Refuting baseless accusations of other forum
-
--------Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
Tell me, what kind of services do we offer, and what kind of things do we sell?
Buddhist forums are only for pure interest in dharma and a place for sharing for Buddhists.Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
If there are any doubts, you can always ask here
As far as I know, no Buddhist centres asks for money (other than what is necessary/for dharma projects)
Tell me if I am wrong.
For my dharma centre for example, all dharma books and dharma CDs are free for distribution. We do not need to donate anything at all and never ask anyone to donate - it is up to the person. Part of the reason is because my dharma teacher is still working - she actually donates quite a lot of her month salary to the upkeeping of the dharma centre.
BTW, I have never brought anyone from my forum to my dharma centre before, except Maggot. Do you all contact him?
[b]p.s My Buddhist forum is not affiliated with my dharma centre, I don't even think my dharma teacher visited my forum before[/b]
Oh ya, pls be invited to come to my dharma centre on Saturdays, 7.30 p.m to 10 p.m. No money needed.
We have chanting, meditation sessions, dharma talks, and sometimes other stuff according to schedule like watching dharma transmission of other teachers from VCD, or other videos. This is a personal invitation 
This is the first time I publicly ask people to come to my dharma centre
Because I am no dharma teacher, I am not enlightened, and what I can do here is only share facts and knowledge. It is always good to have dharma discussions, but to have a true spiritual guide is more important -
where is ur centre?
-
i also never bring ppl to dharma centre
ppl here are passive one lah -
That forum?
When I knew of who they are and what is their real intentions...I deleted all my posts in there and cease to post anything in there -
Linyu, http://www.humanbliss.com.sg/knowledge_activity.htm
JenChen Buddhist Blissful Culture Centre
Contact: 6292 1800 / 6743 1030 (11.00 am - 6.00pm)
Address: No. 30 Citiraya Centre, Geylang Lorong 27, #05-01
It is across the street from Aljunied MRT, and beside the Manjusri Library.
We have adult, teens, and children class. We have also started a cell group among the teens recently
I will scan the weekly schedule and timetable and post it here another day. -
[double post]
-
Its a clone forum....You dont need crictical thinking to arrive at that conclusion.Originally posted by maggot:That forum?
When I knew of who they are and what is their real intentions...I deleted all my posts in there and cease to post anything in there -
Let's not be hostile to each otherOriginally posted by maggot:That forum?
When I knew of who they are and what is their real intentions...I deleted all my posts in there and cease to post anything in there -
What you mean by clone forum?Originally posted by shade343:Its a clone forum....You dont need crictical thinking to arrive at that conclusion.
Anyway, I think that forum is actually quite good as it offers perspective from all sides I do go there and post sometimes. I hope they do not get offended by this topic, as this is not a topic to insult the other forum.
I just wish to clarify a few things here and issue a 'personal invitation' to all those interested out there.
Peace! -
Originally posted by shade343:Its a clone forum....You dont need crictical thinking to arrive at that conclusion.
-
This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
Let them be able and upright,
Straightforward and gentle in speech.
Humble and not conceited,
Contented and easily satisfied.
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skillful,
Not proud and demanding in nature.
Let them not do the slightest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in saftey,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.
Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding.
By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.
- Metta Sutta -
I saw a documentary about a Ang Moh monk whose brain was scanned and i think it reveals his brain has produced new neurons... Probably an effect of accumulative meditation.
So my question is: does meditation really help to control one's inner state of mind? -
hahaha , new findingsOriginally posted by excused:I saw a documentary about a Ang Moh monk whose brain was scanned and i think it reveals his brain has produced new neurons... Probably an effect of accumulative meditation.
So my question is: does meditation really help to control one's inner state of mind?
yes
meditation does calms a person down
i do meditation b4
but not into the insight meditation
only breathing and contemplation meditation -
Originally posted by excused:
I definitely believe so. What are the type of meditation?
[b]I saw a documentary about a Ang Moh monk whose brain was scanned and i think it reveals his brain has produced new neurons... Probably an effect of accumulative meditation.
