A S P E C T S     O F    M E D I T A T I O N
	Talk given By Frank Chandra to BWY teachers
	Please note:  the following is only Dr Chandra's talk from the morning session. I am hoping that the second part covering the effect of meditation on the immune system and the session on specific queries will be issued in the near future. It has taken me somewhat longer to transcribe the talks than I originally thought.
	Dr. Chandra's comments are in normal typeface.   Queries and comments from the floor are in italics and responses in bold
	I'll skip the basic anatomy of the brain as I assume you know this and in talking on meditation, I'll move straight into the subject.
	Although there are many different types of meditation these can be classified into two broad groups and we can talk of the EXCITATORY type, that is the types of meditation that tend to excite the nervous system and produce effects through the excitation and then there is the CALMING ( or inhibitory) type which produces a steady calming effect on the nervous system until one reaches, if one is lucky, perseverance and successful enough that leads us to a state of Samadhi
	The excitatory type is the type where the people talk about invoking the Kundalini and the calming type is the classical Patanjali.
	Some years ago a professor from Ohio, a double professor of neurology and psychiatry   ‑ Roland Fischer produced a diagram where he mapped out the various states of consciousness.   And what he did was to draw out a diagram like this and let us take the central point of the diagram as being where a person would be sitting, resting, but not specially relaxed, and we call that the mid point.
	Then he mapped various states of one side which were increasing in excitation and on the other side he mapped various states of consciousness that were calming or increasing in calmness.
	He said from the position of rest in the chair or whatever, you can then activate yourself to do daily chores and that means a slight outpouring of adrenaline to get your muscles contracting and moving and we can put this down here as activity so that when you get up from the sitting or resting position you are already aroused to a limited extend.
	Then he thought even more aroused were people who are empathic ‑ they have empathy, they are sensitive.  They can empathise with people, with their sorrow, they can perceive with sympathy the emotions with other humans around them.  We call them sensitives.
	They are the people who are artistic who are thought to have a slightly higher degree of excitation of their nervous system and perhaps this is true.
	Because this is rarely, if ever, one meets a phlegmatic person who is highly artistic.  Then we come to a state of conscious.  They are people whose state of consciousness that are involved with movement, excitatory movements such as dancing, Indian dancing and don't forge that in Indian dancing it may go on all night ‑ sometimes for several nights when the dancer gets into a trance like state.  And we can here think in terms of the Dervishes from Turkey and the Meddle East whose slow stately dance in slow gyratory circle while they recite a mantra or passage from the Koran.   And that circle is part of a larger circle so they go slowly around in a circle, wheeling more circles, intoning with their eyes closed and trying to control their breath and an Englishman who took part in a dance who wrote a book many years ago ‑ I've e forgotten the title ‑ but he said that it was quite remarkable how you could get into a trancelike state do this in the proper and correct way so that is one type of motion that gets you even more aroused and also starts getting you into a trancelike state.
	We think of Arthur Ashe when he won Wimbledon ..... he spoke in very vocal terms.  He said he went into this trancelike state and where he could no longer perceive pain or exhaustion and he felt that the crowds were within him.  And these are the precise words that some Olympic gold medallists have said.  They said that at the moment of supreme achievement they floated off and didn't realise the effort they wee putting into it, the exhaustion vanished, the crowd seemed to be within then, there was a programme run by the BBC some years ago on TV where all these great athletes had been put together and they were exchanging their ideas, so extreme exertion (not in everyone) but in some people, seem to produce this effect of arousal to a state where it was beginning to affect consciousness in a particular way.   And then we know that some people became so highly aroused by fright or by excitement that they become helpless for a moment.  A state of catalepsy ‑ they may actually fall but in most cases it is paralysis.  In animals this may be seen when you enter a room in say countries where rats may be everywhere, you switch the light on, there is a rat there, the rat becomes excited and runs away from you, and then it meets a wall, tries to run up the wall but can't so it turns round to face you and becomes more excited.  Then it attacks because it is more excited, then it attacks as the excitement now leads to aggression, but you may have leather boots on and the rat slashes out at you and nothing happens.  Then the next thing is that the rat just becomes immobile.  The state of excitation has become so powerful so the muscles refuse to move or obey commands. The same thing happens with some women ‑ men as well, who are attacked.  Coming home late one night they hear footsteps behind, then suddenly someone comes up and grabs them roughly.  Now very often the victim can be a big woman, strong woman, who could easily foil the attacker, but they become so overcome with fear that they become helpless ‑ these victims of ........... or whatever.
