I have been studying and practicing tibetan buddhism for a little over a year now, particularly dream yoga, but branched into some of the other practices. I'm always a skeptic but it is fascinating some of the stuff they can do. There is scientific evidence they can raise and lower their body temperatures through meditation, withstanding great heat/cold and deprivation conditions. I've played around with deprivation and what it has done for my mental health and body has surprised me. I'm but a novice, but I absolutely believe they are tapping into something scientific about the body/mind that is still unknown.
There are reasons to be extremely skeptical about some of their claims, but, some of it is very interesting and credible.
the translation of their texts is widely available, I started with tibetan yoga and secret doctrines by evan-wentz. There’s a lot of lore and tradition you need to understand for some of it but the gist is there.
There are stories about bodies of Christian monks that did not decompose for a log time after the dearth. Modern take on it attributes it to the climate in caves where the body was put after the dearth. But another important part was diet. Often the well-preserved bodies were of those who had eaten only rough bread and water for months and years before the dearth.
So I suspect both of the factors are at the play here as well.
I read an article about this years ago and came away with the impression that they were effectively mummifying themselves before death. From the Wikipedia page on sokushinbutsu:
In medieval Japan, this tradition developed a process for sokushinbutsu, which a monk completed over about 3,000 days. It involved a strict diet called mokujiki (literally, 'eating a tree'). The monk abstained from any cereals and relied on pine needles, resins, and seeds found in the mountains, which would eliminate all fat in the body. Increasing rates of fasting and meditation would lead to starvation. The monks would slowly reduce then stop liquid intake, thus dehydrating the body and shrinking all organs.
In "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky describes sort-of the opposite process. A body of monk who had been considered a living saint started to smell on the second day after his dearth. That made everybody to realize that he was the opposite of the saint. And then another monk mentioned that eating sweets and cakes could not lead to sainthood.
If TRUE and consciousness is eternal (using whatever framework you like), the idea of death becomes double sided. On one hand, physical death is sad as it's the end of this physical 'epic story' before our consciousness moves onto a new body/story. On the flip side, approaching body death is a sort of a temporary great relief as we are immortal and cannot actually die. I.e. After ten thousand years of being alive, a vampire looks forward to sleeping in their coffin at night.
I really like the metaphor of consciousness as a drop separated from the ocean during bodily life and returning to it (merging with it) after death. (This is what my strongest bufo/5-meo-dmt experiences showed me, but I guess one can't really say if the idea created that or the other way)
- If a drop separated from the ocean and returns to the ocean, is it not still existing in the ocean?
- Are you fully identified with memories? What if you had a head wound and forget your past- are you still yourself?
- After the drop is given back the ocean, is it possible that a new drop will become separated and hold all the same properties as the first droplet (minus its specific history/memory)?
One of the referenced articles is a wilder read, just even from the title: “Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’” (1).
This research is more than deserving of the Ig Nobel.
Interesting thing I learned:
Once you die the biome in your intestines massively contributes to processes that breakdown your body.
That’s why decapitated heads are often in much better shape then the remaining body, especially if the surrounding environment is generally conserving the body, such as is the case in dry mountains or bogs.
From my understanding of the Buddhist process described here, the ritual often begins days or weeks before death, and includes exclusive consumption of substances like plant tars that dramatically reduce the presence of gut bacteria, and that this effect rather than anything supernatural is what most attribute to the most significant decay processes being temporarily inhibited - there's no gut bacteria left to decompose the body from the inside out.
This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.
I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.
The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.
>I'm in the seafood business and work with dead fish all the time... I see varying length of shelf life depending on how the fish was harvested. Whatever the metabolic state is when we die is what will be in the system when you die. High stress, metabolism running full speed, and high external/internal temperature leads to short shelf life. Fish harvested when their metabolism is less excited or in a state close to homeostasis will last much longer. So why any different with humans? If you died in the Sahara running a marathon vs. froze in Antarctica while meditating you would for sure see a difference lol.
So I guess that the diet and low metabolic activity seem to be the most plausible explanation. Also supposedly in some (mythical?) very-deep meditative states the body's oxygen requirement is low enough that passive exchange suffices to keep the cells on the verge of aliveness.
The two phenomena in the article are incorruptibility and responsiveness after apparent death. Granting the evidence is weak, is it possible?
Death for medical purposes is really the boundary when function is not at all expected to return. It's not when metabolic processes stop. It can vary with treatment (handling?).