So my question is: does meditation really help to control one's inner state of mind?[/b]
1. Meditation on Mindfulness
2. Meditation on Concentration
Mindfulness
It is just like watching a movie. For example in movies, there are 24 frames of picture per second. Similarly, our thought process is made up of a series or trains of process. In Mindfulness, you watch the process and the gap in-between each process just like the gap between each carriage. You become aware of it but you are not attach to it. That is you don't judge and say this is a good thought or happy thought that I should have etc...
Concentration
It is just like a playing with a magnifying glass. If you concentrate the sun rays on a magnifying glass, you can burn the dry leaves or paper. You can also brings the picture to show it bigger. So if you are concentrated, you can magnify the gap of the in-between thought process.
With Mindfulness and Concentration, you can become aware of each thought process and being mindful not to have any comment or attachment to each thought process.
On a lower level, it also help you to see and judge the type of action you should take for each thought if you are able to stop at the gap. eg when you are angry you may hit someone.
On a higher level, it can lead to wisdom and even enlightenment.
These are the teaching I learned from my dad's teacher. -
From our Taiwanese forum moderator (who is also highly enlightenedOriginally posted by excused:I saw a documentary about a Ang Moh monk whose brain was scanned and i think it reveals his brain has produced new neurons... Probably an effect of accumulative meditation.
So my question is: does meditation really help to control one's inner state of mind?),
Original Topic: Brainwave study of the enlightened ones
I am not an An Hsiang Chan practitioner, as it is based on Taiwan. But generally, there are many other tests that are suggestive of the same thing.Originally posted by namelessness:I used to do brainwave research on An-Hsiang ChÂ’an practitioners for a period of time. Out of 7 subjects who are enlightened, I found out that their brainwaves are somewhat different from others. First of all, their main frequencies all appears at the lower Alpha or Delta range that indicates they are more relaxed. Secondly, bandwidth of the main frequency is much narrower that indicates more order and concentration. Thirdly, overall brainwave rhythm is more consistent that indicates higher mind stability. And finally, synchronization of both hemispheres is higher that indicates better coordination.
What surprised me is that one subject’s brainwave even showed the pattern of Schumann resonance(See figure below). He told me that he was in the state of deep An-Hsiang while measuring. I guess perhaps that is the state of mind what the the Chinese called “Men in one with the Heaven”.
The above research was incomplete because no comparison was made to others other than An-Hsiang Ch'an practitioners. ItÂ’s purely my personal interest and I was not trained in that area. It was only good enough for me to be deeply involved in the practice of An-Hsiang ChÂ’an. And the research was stopped because I knew that current scientific progress is not advanced enough to prove anything yet. We could only get a small glimpse of it.Originally posted by An Eternal Now:
Here is what I found:
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:zoyxKHzSNEMJ:www.skyhero.com/bininst.pdf+brainwave+of+meditation+alpha+stage&hl=en&client=firefox-a
The four major brain wave divisions:
[b]Beta: Beta is associated with normal, waking consciousness while our attention directed towards our external environment. They are also present during stress and anxiety. Beta waves oscillate between approximately 14 and 30 Hz (cycles per second).
Alpha: Alpha occur when we are relaxed and not thinking about anything in particular. Alpha waves are also associated with a calm and focused mental state. Alpha waves oscillate between 8and 14 Hz.
Theta: Theta is a state of deep relaxation and is often associated with bursts of creative insight; sleep learning and vivid mental imagery. It is also found in more advanced Meditators. Theta waves oscillate between 4 and 8 Hz.
Delta: Delta is the slowest of brainwave activity and is found during deep, dreamless sleep and sometimes in very experienced Meditators. They oscillate between .5 and 4 Hz.
NOTE: The brainwave states are an indication of the most dominant patterns during
any given mental activity. The brain is a dynamic, living organ. During these dominant
patterns, other frequencies still exist and there is no exact, single frequency that our
brain operates on.
Many more articles on Meditation and the Brain: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan2.html & http://www.crystalinks.com/medbrain.html[/b] -
Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A05
Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
Scientists used to believe the opposite -- that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and "neuroplasticity."
Davidson says his newest results from the meditation study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, take the concept of neuroplasticity a step further by showing that mental training through meditation (and presumably other disciplines) can itself change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain.