	Most of us at some time have been frightened so observed that we experience this temporary ‑ not perhaps paralysis ‑ but it takes a great effort of will to move our limbs to do something that normally we would do quite easily.
	Then Professor Fischer describes cases where you have excitation with hallucinations, acute schizophrenics (the acute not the chromic ones) who get hallucinators, they are supposed to be in a high state of excitement or arousal, i...... arousal and in fact a book written by Swami Muktananda who is now dead, unfortunately, he wrote the book called "Guru" which was published about 20 years ago where he described his Siddha Sita Yoga training and his master had set him  off to explore the path, pointed him in the path or direction and told him he must go down that pathway.  He described in some great detail the various phenomena like he began to see hallucinations , he began to see f.... different colours, he began to get "fit‑like" states, c..... and several others and at the end of them some quiet disgusting and then after some years he emerged with some great peace of mind and calm which people who subsequently met him in England ‑ even hard bitten colonels from the army etc ‑ were impressed by the fact that he had a calmness and poise that was almost unworldly and if you read his book, you would realise it didn't come easily; he had to go through these excitatory states including one where he had these mind hallucinations which he describes quite visually and accurately in his book.
	And then, finally, we reach a state of excitement, where you get yogic ecstasy(ies)  Professor Fischer calls it, which he equates with Samhadi.
	So this is one approach to the excitatory type of yoga where you are pouring out adrenaline into your system, then finally, or rather presumably, although no one has shown this by measurements, you exhaust the excitatory nerves ‑ transmitters temporarily and you get a period of calm, which is the calmness or bliss that the Samhadi is supposed to bring.
	Now let us for the moment tackle the other side, the Patanjali type.  He is somebody sitting but not particularly resting, so we can now say to actually try to relax and rest, perhaps lie down in the ordinary lying posture and that is in itself a bit more calming than sitting or resting in a chair.  Then we know you can do the corpse position which isn't just merely a lying down position but the corpse position is an active registering in the cortex s... area of the brain a group of muscles and then relaxing them.  And that is the secret of the proper Savasana, or corpse position.  It is also the secret of most forms of therapeutic relaxation used for instance in Harley Street.
	It is no good lying down on the carpet and relaxing, telling yourself "I'm going to relax' that doesn't seem to work, you have to move a group of muscles and you can start at the top or start at the bottom, get it into your conscious mind and then having got it there, will it to relax.  And so you start in the usual way i.e. tighten up the toes, wriggling them and then releasing them ‑ that doesn't finish the relaxation you have to move all toes and muscles and relax ‑ toes an...  h.... and relax and so on and you creep on up the body and finally end up with the hands and head.  Some people say that the last thing one should do is frown, frown and relax because it is very difficult to relax the muscle across the forehead above the eyes.
	So this "active" relaxation in the corpse position is a further stage of relaxation.
	And then we get T.M. which is a type of meditation that is relatively shallow, that is the type of T.M. that is used in America, England and elsewhere for experimental purposes.  Since then the T.M. people have claimed deeper forms of meditation, but I am talking of the standardised one that has been accepted scientifically in laboratories ‑ that is a fairly shallow type of meditation ‑ it doesn't aspire to get you in communication with the Universe and so on that other types of meditation aspire to do.
