Meditation is performed with the goal of attaining "inner change," according to the proposed definition.
- Traditional explanations of the changes are religious or spiritual, but nothing in our description precludes psychological, philosophical, or other existential interpretations.
- Descriptions of transformational development in literary texts from many schools and traditions are usually diverse and ambiguous.
There are just a few scattered comparative investigations of long-term trajectories of contemplative processes in the scientific literature, and they are restricted in scope.
One scientific definition of meditation includes "[mental] growth," but says nothing about what that entails beyond general comments about fostering good emotions and decreasing negative ones.
“Inner transformation consists in long-term fundamental changes affecting many aspects of the person, such as perceptual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or behavioral patterns, eventually bringing about the anchoring of the person in more fundamental aspects of existence,” I propose as a tentative definition. This term may be interpreted in a number of ways.
- Such change is typically associated with growing closer to God in monotheistic faiths originating in the Middle East, and the Sikh practice of nam simran.
- The goal of many Hindu systems, like Yogic disciplines and yantra and chakra practices, is to discover the ultimate Self (purua or atman), which is frequently associated with God (Isvara or Brahman, or Siva in u nion with Sakti).
- The goal of the various Buddhist approaches is to become enlightened to the fundamental emptiness of the self or of all existence, though some have drawn parallels between the ultimate Self that Buddhism is supposed to deny and the "Buddha nature" prevalent in Tibet's and East Asia's meditative traditions.
The goal of Daoism and Neo Confucianism, as defined by Harold D. Roth and Masaya Mabuchi, is to enhance one's closeness to the Way (Dao), which in Neo-Confucianism frequently has strong moralistic overtones.
- Although some of them suggest a higher spiritual world to which the meditator progressively opens his or her consciousness, modern schools of meditation frequently eschew the religious implications of older terminology.
- Others take a more scientific approach to the processes at hand.
- In both instances, the goal is for the individual to become more firmly rooted in elements of life that are deemed more essential in the relevant cultural context than his or her starting point.
This understanding of inner change does not imply agreement with the perennialist notion that all schools of meditation (or religion, mysticism, and so on) are, at their core, efforts to attain the same ultimate truth.
- In some cases, structural and linguistic parallels between different meditative traditions may reflect actual substance similarities, whether that substance is linked to the notion of an ineffable experience of a nonphenomenal reality, as the perennialist discourse usually argues, or to effable and phenomenal experiences.
- In other instances, as has been argued in the past about similarities between descriptions of contemplative and drug-induced mystical experiences, formal and descriptive analogies across various traditions may be misleading and gloss over fundamental distinctions.
- Even with such fundamental distinctions, the form of their discourses binds the different schools of meditation together.
Models of progressive self-transformation, typically based upon the deliberate development over years of ascesis or contemplative practice, and those of abrupt or even violent alteration in the structure of the self—for example, in religious conversion.
- The changes produced by contemplative practice seem to be firmly placed in the first category when stated this way.
- However, although meditation is often seen as a lifelong endeavor, contemplative change is occasionally viewed as a sudden and, ironically, unplanned occurrence.
- This is especially true of the main schools of Zen Buddhism.
- Perhaps even more unexpectedly, it is also true of certain Christian types of contemplation, as shown by the quote from "The Epistle of Prayer" mentioned above, which indicates that the changes occur "sudden and without any methods."
In progressive self-transformation, the self is "the active agent of its own development," but in abrupt change, the self is "a passive receiver of the process," the situation becomes even more complicated.
- This seems to be reasonable. However, as previously stated, the relationship between the activities engaged in meditation practice and the benefits gained is not linear, regardless of whether the consequences are gradual or abrupt.
- Meditation objects, selected and engaged with purpose, intersect with surprise objects, or external occurrences, happening at important and opportune moments.
- Suddenness and passive recipiency are coupled with gradualness and individual action, or, in Shaw's words, "a voluntary openness to the unexpected and lucky."
The technological aspects of meditation are blended with the nontechnical aspects of daily life.
- Sudden religious conversion may also be claimed to imply a person's grounding in more basic elements of existence, at least when seen through the lens of the religion in question.
- Meditation is more frequently practiced within a particular tradition to which the adept already belongs, and the practice seeks long-term objectives specified by this tradition, at least in premodern settings.
- Meditation is dependent on social circumstances as well as learning, transmission, and interpretation cultures, in addition to the method itself.
- It is often performed in groups, and many schools of meditation think that the benefits of group meditation outweigh the benefits of solo meditation.
Many meditation traditions put a significant emphasis on the master-disciple relationship, giving the abba of early Christianity, the shaikh of Sufism, the Indian guru, or the Chinese shifu tremendous authority. All of this raises the issue of what the nature of the changed "person" or "self" is.
Is the self, as the nineteenth-century Western idealists saw it, mainly a subjective field of individual action emerging from within?
Is it a tabula rasa that gets its primary characteristics from perceptions and effects from the environment, resulting in an inner or interiorized sociality?
One potential explanation of meditation's strong integration into its sociocultural environment is that the alterations are the result of an outside-in movement, in which socially determined expectations are interiorized and influence the transformation.
