you can get 30ml lower in your blood cholesterol. But this happened through Transcendental Meditation, alone.

Cholesterol is the first big risk factor we talk about with heart disease. The second big risk factor. This is a randomized clinical trial finding improvements in the level of insulin resistance, glucose, even insulin levels themselves in over 100 people who had coronary block, in just four months, 16 weeks, of TM practice. Dramatic changes that were significantly better than just teaching people about their health. That's the second part of the problem we have heart disease, which is diabetes.

The third big one - this one, by the way, was funded by the NIH, so it's a reputable organization that's supporting this work. The next study looked at a randomised trial of hypertension sufferers - people with high blood pressure - showing that Transcendental Meditation produced significant reductions in systoc and diostoc - the high number and the low number - of the blood pressure, of 11 and 6ml respectively. Those are big numbers. We don't get those kinds of results all the time with medications.

Now, those three things: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar, those three things drive heart disease. And this last image is probably, for me, the most important. This is an image looking at Transcendental Meditation effects on reducing mortality from heart disease and stroke. By how much? By 47%. It was a long term randomized trial in older African American patients with coronary disease. This kind of a stunning impact... unimaginable... in the Transcendental Meditation group. And when you talk about all causes of death, you can reduce them by that much, as well as non-fatal strokes and non-fatal heart attacks, these are spectacularly large impacts.

Now, that's the data, that's the hard data, about how we can get people to live longer, and live better. Now, lets talk about one other issue of vanity. Obesity. Could it (Transcendental Meditation) potentially impact on weight loss? So loss of weight, in theory, is a pretty reasonable thing to expect if you get rid of stress, because what is chronic stress? Fundamentally, chronic stress, a thousand years ago, was not a deadline. Fundamentally, chronic stress is famine. It's not having enough food. That's what used to cause us to get stressed out. So what happens when you get stressed? You immediately up-regulate these chemicals in the brain called canabinoids. Sound familiar? Like cannabis. You turn them on, it's like you're smoking pot. You get the munchies. So you eat more food, that you don't even like, and you keep eating it throughout the day, if you're not even hungry, which is of course, if you were starving a thousand years ago, what you wanted to do.

So let me explain what happens, with this animation, exactly. This is an animation showing the liver at the top there, and the bile, the little material from the intestines, going up to the liver. The liver, when it's poisoned with the wrong kind of food, leads to a fatty surface as you see here. And this fatty surface leads ultimately to this yellow pad called the omentum. See it pulls ponderously large, across your belly, as you put on belly fat. When I look at belly fat, what I think is, a stressed out person, because we accumulate belly fat for a very particular reason. That belly fat accumulates because it's a receptor for steroids in the body. And the cortisol released, the stress hormones released, when you are stressed out, will accumulate. They get sucked up in the belly fat. Why? Because if you could accumulate belly fat, again a thousand years ago, you could mainline it to your liver. You could quickly shove it into your body if you were starving. So our ancestors definitely needed this protective mechanism, we don't need it anymore.

Now, the anxiety that I'm talking about, that leads to over-eating and many other problems, paralyzes the ability of it's sufferers to function normally. We've all experienced that. But I'm going to talk a little bit now about the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which are not just prevalent in the people who have fought in battle and come back from combat, but in young children growing up in our inner cities, in war-torn regions of the world. It's also exhibited - this post-traumatic stress disorder type phenomenon - with severe anxiety, depression, violent behaviour, impulsive behaviour. And we have to equip our youth with tools to cope with this, as we do have to equip the homeless, impoverished individuals living in reservations across this country. They need the tools to be able to cope with the traumatic stress of their lives. And this is were the good works of the David Lynch Foundation come in. Because that's what they're focusing on. They're working with people who are most at risk for traumatic stress.

The physiological results of having a technique to take deep rest at will are very far reaching, as the next chart shows. According to 600 studies now, that have been published in the worlds leading medical journals, and conducted at over 250 independent universities throughout the world, we've seen marked reductions in every major category of disease, through this very simple program of twice daily rest, including 87% reduction in heart disease, of example. How can we understand 600 studies showing wide ranging physical benefits from a simple intervention, from this technique for deep rest. Well the basic reason is that we now know from the government, so we have to believe it, that about 90% of disease is caused or complicated by stress.