	Then you have the Zen type that is even deeper and some people that do the Buddhist type of meditation whether Zen or others, will say that it is perhaps the deepest of all.   Well there certainly is controversy over that but with Buddhist type meditation you can go very, very deep indeed.
	And then finally you get the Patanjali type which takes you down deeper and deeper until finally you come to Samhadi.  And you can note that you can approach Samhadi from either side.
	Then Professor Fischer made another observation.  He said imagine this is an inverted book and you fill it with water and you have levels across thus: ‑
	He said because people's nervous systems are different you will have sometimes, when you are trying one type of meditation ‑ say for instance the calming type, at certain stages you go down into calmness you will get a flash‑ over from say the calming over to the excitatory type, it will be momentarily but very often it is frightening. People mentally feeling that their bodies are shaking and they are getting things running up and down their spine and they become very frightened ‑ it breaks their concentration.  The thing to do is to persist and if you persist and it is still frightening, then leave it for that day and try again the next day.  But people who are, for instance, naturally quite excitable hen they try the Patanjali type meditation, their nervous system is not accustomed to the calming that you are trying to put on to the body and you will get these flash levels more often.  People who are naturally phlegmatic will not have too much trouble because they are calm and self contained anyhow.  Similarly, people who are doing a Kundalini type, excitatory meditation will occasionally feel they have set deep calmness coming in.
	Now what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of these?  Well ‑ let us examine what happens with the excitatory type, from the literature that has been d... there is an increase in blood pressure, pulse rate and respiratory rate.   You get quite a lot of B waves on the brain, activity waves with occasional alpha, you get an increasing metabolic rate.  And you may get some changes as well produced by the adrenaline, m....... increasing in the system such as an increase in fatty acids, blood cholesterol and so on.  Because of this the excitatory type is considered not to be very good   Certainly in the long term it may do harm.  Especially if you have arteries close to the heart that are partially occluded , this type of meditation might not be a good thing.  It is a demanding one, your metabolic rate goes up and it does impose stresses on your body.  So the Kundalini type meditation is one that in India has almost fallen into disuse, not many people use it.    Here in England there are some people who use the Kundalini type but one has to be very careful.
	Now lets do the calming type, the Patanjali type.  Well, here we get the blood pressure remaining  much the same or it may drop but pulse rate goes down, the respiratory rate, they have measured this with T.M. people, goes down from 15 per minute to about 5 or 6 ‑ very low indeed. Respiratory rate goes down, metabolic rate goes down and although it hasn't been measured and shown change, presumably the chemistry of the blood remains at normal levels, or perhaps even improves.  So it seems from this analysis that the Patanjali type meditation, even it is a shallow Savasana or T.M., would be useful therapeutically and for preserving the health of your body and its the form that I certainly would recommend. I think people who dabble with K...... type may in time find that they are imposing stresses on their body as they get older their body will begin to protest.  Bear in mind some Swami in India did die from coronary troubles/heart problems and I personally have certainly been in correspondence with people who have sought medical opinion/advice in England on this matter.
	So that there is the type I would recommend ‑ the PATANJALI calming type ‑ but bear in mind if you have naturally excitable system, you will occasionally get these frightening flash backs, flash overs to the other type and you have to persevere and not be too put off by them.
	Well, that's a theory behind the technique of Meditation.
	Techniques of Patanjali Yoga, well most of you know Raja Yoga, you can back it up with the general approach of yamas, mudras, asana, pranayama and then you come to the pratyahara where you sit. And this is the type that I would recommend, the Patanjali calming type.  Bear in mind that if you have a naturally excitable system you will occasionally get these frightening flash‑overs to the other type and you have to persevere and not be too put off by them.  Well, that is meditation or the theory of it.
	Techniques in Patanjali yoga ‑ Well I assume all of you know Raja yoga and back it up with the various methods, the Yama, Niyama, Asanas, Pranayama and then you come to the Pratyahara where you sit in a quiet room, in a comfortable position, not necessarily in the Lotus position, but if you want this is a good posture.  Then you close your eyes and you keep a mantra going in your mind ‑ you don't speak it out loud.  And you try to shut out for a brief second or so, sounds and other stimulations from outside, it must obviously be in a quiet room.
