How can monks levitate

The legacy itself dates back to eighth century Tibet, with the yogini Yeshey Tsogyal as a prime example, and has continued over the centuries since that time. The exhibition includes works from important private collections as well as the Rubin Museum of Art. A full color exhibition catalog written by exhibition curator Glenn H. Mullin, world renowned scholar of Tibetan culture and student of the Dalai Lama, will be available during the exhibition.

The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism. Indian Teachers - Shantideva. Buddha Shakyamuni - Life Story. Buddha Shakyamuni - Avadana. Buddha Shakyamuni. Buddha Shakyamuni with 17 Arhats. Buddha Shakyamuni with 16 Arhats. Pindola Bharadvaja - One of the 16 Arhats. Indian Scholar Pandita. Pema Jungne: Padmasambhava. Indian Adept Mahasiddha , Ghantapa. And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings.

Dr Josipovic's research is part of a larger effort better to understand what scientists have dubbed the default network in the brain. He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.

The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee. The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down. This neural set-up allows individuals to concentrate more easily on one task at any given time, without being consumed by distractions like daydreaming. Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment. Scientists previously believed the self-reflective, default network in the brain was simply one that was active when a person had no task on which to focus their attention.

But researchers have found in the past decade that this section of the brain swells with activity when the subject thinks about the self.

The default network came to light in when Dr Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in the US state of Missouri, began scanning the brains of individuals who were not given tasks to perform. The patients quickly became bored, and Dr Raichle noticed a second network, that had previously gone unnoticed, danced with activity. But the researcher was unclear why this activity was occurring.

Other scientists were quick to suggest that Dr Raichle's subjects could have actually been thinking about themselves. Soon other neuroscientists, who conducted studies using movies to stimulate the brain, found that when there was a lull of activity in a film, the default network began to flash - signalling that research subjects may have begun to think about themselves out of boredom.