It's All About Meditation

The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices (like sports), which range from techniques designed to promote relaxation, contacting spiritual guides, receiving psychic visions, getting closer to god, seeing past lives, taking astral journies, and so forth, to more technical exercises targeted at developing compassion, love, patience, generosity, forgiveness and more far-reaching goals such as effortless sustained single-pointed concentration^[2], single-pointed analysis^[3], and an indestructible sense of well-being while engaging in any and all of life’s activities. Thus, it is essential to be specific about the type of meditation practice under investigation.

Failure to make such distinctions would be akin to the use of the word ‘sport’ to refer to all sports as if they were essentially the same. For example, the overly generic description of meditation as a mere relaxation technique12 becomes extremely problematic when one attends to the details of many practices (see 7 and Box 1 and Box 2)7,13,14. In contrast, we should think about the term “Meditation” as referring to several neighborhoods of new age mish-mosh, shamanistic lucid dreaming and astral journeying, theistic-concentration meditations, contemplation’s, visualizations, hypnotherapy, training of single-pointed attention, training in mindfulness, training in single-pointed analysis, vision questing, chi building exercises, and so on, developed for various ends.”

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