Herbert Benson

13 articles
NW 3 IF 4 UP 3 HW 3
NW biofield measurement

Thermal Imaging and Biofield Visualization: Seeing the Body's Heat Signature in Real Time

Your body is a thermal engine. Every metabolic reaction, every muscular contraction, every neural firing, every inflammatory cascade generates heat.

17 min · 2 researchers · 11 concepts
IF contemplative neuroscience

The Mind and Life Institute: How a Monk, a Scientist, and a Lawyer Created Contemplative Science

In October 1987, in the private audience hall of the Dalai Lama's residence in Dharamsala, India, five scientists sat in a semicircle across from the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Between them, on a low table, sat a small model of a neuron.

14 min · 6 researchers · 13 concepts
UP death consciousness

Death Meditation: Phowa, Zen Death Poems, and the Art of Conscious Dying

Every contemplative tradition that has seriously investigated consciousness has concluded that death is not the end of awareness but a transition — and that this transition can be navigated consciously, skillfully, and even joyfully. The preparation for conscious dying is not a peripheral...

17 min · 3 researchers · 21 concepts
HW longevity consciousness

Epigenetic Clocks: Measuring Biological Age and the Consciousness-Aging Connection

You have two ages. The first is chronological — the number of years since your birth, ticking forward at exactly the same rate for everyone, indifferent to how you live.

16 min · 2 researchers · 25 concepts
HW longevity consciousness

Longevity Mindset: How Consciousness Practices Are the Most Evidence-Based Anti-Aging Interventions

In 1979, Ellen Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard, conducted one of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of aging research. She recruited eight men in their late seventies and brought them to a converted monastery in New Hampshire that had been retrofitted to replicate 1959 —...

17 min · 3 researchers · 37 concepts
HW longevity consciousness

Mitochondrial Longevity and Biogenesis: Renewing the Inner Fire

Inside every human cell — except mature red blood cells — lives a population of ancient organisms that merged with our ancestors roughly two billion years ago. Mitochondria, the descendants of free-living alpha-proteobacteria that were engulfed by an archaic host cell in one of evolution's most...

17 min · 2 researchers · 19 concepts
NW sacred architecture consciousness

Gothic Cathedrals and Gregorian Chant: How Sacred Architecture Engineered Altered States Through Sound

Walk into Chartres Cathedral on a quiet afternoon and clap your hands once. Then wait.

15 min · 3 researchers · 14 concepts
IF sexuality consciousness

Sexual Energy Transmutation: What Science Actually Says About Semen Retention, Brahmacharya, and Jing Conservation

There is a conversation happening in the quiet spaces between science and spirituality — in Taoist monasteries, in yogic ashrams, in online forums dedicated to "NoFap" and "semen retention," in the coaching practices of high-performance athletes — about whether sexual energy can be consciously...

16 min · 4 researchers · 21 concepts
IF sexuality consciousness

Sacred Sexuality Traditions Worldwide: How Diverse Cultures Independently Engineered Consciousness Through Sexual Practice

The most striking thing about sacred sexuality traditions is not their exoticism or their antiquity. It is their convergence.

17 min · 1 researchers · 24 concepts
NW soul psychology

Collective Consciousness and the Morphic Field

There is an idea that recurs across disciplines, across centuries, across cultures — stubbornly, irrepressibly, despite every attempt by materialist science to dismiss it. The idea is this: consciousness is not confined to individual skulls.

14 min · 8 researchers · 21 concepts
UP spiritual practice

Breathwork as Spiritual Technology

Every spiritual tradition names the breath as the boundary between body and spirit — and as the bridge across that boundary.

11 min · 4 researchers · 22 concepts
UP spiritual practice

The Science of Prayer, Intention, and Healing

In the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital in 1988, 393 patients were randomly assigned to two groups. One group received standard medical care.

11 min · 8 researchers · 12 concepts
IF yoga

Forward Folds: Posterior Chain Release and Parasympathetic Activation

Forward folds are among the most common postures in yoga — and among the most misunderstood. They are routinely treated as hamstring stretches.

9 min · 1 researchers · 8 concepts