Rhonda: Do you think that part of the effects of meditation in general, because a lot of meditation has focuses on breathing and breathing, do you think that the breathing itself may be responsible for some of those positive effects: meditation, respiration?

Wim: Sure. If you go in very... Capel, Professor Capel who was also talking about this, about the neocortex and the hypothalamus, which is the surface of the brain, and the hypothalamus is the brainstem, more or less, and we lose the contact, but it's all the time the neocortex going on with the world, like, "Hey, I got to do this. I got to do this." Then the blood flow will go to this, and it creates a sympathetic nervous system activity all the time. But to create new energy, it happens only, like a cow, it's going to sit down, it's going to chew on its grass, and this way, if these chemical processes are able...if she runs, these chemical processes to make milk are not able to happen. So we got a same process. We are mammals too. So in the cell, it needs peace. We need to sit down, relax, and to make new energy in the cell. But as we are always going on in the brain, the sympathetic nervous system is going on and on and on, and it only takes energy. And because we don't know how to get into the parasympathetic nervous system, which enables the cell production to make new energy, we are not able to disconnect therefrom. Therefore we get no new energy. And that's why life is so depressing, or too much going on, and you got to go all the time.

So now to get into this part by breathing, vipassana meditation and all that, every person [SP] and all these techniques, I worked them out. I wrote a manuscript on yoga as a technique, but so long a time it takes to get into it. And now we are doing a study with psychiatrical research, we are doing, to compare it with mindfulness. Mindfulness is actually a Western answer on the Asian meditation forms of the East, and it's called mindfulness. But still it takes such a long time to tap into the brain the right way to disconnect from the sympathetic nervous system activity course by the neocortex to get into the limbic system which is connected to the parasympathetic nervous system, which creates energy, which gives space, which doesn't give anxiety, and all that. So if you go into this breathing, profoundly, then there is no danger. There is no danger. You don't need to be. And if it takes just four minutes or five minutes, then it will disconnect from the neocortex, which is the sympathetic nervous system activity, it shuts down. There's no blood flow anymore going toward it, and it goes down, and you feel relaxed.