For incorruptibility, (as others have mentioned) diet could be a factor, especially for immunogenic foods. Lack of stress is another. Stress hormones have wide-ranging impacts and are key to sleep, wherein detoxification, esp. reduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by melatonin. A monk at peace for months or years before death could have a vastly altered hormonal and metabolic landscape.
Therapeutic hypothermia is cooling the body after near-death trauma from heart attacks and drowning. In the last ~15 years, it has been instrumental in increasing survival, even for people e.g., under water for many minutes. The problem is reperfusion injury: after a bout of anoxic cellular respiration, there's a large build-up of ROS; re-introducing full metabolism quickly results in these molecules reacting with others, impeding metabolic processes and destroying some cellular structure. So cooling and only slowly reheating the body allows the ROS to be scavenged instead, and people survive as a result.
If there's validity to incorruptibility in this context, my bet would be on some combination of coolness and processes that reduce ROS, coupled with a very low population of ROS from a stress-free history before death.
But a mechanism of incorruptibility doesn't address the other phenomenon of responsiveness, holding collapse off until some signal.
In my (limited) experience with people after stroke, long after any cognitive abilities are gone, the person maintains reactivity to the environment - touch, heat, light, sound, and (yes) voices. This reflects more autonomic processes. The cerebellum maintains body awareness and position with input from the midbrain, and spinal nerves for muscle groups can operate on their own to hold position and react. (Indeed, one of the signs of the absence of CNS suppression is painful, relentless muscle spasms.) So I can imagine nerves and muscles holding anoxic positions, and even some reduced nerve signaling from the cerebellum using ion reserves. The holding would have to be perfect, and the signal to release would be a one-time thing. This would not work repeatedly or for any signal to do something.
My overall takeaway is that we don't realize the extent to which we are a product of our bodies.
Since we're of a certain level of interest and openness, I'll throw a pop fiction title into the mix: Dan Brown's /Secret of Secrets/ for a tip toe through the non-local mind and soul topic. It's a 4 index card book for me - meaning I have 4 index cards of notes, references, and words worthy of reflection or research. Pretty good for a fiction best seller.
I think it pays off to treat unexplained widely perceived mystical things as real phenomena, I.e. genuine experiences, and go from there scientifically.
The conflict between subjective and objective phenomena is alleviated simply by recognizing subjective experience as objective phenomena. Not as necessarily accurate interpretations of reality, but also as not devoid of an objective connection to reality.
History is full of psychological effects thought to be purely subjective for which we now have an objective understanding much more interesting than “those experiences are just made up”.
The brain processes information along many pathways and in complex ways. This creates all kinds of interesting effects of perception, many not experienced by everyone.
A really good example is people who “see vibrations and colorful auras”. We now know there is a large class of effects given the umbrella name of “synesthesia”. In these cases, pre-awareness or sub-awareness information is combined in the brain, in a way not common to most people, and encoded into a directly perceived form.
For the person with one of these effects, the perception is very real.
But the effect is often more interesting than a different sensory/conscious encoding of reality.
For instance, many people, due to early childhood trauma or divergent development, innately process social information very early in their perception pathways. They pick up on micro-gestures, perceived intentions, hints of people’s characters in a pre-conscious way that they experience as direct perception.
Often this came about due to basic psychological function being tuned for an uncommon level of social negotiation demands and social threat preparedness, from birth.
I am very close with a “highly sensitive person” (psychological technical term) who also has color-social synesthesia.
She absolutely “sees” auras and vibrations around people and has since her earliest memory. This is as real to her as the emotional responses most of us have mixed into our perceptions of music.
She can’t unsee these effects any more than most people could go-music-affect blind at will. But she spent her childhood being bullied for her “strange”, “weird”, “stupid”, processing and reactions, to a level and form of information people around her couldn’t see.
But her differences are not just a curiosity, they are very adaptive for her. She sees a visual representation of information generated by her hyper alert pre-conscious social mind directly. Essentially she has an unusually effective social co-processor/pre-processor most of us do not have.
I have been simply amazed on too many occasions to count, at how quickly she picks up on people’s intentions, character traits, or current situational psychology. Such as stress about something unrelated to the moment, and any behavior I could see.
She is not always right in interpretation. And the fact that to her, she perceives many of these subtleties encoded as something clearly seen can make it hard for her to accept a different interpretation without some good alternate evidence.
But generally speaking she is a wonder at low latency high bandwidth personal interpretation.
I feel absolutely blind compared to her, even in situations where I am paying close attention to behavior and cues.
