Introduction
by Eugene Taylor, Ph.D.

| Next >
 

 

Some Definitions

Meditation—that great and mysterious subject which in the past has always conjured up the image of the solitary Asian ascetic sitting in deep trance—is fast appearing in unexpected places throughout modern American culture. Secretaries are doing it as part of their daily noon yoga classes.  Preadolescent teenagers dropped off at the YMCA by their mothers on a Saturday morning are learning it as part of their karate training. Truck drivers and housewives in the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center are practicing a combination of Hindu yoga and Buddhist insight meditation to control hypertension.  Star athletes prepare themselves for a demanding basketball game with centering techniques they learned in Zen. [1]

Dhyana is the generic Sanskrit term for meditation, which in the Yoga Sutras refers to both the act of inward contemplation in the broadest sense and more technically to the intermediate state between mere attention to an object (dharana) and complete absorption in it (samadhi). [2] The earliest known reference to such practice on the Indian subcontinent occurs on one of the seals, a figure seated in the lotus posture, found in the ruins of the pre-Aryan civilizations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro which existed prior to 1500 BCE. Most of the orthodox Hindu schools of philosophy derive their meditation techniques from yoga, but superimpose their own theoretical understanding of consciousness onto the results of the practice. [3]

Meditation is also referred to as a spiritual practice in China. Chinese forms of meditation have their origins in the early roots of popular Taoism which existed long before the codification of Taoism as a formal philosophy during the seventh century, B.C.. However, there is no concrete evidence to prove that meditation first arose in Hindu culture and then spread elsewhere. Thus, for the time being the original meditative traditions in China and India should be considered as separate and indigenous. To further complicate the issue, analogies between meditative states and trance consciousness suggest that even earlier precursors to the Asian meditative arts can be found in shamanic cultures such as those in Siberia and Africa. [4]

As for modern developments, in trying to formulate a definition of meditation, a useful rule of thumb is to consider all meditative techniques to be culturally embedded. This means that any specific technique cannot be understood unless it is considered in the context of some particular spiritual tradition, situated in a specific historical time period, or codified in a specific text according to the philosophy of some particular individual. [5] Thus, to refer to Hindu meditation or Buddhist meditation is not enough, since the cultural traditions from which a particular kind of meditation comes are quite different and even within a single tradition differ in complex ways. The specific name of a school of thought or a teacher or the title of a specific text is often quite important for identifying a particular type of meditation.  Vipassana, or insight meditation, for instance, as practiced in the United States is derived from the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, and is usually associated with the teachings of the Burmese monk Mahasi Sayadaw; Transcendental Meditation is associated exclusively with the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose tradition is Vedantic Hinduism; and so on.

The attempt to abstract out the primary characteristics of meditation from a grab bag of traditions in order to come to some purified essence or generic definition is a uniquely Western and relatively recent phenomenon.  This tendency should be considered, however powerful and convincing its claim as an objective, universal, and value-free method, to be an artifact of one culture attempting to comprehend another that is completely different. [6]

At the same time, however, Western styles of meditation have long existed in the form of contemplative prayer, and contemporary interest in Asian practices has kindled a resurgence of interest in Western parallels. Orison, the repetitive and devotional meditation on Christ, repetition of the Holy Names, the spiritual teachings of St. Ignatius, and the Eastern Orthodox practice of the philokalia are examples from the Western contemplative tradition that come nearest to meditation as it has been cultivated in Asian countries.  Indeed there is an unbroken tradition of mysticism which can be said to embody forms of meditative practice in the West—from the NeoPlatonists such as Plotinus, through the medieval mystics both early and late—Johannes Eriugena, St. Bonaventure, John of the Cross, St. Theresa, St. Bernard of Clarivaux—followed by such personalities as Robert Parsons, Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Emanuel Swedenborg, to modern Christian contemplatives such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton, and now Schlomo Carlbach, Bede Griffiths, and David Steindl-Rast. [7]