The new findings are the result of a long, if unlikely, collaboration between Davidson and Tibet's Dalai Lama, the world's best-known practitioner of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama first invited Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson's innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks' meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson's lab.
The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners to Davidson's lab to have them hooked up for electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training.
The monks and volunteers were fitted with a net of 256 electrical sensors and asked to meditate for short periods. Thinking and other mental activity are known to produce slight, but detectable, bursts of electrical activity as large groupings of neurons send messages to each other, and that's what the sensors picked up. Davidson was especially interested in measuring gamma waves, some of the highest-frequency and most important electrical brain impulses.
Both groups were asked to meditate, specifically on unconditional compassion. Buddhist teaching describes that state, which is at the heart of the Dalai Lama's teaching, as the "unrestricted readiness and availability to help living beings." The researchers chose that focus because it does not require concentrating on particular objects, memories or images, and cultivates instead a transformed state of being.
Davidson said that the results unambiguously showed that meditation activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of the waves through the brain was far better organized and coordinated than in the students. The meditation novices showed only a slight increase in gamma wave activity while meditating, but some of the monks produced gamma wave activity more powerful than any previously reported in a healthy person, Davidson said.
The monks who had spent the most years meditating had the highest levels of gamma waves, he added. This "dose response" -- where higher levels of a drug or activity have greater effect than lower levels -- is what researchers look for to assess cause and effect.
In previous studies, mental activities such as focus, memory, learning and consciousness were associated with the kind of enhanced neural coordination found in the monks. The intense gamma waves found in the monks have also been associated with knitting together disparate brain circuits, and so are connected to higher mental activity and heightened awareness, as well.
Davidson's research is consistent with his earlier work that pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex as a brain region associated with happiness and positive thoughts and emotions. Using functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) on the meditating monks, Davidson found that their brain activity -- as measured by the EEG -- was especially high in this area.
Davidson concludes from the research that meditation not only changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite possibly produces permanent changes. That finding, he said, is based on the fact that the monks had considerably more gamma wave activity than the control group even before they started meditating. A researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Jon Kabat-Zinn, came to a similar conclusion several years ago.
Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities are now testing some of the same monks on different aspects of their meditation practice: their ability to visualize images and control their thinking. Davidson is also planning further research.
"What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one," he said. In time, "we'll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously." -
Other brain scans on Buddhists: Buddhists are Happier! (this study is not only limited to specific meditators but all buddhists in general)
Personally, I practise the Anapanasati Meditation (Mindfulness of Breathing). I am able to attain a much more peaceful state and sometimes experience rupture. Unfortunately I haven't got time to meditate these days. My dharma teacher recommends 30 minutes of meditation each day (shorter than that may not be enough to enter a deep state of one pointedness for beginner).
But actually, Buddhist practise is not only in sitting meditation.
True samadhi can be experienced every moment.
Without 'self' oneness is immediately attained.
There is only and always this Isness. Subject has always been the Object of observation.
This is true samadhi without entering trance.
Completely understanding this truth. It is the true way towards liberation.
Every sound, sensation, arising of consciousness is so clear, real and vivid.
Every moment is samadhi.
The tip of the fingers in contact with the keyboard, mysteriously created the
contact consciousness, what is it? Feel the entirety of beingness and realness.
There is no subject...just Isness.
No thought, there really is no thought and no 'self'. Only Pure Awareness. - my friend Thusness, a highly enlightened meditator -
A lot of the forums in sgforums, pure nonsense one...dont be bothered...
-
Jen Chen Buddhist Blissful Culture Centre weekly schedule (adult): http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs50&d=05414&f=JenchenAdult2005_1.jpg
-
This Saturday there is no dharma talk, only a chanting session (Amitabha Sutra) and silent meditation.
-
Yesterdays' session was great
After meditation we had a Q&A session with our dharma teacher on Sitting Meditation. So some of them queried on various problems and issues, experiences on meditation. Some of them also shared their own personal experiences (I suspect some of them are quite experienced) and asked on various stages of Samadhis and luminous state. The most comprehensive talk on meditation 'samadhi' stages so far.