Since I respected her experiences from the time we first met (even though I initially assumed there was a lot of “pure” subjectivity and wishful thinking going on), and brought up the scientific view of understanding phenomena as complementary to perception, not anti-mystical, we got along well. We routinely talk about many things back and forth in mystical vs. scientific forms, with the assumption there is only temporary, never inherent, inherent conflict.
Which is really fun. Her mystical mind and her perception of the world is beautiful and functional in ways I would never have imagined without our rapport.
I think scientists make a big mistake when they approach mystical views from a science competitive stance. Especially perceptions that are common to many. There is likely it or only a scientific explanation, for those subjective perceptions, but interesting benefits associated with the value that people with these perceptions place on them.
Recognizing when there is value makes a dual but consistent mystical/scientific view more accurate and more palatable to people who otherwise have seen science practiced as a selective reality ideology.
The internal mind, relative to our physical processing machinery, is a first class world, for exploration, discovery, and surprising explanations. That it can operate by very different rules from non-psychological artifacts just makes it more important to take seriously as a first class realm.
Some of these esoteric states are really weird, and it seems crazy to me that we are only now investigating them. This isn’t just “energy” woo that can’t be measured, there are clear physical phenomena.
Of course, I should have been more clear, I meant that we are only now investigating these states with modern scientific rationalist/empiricist approaches.
Eg the example I gave has apparently never been measured before the last couple years, despite being known in the Buddhist tradition for thousands of years.
Perhaps not known to Westerners though, it could just be that more esoteric states are only recently being described in English.
I have been studying and practicing tibetan buddhism for a little over a year now, particularly dream yoga, but branched into some of the other practices. I'm always a skeptic but it is fascinating some of the stuff they can do. There is scientific evidence they can raise and lower their body temperatures through meditation, withstanding great heat/cold and deprivation conditions. I've played around with deprivation and what it has done for my mental health and body has surprised me. I'm but a novice, but I absolutely believe they are tapping into something scientific about the body/mind that is still unknown.
There are reasons to be extremely skeptical about some of their claims, but, some of it is very interesting and credible.
Do you have some literature resources on where to start reading on that stuff?
the translation of their texts is widely available, I started with tibetan yoga and secret doctrines by evan-wentz. There’s a lot of lore and tradition you need to understand for some of it but the gist is there.
There are stories about bodies of Christian monks that did not decompose for a log time after the dearth. Modern take on it attributes it to the climate in caves where the body was put after the dearth. But another important part was diet. Often the well-preserved bodies were of those who had eaten only rough bread and water for months and years before the dearth.
So I suspect both of the factors are at the play here as well.
I read an article about this years ago and came away with the impression that they were effectively mummifying themselves before death. From the Wikipedia page on sokushinbutsu:
In medieval Japan, this tradition developed a process for sokushinbutsu, which a monk completed over about 3,000 days. It involved a strict diet called mokujiki (literally, 'eating a tree'). The monk abstained from any cereals and relied on pine needles, resins, and seeds found in the mountains, which would eliminate all fat in the body. Increasing rates of fasting and meditation would lead to starvation. The monks would slowly reduce then stop liquid intake, thus dehydrating the body and shrinking all organs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu
I think you’re referring to the phenomenon named “incorruptibility”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility
Recent case, died 2019, found not decomposed in 2023, had not been embalmed, unsealed wood coffin:
https://www.ncregister.com/cna/incorrupt-body-of-sister-wilh...
In "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky describes sort-of the opposite process. A body of monk who had been considered a living saint started to smell on the second day after his dearth. That made everybody to realize that he was the opposite of the saint. And then another monk mentioned that eating sweets and cakes could not lead to sainthood.
The peasant child died and didn't stink though. So, I guess he didn't eat a lot sweets I suppose that aligns with his wretched upbringing...
Assuming no supernatural forces, can this sweets adversion be explained by the fat vs muscle ratio in the body?
Also related: Mystery of the Tibetan Mummy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCkB9daCVZ0)
If TRUE and consciousness is eternal (using whatever framework you like), the idea of death becomes double sided. On one hand, physical death is sad as it's the end of this physical 'epic story' before our consciousness moves onto a new body/story. On the flip side, approaching body death is a sort of a temporary great relief as we are immortal and cannot actually die. I.e. After ten thousand years of being alive, a vampire looks forward to sleeping in their coffin at night.
> using whatever framework you like
Can I use SCP-2718?
Don't vampires sleep in the day? I read the tech manual, no personal experience, ahem.
Consciousness is eternal. If your ego is an illusion, who gets reborn?
