Meditation is a form of self-healing

If anything shines a light on the power of placebo effect it is meditation, this effect just being another name for self-healing.  In a word, meditation helps to jump-start the power of the placebo effect. It is important to keep in mind also that self-healing is a whole process, hence, the meaning of “heal” which is, to make sound or whole.  A Buddhist explanation of this effect begins with accepting that our fifty trillion or more cells, which make up our protein body, are influenced from outside of the cell’s membrane.  They are dynamically linked to the surrounding conditions and influences which include our consciousness.

Our consciousness is interfacing with the biological body since the time of conception in our mother’s womb. This consciousness is somewhat like our fingers on a computer keyboard (the cell membrane) giving our computer-body (the internal parts of the cell) its commands. The scope of this interfacing consciousness is beyond the biological body.  It has enormous power.  Unfortunately for us, this consciousness is quite biologically limited and species-specific.  It is also limited to a unique personal system or “my self.”

From the Buddhist standpoint, the trapping and limiting of this consciousness occurs when consciousness/vijñāna (the rebirth transmigrant or gandhabba) vibrates sympathetically with the nāma-rūpa (the embryo) during sexual intercourse when the sperm of the father-to-be yokes with the embryo of the mother-to-be.  One might characterize this as the fall from the immortal into the mortal or somewhat the same, the joining of the real with the unreal such that the real becomes greatly obscured—tied to the suffering biological system from which no apparent escape is seen except death.

During meditation, our awareness (the subject side of consciousness) is somewhat able to limit its infatuation with the body (the object) and the world constructed through it (the object side of consciousness).  In a way we are trying to get back to our disembodied, unconditioned state of being if not to at least enter into a state as peaceful as when we were in our mother’s womb when the object-side was far less powerful and influential.  One particular form of Buddhist meditation, ānāpānasati (breathing awareness) involves having our awareness being before or prior to inhalation and exhalation.  This is based on the principle that, intrinsically, what we are transcends the range of the physical body.  Thus, being before or prior to inhalation and exhalation is a kind of withdrawing process which as the practice continues over time the more of us becomes the less of what brings us suffering.  Meditation then becomes a form of self-healing as we work our way back to the whole which is before the fall into our limited corporeal body which eventually must perish.

Comments

[Avalon]

Mathesis, there is no actual "life", nor any actual "death".

That perception of spatial-temporal forms in an ever appearing wave formation of arising and cessation, is an ILLUSION.

Mathesis, there is MInd Only. i.e Your true nature. Anything else within this dynamically awesome Essence, is mere phenomonolgy. A mere dance of permutations,wave forms born out of thought (that regulates/conditions said essence)

As your Spirit is ignorant of said true nature, it brings down the animative light of said uncodnitioned nature into sheer conditionality - being animated as things, sounds and thought at any given moment.

Thus you are dwelling in a persona of limited perspective
(skandhic consciousness) that acts within a conditioned sphere (consciousness filed of unknown parameters), filtering the conditioned light of your unconditioned true nature, as a world filled with seemingly interacting phenomena, like "beings", inanimate objects, sounds smells, etc.

Perhaps you shoud give the Lankavatara Sutra another go and adjust your dhyana, as a usefool tool by which you break through this illustrious spatio-temporal bubble that prohibits yourself a right view of your true self..the Dharmakaya. ;)

[mathesis]

The is very interesting how you identify the gandhabba with viññana/vijnâna and I like the expression "vibrate sympathetically". Also the development through meditation of a "first-person science" and first-hand knowledge of the body in its static (kayagati) and dynamic (ânâpâni) aspects.
What about the origin of the physical body of man itself or the state of mankind in the remote past of this planet ? I once made a study of the relevant cosmological sutta of the Digha-Nikaya were curiously enough the Buddha claims to have a perfect knowledge concerning matters regarding "origins". There are periods of "evolution" and "devolution", several classes of devas are involved, and we a have a descent and progressive solidification and differentiation from a more luminous and ethereal state until arriving at the sexually differentiated material bodies of today.It is difficult to interpret this but I think it as least clear that just as the vijñana enters into and resonates with the other levels of man, so to there must be a class of beings or principles that brought all species of life and the human body into being from a Cosmic Seed (this was an idea already of Erasmus Darwin) in a coherent way analogous to the embryological development of the individual.The human body represents the heart or brain of the fully developed seed and also its full image and synthesis. This is what the German Paleontologist called the Ur-mensch.