MEDITATION

Meditation is an expansion of self-awareness.

BENIFITS

  Physical level- it is effective as an anti-stress process. It quiets the body, improves cardiovascular function, modulates the immune system and enhances self-repair mechanisms. There are thousands of studies that validate the physical benefits of meditation. Most recently there have been studies that show increased activities of the prefrontal cortex of the brain along with enhanced immune functions and increased levels of the enzyme telomeres which lengthen the telomeres at the end of chromosomes, suggesting increased longevity through the adjustment of our biological clock.

 Psycological- meditation enhances emotional wellbeing and is associated with a restfully alert mind.

 Spiritual - expanding self-awareness, meditation gives us access to the qualities of our consciousness such as insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, and freedom of choice. It also reveals to us the inseparability of everything in the universe and therefore shifts our identity to transpersonal to universal.

TYPES-

• Transcending meditations, which usually involve the use of a mantra or sound. However transcendence can also be achieved through any of the five senses and there are techniques for all the five senses.
• Contemplative meditations that involve self-reflection and self-inquiry.
• Mindfulness meditations (also referred to as vipasana) that make practitioners aware of various aspects of their experience. These include awareness of the environment; awareness of the body, including internal organs; experience of mental space, including sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts; and awareness of relationships. Mindfulness brings insight spontaneously and therefore mindfulness meditation is also referred to as insight meditation.
• There are also meditations for enhancing specific aspects of emotional and physical wellbeing and for increasing the experience of love, abundance, joy, equanimity, compassion, and empathy.
• In addition, there are meditations that enhance mind-body coordination, use breathing techniques, and specific gestures and interoception. These procedures -- frequently known as mudras and bandhas -- give us the ability to influence our internal organs including heart rate variability and blood pressure.

HOW OFTEN

A daily practice is best, and should be included as part of a normal routine that includes slicing up our time in various areas of life: sleep time, exercise time, focused work time, relationship time, mindful eating time, play and creative time.

So there is a personal benefit to meditation, is there a social or communal benefit?

When a large number of people reach expanded awareness through collective meditation, there is improvement in the quality of society. Some studies have indicated the following:

• Decreased crime rate.
• Decreased recidivism in prisoners.[1]
• Decreased hospital admissions.
• Increased economic and career wellbeing and productivity.
• Decreased absence in the workplace.
• Decreased incidence in alcoholism and other addictive behavior.
• Decreased domestic violence.

GOD PARTICLE

The possible discovery of the Higgs boson would not have been splashed across every major media if the tag "God particle" weren't attached to it. Physicists hate the term, but they love the publicity. There are huge government grants at stake as well as the prestige of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. After you read the headline, however, there's little doubt that a general reader cannot actually grasp what a Higgs boson is (or a large hadron accelerator, either).

If you watch enough PBS programs and listen to a few physicists, some clarity emerges that a non-physicist can understand. The Higgs boson discovery adds validation to a mathematical model of force fields in the universe. It attaches a real particle to an expectation, the expectation that buried inside force fields was the key to why subatomic particles have mass. Mass would be acquired as a particle meets with resistance when it moves through the vacuum of space, a kind of "molasses" that slows it down.

This molasses is very elusive. It took many billions of colliding protons in the huge CERN accelerator, backed up by 100,000 computers around the world, to analyze the data before the discovery seemed real. Even then, most physicists are guarded about whether this new particle actually is a Higgs boson. They are equally guarded about whether its properties will uphold the Standard Model of force fields or in fact create more problems.

But behind all the hoopla and uncertainty, the news flew around the world that a basic building block of the universe has been uncovered, bringing quantum physics closer to its triumphant goal of explaining creation -- hence the inflated and rather silly label of God particle. Yet from another perspective, nothing like an explanation of the universe is emerging at all. Physics may be getting closer to the day, in fact, when the way it views the universe classically reaches a dead end.

Here we will refer to some technical matters, but stick with us. The preliminary discovery comes as a culmination of many years of both theoretical and experimental work, since 1964 when the British physicist Peter Higgs, along with Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, hypothesized the existence of a field, filling all vacuum. They used symmetry breaking (which would allow particles to acquire their masses without violating other aspects of theory that were correct). This ubiquitous Higgs field would allow all particles in the universe to acquire mass through interactions with it, through a kind of dragging as they move in space. High energy proton collisions at the LHC should, in principle, reveal the elusive Higgs. The Higgs, unlike the photon, has a mass, expected to be in the approximate range of 125 (or more) times the mass of the proton.

The Higgs boson is the last, missing link in the highly successful quantum theory of particles, called the Standard Model. It is also highly unstable, very elusive. To detect it, one has to observe many, many high energy collisions of protons and build up the statistics. In the LHC collider, particles are accelerated through a tunnel, brought together at speeds close to the speed of light, producing showers of particles, with high energies, capable to generate the Higgs particle. It exists for only a tiny fraction of a second before breaking up into many other particles and can be detected only indirectly by identifying the results of its immediate decay and analyzing them to show they were probably produced from a Higgs boson.

Even in its lowest energy state, the Higgs field filling all vacuum has non-zero values everywhere. In fact, ripples or waves in the quantum Higgs field, create for fleeting moments the Higgs particles. The Higgs boson is itself very massive, and it must interact with itself. It itself mediates interactions with the Higgs field and is itself an excitation of the Higgs field.

The full properties of the Higgs (or whatever was observed by the teams) are not yet known. In fact, the signature of what they observed may be multiple Higgs bosons with the properties required by the next theory that the Standard Model would extend into supersymmetry.

Particle physicists are not the only ones excited by the prospect of finding the missing link in the theory: Cosmologists seem to agree that all the luminous matter in the universe makes up only 4 percent of whatever there is in the universe. All the hundreds of billions of galaxies composed of many billions of stars make up just 4 percent of everything! The rest of it may be in the form of dark matter and even more exotic (but unknown) dark energy. So if the "Higgs-like" particle discovered at CERN turns out to be more exotic form, it could help us understand at least dark energy.

These possible future developments could get us closer to what particle physicists call the Theory of Everything, a rather particle-centered view of the cosmos, because their theory of everything, as envisaged, says nothing and in fact cannot say anything about life, evolution and the phenomena of mind and awareness. It is not even clear how gravity, the last of the four forces of nature, will fit into Standard Model, developing into supersymmetry and perhaps developing into superstring theory. But it would be a start.