Eloisa and Shankari meditate, Ananda Sangha, Palo Alto, CA. Photo by the author.
Left to its own devices, my brain’s everyday cycle of operations fluctuates from the beatific to the bumfuzzled, from Einstein to Mortimer Snerd. But since discovering Paramhansa Yogananda’s meditative path, I find that there’s a hitching post I can return to, to take control and rest a while.
Patanjali, whose Sutras are considered the bible of yoga, defined the purpose of meditation as “the neutralization of the vortices of raw, reactive emotional feeling.”
“Neutralized” is a feeling you begin to get when you meditate regularly. The world becomes steadier, and you feel less moved by events that might formerly have rocked you. You wait, observe, consider, then speak or act, maybe.
There’s a TV series called Dept. Q where the principal characters are detective Carl Morck, who’s reactive, impulsive, and lets his emotions vent freely through his mouth, and Akram Salim, a former Syrian police detective who’s Carl’s temperamental opposite.
“When you react, you lose control,” Akram tells Carl. “When I react, I am completely in control.”
It’s reflected in Akram’s dress and manners. He wears a jacket and tie and is unfailingly polite, even to the bad guys.
After effortlessly subduing a violent skinhead and extracting the information he needs, Akram quietly says, “Thank you very much,” and walks away, unruffled.
How can we acquire the very useful life skill of calm self-possession? Meditation holds the answer, and science has begun to confirm it. This is from my book, The Joyful Athlete.
The Runner’s Brain
A tire on my car developed a bubble – thump, thump – and I went to Wheel Works for a replacement. They said it would take an hour, so I strolled over to Target to look at sweatshirts, then came back and sat in the waiting room thumbing through a copy of U.S. News. The back cover featured an Allstate ad that asked rhetorically if 16-year-olds are missing part of their brain.
I’m fascinated by a field of brain research that’s been popularly dubbed “neurotheology.” It includes studies of what happens in the brains of people who meditate, and in states that subjects describe as spiritual experiences.
An area of the brain that becomes activated in meditators is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), just behind the forehead.
It’s the “young” part of the brain, where uniquely human attributes are localized.
This part of the brain doesn’t develop fully until our early twenties. It’s a serious problem for young drivers: 16-year-olds have three times as many crashes as 17-year-olds, and five times as many as 18-year-olds.
Allstate wants state governments to create Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) laws to reduce teen deaths. The laws would restrict teens from nighttime driving and driving with other teen passengers.
When North Carolina implemented strict GDL laws, crash rates for 16-year-olds dropped 25%.
Not long ago, a friend and I reminisced over lunch about the idiotic way we drove 70 years ago, when a key part of our brains was missing.
Bruce remembered racing through suburban Phoenix streets at over 100 mph. I remembered flying (yes, we were airborne) over hilly Arizona desert back roads in the 1954 Cadillac of a local doctor, his mentally defective 16-year-old son at the wheel – and on other occasions, in a pal’s 1928 Ford Model A.
I recalled timing the 10-mile drive to school over a curvy, hilly, twisting desert road with Bruce at the wheel. We made it – alive – in 10 minutes.
I remembered zooming up a near-vertical hill in Bruce’s WWII-era Jeep, whereupon the Jeep flipped and we spilled out, fortunate that it didn’t land on us.
Another time, riding in the back of Bruce’s father’s 1950 Chevy pickup, one of our crew, Rudy Duran, had the bright idea of tying a rope to a spare tire that was loose in the pickup bed, and with the other end of the rope, lassoing a stop sign as we sped past. Bruce’s dad was not pleased with his new half-moon-shaped tailgate.
Perhaps teenagers should be taught to meditate. It might save lives. Various meditative traditions teach that by concentrating attention gently in the prefrontal cortex, we can develop the abilities neuroscientists associate with that area, including emotional control, mature self-restraint, and calm objectivity.
Richard J. Davidson, PhD, is a leading expert on the prefrontal cortex. Davidson is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, and Director of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience.
In Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, Davidson reports:
Of particular note in this regard are pilot data collected . . . in one older monk who had been engaged in daily practices to cultivate compassion for more than 30 years. We measured brain electrical activity during the baseline state in this monk and found that he exhibited the most extreme left prefrontal activation compared with a normative sample of 175 Wisconsin students.
Scientists tend to be cautious in their language. In plain English, what Davidson is saying is that, in competition with 175 college students, the meditating monk’s left prefrontal cortex scored off the chart. And because left-prefrontal activation is associated with positive affective states, his test score indicated that he was one happy dude.
How can this research help us become more inwardly self-possessed, calm, stable, focused, and mature?
One “ability” of the PFC that’s particularly useful is emotional control.
Brain scientists have found that raw, uncontrolled emotions are localized in an older structure of the brain, the amygdala. There are strong neural connections between the forebrain and amygdala, and the scientists have found that energizing one structure withdraws energy from the other. Thus, when we concentrate deeply, the prefrontal cortex becomes activated and pulls energy away from raw emotions in the amygdala. It’s the physiological basis for the time-honored maxim that when people are under emotional stress, we can help them by giving them a simple, useful task to focus on.
I think Allstate’s suggestion that we regulate teenage zombies is wonderful. The facts don’t lie: 18-year-olds have one-fifth as many wrecks as 16-year-olds.
Surely, schools in the future will draw upon brain findings like those described above.
These ideas have been a keystone of spiritual teachings for a long time. In Western religious art, saints are shown gazing upward toward the “spiritual eye.” In the East, artists paint the saints with a mark at the center of the forehead, above and between the eyebrows.
The practice of energizing the prefrontal cortex is referred to in the scriptures. In the Bible:
“If thine eye be single, thy body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)
And in the Bhagavad Gita (from The Song Celestial: Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold):
His gaze absorbed
Upon his nose–end (the origin of the nose, at the point between the eyebrows), rapt from all around,
Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent
Upon his Brahmacharya vow, devout,
Musing on Me, lost in the thought of Me.
That Yogin, so devoted, so controlled,
Comes to the peace beyond – My peace, the peace
Of high Nirvana!
If you’re preparing for a job interview, meeting people for the first time, giving a public talk, or wanting to help friends in stressful situations, you can instantly make yourself feel more in control and mature by deliberately placing all of your attention and energy at the point between the eyebrows, approximately a half-inch inside the skull. You’ll be surprised, also, to see how people judge you as being mature and a source of wisdom, comfort, and strength.
Paramhansa Yogananda called this area of the brain the broadcasting station where we can send our prayers so that God will hear them. He said that the receiving station where we can feel His answers is the heart.
Obviously, the practice of meditation has depths that are barely touched by the more utilitarian functions of the prefrontal cortex.
In creative work, we can also align ourselves with a higher inspiration by keeping our attention calmly riveted on what we are doing, aided by bringing energy to the PFC. If you are eager to learn more about meditation, I can heartily recommend a visit to the website of Ananda.org, where you will find a wealth of resources to support your practice.
— Rambhakta