Exploring the Relationship between Tibetan Meditation Attainment and Precognition

Abstract

Abstract—This study of advanced practitioners of meditation extends our earlier work testing the hypothesis that meditation enhances psychic awareness or “psi” (Roney-Dougal, Solfvin, & Fox, 2008). Ten (male) Tibetan Buddhist monks participated individually in eight sessions, each comprising a meditation period and a computerized test of precognition in which they were asked to rate each of four pictures on a 100-point scale in terms of how likely it was to be randomly selected as the “target” to be displayed at the end of the session. The normalized rating assigned to the target itself was defined as the “psi” score, where a score of zero is chance expectation. Overall, psi scores did not exceed chance expectation, t(79) = 0.70, p = 0.49, 2-tailed, r = .08, and the type of meditation (mantra or visualization) did not make a difference. The correlation between years of meditation practice and psi scores was in the predicted direction but not significantly different from zero (rho = 0.28, p = 0.22). Nevertheless, the two most experienced meditators, both Nyingma lamas, achieved significant mean psi scores, t(15) = 2.25, p = 0.04, 2-tailed, r = 0.50, confirming a similar finding from our earlier work.

Keywords: precognition—meditation—Tibetan Buddhist monks