	If you try to blank out what's happening and this is not easy to do, Swami Vivekenanda who is now dead and who came from Mauritius lectured in England many times, said that he found a lot of people who tried to do this they were troubled by day to day problems and he recommended that (and I believe it was in one of the Wheel's magazines many years ago) if you find it difficult to shut out what's happening around you, have a little note‑book and write down any problem that arises in your mind and leave it to the note book so you free or un-clutter your mind from this problem.
	The next stage is to try to prolong the interval and you focus on the mantra in order to keep the state of not being aware, consciously, of what is going on outside.  The next stage is when you stop the mantra, you learn to preserve this inwardly[mentally] away from the environment and now you want to stop this mechanical mantra going on in your mind.  Of course when you do this, thee is a great void in you mind and everything rushes back in so it would take repeated trial and error to apply the new skill which is to get into the room, sit down, close your eyes, start a mantra, to get the environment disappearing from your consciousness and then stop the mantra and when you have mastered that you can tolerate the emptiness in your mind.  The next and final stage is to try and see what then comes spontaneously into your mind.  It might be a feeling, an emotion, or a sound, whatever it is, it is something that is very feeble, and the very last stage that leads to Samhadi is when you try to amplify that feeling or whatever it is, .......... it successively day after day until you finally experience it to the full as some of the great mystics have but also hang on to it when you are back to ordinary life.  The great mystics have done this.  Many can achieve it by sitting down and meditating deeply but the moment they come back to ordinary life, it goes.
	The final stage is a person that has experienced true
	Samhadi ‑ it stays within them and this is why throughout their lives they have this air of calmness and detachment that is so very impressive when you meet one.  Those are the stages of Patanjali type mediation, Pratyahara, Dhyana, etc.,
	I won't go too much into to much detail on the Kundalini type of mediation but we all know that at various times, through fright, seeing beauty, a special experience like a special piece of music, you can begin to get goose pimples on your skin.  Now the stiff upper lip tradition in Britain makes you put that away, you must not allow this to show, but in Kundalini you don't, you seize upon this and you try to increase it by conjuring up visions or whatever in your mind will enhance this feeling of goose pimples until the feeling gradually takes over.  When it does, various things happen, like hallucinations, and so on.  This does call for a strong minded person to do that and of course your physiological parameters are going haywire in the mean time.
	On this side you also get alpha waves. In Patanjali meditation you get mostly coherent alpha waves both sides of the brain.  This coherence is quite a deviation from normal, because in normal life, if you do EEGs, you find that one half of the brain will give you alpha whilst the other half is giving you beta, and then it may switch over, but in ordinary life apparently you never get over the same area,  ‑ say in the frontal area you never get alpha and alpha on both sides but in Patanjali meditation, whether it is in T.M. (where it was first described) or the deeper Patanjali type ‑ not only the alpha waves on both sides but with deep meditation they become the same in number because as you know that alpha waves are a range from 8 ‑ 13 per second, they become the same number, it is possible to have alpha on one side of 8, and alpha on the other side of 13.  But in deeper meditation apparently the waves begin to correspond in number per second and they are in phase.  This is described by Gastean / who was a great electro encephalographist.... attached to the T.M. people in Switzerland.  He was a recognised world authority in this field before he joined the T.M.  and his work is generally accepted as being accurate
	Q.  Excuse me Dr. Chandra, can you clarify a point.    Did you say there were coherent alpha waves on the     excitatory side as well?
	A.  Yes, not in both types of meditation but only in Patanjali.  In the excitatory side, when we get are runs of beta waves and as far as I know they have not documented coherence here but what it means is that the brain is intensively active in the excitatory type whereas the alpha waves on the calming  type it means that both halves of the brain are resting.
