I took a passenger home from work the other day, and he told me some about one of their ongoing studies.
They are brain scanning Buddhist monks in a meditative state to compare the scans to “normal” (non-meditative) brains, and apparently the differences are very clear and visible. But then we went on about a potion of the study, which puts a shock collar around their necks and subjects them to painful electrical shocks while meditating.
“They feel the pain just as much as anyone else. They self-rate the pain on a scale of 1-10 just the same as non-monks do, even when we give them a good jolt at level 8. But their brains immediately return to their meditative state, once the shock is stopped.” Normal brains, he said, don’t do that, they will remain in an abnormal and agitated state for considerably longer periods of time.
I’m not sure why, but both he and I found amusement in the idea of “jolting” Buddhist monks. And I’ve told the story to a few friends and co-workers since, and we always end up giggling over it.
I did ask what they hoped to learn by electrocuting Buddhist monks, and he said they hoped to demonstrated that calmness, perhaps even “happiness”, can be learned and trained, and is not a state that just “happens” due to outside circumstances.
Just to be fair, they should also be shocking priests, rabbis and ministers, plus the pope and the dalai lama, and of course some nuns. Especially nuns.
Not only is it not evil, but it’s probably the perfect pain to laugh at. It happens, but then it goes away completely. There is absolutely no harm at all to these guys. So the one reason to feel guilty isn’t there.
