Out of my body. Does meditation practice cause losing of the body sense?
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The most discussed theme of the Buddhism is experience, especially the experience of alternated states of consciousness. In the Buddhist literature and among Buddhists, we can find many self-reports about "missing legs", "loosing hands" and disappearing of other body parts, out of body experiences, or near-death experiences during meditation. From the Buddhist point of view these "special" states are solely results of mental cultivation by meditation techniques. But we can find these experiences also in our everyday life in biologically predisposed individuals. But we have to also include an influence of Buddhist indoctrination and socialization. Are these special states results of mental techniques or are they more connected to the Buddhist indoctrination and group? The paper describes results of experiment based on research of the body schema distortion during Buddhist meditation, where individual biological predispositions and cultural influence are taken into consideration. In the research standardized methods of behavioral body schema perception measure and questionnaires are used to shed the light on this issue. |
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