	Now I believe we should now take time to talk on the effect of meditation on the body.
	Q.  Dr. Chandra ‑ the Rajneesh dynamic meditation where does that fall?
	A.  I think it falls clearly on the excitatory side.
	Q.  Dr. Chandra ‑ would you say something on theta waves
	A.  Very briefly then theta waves may be puzzling people. You have beta which are 13+ sometimes up to 100 which describes intense activity in the brain.  Alpha waves are from 8‑13 and this denotes resisting activities of the brain.   Usually alpha waves start to occur when you compose yourself for sleep ‑ you close your eyes and alpha waves begin to appear.
	Theta waves are from 4‑8 (Incidentally this is conventional, it is not a law of nature but the electro‑encephalo graphists decided that they would divide them up into these groups.Theta waves also appear during sleep and they appear in little trains and gradually become stronger, more and more of these appear ‑ at that stage you begin to get creative thoughts and problems that have been bothering you may suddenly become unreal.  And as I pointed out the problem is that you are going into deep sleep and when you wake up you have forgotten how you solved them.  In the sleep laboratories they ring it for a while then they ring a bell to wake you up and you jot down quickly what you remember (it can come in the  morning just before you awake).
	Q.  Does this correspond to the dream state.
	A.  No ‑ that is a different area.  Very briefly I'll  discuss sleep as it is taking us away from the subject matter.
	(The last lot is delta waves which are O+ to 4 ‑  although it really above 0 because at 0 you are dead  !  ).
	Beta waves are like rigging waves and quite large. Alpha are more even and formed. And the giant waves are the delta waves.
	There are other waves that occur in illness. Kapa waves, and so on,  - but I don't want to go into that.
	Delta waves appear in very deep sleep so called NREM sleep.  So if we talk about sleep then we start off and you have alpha waves; first off you have beta waves ‑ then you go down to alpha and then down to theta.   Then you plunge down into deep sleep and you come up into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep ‑ after    about 30 minutes you go down again into deep sleep and this continues. REM sleep is dreaming sleep and eventually you are awake.  This deep sleep they used to call NREM because your eyes do not move. In REM sleep if you open the eyes gently of the person sleeping, the eyes are moving rapidly.  What they do is to put muscle electrodes that record the movement of the muscles so the person is not disturbed/woken up.  At that stage you are dreaming and of course since you are dreaming you get beta waves (it is exciting and where people die in consciousness in REM sleep if they have a weak heart and dream they are being attacked or frightened they get so excited they may have a congruously.
	In REM sleep the body is quite flaccid. Actually in this stage the body is relatively paralysed ‑ the only thing that works is the chest and here in REM sleep the eyes are not paralysed but the rest of the body is.
	In NREM  sleep you become even more paralysed and it used to be thought that you didn't dream in that stage but you do dream.  Breathing becomes very slow. In NREM you get peculiar things happen, for instance you get might terrors.  Now "night terrors" are dreams ‑ not nightmares, when you dream and then forget which you dream and then forget about in time. Night terrors remain with you for live ‑ the actual feeling remains with you.  I had one when I was a boy. When I had malaria I had a night terror and I can still remember it.  Although you are paralysed some muscles go into automatic and take you off into sleep walking at this stage.  So its an odd area this NREM sleep. (REM gives you just ordinary dreams, feelings,nightmares etc).
	Q.  If you are paralysed what causes the body to move around to change positions.
	A.  This happens because if you rest in one position for  too long, the blood pressure is altered and the body  signals automatically from the area that is being squashed and the blood can't press through, chemicals begin to accumulate which send nerve messages up to the thalamus area and an automatic signal comes to get the body moving, it is purely muscular line‑feedback and is not done consciously but at a reflex level.  This occurs in the REM stage.  Some people who are obese who get problems with the tongue falling back and with relaxing too much they can get cyanosed and go quickly blue ‑ they don't die but wake up frequently so next day they are falling asleep  all the time.
