Monks Meditating After Death and a Marathoning Woolly Mammoth

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a woolly mammoth that walked VERY far.

Thukdam Project scientists still stumped over how deceased Tibetan monks continue to meditate after death by Grant Currin

Berman, R. (2021, August 5). The strange case of the dead-but-not-dead Tibetan monks. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/thukdam-study
Burke, D. (2021, July 28). Inside the First-Ever Scientific Study of Post-Mortem Meditation. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/thukdam-project/
Lott, D. T., Yeshi, T., Norchung, N., Dolma, S., Tsering, N., Jinpa, N., Woser, T., Dorjee, K., Desel, T., Fitch, D., Finley, A. J., Goldman, R., Bernal, A. M. O., Ragazzi, R., Aroor, K., Koger, J., Francis, A., Perlman, D. M., Wielgosz, J., & Bachhuber, D. R. W. (2021). No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.599190

Researchers found a Pleistocene era woolly mammoth that walked far enough to circle the Earth…twice by Cameron Duke

Koumoundouros, T. (2021). An Ancient Woolly Mammoth Trekked So Far, It Could Have Circled The Globe Twice. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-decipher-the-travel-diary-written-within-a-17-000-year-old-mammoth-s-tusk
Wooller, M. J., Bataille, C., Druckenmiller, P., Erickson, G. M., Groves, P., Haubenstock, N., Howe, T., Irrgeher, J., Mann, D., Moon, K., Potter, B. A., Prohaska, T., Rasic, J., Reuther, J., Shapiro, B., Spaleta, K. J., & Willis, A. D. (2021). Lifetime mobility of an Arctic woolly mammoth. Science, 373(6556), 806–808. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg1134

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from
0:05.0	Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about the
0:09.4	mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death and a woolly mammoth that walked far enough to circle the earth twice.
0:18.0	Let's satisfy some curiosity.
0:20.0	Tibetan monks seem to have a strange superpower.
0:25.0	They can continue meditating after death.
0:28.7	And scientists want to find out what's going on. One of those scientists is Richard Davidson. In 2014, he saw something truly
0:38.3	remarkable, the body of his friend, a Tibetan monk named Geshay Lundub Sopa, five days after his death.
0:46.8	The monk's body looked pretty good, and that's unusual because a corpse normally
0:52.4	starts to decay just one day after death.
0:56.3	Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and the experience inspired him to launch a huge research project into the Tibetan Buddhist practice of meditation after death.
1:09.0	Davidson and his collaborators have just published their first paper and it suggests that the mystery
1:15.4	won't be easy to solve. In the eyes of his fellow believers, the deceased Sopa
1:21.2	was in a meditative state called Tukdam or Clear Light.
1:26.2	There are some reports of Tukdam lasting for hundreds of years,
1:30.4	but it typically lasts a couple of weeks.
1:33.0	Tibetan monks say that during Tukdam,
1:36.0	the mind slowly dissipates and flows into a universal consciousness.
1:41.0	Soapas body began to decay normally after about seven days, at which
1:46.8	point it was cremated.
1:49.4	Davidson and his team are using modern scientific instruments and methods to study this unusual meditative state.
1:56.3	The endeavor is called the Tukdam Project, and it's sponsored by a Center for Healthy Minds
	...

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