Meditation: The Complete Guide

Techniques from East and West to Calm the Mind, Heal the Body, and Enrich the Spirit

Patricia Monaghan, Eleanor G. Viereck

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781608680474
• eBook ISBN: 9781608681143

Uniquely comprehensive, this one-stop resource describes thirty-?ve distinct meditation practices, detailing their historical background and contemporary use, ways to begin, and additional resources. The what and why of meditation in general are discussed, with emphasis on helping readers discover what particular type of meditators they are. Disciplines grounded in Buddhism, Tantrism, Taoism, Judaism, and Islam are included, as are contemplative prayer, Quaker worship, and indigenous traditions. Drumming, trance dancing, yoga, mindfulness, labyrinth walking, gardening, and even needle crafts are explored in a spirit that invites and instructs novice, devotee, and healing professional alike. How to choose an approach? The authors ask questions that steer readers toward options that match their habits, preferences, and needs.

PART ONE

INDIGENOUS
TRADITIONS

INTRODUCTION

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

— BLAISE PASCAL

Deep in the recesses of European caves, great horses leap and gallop, bison rear and charge, and antelope graze and run. Painted or incised upon rock, these vestiges of the earliest human culture of which we have record show that the spiritual impulse can be traced to the dawn of humanity. The placement of these paintings, as well as their surrounding motifs and figures, tells us that the caves were not galleries or museums but rather were ancient places of worship.

Little remains of the specifics of the worship of those who painted and carved their visions in the vaulting caves some twenty-five to thirty thousand years ago. The caves may have been used for initiation rituals, for they seem not to have been in regular use but rather to have been the location of occasional important ceremonies. They are often located in inaccessible and even dangerous places, suggesting that a journey with presumed spiritual value preceded the revelation of their glories.

One of the most telling finds is a simple trace that could easily have been overlooked: the pattern of footprints, made in soft mud many thousands of years ago, then hardened by the same rocky glaze that forms stalactites and stalagmites. These footprints show someone moving in a circle, many times, landing with each step hard on the heel. It is the record, scholars believe, of an ancient ritual dance.

On the cave walls dating to the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic period, we occasionally find human figures. One of these, the famous “sorcerer” image, has staring eyes and a rigid body that has apparently been punctured by many arrows. The body is half standing, not lying down as a dead person would be. And his erect sexual organ also suggests that the figure is alive.

What could this strange position indicate? Scholars believe that the image represents the initiation of a religious practitioner, for accounts of initiatory spiritual experiences among indigenous people show some similarity despite their wide geographical dispersion. In Siberia and Australia, for instance, we find priest-magicians of both sexes who describe their initiation as being torn apart or punctured with sharp objects such as spears or arrows. This psychic dismemberment is followed by re-creation as a new being, with access to spirit realms not available to the uninitiated.

This particular form of initiation is found especially in the arctic regions, and it has been described by modern scholars with the somewhat derogatory term arctic hysteria. Older scholarship used the term shamanism to describe the religious beliefs of people whose priests underwent initiation in an altered state, but this usage has been called into question in recent decades for suggesting a unanimity of experience among widely diverse groups. In this section, we will deal with meditative and trance techniques that derive from or are inspired by indigenous traditions, and we will note any controversies that surround their use.

The role of trance was traditionally important in the religions of the arctic, from where the term shaman (from the Tungus people) comes. In these religions, after initiation, the new shaman’s duty was to enter a trance and in that altered state effect changes in the material world for the benefit of others. Sometimes the shaman traveled to a distant realm where the spirits of animals dwell and begged for a more successful hunt. Sometimes the shaman went to the land of the dead to find the soul of someone who had died but whose spirit haunted the deceased’s survivors.

The trance was not entered lightly, for the realms that the shaman traversed could be dangerous. The visions that shamans describe are frequently terrifying, involving spirit beings of great power and occasional malevolence. Shamans were therefore equipped with an arsenal of psychic practices to defend them from the power of malevolent spirits. Mircea Eliade called these psychic practices “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”

Many indigenous religions in areas other than the arctic had similar traditions, in which an initiated or a hereditary religious practitioner used techniques such as drumming, chanting, or consumption of entheogens (plants that “bring on the gods”). In this, and in all the other religious paths discussed in this book, the potential practitioner is urged to consider ethical issues in employing techniques of any religion or culture of which he or she is not an active and participating member.

Women’s Positions and Roles

Although an increasing number of scholarly as well as popular works on indigenous religions are being published, many of them imply, or even directly state, that the priests of these religions are entirely or almost exclusively male. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women too assume these roles in most cultures. Even in many patriarchal cultures, male priests wear female attire when they practice, which suggests that women may have predominated in this religious role in the past.