If there were simple means to dissolve accumulated stress, that would have wide ranging benefits for the prevention and cure of disease. This next study is actually very important. It's a so called meta analysis of 146 previously published studies on the effects of what are called meditation techniques and relaxation techniques on reducing stress, and the negative effective effects of stress on brain functioning and health. The top bar, showing the magnitude of the effect, is Transcendental Meditation. And as you can perhaps see, it's more than twice as effective as any other approach that has ever been studied to reduce physiological stress. Also studied in the scientific literature are things like relaxation techniques, the relaxation response, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation technique like mindfulness meditation, biofeedback, and finally at the bottom of this list, concentration. And as you can see from concentration, provides no relaxation at all, because it's dynamically engages the mind. The point here is not to engage the mind. The point is to give the mind a few minutes to settle down, and sink deeply and naturally experience the state of deep rest, restful alertness. That is what has such powerful sweeping effects on health, and as we'll see on brain functioning.

I do want to show one last slide that has to do with the subject of health, and leave the further discussion of health to a great medical doctor, Dr. Gary Kaplan, who will be speaking in a few minutes. I want to show this though, because it's a very important study on what's called metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome, called the modern malaise or modern epidemic, affecting young people as well as adults, metabolic syndrome is a combination of high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. There is nothing in the medical literature that simultaneously improves blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity - except for Transcendental Meditation. And when the AMA believe it or not, and their journal of internal archives and internal medicine published this result, the AMA actually became so excited about it that they issued a global press release and thousands and thousands of articles were written on this extraordinarily simple intervention to prevent and reverse metabolic syndrome. And if you're a young person, 16 years, 18 years of age, and you already have signs of rising blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, your prognosis for health for life is very poor. Now there's something simple, and this is the only thing that's been found scientifically to reverse all those symptoms.

Enough of health for the moment. I just wanted to mention that all of these extensive benefits that I've only alluded to, are side-effects of what is really a mental process. Meditation is a mental technique, and what is fundamentally happening that is so exciting to me as an educator is what's happening in the brain, what's happening in the mind. And the next chart just shows that with modern investigative procedures like the EEG, electroencephalogram, and the MEG, and SPECT and PET and MRI and functional MRI, we can study what's going on in the brain during the meditation experience. And it's a very profound transformation as this chart shows. This chart shows by the way, on the left hand side, the top view and front view of the brain, and on the right hand on side as well. But the difference is on the left hand side, is a student, a subject, in ordinary, agitated, stressed, waking consciousness. Now the little dots on the scalp in this picture, they indicate the position of electrodes measuring the neuronal firings. And you see on this chart occasionally there are bars connecting neighboring points on the brain. Were you see a bar, it means that those neighboring parts of the brain are communication. They're functioning in a correlated way, an integrated way. But in ordinary, agitated waking consciousness on the left, there's not much co-ordination in the brain. Not much order, not much coherence. The brain is functioning, frankly, in a very scattered fashion.

On the right hand side, we show the very same student three months later, practicing the Transcendental Meditation program, and experiencing this meditative state, this expanded, silent state of consciousness. What you see is the whole brain is, you could say, criss-crossed by coherence. That means the whole brain functions in concert, in a completely integrated and coherent way. Orderliness of brain functioning. And the difference is like a symphony frankly, before the conductor arrives, and the instruments are warming up, and no attempt to co-ordinate the music, you get a cacophony of discordant sound. That's frankly what our brains look like. If you've ever seen your own EEG, it's depressing. There's no obvious order, no obvious intelligence in there. Not much. But in the meditative state, we have this profound orderliness of brain functioning, it's like the composer arrives, and raises his baton, and suddenly that chaos is transformed into flowing music. The chart on the right shows the whole brain functioning in concert, in a coherent, orderly way. That is an education breakthrough of the foremost magnitude, because as the next chart shows, orderly brain functioning correlates with intelligence or IQ, rising creativity, academic performance, learning ability, moral reasoning, emotional maturity, physiological stability, alertness, reaction time, everything good about the brain depends on it's orderly functioning. And now today with this tool of meditation, we can systematically increase the order and coherence of the brain in any student, indeed any adult. It's extremely simple, extremely natural.