Meditation

Suspend language and desire for a time and just be mindful of your breathing, or of the motions and sensations of your body, or of a natural scene, or of a visualized image. Or quietly watch a candle or listen to a bell or chimes or music or repeat a phrase or word. Or find some time to yourself and ask yourself questions and give yourself the answers. Or read a text closely, following the flow of meaning and syntax with attention and even love. Or project to every living creature feelings of loving kindness and goodwill. Or ask for the help you need and then rest for a moment in the presence of that mysterious other.

Meditation is the deliberate cultivation of inner experience. Many of the inner experiences that inspire religion happen spontaneously and are not necessarily sought out, but once an inner life is recognized, people often seek ways to cultivate it.

There are many and varied approaches to meditation. Some involve language. For example, a common practice is to repeating a word or phrase such as "Om" or "Namu Amida Butsu" or "Jesus", sometimes synchronized with breathing. This is intended to associate the person with a sacred concept or presence, or to simply remind the person of some centrally important aspect of their life. The result of this is often to bring about a feeling of calm centeredness.

Another use of language is inner dialog. This could be talking to yourself or to an imaginary friend or to a "spirit guide". It may be hard to really know which of these you are really talking to. Still this can provide a way of working through problems and getting some comfort.

Prayer can also be a form of inner dialog, but you most likely do not hear a direct answer back. You might feel a certain calm or a feeling of a peaceful and loving presence. Sometimes you may forgo the words and just "practice the presence".

Another use of language is reading sacred texts or affirmations or comforting words. This can be prayer. The reading can be out loud or silent, followed perhaps by a brief silence.

Then there is close reading where you try to uncover layers and layers of meaning or just savor the words. Or you might ask a question and turn to a random passage and see what answer you get. This is a sort of divination where you give meaning to something like the way sticks fall or the direction a pendant turns. Although this hardly seems like a very reliable method for getting your questions answered, it may give you some ideas.

Going beyond language, you can use various ways to quiet your mind and to suspend desire and striving for a brief time. You can focus your attention, without strain, just being mindful, on your breathing, your body, a scene, a candle, a sound, or just the sequence of your thoughts. This can help you to learn to observe and be more detached.

Beyond this there is active imagination. You can visualize a scene or a picture of spiritual being in every detail. You can go further to visual and analyze different sequences of images. This is used in some forms of psychotherapy, but it can also be used to contact the sacred dimension. Some particularly vivid and perhaps involuntary examples of this are visions.

There are some cautions that should be put forward on these practices. Practiced in moderation for relatively short periods of time (twenty minutes to an hour, for example), they can be very beneficial. But if taken to excess or practiced with great intensity, they could be disturbing and in certain cases could even lead to hallucinations (through sensory depravation, for example) or other problems. So moderate, consistent practice in a calm state of mind is the key. If you want to go much farther than this, it would probably be wise to find a teacher who has covered the territory before. Again, though, caution is very warranted. Make sure the teacher is someone you can trust to be playing around with your mind.

Some people who cultivate these practices, after a while, become convinced that there is "something more", something behind the veil, something hidden and beautiful. Could it be that there are many worlds of experience and our absorption in the flow of everyday experience prevents us from sensing them? This is the experiential basis of religion. There is something more than the outer, there is the inner. And at times they seem one, so you think, "as above, so below", "as within, so without".

Obviously this is not at all as clear cut as the publicly accessible experiences that science deals with, or that we deal with in our everyday, practical affairs, so it is tempting to just dismiss it. But some people just can't dismiss it. It seems "real". It seems centrally important.

Scientifically minded people are probably very justified in viewing this sort of experience as less "objective", less definite, difficult to test, just private. On the other hand, meditation shows that one person can have these experiences and then tell others how to experience the same thing. So they are repeatable and publicly accessible in that sense. But the interpretations cannot be easily tested. Was it a hallucination or a vision of the sacred? How can you test it? It becomes more an issue of choice and risk. Do you want to spend your time this way given the risk that you might be fooling yourself? Or do you want to dismiss it and risk overlooking something vitally important? There is no easy answer.