Meditation & Spirituality

The aim of meditation, the scientists discovered long after Eastern mystics hadbeen practicing it for centuries, is to get alpha waves of about 9Hz topredominate in the brain instead of the everyday life beta waves of 20+Hz. Thisresults in a reduction in stress and anxiety levels, which are probably at an all-time high in the populations of the developed world, in those who practice it.

You can choose from a number of types of meditation, varying in price when itcomes to teachers and teaching methods, or you can DIY with meditation CDs,the internet and books.

• ‘Mantra meditation’ was given to the western world and the Beatles inthe 1960s with TM, Transcendental meditation.
• Other mantra types include NSR, Natural Stress Relief techniques,
• And Primordial Sound Meditation, from Dr Deepak Chopra.
• Buddhists favour Pranayama, a practice with breathing and counting,not a mantra.
• Mindfulness, one of the most recent introductions and highly thought ofin Mental Health circles. It has its’ own website, www.mindful.org , andis accessible through books and the internet, free on Youtube.
• ‘Guided meditations’ and visualisations are also available on Youtubeand CDs are available for different slants on Personal Development andspirituality.

Before the buzz word of ‘Meditation’, religions had their own approach tomental prayer, sometimes dubbed ‘Contemplation’. The Greek philosopherPlato reckoned that contemplation would give the contemplative access to the
highest form; Jewish thought was that contemplating God involved recognizingmoral perfection; Mohammed went up Mt Hira to contemplate Life and its’meaning; the 14 th century Christian treatise ‘The cloud of unknowing’ saidthat contemplation was a ‘kind of transcendent seeing’, without use of theintellect….’God can be loved, but not thought’

The differences between the two practices become blurred when thebrainwaves of 9 Hz are approached. The Contemplative’s direct awareness ofthe Divine and the Meditator’s clearance of thoughts from the mind both havethe possibility of connecting with the Divine.

This is why Spiritualists meditate