But for purposes of carrying on a coherent discussion about the subject, while mystical awakening can be found in some form in all cultures, meditation per se should be taken as a uniquely Asian phenomenon which, wholesale, has only recently come to the attention of the West. In its new Western context, particularly in the United States, however, it has undergone a significant reformulation. In the US it has become indigenized, so that now one can say that Asian forms of meditation have become thoroughly American. [8]

The Americanization of Meditation

Ideas about the Eastern meditative traditions began seeping into American popular culture even before the American Revolution through the various sects of European occult Christianity that transplanted themselves to such new settlements as Germantown and Ephrata in William Penn's "Holy Experiment," which he named Pennsylvania.  Early framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were influenced by teachings from mystical Sufism and the Jewish Kaballah through their membership in secret fraternities such as the Rosicrucians.

Asian ideas then came pouring in during the era of the transcendentalists, especially between the 1840s and the 1880s, largely influencing the American traditions of spiritualism, theosophy, and mental healing. The Hindu conception of Brahman was reformulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson into the New England vision of God as the Oversoul, while Henry David Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience arose out of his reading of Hindu scriptures on meditation, yoga, and non-violence. At the same time, spiritualists—those who believed that science had established communication with the dead through the medium of the group seance—also dabbled in Asian ideas. Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the International Theosophical Society, is usually credited with introducing Hindu conceptions of discarnate entities into American spiritualist circles. In this context, the Theosophists also translated Hindu texts on meditation and for the first time made them available in popular form to English-speaking audiences. Similarly, New Thought practitioners—followers of the healer Phineas P. Quimby—also included meditation techniques such as guided visualizations and the mantra into their healing regimes. 

In general, by the late nineteenth century Americans appropriated Asian ideas to fit their own optimistic, pragmatic, and eclectic understanding of inner experience. This usually meant adapting ideas such as reincarnation and karma into a very liberal and heavily Christianized, but nevertheless secular, psychology of character development that was closer to the philosophy of transcendentalism than to doctrines in any of the Christian denominations. (Today, the same standard for interpreting Asian ideas persists but in the form of a neo-transcendentalist, Jungian, and counter-cultural definition of higher consciousness.)

The World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, was the landmark event that increased Western awareness of meditation. This was the first time that Western audiences on American soil received Asian spiritual teachings from Asians themselves.  Thereafter, Swami Vivekananda taught meditation to the spiritualists and New Thought practitioners in New Hampshire and went on to found various Vedanta ashrams around the country in his wake. Anagarika Dharmapala lectured at Harvard on Theravada Buddhist meditation in 1904; Abdul Baha followed with a 235-day tour of the US teaching the Islamic principles of Bahai, and Soyen Shaku toured in 1907 teaching Zen and the principles of Mahayana Buddhism. 

By then, the idea of comparative religions had caught on as an academic field of inquiry in the universities. Following the Sacred Books of the East Series, edited by F. Max Mueller, and major translations of the Theravada scriptures by the Pali Text Society in England, the Harvard Oriental Series appeared after 1900 under the editorship of Charles Rockwell Lanman.  Meanwhile, the Cambridge Conferences on Comparative Religions, carried on by Mrs. Ole Bull in her Brattle Street home near Harvard University, and the Greenacre School of Comparative Religions, operated by Sarah Farmer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had been bringing ideas about meditation to interested New Englanders since the late 1890s.

During the 1920s, American popular culture was introduced to the meditative practices of the Hindu yogi Paramahansa Yogananda.  Gurdjieff, the Georgian mystic who had toured the US in 1924, was spreading the gospel of meditation in action to American expatriates in Paris by the 1930s. A young Hindu trained in theosophy named Jidhu Krishnamurti had been touring the US around that same time. Settling in Southern California in the 1940s, Krishnamurti would soon be joined by English émigrés fleeing the European war, such as Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and Aldous Huxley, who were themselves writers and practitioners of the meditative arts.

