Buddhist meditation

There are various types of meditation Prayer is probably the best known, but there is also TM (transcendental meditation), mindfulness meditation, and, from the Eastern tradition, Zen meditation, Buddhist meditation, and Taoist meditation. All of these types of meditation focus on quieting the busy mind. The intent is not to remove stimulation but rather to direct the concentration toward one healing element—one... 

A particularly useful focused form of self-observation is the type of Buddhist meditation know as vipassana or mindfulness meditation. 

It may be that some d-SoCs cannot be reached directly from another particular d-SoC some intermediary d-SoC has to be traversed. The process is like crossing a stream that is too wide to leap over directly you have to leap onto one or more stepping stones in sequence to get to the other side. Each stepping stone is a stable place in itself, but they are transitional with respect to the beginning and end points of the process. Some of the jhana states of Buddhist meditation may be of this nature (see Goleman s chapter in Transpersonal Psychologies 128 ). This kind of stable transitional state should not be confused with the inherently unstable transitional periods discussed above, and we should be careful in our use of the words state and period. 

The use of meditation is not new. Meditative techniques exist in the traditions of many of the world s great religions. In fact, practically all religious groups practice meditation in one form or another, although Buddhism, practiced widely in eastern and central Asia, is perhaps the best known. Buddhists believe that meditation gets us in touch with our unconscious minds and makes it possible to live life to its fullest potential. 

Zen Buddhists have developed questions and statements called koans that function as a meditative discipline. Koans ready the mind so that it can entertain new intuitions, perceptions, and ideas. Koans cannot be answered in ordinary ways because they are paradoxical they function as tools for enlightenment because they jar the mind. Similarly, the contemplation of 4-D life is replete with koans that is why these final paragraphs pose more questions then they answer. These questions are koans for scienrific minds. 

The relative rarity of self-awareness is a major contributor to neurotic qualities of behavior and to the classification of ordinary consciousness as illusion or waking dreaming by many spiritual systems, an idea explored in Chapter 19. The higher end of the continuum of self-awareness comes to us even more rarely, although it may be sought deliberately in certain kinds of meditative practices, such as the Buddhist vipassana meditation discussed in chapter 7. 

Another important difference is that in hypnosis induction the hypnotist takes credit for these anomalous effects, thus helping to incorporate himself into the subject s own psyche we have given little attention to the role of the hypnotist as "outsider," for he only becomes effective as he becomes able to control the subject s own attention/awareness energy. The meditator in the Buddhist tradition is seeking to free himself from control by external events or persons, and so does not value particular phenomena (back)... 

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