Meditation: Facts at a Glance
Meditation is about having full consciousness of oneself. It means making yourself totally aware of activities like listening to the rain as it falls on the rooftop or paying closer attention to your breathing. When you say full consciousness or total awareness, it means that you are getting rid of any distraction in your mind.
Effective meditation means zero mind distraction and sticking only with that particular activity that you chose to focus on. Hence, a person who meditates is a person who observes with a single focal point. It means that all of your mind activities are reduced to a single activity. Simply put, meditation pertains to a state of consciousness whereby your thought processes come to a halt, free of dispersed thoughts and scattered patterns. Meditation is, in a sense, a way of life.
Etymology of the Word
The word “meditation” came from two Latin words, namely, “meditary” which means to think or to exercise the mind, and “mederi” which means to heal. In Sanskrit, meditation is derived from the word “medha” which means wisdom. The classical concept of yoga is commonly associated with Eastern culture. What is neglected is the fact that meditation is universal in both theory and practice, and cannot be dismissed as either Eastern or Western.
Meditation is originally a traditional practice not meant to be an aspect of the modern age. In recent years however, the practice of meditation has become a magnet to the modern man from different races with varying personal and social backgrounds. The popularity of meditation can be attributed to medical and scientific proofs on the benefits of meditation which have been made publicly available over various forms of media; however, such published evidence still needs to be carefully scrutinized.
Meditation has evolved from how it is understood in the past to how it is perceived in the present. Nowadays, meditation is generally grasped as a form of mystical experience whereby the observer or the person doing meditation rests with a certain seating position, eyes closed and concentrates by emptying his or her mind to delve into deep relaxation, with the hope of achieving inner peace and sometimes an encounter with the Supreme Being. At other times, people associate meditation with their past times or forms of relaxation like music, dance, arts, or even their ordinary hobbies, which notions are rather confusing because if that’s the case, meditation is merely taken as a technique to get one’s mind off things.
The Practice of Meditation
Traditional writings on meditation provide that the true essence of meditation is achieved by going through various stages. The initial stage is preparation of oneself. To be prepared means to be relaxed and in control of one’s breathing. One must also be prepared in terms of certain personal and social codes and even physical positioning. After the preparatory stage come the more complex stages of focus and attentiveness, reflection, and finally, absorption. In some instances, however, like the integral meditation method, these meditation stages are simultaneously applied. This means that one need not refine each stage before shoving on to the next stage.
Presently, the practice of meditation is being investigated for its optimal advantage based on the scientific claim that the energy of the mind and body can break free and that the characteristic of consciousness can be expanded through constant practice of choice meditation techniques. Scientists are now looking for empirical facts to establish this hypothesis.