	Sometimes if you have a bad heart, the lack of oxygen on your tongue falls back and in this state can be a problem. So those of you who believe in the healing aspects of sleep and that sleep is a good thing, you may consider it isn't always a good thing.
	Q.   Is there any question between night‑tremors and waking transferred anxiety ?
	A.   I won't be able to answer that question accurately.  I might speculate that there might be some connection.  I am not certain as that is a psychiatric question and I haven't read around it.  It does sound feasible but I do not know for certain.
	Q.   Do night tremors always occur in the NREM at very deeper level ?
	A.  No. When they occur they always occur in NREM but they don't occur every time one goes into NREM and as most people do not get night tremors it needs some other cause and that's where factors like stress, anxiety may come in.  In my case it was the stress of a fever ‑ malaria, in other cases it might be psychological that would trigger it off.
	Q.  And if it is so distressing are you likely to wake violently ?
	A.  Well it brings you awake and it takes some time to come back to your normal environmental state.  You are still living in the "terror" and little children may scream for some time before they come out of it.  The awakening in that sense is gradual as you awake, but you are still in the terror as you come out of it suddenly and try to reject it.
	Q.  Is it something that can keep recurring ‑ the same night terrors?
	A.  I do not believe it has been demonstrated as recurring. Certainly nightmares do re‑occur, but with night terrors you have one experience and that lives with you all your time.  It doesn't come back if you sleep but you can conjure it up during the day and if I sit and reflect I can remember vividly how I felt and remember details of the night terror that I had when I was six ‑ a long time ago.
	Sleep is a fascinating subject. If you ever want to read about sleep, get books by Professor Ian Oswald, who runs a sleep research laboratory in Edinburgh, and he has written some popular books on the subject of sleep. I haven't come across a recent book by him, but if you enquire there may be some recent literature by him.
	Professor Oswald was the man who proved that if you take sweetened cocoa at night it does help you to sleep and that has been proved scientifically.
	Effects of Meditation
	There are all sorts of effects.
	The good Maharishi in his time when he was touring the world and having great impact, talked about social effects  And what he thought (but this isn't proven) that if 1% of the population in any country meditated, even at the TM level, then violence would gradually subside.
	Obviously we haven't got 1% of the population of this country currently meditating.
	Relaxation and diminution of anxiety.
	Anxiety is one of the big complaints of our time but it may have been there all the time as long as human beings have been around.
	Certainly the stress of fast living and the demands of work and so on engender a lot of stress and this is connected with anxiety and this is one of the manifestations of anxiety.  I think it is pretty well accepted that TM and that sort of meditation will very often help anxiety ‑ not in all cases but in many cases it will help.  And there was one concept we apply here and that is when you have anxiety with depression, the depression may be masked by the hyper activity from anxiety. When you calm the anxiety down by meditation or Pranayama (NTM) the depression then hits the consciousness of the person and they may do something stupid.  Professor Ivor Mills of Cambridge described a student who was worried about his exams, he had depression with anxiety, he was also a member of a TM group and did very deep T.M. trying to stabilise himself for exams, he knocked down his anxiety alright, but the depression then hit him at 2 o'clock in the morning and he jumped through the window.  He only broke a leg but he might easily have done something else.
	Depression is one of the big causes of suicide as you know, so this is one type of anxiety you want to precede with care.  Other forms of anxiety, panic attack and so on if you can get the person to do some meditation, Pranayama especially it will help.
	It is said it recharges the batteries (whatever that means) and we are also talking of spiritual recharging, bear in mind you can meditate with the Jesus Mantra.
	I once took a group in St. Martins in the Field in the crypt they were doing meditation and I lectured to them and they said they were using the Jesus Mantra for meditation with quite good results.  So they had found a useful solace in the Christian Church by using meditation altered in this way.  Instead of using AUM or whatever they were using the word Jesus.   You can use anything as a mantra, it is true that some people say some Sanskrit texts have a resonance with some personalities but I thin the advantages you get for having a selected Sanscrit text is very small  ‑ I think in fact it is what you believe ‑ it you use that ‑ that creates the ..... and so Christians use the Jesus Mantra.