During World War Two, Huxley, Heard, and others became disciples of the meditation teacher Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Together, they produced such influential books as Vedanta for the West and assisted in the popular dissemination of texts such the Hindu Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras. Meanwhile, on the east coast of the United States, Swami Akhilananda of Boston frequently met with leading university intellectuals in psychology, philosophy, and religion, including Gordon Allport, Peter Bertocci, William Ernest Hocking, and George H. Williams. One product of this liason was Akhilananda's Hindu Psychology (1946), with an introduction by Gordon Allport, a text on the philosophy and psychology of Vedantic meditation.

Another momentous event introducing Asian ideas to the West was the arrival in 1941 of Henrich Zimmer, Indologist and Sanskrit scholar, who had been a friend and confidant of C. G. Jung. Zimmer brought the young Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist and folklorist, to the attention of the newly formed Bollingen Foundation. Subsequently, the Foundation  produced the English translation of Jung's collected works, as well as numerous books by Zimmer, which Campbell edited, among other titles. Perhaps the most influential product of this endeavor was the Bollingen edition of the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes. The I Ching was a Taoist oracle book revered in Chinese religious history as one of the four great Confucian classics. Translated by Richard Wilhelm with a preface by Jung, the work has continued to enjoy immense popularity since its first publication in 1947.  

The 1950s represented a major expansion of interest in both meditation and Asian philosophy.  Frederick Speigelberg, a professor of comparative religions at Stanford, opened the California Institute of Asian Studies in 1951, which highlighted the work of the modern Hindu mystic and social reformer Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Alan Watts, a student of Zen and former Episcopalian minister, soon joined the faculty and within a few years produced such best-selling books as Psychotherapy East and West and The Meaning of Zen. 

It was also during this time that Michael Murphy first came under the influence of Speigelberg, was introduced to the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, and began the practice of meditation. With the assistance of Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, Willis Harman, Aldous Huxley, George Leonard and others, Murphy would soon collaborate with Richard Price to launch Esalen Institute, which quickly became the world's premier growth center for human potential.  

During the same period of the early 1950s, with the help of Watts,  D. T. Suzuki came from Japan to California and introduced Zen to a new generation of Americans. Suzuki settled in New York, where he accepted a visiting professorship at Columbia. His seminars were open to the public and subsequently had a wide influence.  Thomas Merton visited him.  The neo-Freudians such as Karen Horney and Erich Fromm were his students. Suzuki even took Horney on a three-month tour of the religious shrines in Japan. John Cage heard him, as did J. D. Salinger. Soon, Suzuki was profiled in The New York Times, and many of his previous works on the history and philosophy of Zen, published in relative obscurity, were translated and reprinted for American audiences. Zen, embraced by the beat generation, had suddenly come to the West.

What occurred next opened an entirely new era of popular interest in meditation. This was the confluence of three major cultural events in the 1960s: the psychedelic revolution, the Communist invasion of Asia, and the rise of the American counter-culture, especially in terms of widespread opposition to the Vietnam War.

By the early 1960s, mind expanding drugs were being taken by a significant segment of the post war baby boom, a generation which numbered some 40 million people born between 1945 and 1955 who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  This led young people in their teens and twenties to collectively open the doors of inward perception, experiment with alternative lifestyles, and question established cultural norms in Western society. An entire generation soon established their own alternative institutions which began to operate in defiance of traditional cultural forms still dominated by the ideology of their parents' generation. Subsequently, this was to have important political, economic, religious, and social consequences in the West, especially in the United States as enduring but alternative cultural norms began to take root in the younger generation of the American middle class. 

