Meditation and Spirituality

At this website section, you can read a few essays on meditation practices and experiment for yourself with the wonders of consciousness and opening up to astonishingly beautiful realms of spirituality. ("Yes, Martha, the world of the heart-mind is far more interesting than we've been led to believe.")

For starters, here's a detailed overview on demographics, styles, stages and goal of meditation, an excerpt from an old book manuscript I may eventually revise and publish, Our Religions' Future: Truths, Trends and Challenges for Old and New Spiritualities, which is intended for mainstream general readership, not just mystics. Yet i've "stealthily" inserted a lot of mystical insights into the book, as you can see.

From the same book manuscript is another excerpt on meditation as a powerfully resurgent trend within Christianity, where it is more generally called "contemplation" (the word "meditation" in Christianity usually referring to the more discursive, reflective initial mental practice before one goes beyond the mind in the kinds of contemplative depth advocated by the eminent Christian spiritual masters).

In the future I'll also scan, format and upload some old papers I wrote in graduate school about other aspects of meditation. Here's one that you can read, on Meditation, Mandalas and Mandalization. A couple of classic overview texts on styles of meditation are those by Lawrence LeShan (How To Meditate: A Guide to Self-Discovery, 1973/1999) and Daniel Goleman (The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience, 1996), available for purchase, along with other books on meditation by Kathleen McDonald, Stephan Bodian, et al., at online booksellers like amazon.com, powells.com, abebooks.com, etc.

If you've not already seen it at the Healthy / Unhealthy Spirituality section of our website, you can download the healing meditation at the webpage Healing abusive subconscious models of God (instructions for the experiential meditation come after the long preface, about 2/3 down the page).

An overall bit of wisdom I would share with anyone interested in the practice of meditation: Let God meditate you! Let the One great Power, call THIS whatever you wish (God, Buddha-Nature, Tao, Brahman, Life, Consciousness) which is already doing your life, digesting your meals, growing your cells, etc., also meditate you in sublime peace, relaxation and radiance... Enjoy!