- These expectations may be part of the practice itself in some instances, such as meditations on a particular religious topic, or they may be part of the environment around the practice in other cases.
- In any case, this outside-in movement parallels one of the potential functioning processes of the placebo effect in psychology, psychiatry, and somatic medicine, where motivation and expectations have been proposed as significant elements in the treatment's success.
- It also has aspects in common with autosuggestion and autohypnosis.
Finally, it is compatible with long-held social and cultural constructivist perspectives on human cognition in cultural and religious studies.
- However, this isn't the only way to explain how meditation and its social environment are so closely linked.
- Contemplative change entails more active activity, not less, than abrupt religious conversion.
Meditation is frequently regarded as mainly a solitary activity, even in social settings, as stated above.
- The enhanced impact ascribed to community practice in meditation traditions is only partially attributable to simple social variables such as inspiration and support; it is more frequently understood as the influence of spiritual forces produced during meditation.
- Guided meditations, in which practitioners follow continuous instructions from a meditation guide are at most peripheral to the subject of meditation in most traditions.
- Modern scientific definitions of meditation tend to emphasize individual agency, describing it as a "self-regulation activity" that employs a "self-focus skill" or a "self-observation attitude" to achieve a "self-induced condition."
Furthermore, there is often a conflict between contemplative traditions and the expectations and ideals engendered by their broader religious or cultural settings, which meditation is typically thought to transcend.
- The Chinese Zen “recorded sayings” (yulu) urge meditators to “kill the Buddha when you see him, and kill the patriarchs when you see them,” implying the necessity to let rid of any internal allegiance to holy authority.
- The relationship between the established church and its different contemplative orders has been tense in Catholicism, owing to the contemplatives' insistence on their own particular views of realities that the church felt compelled to regulate.
- The technical and non-semantic nature of some meditation objects—such as body and breath practices, “objectless” attention training, meaningless mantras, aniconic yantras, de-semanticized Zen koans, and the blurring of the recitative content in some Sufi dhikr practices—indicates that meditation may transcend the webs of meaning provided by the cultural and religious context.
All of this suggests that, rather than just adapting to societal norms, people are becoming more autonomous.
- Social settings may be more important than only providing outward cultural standards, spiritual goals, and interpretative webs of meaning.
- The environment's incentive and encouragement may not necessarily promote conformism, but they may offer the feeling of security required for individual investigation of existential problems.
Similarly, the direction of instructors or masters may not necessarily be oriented toward the exercise of authority, but may also attempt to offer chances for technical or existential clarity to the pupil or disciple.
- According to this perspective, meditative transformation entails not only the interiorization of external expectations or webs of meaning, but also the activation of internal and individual processes that may be physiological, psychological, or spiritual in character, or all three at once.
- This viewpoint is consistent with perennialism but does not need it, since the inner components awakened may or may not belong to what is called the perennial “core” of meditation, mysticism, or religion.
The interaction between outside in and inside out changes in different kinds of contemplative practice.
- Some kinds of self-transformation, as defined by Shulman and Stroumsa, may not always indicate the long-term anchoring of a person in the more basic elements of life that contemplative transformation and religious conversion are thought to suggest.
- Demonic possession and spirit mediumship may refer to long- or short-term contact with entities that are outside of most people's daily experience, but they are seldom considered to be part of the more basic levels of existence in the manner described above.
- The most apparent long-term change involved in spirit mediumship is not on the part of the spirit medium himself or herself, but on the part of the community or person that the medium is helping.
Finally, although madness may last a long time or a short time, it is generally believed to cause a person to lose touch with the fundamentals of daily reality rather than becoming anchored in more essential elements of life.
- Nonetheless, some currents of thinking in a number of cultures have seen certain kinds of lunacy as portals to or manifestations of knowledge or insight, which are sometimes even linked to contemplative practice.
- While none of these changes—religious conversion, demonic possession, spirit mediumship, or insanity—are characteristic of meditation, they do occur, demonstrating the breadth of the changes connected with the practice.
- The qualifier "inner" in the phrase "inner transformation" implies that the changes are indicated to transcend beyond merely physical impacts on the body.
- This is in contrast to certain medical and gymnastic traditions, in which mental training is prioritized above physical accomplishment or well-being.
- The traditional use of physical exercise for character development falls somewhere in the middle.
- Both the body and the mind are typically engaged in meditation, although the “embodied” aspect of meditation is not included in its description.
Many contemplative traditions emphasize the body via postures and motions, as well as physical meditation objects and different efforts to "liberate" the mind or spirit from the body.
Most clearly, contemplative practice is often associated with a sitting (and sometimes cross-legged) position, and the Chinese verb zuo, which means "to sit," is a component element in several words for meditation: jingzuo (silent sitting), dazuo (hit sitting), chanzuo (zen sitting), zuochan (zen sitting), jiaf Uzuo (cross-legged sitting), duanzuo (straight sitting), and zhèngzuo (straight sitting) (sit straight).
While sitting meditation is the most common form of the practice, there are also laying, standing, strolling, and even dance meditations.
- Similarly, although closed eyes are often associated with meditation, half-closed or open eyes are also frequent.
- And, whatever part the body plays in the practice and process of meditation, the transformational changes it brings about transcend beyond bodily concerns.