The peer-reviewed article, “Review of Controlled Research on the Transcendental Meditation Program and Cardiovascular Disease; Risk Factors, Morbidity, and Mortality” by Kenneth G. Walton, Ph.D., Robert H. Schneider, MD, and Sanford Nidich, EdD, published in the National Institute of Health’s US National Library of Medicine, focuses on summarizing the effects of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique, for it’s wide range of research due to the popularity of its use in the Western world, on cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Among the 600 published studies analyzed, a wide range of physical indicators of CVD showed vast improvement with use of TM, revealing the usefulness of meditation to treat and prevent CVD. This included dozens of studies in which TM reduced the physiological effects of stress from lowering blood pressure, hypertension, obesity, and sodium/potassium ratios, while increasing muscle relaxation and physical activity, with outcomes significantly outperforming health education controls. Similarly, success in decreasing use of cigarette, alcohol, and other addictive substances was significantly influenced using TM compared to that of the experimental controls. Observational studies also found that TM practitioners had significantly lower lipid peroxide levels, which as a component of arterial plaque, is an indicator of free radical exposure, correlated with oxidized cholesterol.

Also among the studies, were 146 independent outcomes showing positive relative effectiveness on the CVD contributors to stress and trait anxiety, using the TM technique. As for the striking evidence of the reduction of atherosclerosis, one study of subjects with two or more CVD risk factors, showed an 11% reduction of risk to heart attack or stroke with eight months of TM alone and a 33% decrease of risk over a one year period. Similar benefits on myocardial ischemia and left ventricular hypertrophy in subjects with pre-existing coronary artery disease were also revealed in the analysis of TM research, with an overall strong trend of reducing CVD mortality rates in the TM groups compared with the control groups. Overall, throughout the entire database of research participants, the groups practicing TM had 87% fewer inpatient/outpatient admissions for CVD. (Walton, Kenneth G et al. 262-6) According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, cardiovascular disease affects half of the U.S. population with 1 in 4 annual deaths attributed to heart disease. (Heart Disease Fasts and Statistics CDC.gov) For the sake of our hearts alone, the choice to practice meditation could potentially improve those statistics greatly.

Another research article probing the effects of conscious awareness, “Meditation and Neuroscience: From Basic Research to Clinical Practice” published in “Integrative Clinical Psychology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine: Perspectives, Practices and Research” by Claire Braboszcz, Stéphanie Hahusseau, and Arnaud Delorme, also reveals the effects of meditation in improving quality of life. Among the findings, was a positive correlation between meditation and thickening in the cortex area of the brain, inducing cortical areas known to increase sensory awareness of the body.
In connection with the immune system, daily meditation practice has been shown to raise the antibody response to flu shots; and in HIV patients, to increase activity of lymphocyte T and the natural production of other protective cells. Deep breathing associated with meditation has also been linked to improved regulation of the autonomic nervous system. In association with aging, neuronal decay, decline in cortical thickness, and decrease in the slow wave sleep period before REM, was all reduced in meditators. Meanwhile cognitive function was improved with the abundance of brain activation correlating with the level of experience of the meditator. Emotional regulation also improved with meditation practice and was linked to a suppression of dissociative disorders. (Claire Braboszcz et al. 1910-18)

In other experiments of consciousness affecting health, a healing technique developed by Dr. William Bengston, acknowledges information transfer, opposed to energy transfer as the vehicle of healing performed by the consciousness. The basis of the method is a trained technique he labels as image-cycling. This method entails creating conscious mental images of a desired end goal, as if they had already occurred in detail, in a series of multiple pictures that are cycled through the mind in a fast pace and repeated over an extended period of time. (Bengstonresearch.com 2019).

In laboratory studies led by Bengston, 67 female mice in total were all induced to develop breast cancer with the injection of a standard mammary adenocarcinoma, which produced a nonmetastatic palpable and visible tumor. A historical consensus of the known effects of reaction in mice to this agent is 100% fatality between 14-27 days after injection. Over multiple experiments, a statistically significant number of mice given the healing technique, had their tumors grow, blacken, then implode, followed by a healing of the wound where the ulcer had been, even demonstrating not just remission, but a complete disappearance of the cancer from their system. Some of the mice went on to living out their natural life cycle, not only completely recovered from the treatment, but also to have apparently developed a resistance or immunity to attempts at re-injecting the mice again, with no following tumor response or cancer reproduction detected. In a further analysis of the infected tissue, the mice that had experienced their ulceration go through the process of the area healing over, displayed no viable adenocarcinoma cells and were completely cancer-free.

