When Thomas Hübl was a 19-year-old medical student in Vienna, he found himself meditating for long periods every day without any instruction or guidance. During the next several years, he began to explore different spiritual traditions, until he eventually dropped his studies – despite his love for science and medicine – and went into retreat.

Today, Hübl is a celebrated contemporary spiritual teacher with an increasingly large international body of students. He also propagates spiritual science, which he claims is not a contradiction in terms. The core of Kabbalah and Judaism, he says, is similar to the scientific approach to the development of an inner journey.

Hübl talks about his collaboration with a German institute, which tested him and his students with an MRI machine in order to measure the effect of meditation on the brain. A developed meditation technique, Hübl explains, can stop the area in the brain responsible for daydreaming from producing random thoughts: “You start mastering your thinking, instead of your thinking mastering you.”

Hübl has found a perfect home for his work in Israel, where he believes there is a strong spiritual dimension. He has led large-scale healing events, bringing together hundreds of Israelis and Germans to address the collective wounds of the Holocaust. Germans, Hübl believes, have inherited their ancestors’ traumas in a genetic sense, just as Jewish Israelis define themselves as being second or third generation to the Holocaust.

Playlist:

Leonard Cohen – Anthem
Keith Jarrett – Cologne Concert part 1
David Grey – Babylon
Coldplay – Fix You
U2 – A Beautiful Day