At the same time, the increased Soviet influence in India, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Communist Chinese takeover of Tibet and Mongolia, and the increased political influence of Chinese Communism in Korea and Southeast Asia were key forces that collectively set the stage for an influx of Asian spiritual teachers to the West.  An entirely new generation of them appeared on the American scene and they found a willing audience of devotees within the American counter-culture.  Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, Swami Satchitananda, Guru Maharaji, Kerpal Singh, Nayanaponika Thera, Swami Rama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Muktananda, Sri Bagwan Rujneesh, Pir Viliyat Kahn, and the Karmapa were but a few of the names that found followers in the United States. While there remain numerous contemporary voices, such as Guru Mai, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Maharishi, and Sogyal Rinpoche, there can be little doubt, historically, that the most well known and influential figure in this pantheon today remains Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

As a result of such personalities, there has been a tremendous growth in meditation as a spiritual practice in the United States from the 1960s to the present. This phenomenon remains largely underestimated by the pundits of American high culture who see themselves as the main spokespersons for the European rationalist tradition in the New World. In the first place, from a socio-cultural standpoint, it is clear that from the 1920s to the 1960s, Freudian psychoanalysis was the primary socially acceptable avenue through which artists, writers, and aficionados of modernism gained access to their own interior unconscious processes. For a new and younger generation of visionaries, however, psychoanalysis was soon replaced by psychedelic drugs as the primary vehicle for opening the internal doors of perception. This occurred as a result of experiments undertaken in military and university laboratories associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA was interested in developing mind-control drugs for potential use in psychological warfare. At the same time that the CIA began testing substances such as LSD on unsuspecting populations of soldiers, businessmen, and college students, some of these chemicals came into the hands of the scientific and medical community. Researchers themselves began ingesting mescaline and LSD. Soon, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the psychiatrists' couches in Hollywood to the hallowed halls of Harvard University, the youthful and educated elite of the American middle class began to experiment with psychedelics in ever-increasing numbers.

The counter-culture movement that followed was considered a revolution in consciousness, driven by mind-expanding drugs, as well as defined by spiritual teachings from Asian cultures, each creating the conditions for expansion of the other. As the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s subsided for the post-war baby boomers maturing into the 1970s, meditation, and all that it implied, then became fixed as an enduring ethic of that generation. The belief was that meditative practices not only cleansed consciousness of psychedelics, and confirmed the commitment to pursuing alternative lifestyles, but they also informed the socio-cultural direction that the lives of many young people would soon take in establishing new and permanent forms of lifetime spiritual practice. Now, after thirty years, these developments have produced advanced Western practitioners, who themselves are qualified senseis, roshis, swamis, and tulkus. We known them as Ram Dass, Sivananda Radha, Jiyu Kennet Roshi, Maureen Freidgood, Jack Kornfield, Robert Frager, Richard Baker Roshi, and others.  They have begun to teach these Asian traditions to Western audiences. In so doing, they are also partipating in their modification by forming new lineages of meditation practice that, while informed by Asian influences, turn out to be uniquely Western. Such teachings are already being transmitted to a second and third generation of younger people in the United States and Europe as well, altering irrecoverably the shape and direction of spiritual life in contemporary Western culture.

Not the least of these influences has been renewed interest in the Western contemplative traditions.  Examination of Western mystics had increased dramatically since the 1960s. Witness, for instance, establishment of the Classics in Western Spirituality Series, published by the Paulist Press, or the appearance of the newly formed Mysticism Study Group within the American Academy of Religion. At the same time, popular books on Christian meditation are clearly linked to the spiritual awakening that has occurred in the counter-culture. Avery Brooke's Learning and Teaching Christian Meditation (1975), Joan Cooper's Guided Meditation and the Teachings of Jesus (1982), and Swami Rama's Meditation in Christianity (1983) are but a few of the titles that have enjoyed continuous printings since they first came out. There is also a case to be made for the idea that the fundamentalist revival in the Christian right has been a direct reaction to the larger upsurge of spirituality that has occurred in the American counter-culture.

