The term meditation refers to a broad variety of
practices (much like the term sports),
which range from techniques designed to
promote relaxation, contacting spiritual guides, building internal energy (chi,
ki, prana, etc.), receiving psychic visions, getting closer to a god, seeing
past lives, taking astral journeys, 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, single-pointed analysis, 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 technique becomes extremely problematic when one attends to the
details of many practices.
In contrast, we should think about the term
"Meditation" as referring to several neighborhoods of New Age
practices, shamanistic lucid dreaming and astral journeying,
theistic-concentration meditations (Samadhi, clinging to god, Gnosis),
contemplation, visualization, hypnotherapy, aromatherapy, chakra clearing,
kundalini, breathing exercises, 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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