image via: https://bengstonresearch.com/faq

Honing in on the specifics of the results, half of the mice were given the healing technique, while some in the control group were sent to a separate laboratory on-site of the experiments, and others sent to a laboratory in a completely separate city. Of those sent to a different city, all of the mice died from the injection on or before the 27 day expectancy with a 0% remission rate. The mice that had been on-site in a separate laboratory experienced a 69.2% remission rate, though some of the trained healers reported sympathy for the mice, including them in their mental exercise. Of the mice that were directly included in the healing practice, an overall 87.9% remission rate was reported. The methods also seem to eliminate belief as a factor in using such healing successfully as the researchers specifically chose candidates that were skeptical that such healing capabilities existed, choosing to train healers that did NOT believe in the possibility of such phenomena. (Bengston 353-64)

As unsettling as it may be to put living beings through such trials, it does offer some empirical evidence that is not subjective, as human experience in subjects of such experiments might be. In this case, considering that mice, through their lack of ability to believe, helps to rule out the placebo effect. Also, training healers that were identified as skeptical to the methods, shows actual results that can be separate from interpreting the finding through the power or desire of belief. This is among numerous contemporary research projects beginning to look for and find physiological changes associated with the act of meditating.

Beyond improvements to the physical organism, engaging in meditation practice appears to be a vehicle of harnessing the law of physics to transform the physical world with thought activity. “The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism”, fifth edition, By Fritjof Capra, investigates the parallels between physicists and mystics and the reluctance of science to acknowledge these intersections. Through his lifework in physics, ecology, business, and politics, Capra arrived at a foundational philosophy that everything we experience is of living systems, from people and the natural world, to economic systems and social structures, conceding that an awareness of connection with an encompassing All, becomes evident through a mystical scientific approach, or Metaphysics. While studying theories of mathematics, graphs, and diagrams as a physicist, he had an epiphany on a beach one day as he acknowledged the vibrational particles of atoms and molecules dancing in the water, sand, cosmic rays of the sun and of everything around him, through the influence of his practices in Eastern mysticism, as the Hindu Lord of dance, Shiva. By connecting quantum theory with aspects of Zen teachings, profound understandings about the working of the physical world unraveled for him. Essentially, his book translates the findings about the subatomic world of Modern Physics through the lens of Hindu, Buddhist, and Tao philosophies. (Capra 11-13)

Ervin Laszlo offers an interpretation of this interconnected field of Eastern philosophy through the language of Western physics in, “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything”. Akashic in Sanskrit is translated as ether space and as an informational record of all that is, which is accessible through consciousness. Laszlo explains how physicists have moved from a foundation of belief of particles as the atomic building block, to one of quanta, or radiant energy connected in vibrating filaments as explained in string and super string theories. Beyond this, the new physics of field theory emergent from the quantum vacuum, which can lead the view from energy and matter to another element that is neither; that is information, an informed Universe, as termed by David Bohm as in-formation. In this terminology, it is defined not as constructed by humans or any being but is a fundamental aspect of nature that builds all that exists from simple to complex. (Laszlo 2-3)

The dissection of the Akashic Field interpreted through science by Ervin Laszlo, begins with the 1955 findings of Hugh Everett, that would require 10,100 Universes to address the puzzle of Quantum Mechanics, in which a particle is in a superposition of all possible states until it is observed, interacted with, or measured by an instrument. (Laszlo 19-20) Laszlo goes onto explain the anomalies of coherence and correlation in the findings of quantum physics. As coherence is explained like a synchronization of harmony among the waves making up rhythms and processes, an underlying correlation of unity in the natural world is shifting paradigms in multiple branches of science. (Laszlo 24-25) Coherence, as discussed by Laszlo, is seen through harmonic ratios that reappear through the cosmos, in repeating constants and patterns, and in the uniformities found throughout structures, from micro- to macro-. In accounting for some of the confounding questions that have been introduced to the Big Bang theory by quantum physics, the concept of a Meta-verse, meta- signifying what is beyond or behind, that which our personal Universe emerged from, has been theorized as a fitting remedy. Thus, the evolving cosmos in which coherence and correlation of our Universe is observed, is informed by a more advanced, evolved, and complex Metaverse. (Laszlo, 27-30)