Perhaps the most significant opportunity to arise out of the new stream of Western meditation practitioners has been heightened awareness of Asian cultures, especially in terms of their unique integrity and outlook. While the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western European and Anglo-American tradition continues to export its beliefs and values into other cultures on a grand scale, the Asian worldview is also fast asserting itself as a competing economic, political, and social force. But is a clash of world epistemologies inevitable?  Perhaps. Meanwhile, Westerners within a new and younger generation have appeared who are fast becoming skilled interpreters of these non-Western traditions as legitimate worldviews in their own right. Their vehicle, the practice of meditation, could, instead of the predicted clash of cultures, potentially set the stage for an exchange of ideas between East and West that may yet turn out to be unprecedented in the history Western thought.

Meditation as a Scientific Study

Within this context scientific interest in meditation has grown significantly over the past quarter of a century.  This has occurred partly on the justification that science might be able to show us objectively what meditation is and what its effects are, but also because the scientific method represents one of the few ways in which our culture can peer into the  depths of another culture so radically different from our own. To objectively study meditative practices, however, requires that they be taken out of their subjective context.  One quarter claims that science produces objective truth independent of cultures, while another maintains that the scientific attitude has its own implied philosophical context, so all we are really doing is taking the subject out of its original frame of reference and putting it into one we can more easily understand.  The methods and theory surrounding the practice of meditation techniques thereby undergo a radical change.

According to this second view, no more quintessential example exists of the Westernization of an Asian idea than the scientific study of meditation.  Science, the product of Aristotelian thinking and the European rationalist enlightenment, now turns its attention to the intuitive transformation of personality through awakened consciousness (and other such Asian meanings of the term enlightenment). This means that the faculties of logic and sense perception, hallmarks of the scientific method, are now being trained on the personality correlates of intuition and insight, hallmarks of the traditional inward sciences of the East.

To grasp what meditation is has proven to be no easy task. The underlying and usually hidden philosophical assumptions of traditional, rationalist science do not value the intuitive. They do not acknowledge the reality of the transcendent or subscribe to the concept of higher states of consciousness, let alone, in the strictest sense, even admit to the possible existence of unconscious forces active in cognitive acts of perception. Meditation, therefore, is a topic that characteristically would not be taken up by mainstream scientists.  One would expect that research funding would be scarce, peer review difficult, and publication channels limited. The evidence shows that, at least until recently, this has been exactly the case. 

The essential difficulty here is not just the reformulation of meditation techniques to fit the dictates of the scientific method, but rather what might be called a deeper, more subtle, and potentially more transformative clash of world epistemologies. It is not simply that meditation techniques have been difficult to measure but rather that, in the past, meditation has largely been an implicitly forbidden subject of scientific research. Now, however, major changes are currently underway within basic science that presage not only further evolution of the scientific method but also changes in the way science is viewed in modern culture. An unprecedented new era of interdisciplinary communication within the subfields of the natural sciences, a fundamental shift from physics to biology, and the cognitive neuroscience revolution have liberalized attitudes toward the study of meditation and related subjects. Meanwhile, the popular revolution in modern culture grounded in spirituality and consciousness is having a growing impact on traditional institutions such as medicine, religion, mental health, corporate management strategies, concepts of marriage, child rearing, and the family, and more.  Increasingly, educated people want to know much more about meditation, while our traditional institutions of high culture remain unprepared as adequate interpreters.

The First Edition

As a result, when it first appeared, predictably, The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation drew wide attention within the meditation community and eventually sold out. Its authors, Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan, leaders in the American growth center movement and themselves seasoned meditators, presented their bibliography as a project of the Center for Exceptional Functioning, a newly founded program within Esalen Institute. Esalen, which Murphy had co-founded with Richard Price in 1961, was, for many, the premier growth center for personal development in the United States.

Interest in meditation actually began out of the earliest programs at Esalen. Alan Watts, the well-known interpreter of Zen to the West, and Al Huang, a Chinese Tai Chi master of movement meditation, both taught meditation-related workshops when Esalen first opened. Throughout the years, figures such as Suzuki Roshi, Baker Roshi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Lama Anagarika Govinda, and various Tibetan Buddhist tulkus introduced different forms of meditation into the growth center environment and helped to shape the basic theme of the Esalen program. This theme Murphy conceived as nothing less than the transformation of personality.