	Also John Leyland in a broadcast in 1982 on ITV said that "Its important for us to adjust ourselves to the environment by letting our minds be still for some portion of time each day and meditation is one of the best ways of doing this."  This is the calming type of meditation, because you are trying to still the mind and cut yourself off from the environment.  When you come back to the environment you see it in a fresh light.  I can't today give you the theory behind meditation, the sensory perception, etc.   When I give a full days talk on meditation then I can explain in detail how it is that we get trapped into what is called the eternal cinema where we have tapes that we switch on, father goes home and switches on his father's tape, he doesn't look at the reality that exists, but he acts the role of father as implanted in his mind.  We become robots in a way, through tiredness, through fatigue, or other problems occupying our minds.  We just switch on attitudes i.e. Husband's attitude to wife, we switch on the tape and the child comes in....and this was well explained by the Berkeley group in California and they founded a whole school of psychotherapy based on this thesis.
	So doing meditation for a while, stilling the mind, as John Little said, does help you come to the environment and it hits you and it jolts you out of the automatism for a short while.  Of course you slip back and within an hour you are back again in the usual thing but at least for that while you may see something around you that you would have missed if you had just switched on the automatic responses ‑ so all that comes under recharging the batteries.
	Then one aspect that was very popular with drug addicts, was that meditation expanded consciousness.  The whole business of T.M. took off because literally hundreds ‑ if not thousands ‑ of drug addicts were coming back from the Vietnam war and the USA authorities did not know what to do with them.  The Maharishi got together with some very eminent doctors from Harvard and Yale (Wallace & Benson).  They formed a study group and then tested several thousand drug addicts and taught them T.M. by the simple method and presented the findings to a Senate sub‑committee which showed that certainly, in the short term, many drug addicts could be weaned from their addiction by T.M.    This so impressed the Senate that they voted a grant of money going to Universities like Stanford to investigate T.M. and this is how T.M. started becoming scientific or at least the scientific back up was investigated.  What the drug addicts found was that drugs used to expand their consciousness, make them see colours and other things that we normally can't perceive with any intensity, and it seems that T.M. can do this for you as well.  I do not know how deep you have to go into T.M. to get this effect.  Most people do it for other reasons as we shall see.   Some years a doctor Rigby, who was based at St. Georges Hospital said that for chronic schizophrenics, T.M. not only helped them to recover but also contributed to its prevention and relapse.   It seems therefore that for chronic schizophrenics once you have got them to some stage of rationality, where they can co‑operate and that is important because if you have a chronic schizophrenic that is completely cut off, then you can't reach them.   But if you can reach the person and if you can get them onto T.M. with the meditation, it gradually helps to bring them out and then, of course, if they stick with T.M., it makes the gaps between relapses much longer.
	There are numerous papers published on the treatment of hypertension with meditation.  What has emerged from the mass of anecdotal literature, has been some broad findings by controlled studies, which show that for moderate hypertension it works.  Now by moderate hypertension we know that ordinary blood pressure should be 120/80 for a young person.  We would say that such a person would have moderate hypertension if he has a B.P. of 160/120. In a young person with that level of blood pressure  T.M. works, but you have to do it every day.  And with meditation as with biofeedback, the great problem is that biofeedback and T.M. meditation can control a lot of things but the difficulty is to get people to stick to it every day.  Unfortunately once you feel better you are not motivated, you lose your incentive and that is why these things have not become more popular.  It is much easier to pop a pill into your mouth in the morning before you go to work.  But to sit on the floor for 20 minutes in a room and do meditation is harder. Of course it is more socially acceptable to pop a pill because it is socially disruptive in a family for one person in the family to go away to meditate.