In some areas, the priestly or oracular function is specifically a feminine role. Indeed, one taunting song from medieval Japan refers in derogatory fashion to a region’s inhabitants as being so deprived that “they even have male shamans there.” In Japan and Korea, shamanism remains part of the religious sphere of women. In Siberia, frequently described as the ancient birthplace of shamanism, practitioners were women as often as men. Throughout the Americas, women as well as men practiced this important skill. In Scandinavia, the prophetic voluspa served important social and religious functions. Priestesses have been an important part of many societies.

It is possible that political changes resulted in the obliteration of the female shaman. This was certainly true in China, where there are records of widespread persecution of women practitioners, called wu, so severe that ultimately all were martyred. In Korea, too, the women known as mudang were persecuted, although the religion survived underground for more than fifteen hundred years to reemerge in recent years.

Trance and Meditation

The “archaic techniques of ecstasy” are humanity’s most ancient reservoir of information about the way that body, mind, and spirit interact. Although some religious practices may extend even to the precursor of our species, the Neanderthal race, since the rise of Homo sapiens our bodies and minds have not significantly changed or evolved. What worked for our most ancient relatives will still work for us: drumming and dancing can change our consciousness.

Some scholars discover, in this most ancient of spiritual traditions, the basis of later meditative disciplines such as yoga or various martial arts. Others contend that the intention of such disciplines is to attain a state of consciousness that, though different from that of ordinary life, stops short of a visionary trance. Yet the entranced priest, rigid in body while the soul flies to another realm, seems physiologically little different from the yogi absorbed in deep meditation. What differs is the epic adventure reported by the priest after returning from that altered state — an adventure that seems to have little in common with the mindless awareness of, for instance, the Zen practitioner.

Trance is a common human experience. Studies of people who have been asked to follow their thoughts while awake reveal that we engage in constant momentary forays into a dreamlike state. What we call consciousness is not a steady state of crisply lucid awareness but a fluidly shifting one. To enter a trance is to accept and embrace those more visionary or dreamlike moments, to enter that river of images with the confidence that it is possible to return. Trance is an extraordinarily variable experience, ranging from a light daydream to an intense transformative experience, but it is a common human experience that offers benefits similar to those of what is more conventionally called meditation: it relaxes and refreshes, lowers blood pressure and heightens sensory awareness, pulls the mind away from limiting patterns, and opens new doors of perception.

Some individuals enter a trance more readily than others. For such a person, any meditative practice can bring on a trancelike experience in which the mind is flooded with vivid images and one experiences a sense of exhilaration tinged with danger. Such people often have vivid dreams as well, whether they can recall them in the waking state or not. For the unprepared, the trance state can be surprising and sometimes frightening. If one is not expecting to encounter dreamlike beings and narratives, even a light trance can make one feel dangerously out of control. Learning the techniques of trance can be rewarding in itself or can assist the practitioner with other meditative disciplines.

Various Techniques

Two important techniques, drumming and dancing, form the basis of the meditative techniques that derive from indigenous religions. Another, more controversial one is the use of psychotropic, or mind-altering, substances. A significant literature discusses the impact of vegetative concoctions on consciousness: mushrooms, ergot from rye or wheat, and alcohol. Those who have struggled with addiction to drugs or alcohol may benefit from learning consciousness-alteration techniques, for an addict’s original soul intention in using these substances may have been to achieve the trance state or ecstasy.

In many traditions, the drum is the main tool for altering consciousness, creating a path that both leads to the spheres beyond this one and provides a means to travel back to ordinary reality. Such drumming is repetitive rather than complex and creates measurable physiological changes in both the drummer and the listener. Specifically, both the heartbeat and the breath will entrain, or synchronize, with the drum, so that groups of individuals will find themselves literally embodying the rhythm.

Dancing too can change consciousness. Even ballroom dance can create an ebullient mood of release and refreshment, but trance is induced either by repetitive dancing, as in many Native American powwow dances, or by expressive dance that follows only the body’s promptings rather than choreographed steps (see chapter 43, “Kinesthetic Meditations”). The combination of drumming and dancing, found throughout the world, represents one of the most intense...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More praise for Meditation — The Complete Guide
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: What Is Meditation?
• Part 1: Indigenous Traditions
• Part 2: Yoga
• Part 3: Buddhism
• Part 4: Taoism
• Part 5: Judaism
• Part 6: Christianity
• Part 7: Islam
• Part 8: Mixed and Modern Forms
• Part 9: Creative Meditations
• Part 10: Active Meditations
• Conclusion: A Meditation on Meditation
• Index
• About the Authors
• Promo Page