I really like the metaphor of consciousness as a drop separated from the ocean during bodily life and returning to it (merging with it) after death. (This is what my strongest bufo/5-meo-dmt experiences showed me, but I guess one can't really say if the idea created that or the other way)
Meditations:
- If a drop separated from the ocean and returns to the ocean, is it not still existing in the ocean?
- Are you fully identified with memories? What if you had a head wound and forget your past- are you still yourself?
- After the drop is given back the ocean, is it possible that a new drop will become separated and hold all the same properties as the first droplet (minus its specific history/memory)?
The research mentioned in the article (which indicates no EEG activity): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7876463/
One of the referenced articles is a wilder read, just even from the title: “Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’” (1).
This research is more than deserving of the Ig Nobel.
(1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3029360/
Here's the documentary referred to: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21945758/
It's rentable at the usual places. I might check it out.
And here it is online: https://vimeo.com/857320140
Interesting thing I learned: Once you die the biome in your intestines massively contributes to processes that breakdown your body. That’s why decapitated heads are often in much better shape then the remaining body, especially if the surrounding environment is generally conserving the body, such as is the case in dry mountains or bogs.
From my understanding of the Buddhist process described here, the ritual often begins days or weeks before death, and includes exclusive consumption of substances like plant tars that dramatically reduce the presence of gut bacteria, and that this effect rather than anything supernatural is what most attribute to the most significant decay processes being temporarily inhibited - there's no gut bacteria left to decompose the body from the inside out.
This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.
I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.
The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.
curious where you learned this. can’t seem to find anything in a quick google and LLM search about ingesting plant tar for tukdam
There are references to it in https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dzrho6/til_... but I cannot trace to a more authoritative source
There is also an interesting comment
>I'm in the seafood business and work with dead fish all the time... I see varying length of shelf life depending on how the fish was harvested. Whatever the metabolic state is when we die is what will be in the system when you die. High stress, metabolism running full speed, and high external/internal temperature leads to short shelf life. Fish harvested when their metabolism is less excited or in a state close to homeostasis will last much longer. So why any different with humans? If you died in the Sahara running a marathon vs. froze in Antarctica while meditating you would for sure see a difference lol.
So I guess that the diet and low metabolic activity seem to be the most plausible explanation. Also supposedly in some (mythical?) very-deep meditative states the body's oxygen requirement is low enough that passive exchange suffices to keep the cells on the verge of aliveness.
I know about that something like that specifically in Japan (also Buddhist), but don't know if it is related to tukdam in Tibetan Buddhism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu
The two phenomena in the article are incorruptibility and responsiveness after apparent death. Granting the evidence is weak, is it possible?
Death for medical purposes is really the boundary when function is not at all expected to return. It's not when metabolic processes stop. It can vary with treatment (handling?).
For incorruptibility, (as others have mentioned) diet could be a factor, especially for immunogenic foods. Lack of stress is another. Stress hormones have wide-ranging impacts and are key to sleep, wherein detoxification, esp. reduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by melatonin. A monk at peace for months or years before death could have a vastly altered hormonal and metabolic landscape.
Therapeutic hypothermia is cooling the body after near-death trauma from heart attacks and drowning. In the last ~15 years, it has been instrumental in increasing survival, even for people e.g., under water for many minutes. The problem is reperfusion injury: after a bout of anoxic cellular respiration, there's a large build-up of ROS; re-introducing full metabolism quickly results in these molecules reacting with others, impeding metabolic processes and destroying some cellular structure. So cooling and only slowly reheating the body allows the ROS to be scavenged instead, and people survive as a result.
If there's validity to incorruptibility in this context, my bet would be on some combination of coolness and processes that reduce ROS, coupled with a very low population of ROS from a stress-free history before death.
But a mechanism of incorruptibility doesn't address the other phenomenon of responsiveness, holding collapse off until some signal.
In my (limited) experience with people after stroke, long after any cognitive abilities are gone, the person maintains reactivity to the environment - touch, heat, light, sound, and (yes) voices. This reflects more autonomic processes. The cerebellum maintains body awareness and position with input from the midbrain, and spinal nerves for muscle groups can operate on their own to hold position and react. (Indeed, one of the signs of the absence of CNS suppression is painful, relentless muscle spasms.) So I can imagine nerves and muscles holding anoxic positions, and even some reduced nerve signaling from the cerebellum using ion reserves. The holding would have to be perfect, and the signal to release would be a one-time thing. This would not work repeatedly or for any signal to do something.
My overall takeaway is that we don't realize the extent to which we are a product of our bodies.