The immediate impulse that launched the bibliographic project, however, was publication of Murphy's speculative fiction Jacob Atabet (1977). This was a tale, set in modern San Francisco, about a writer, Darwin Fall, who had been investigating various miraculous events for the Catholic Church in Rome and doing research into all kinds of transformative phenomena. Fall meets and begins to chronicle the story of Jacob Atabet, who is actually in the process of transforming every cell of his body into the higher spiritual light. Atabet, for his part, finds in Fall someone who at last understands what he is going through. In the course of the novel, Atabet needs to be instructed in the contents of the massive text summarizing Fall's not yet complete research. The monumental tome, given to Atabet in outline form as a work in progress in that fictional account, later actually became Michael Murphy's voluminous The Future of the Body (1992).

Meanwhile, scientific publications and other material collected in the course of putting together The Future of the Body became the basis for the first edition of the annotated bibliography in meditation research, which appeared in 1988. Before the advent of the revolution in personal computers, before managed care took over the health care industry, and before the full impact of rapid developments in the cognitive neurosciences were felt, Murphy and Donovan had collected a database of some 10,000 articles on various aspects of human potential and higher consciousness. Out of this cache they extracted 1253 scientific and literary studies on meditation which formed the core of the first edition. They introduced their bibliography with a series of essays to make a statement on the physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects of meditative practice as was understood in the Western literature. To this analysis they brought a meditator's reading of both the Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, which provided insightful comparisons to the slow but steadily growing study of meditation according to the methods of Western science.

The first edition clearly indicated that the scientific study of meditation was fast becoming a growth industry. In the wake of its publication, Esalen, in cooperation with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and with financial assistance from Marius Robinson, launched an annual series of invitation-only conferences on advances in meditation research. These conferences, held annually at Esalen from 1988 to 1996, brought practitioners of meditation together with scholars in comparative religions and scientists interested in experimental and clinical investigation in order to generate cross-disciplinary dialogue about the experience and the effect of meditative practice. One fruit of those conferences has been this second edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography.

The Present Update

In the eight years since the first publication of their work, basic experimental studies on the subject of meditation have steadily increased, while outcome research in clinical settings has grown at an even faster rate. At the same time, when compared to what had gone on in the field in the fifty years preceding 1988, the total rate of increase between 1988 and 1996 in articles in scholarly and scientific journals as well as trade books has been nothing short of spectacular.

The second edition, in keeping with the first, chronicles mainly scientific and scholarly works, revealing several key trends and changes. Since 1988, not only has government sponsored research increased, but meditation is now a category on the National Library of Medicine's list of computer search subjects. There also has been an increase in the number of studies reported by researchers outside the US, especially from Asian countries. While more studies are being undertaken overall, the majority of research programs appear to be conducted by practitioners of meditation who are also skilled in the techniques of modern experimental methods. Finally, and perhaps most important from the standpoint of basic science, investigation has moved from the level of gross physiology to more detailed points of biochemistry and the voluntary control of internal states. From a philosophical standpoint, these studies have also raised a number of issues about the role of spiritual experiences in both psychology and medicine.

TM and the TM-Sidhi Project

As Murphy and Donovan pointed out in their first edition, and as the present update of their work has confirmed, the most prolific research on meditation in the United States in sheer numbers of published studies has been and continues to be on Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation is the specific introductory program taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a Vedantic meditation teacher originally from Madhyapradesh, India, to thousands of disciples, most of whom are in the West. Meanwhile, the TM-Sidhi program (an anglicized version of the Sanskrit siddhi, meaning supernormal powers) represents more advanced training in the Vedantic interpretation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.  The experimental research program into the effects of TM is carried on largely at Maharishi Mahesh International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa (now called the Maharishi International School of Management), but there are other centers and individuals engaged in TM research as well. 

