Zazen and the placebo effect

Reviewing some of what the mysterious placebo effect has been most effective with, includes hypertension, stress, cardiac pain, headaches, adrenal gland secretion, diabetes, colitis, menstrual pain, the common cold, fever, asthma, and multiple sclerosis.  In fact, 60 to 90 percent of most drugs and other
therapies prescribed by physicians depend on the placebo effect.  Not surprising, zazen may well prove helpful in producting the placebo effect.

It is not unusual after several weeks of doing daily zazen for a typical practitioner to notice a general clearing up of their former malaise.  We need to keep in mind that meditation is Asia's preeminent mind recharging exercise which can, to some extent, reboot the body’s invisible homeostatic system.

I would hope that some Zen centers and researchers take up a study of zazen and its possible connection with the placebo response.  I think zazen offers more than just helping us feel good for a while.  In fact, its true benefit all along may have been to produce the placebo response as no other therapy can.  On this train of thought, in the future we might see zazen and certain Tibetan Vajrayana practices be incorporated by medicine to bring about the maximum placebo response in which invisible mind exerts its power over the brain.

Comments

[Instance]

"This might shock you, shock many of you. I think Buddhism, the whole Dharma practice, is a placebo. You know placebo? Placebo. Placebo is a pill, it is a fake, it is not a medicine. Sometimes you give it to someone saying that this will work. And they eat and they think it works. Whole Buddhism is that. And Buddha said so. It is not that as if I am making it up actually. Buddha said that. The path, it’s a deception but it’s a necessary deception. It is a necessary deception. Let’s say you and I are in the dessert. You are very thirsty. Everywhere you look you see mirage and you think it is a water. And you say you really want to go to this water. Now I have been to the desert and I know you are hallucinating. Now I can be very unskilled, little bit of compassion but no skillful means, no wisdom. And then I can tell you: “Hey you shut up, this is not a water, this is a mirage.” That is not going to help you. So if I am a compassionate, skillful, then I might say: Yes. Even so knowing that this is not true. Because I know that you will not hear me saying this is not water. I will have to say: “Yeah, let’s go.” I might even go with you. And as we get closer you yourself will see it is a fake. And this is what we call skillful means of the Buddha. There is a thousands of that. How many? Eighty four thousands placebos."
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

[Jure]

I suspect the Zennist is anticipating the future ... in my humble opinion research into the placebo effect will be crucial in/to the future of science, even more than other central philosophy of science topics such as the ontological status of the observer, and the ontological status of possibility.

Princeton University has proven that "mind over matter" is a reality:

In the PEAR Labs, operators frequently spoke of "achieving a state of resonance" with the devices they were working with, which positively correlated with higher than chance performance in random trials. Their data gives “a consistent empirical indication in the presence of groups of people engaged in shared cognitive or emotional activity”, “One conceptual hypothesis for the group-related anomalies indicated by FieldREG is that the emotional/intellectual dynamics of the interacting participants somehow generate a coherent ‘consciousness field,’ to which the REG responds via an anomalous decrease in the entropy of its nominally random output.” That is, emotional intention, especially group emotional intention, increases order. “Bonded co-operator pairs” also show increased order (Dunne, 1991) Jahn and his team confirm Radin’s experiments indicating that random chance machines “may be affected by group consciousness.” Such a group consciousness field effect would then transcend space and time limitations defined in historic models." -

"Consciousness" transcending space and time!

This coming from hardheaded scientists, not New Age spiritualists.

[The Zennist]

JS:

Dogen's shikan-taza (只管打坐, lit. solely engrossed in sitting) is one of those typical Dogen, off-the-wall, interpretations of accepted Buddhist terms. In this case, it is an interpretation of 止觀 zhi-guan (samatha-vipasyana) with the addition of 打坐 da-zuo. Both sound the same, but both are entirely different. I use zazen in the blog to refer to meditation in general.

[JS]

Now, dost thou mean "zazen" as in general word for sitting meditation, or specifically "shikantaza"?

Otherwise a somewhat odd entry.