	Yes, of course this is quite true but we are lucky in England that we can usually get a room where you can cut yourself off.  I remember Pandit Vishnu Narayan, who came from Benares in India and he was a meditator.  He used to lecture to Yoga groups as well.  He went back to India to visit his relatives and when he came back he said "You know those six weeks I spent in India I couldn't meditate even once.  Everyone was coming in to visit, people coming in all the time and I just couldn't find a place quiet enough unless I went off on my own into the mountains."But he was still with his family and he said it was with a distinct sense of relief that he came back to England where he could get back to his meditation.
	Allied to expanded consciousness there are a number of addictions that have been helped by T.M. (not 100% I hasten to add).
	Drugs  It works with some drug addicts but again there is a question of motivation. But it certainly did work with this huge number of cases that was presented to the Senate sub‑committee and which was published (but I don't know the year).
	Tobacco  They have had some success ‑ again only a percentage ‑ but then anything helps.  Some people have been able to give up smoking through meditation but alas in a number of cases it doesn't work.
	Drinking The same thing happens with alcohol.   Where other things have failed, occasionally it seems that T.M. can work.  The success rate is low but it is worth trying even though you know it might not work.  So for various addictions you have some degree of success.
	There are a number of physiological effects that are rather for researchers but I will mention them to you.
	There were researches done by the T.M. people and I have mentioned that your metabolic rate goes down, your respiratory rate goes down, your pulse rate goes down.  So if you have a fairly rapid heart rate because of perhaps some problem with the nervous system/connective tissue, it may help briefly.  The effects last a little while ‑ perhaps an hour ‑ but these are some of the physiological effects.  Then they found that the speed of reflexes was increased.  They tried the light tapping ‑ one where an examiner turns on a light and you have to try to switch it off the moment he switches it on.  They found there was a significant improvement providing you had been doing meditation for at least six weeks.  It doesn't help with a beginner on his first day.
	Some levels of hormones such as cortisone or prolactin were altered in a beneficial direction, although there is some doubt on this as the changes were small.  This is an area where further work has to be done.  There is not enough evidence to say that definitely cortisone is increased.
	Q.  Dr. Chandra, earlier you said that heart rate and the metabolic rate is going down and that was just for an hour or two.  So are you saying there is no long term effect ?
	A.  That depends whether or not you are in a state of anxiety, in a stressful environment and you managed to get away to meditate you will slow these things for an hour or so.  But when you get back to the stressful environment it is going to start all over again and gradually raising it back.   If you are a very deep meditator and a very skilled one, you can learn to detach yourself from the environment and from distress.  But that comes after years of practice.  For the average person if you go straight back to a stressful environment, you will have problems starting up again.  Of course if you can meditate two or three times a day (but most people can't do that), then of course it will help to keep down the problem longer.  But I am afraid the effects are not permanent in that sense.
	Q.   Can I come down to blood pressure.  The higher blood pressure in that of the older man, and I speak from personal experience, does it work at all??
	A.  No, not very well, it takes it down a few points but not to a level that would make it therapeutically recommended; now the one that works, oddly enough on the very high blood pressures is the corpse position, SAVASANA.  And this has been shown to work in many cases.  Dr. Chandra Patel, (Croydon Hospital),  has carried out work on this with biofeedback and Dr. Dhote in Bombay did it without biofeedback and he found the same things.But meditation apparently only works as a moderator.  There was an article published in the Lancet some years ago that showed the difference with very high ones they had poor success.
	Q.  Among the physical effects as I understand it, metabolic rate means the ability of the body to use oxygen.  Is it therefore a good thing to reduce that ?
	A.  No.  But perhaps you have defined it badly. It measures the usage not the ability of the body but the actual usage.  This means that if you tense your muscles, in stress and anxiety, you will use much more oxygen than you should.  You are imposing unnecessary work on the body and what this (meditation) does is to relax tension and therefore the muscles do not demand so much oxygen.  It does not mean that you are starving the body of oxygen.