What are the causes of mental suffering, how can we find an end to mental suffering, and a scientific method to achieve this?

Last Updated on January 6, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

This has been described in the Buddhist teachings. The are transmitted further since 2500 years. Would this happen if there is no substance in it?

A study of Dr. Richard Davidsons studied a statistical relevant group of long-term practitioners, and found extraordinary gamma wave osciallations in their brains:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101

the paper can now also be found on research gate net:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8187109_Long-Term_Meditators_Self-Induce_High-Amplitude_Gamma_Synchrony_During_Mental_Practice

We can find similar studies in PLOS ONE:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073417

What we miss are long-term studies with long-term mediation practicioners, which demonstrate a shift in the left prefrontal cortex of the gamma wave oscillations.

This would then be the nature paper Mattheu Ricard was talking about, and we eventually receive the Nobel Prize in medicine if we publish nature papers about this topic on a regular basis.

But who has the money to do this? Only the international community. We can start to measure the easiest physiological parameters, as we try to do this here. But the most interesting parameter in this context are the gamma waves in the left pre-frontal cortex, and how they correlate with mental suffering and the end of mental suffering.

Is Richard Davidsons capable of answering the question, what are the causes of mental suffering on a scientific basis, and how can we find an end to the mental suffering alone, with his Center of Healthy Minds with 100 people working there to do research on this topic?

We strongly doubt about this. We suppose this can only be done be the international community in cooperation with the entire humanity, who is one community.

One Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama says, that we are all the same human beings, and he says he is a simple Buddhist monk. And Richard Davidson is a simple researcher with an fMRI brain scanner.

As we said before, it is difficult to get a research grant for the topic described here, altough it is of interest for the entire humanity. But we think it can only be solved on the long-term in co-operation with the entire humanity.

A simple Buddhist monk who received the Nobel Prize already for his work, could trigger a second Nobel prize topic: the causes of suffering and how we can find an end of this suffering. The reserachers who can answer this question on a scientific basis certainly deserve the Nobel prize. But these researchers are eventually the researchers of the whole humanity, since the whole humanity does research on this topic since thousands of years.