Since we're of a certain level of interest and openness, I'll throw a pop fiction title into the mix: Dan Brown's /Secret of Secrets/ for a tip toe through the non-local mind and soul topic. It's a 4 index card book for me - meaning I have 4 index cards of notes, references, and words worthy of reflection or research. Pretty good for a fiction best seller.
[dead]
I think it pays off to treat unexplained widely perceived mystical things as real phenomena, I.e. genuine experiences, and go from there scientifically.
The conflict between subjective and objective phenomena is alleviated simply by recognizing subjective experience as objective phenomena. Not as necessarily accurate interpretations of reality, but also as not devoid of an objective connection to reality.
History is full of psychological effects thought to be purely subjective for which we now have an objective understanding much more interesting than “those experiences are just made up”.
The brain processes information along many pathways and in complex ways. This creates all kinds of interesting effects of perception, many not experienced by everyone.
A really good example is people who “see vibrations and colorful auras”. We now know there is a large class of effects given the umbrella name of “synesthesia”. In these cases, pre-awareness or sub-awareness information is combined in the brain, in a way not common to most people, and encoded into a directly perceived form.
For the person with one of these effects, the perception is very real.
But the effect is often more interesting than a different sensory/conscious encoding of reality.
For instance, many people, due to early childhood trauma or divergent development, innately process social information very early in their perception pathways. They pick up on micro-gestures, perceived intentions, hints of people’s characters in a pre-conscious way that they experience as direct perception.
Often this came about due to basic psychological function being tuned for an uncommon level of social negotiation demands and social threat preparedness, from birth.
I am very close with a “highly sensitive person” (psychological technical term) who also has color-social synesthesia.
She absolutely “sees” auras and vibrations around people and has since her earliest memory. This is as real to her as the emotional responses most of us have mixed into our perceptions of music.
She can’t unsee these effects any more than most people could go-music-affect blind at will. But she spent her childhood being bullied for her “strange”, “weird”, “stupid”, processing and reactions, to a level and form of information people around her couldn’t see.
But her differences are not just a curiosity, they are very adaptive for her. She sees a visual representation of information generated by her hyper alert pre-conscious social mind directly. Essentially she has an unusually effective social co-processor/pre-processor most of us do not have.
I have been simply amazed on too many occasions to count, at how quickly she picks up on people’s intentions, character traits, or current situational psychology. Such as stress about something unrelated to the moment, and any behavior I could see.
She is not always right in interpretation. And the fact that to her, she perceives many of these subtleties encoded as something clearly seen can make it hard for her to accept a different interpretation without some good alternate evidence.
But generally speaking she is a wonder at low latency high bandwidth personal interpretation.
I feel absolutely blind compared to her, even in situations where I am paying close attention to behavior and cues.
Since I respected her experiences from the time we first met (even though I initially assumed there was a lot of “pure” subjectivity and wishful thinking going on), and brought up the scientific view of understanding phenomena as complementary to perception, not anti-mystical, we got along well. We routinely talk about many things back and forth in mystical vs. scientific forms, with the assumption there is only temporary, never inherent, inherent conflict.
Which is really fun. Her mystical mind and her perception of the world is beautiful and functional in ways I would never have imagined without our rapport.
I think scientists make a big mistake when they approach mystical views from a science competitive stance. Especially perceptions that are common to many. There is likely it or only a scientific explanation, for those subjective perceptions, but interesting benefits associated with the value that people with these perceptions place on them.
Recognizing when there is value makes a dual but consistent mystical/scientific view more accurate and more palatable to people who otherwise have seen science practiced as a selective reality ideology.
The internal mind, relative to our physical processing machinery, is a first class world, for exploration, discovery, and surprising explanations. That it can operate by very different rules from non-psychological artifacts just makes it more important to take seriously as a first class realm.
Some of these esoteric states are really weird, and it seems crazy to me that we are only now investigating them. This isn’t just “energy” woo that can’t be measured, there are clear physical phenomena.
Another good one is Niroda Samapatti (cessation) where advanced meditators can momentarily cease awareness https://awakeningdharma.org/havard-study-on-nirodha-samapatt...
Made me think of "How to do the jhanas" by Nadia Asparouhova: https://nadia.xyz/jhanas Cessation is impressive and the rest too.
Humans have been researching alternative states of mind since beer was invented, at least. With great interest and investment.
Of course, I should have been more clear, I meant that we are only now investigating these states with modern scientific rationalist/empiricist approaches.
Eg the example I gave has apparently never been measured before the last couple years, despite being known in the Buddhist tradition for thousands of years.
Perhaps not known to Westerners though, it could just be that more esoteric states are only recently being described in English.