Over the past two decades, David Orme-Johnson, one of the key investigators at MIU, and his colleagues have complied and edited 508 studies on TM in five volumes under the title Scientific Research on Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi Program: Collected Papers (Orme-Johnson and Farrow, 1977; Chalmers, Clements, Schenkluhn and Weinless, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c; Wallace,Orme-Johnson and Dillbeck, 1990). These studies are arranged approximately in chronological order in each volume under the headings of physiology, psychology, sociology, and then either theoretical or review oriented papers.  Experimental studies reported are about evenly divided between articles in refereed journals and those from TM conferences and in-house TM publications.

The content of the collected papers indicates that, historically, TM researchers began by positing the existence of a fourth state of consciousness—a hypometabolic waking state which their physiological measures suggested was distinctly different from either normal waking consciousness, the state of sleep with dreams, or the state of deep sleep without dreams. Studies then began to show effects when TM was applied to medical conditions such as asthma, angina, and high blood pressure. Personality variables became a focus of research. These included measures of intellectual problem-solving ability, thinking and recall, creativity, field independence, sense of self-esteem, and self-actualization. Researchers then moved into applied social situations, looking at the effects of teaching TM to the police, the military, and such populations as juvenile offenders, incarcerated adults, high school students, and athletes, as well as managers in the corporate environment. Meanwhile, more subtle biochemical measures of blood chemistry were also undertaken. These included endocrine levels, effects on neurotransmitters such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin, and the measurement of altered cell metabolism. TM was also examined in the context of various psychiatric disorders.

By the late 1970s studies began to appear testing the abilities of advanced meditators in the TM-Sidhi program on numerous variables during deep meditation and during what they described as yogic-flying. Along with individual studies, TM researchers also began reporting evidence for an inverse correlation between the amount of meditation going on and sociological variables such as the local and national crime rate for a given period. This has been labeled the Maharishi Effect. Finally, there are numerous papers on TM and world peace.

After almost a quarter of a century of scientific investigation, TM researchers now describe their findings in theoretical terms referring to "Vedic psychology" and "Vedic science." Their system clearly acknowledges the reality of the transcendent and subserves materialist methods of Western scientific investigation under the larger domain of spiritual experience within the philosophical and religious context of Hindu monism.  Their expertise with certain aspects of Western science has become quite sophisticated, however, creating an altogether new avenue of investigation at the interface between science and spirituality.  In the new and more open scientific climate toward research on the subject of meditation, TM researchers have successfully been able to master the blind peer review process and were recently awarded some $2,500,000 in research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Their studies will look at the large scale application of TM in the treatment of alcohol and drug abuse and in such conditions as hypertension. [9]

Their preliminary research has shown that, with regard to drug dependence, the traditional single-cause-for-a-single-illness model is unworkable. Instead, addiction is viewed as a progressive behavior pattern involving a complex of physiological, psychological, and socio-cultural variables that can be successfully influenced by meditative practice at key points.  In the case of hypertension, they have shown that psycho-pharmacology is still the preferred medical intervention but remains complicated because of toxic side effects, issues of patient non-compliance, and the fact that drugs work well on preventing stroke but not coronary heart disease.  Their previous studies have confirmed that meditation works better than drug placebos, but is slower acting than pharmacologic agents, leading them to confirm the current recommendation that TM is most effective when used in combination with other therapies.

Herbert Benson: The Mind-Body Medical Institute

Another of the most visible research projects into the effects of meditation originally reported in the first edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography has been going on under the direction of Herbert Benson, cardiologist at Harvard Medical School. In the late 1960s, Benson began studying Transcendental Meditation practitioners. He has since expanded his work by looking at Tibetan Buddhist meditators, and generic forms of relaxation capable of being elicited by the general population.

