Krishna Kantha, Thailand’s living saint, gently placed his hands on top of my head. I could feel an icy coldness penetrating my skull.

A lovely golden ball of liquid energy soon formed in the center of my brain .

“Go meditate. No talking, cell phones or TV. Be quiet. Walk in the grass. Observe Nature,” came instructions from best meditation teacher I ever had.

My head felt like it had been stuffed with cotton wool for the next few days. Any attempt to talk or do any intellectual activity brought a headache.

But meditation was great!

My mind could see inside the golden ball in my brain. Millions of sparks flew about in it. These sparks were busy rebuilding my brain cells. All my old patterns of intellectual thinking were disappearing. Awareness was growing along with the golden ball .

The ball of sparks became bigger and bigger until it encompassed my entire brain before proceeding down my spinal cord to work on it too.

After three days, I could walk about performing the daily chores of life while holding the empty mind state. No thoughts at all arose while doing physical activities. Buddhist monks practice Vipassana meditation all day every day for many years to achieve this .

I had it in just three days!

After three weeks, I had also experienced oneness and emptiness, two of the most advanced states of meditation.

Thank you Krishna Kantha!

In the years since my experiences on retreat at Krishna’s, I had often wondered if my visions of the golden sparks rebuilding my brain were imagination or reality dermes vs medilase.

Then I read a study by the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness.

The study shows that meditation actually grows grey matter in the hippocampus. This area of the brain is already known as being associated with learning and memory, and with structures related to compassion, self-awareness and introspection.