Meditation expectations

Throughout history the East has produced men who have likewise pushed the envelope of human ability. .. an astounding collection of documented cases of unusual bodily transformation, including the ability to levitate, spontaneous changes in form, and the performance of unbelievable feats of strength. Many thinkers in the Eastern tradition consider these attributes the optimal result of yogic practices, still rare perhaps, but the expected outcome of years of meditation and movement practices.. . . ... 

A. It s probably not like what you expect. Even if you have considerable experience with various drugs. Salvia is not much like what you have encountered. Salvia is unique, and it is best understood on its own terms, and not by analogy with other substances. Salvia is not a recreational drug, rather, it is best used by those wishing to explore deep meditative states, spiritual realms, mysticism, the nature of consciousness and reality, or the possibilities of shamanistic healing. Experiences vary with the individual, set, and setting as well as with dose and route of administration. It produces a short-lived inebriation that is very different from that of alcohol. However, like alcohol it interferes with the ability to drive, produces incoordination (ataxia), and may produce slurred speech. 

No, I don t expect it is. He smiled with forced kindness, before losing himself in one of his profound meditations. Fitz could almost hear Bugayev s impatience mounting, until the Doctor s thoughts finally emerged as words. I ve been to the future and it looks bleak. ... 

As in any induction technique, the person preparing to meditate has explicit and implicit expectations of what will come about. His explicit expectations stem from his immediately conscious memories of what he knows about meditation and his goal in doing it. His implicit expectations range from the implicit but potentially conscious ones that come from other knowledge about meditation he could recall but is not recalling at the moment, to more implicit ones that he has absorbed over a longer time and of... 

One legend of the discovery of tea—from the Orient, as you might expect— attributes the discovery to Daruma, the founder of Zen. Legend has it that he inadvertently fell asleep one day during his customary meditations. To be assured that this indiscretion would not recur, he cut off both eyelids. Where they fell to the ground, a new plant took root that had the power to keep a person awake. Although some experts assert that the medical use of tea was reported as early as 2737 BC in the pharmacopeia of Shen Nung, an emperor of China, the first indisputable reference is from the Chinese dictionary of Kuo P o, which appeared in AD 350. The nonmedical, or popular, use of tea appears to have spread slowly. Not until about AD 700 was tea widely cultivated in China. Tea is native to upper Indochina and upper India, so it must have been cultivated in these places before its introduction to China. Linnaeus named the tea shrub Thea sinensis-, however, tea is more properly a relative of the camellia, and botanists have renamed the shrub Camellia thea. 

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