His first major work, a trade book entitled The Relaxation Response, appeared in 1975. In it, he described procedures he believed were generic to the onset of meditation and other contemplative practices. The conditions necessary to evoke the relaxation response involve a quiet environment, repetition of a sound or phrase, a passive attitude, and relaxed watchful breathing. Meanwhile, in the medical literature he had identified the relaxation response as a natural reflex mechanism which, when practiced twenty minutes a day, reduced stress and physiologically had the opposite effect of the fight-flight reflex.

Beyond the Relaxation Response appeared in 1984, and combined Benson's research into both the relaxation response and the placebo effect. This text emphasized the role that harnessing physiology can play in improving quality of life and character. Benson followed in 1987 with Your Maximum Mind, a text that clearly associates the positive physiological effects of the relaxation response with the hopefulness of the patient's own religious beliefs and values.

Since publication of Your Maximum Mind, Benson has launched the Mind-Body Medical Institute, a for-profit research and training initiative in behavioral medicine, in conjunction with the Deaconess Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Medical School. Two major streams of Benson's work on meditation are carried on at this Institute. One involves ongoing programs in scientific research, while the other is dedicated to community education.

Since 1967 Benson has been working on identifying the physiological and neurochemical underpinnings of the relaxation response, which he defines as a hypometabolic state of parasympathetic activation, that is, a state of deep rest.  Early work showed the effect of the relaxation response on lowering conditions such as essential hypertension, headache, and alcohol consumption. Studies then moved to show the effect of the relaxation response on various forms of heart disease, serum levels in the blood, and on psychiatric disorders such as anxiety. Other studies compared the relaxation response with other forms of relaxation such as hypnosis.

The next major phase was to assess the effects of the relaxation response in a variety of clinical situations.  Women experiencing moderate forms of PMS were found to benefit from the technique. Patients at a major health maintenance organization were found to utilize the facilities less and to report less illness over time when taught Benson's method.  Recently, the Institute has inaugurated a successful relaxation curriculum for high school students. 

At the same time, Benson has also been investigating advanced meditators.  While he began with practitioners of TM, as work on the relaxation response became more sophisticated, Benson turned his attention to measuring the physiological changes in advanced Tibetan Buddhist meditators, using monks who follow the Dalai Lama. These were on-site investigations at monasteries in Nepal in the Himalayas.  Most recently, Benson and his colleagues have been testing out the physiological effects of different forms of practice, as well as assessing  metabolic and electrophysiologic changes in advanced meditators.    

On the educational side, The Mind-Body Medical Institute offers regular one-week training programs for health care practitioners in all aspects of the relaxation response. The Institute franchises out its model to hospitals and other health care facilities and periodically launches educational programs for the public.

In December of 1995, for instance, the Institute sponsored a major conference on "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine." The three-day program was aimed at clinical practitioners, including physicians, psychologists, nurses, clergy, social workers, allied health professionals, and health care administrators. Perhaps for the first time, scientists, and Western healthcare practitioners joined with scholars in comparative religions to assess the relationship between spirituality and health. Here presentations on scientific evidence as well as historical and thematic scholarship attempted to interpret the life-world of radically different epistemological frames of reference from those of the laboratory scientist. It also meant taking seriously the claims of faith traditions in the West such as Pentacostalism, the Charismatic Catholic movement, and Seventh Day Adventism which the scientific outlook normally rejects. As well, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist scholars took up the more difficult task of interpreting the spiritual traditions of non-western cultures as significant sources of healing. Thoughout the conference, the practice of meditation played a central role in these discussions.

More recently, Benson has released Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (Benson and Stark, 1996).  In this text he renames the placebo effect "remembered wellness." By using this new term he takes the idea of the placebo, which carries a negative connotation in science as something "not real," and re-examines it as a new psychological tool in medicine.  In the term "remembered wellness" he here redefines the old term "placebo" as the person's natural desire for health and the person's right to choose the kind of healing to achieve it. To pharmaceuticals and surgery, Western medicine must now add the patient's own capacity for self-healing. Expectations, beliefs, values, and the practice of meditation, Benson maintains, are among the new forces we must now harness for health and growth.