Last time I introduced the idea of checking out the basics of meditation for spiritual seekers who, unlike Sunyata, were not enlightened at birth.

Much of the following material is in the first few pages of one of my books on meditation entitled Meditation: The Bridge from the Apparent to the Real…with the sub title How some methods deceive meditators into delusions of progress, and the ancient method that bypasses all such problems, does no harm, and always works.

This book is available from Lulu publishing by clicking on the title on the right hand side of this blog page, or from Amazon.com. Here we go then with a short history of meditation in the West.

It hasn’t been too long since meditation was considered a weird activity practiced by brown skinned people from the mystic East who twisted themselves into pretzels as a form of self inflicted torture.

Most nominal Christians, with their customary ignorance, looked at the practice with suspicion in spite of their Lord’s directive “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” Matt 6:25 and the teaching “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21 Seems clear to me, but connecting these dots was not done by the majority of the faithful. They still look outside for their God and their salvation, and quarrel about the labels they use.

In spite of the incursion of Eastern ideas into the Western world initiated by the activities of the Theosophical Society and Vivekananda’s tour de force at the Parliament of Religions in the 19th Century, not much of a dent was made in the spiritual habits of the Protestant or Catholic communities.

Even the early 20th Century fame of the enlightened Paramahansa Yogananda, and the popularity of his Autobiography of a Yogi didn’t affect society as a whole.

After World War II, the second war to end all wars, Transcendental Meditation became a buzzword when the Beatles embraced the practices of the Maharishi. Many shaggy swamis and yogis, male and female came to sow their seeds in the suddenly receptive soil of the West. The Maharishi influence is still here in the fully certified, but spiritually based, Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, the town to, and around which many Indian saints come to visit.

Then came the New Age yuppies, seeking their usual competitive advantage in spiritual worlds, having become bored with the physical, unless of course it was yoga, which meant Hatha Yoga to them because the other yogas weren’t obviously physical, and you couldn’t see anything happening. Rather like Einstein doing nothing from the reporter’s point of view, while actually sitting at his desk generating world shattering ideas.

The Mayo Clinic experiments involving Swami Rama showed clearly that some people had a control over their bodies that could not be explained by what we call medical science. The Swami changed the temperature of his skin at any points indicated by the experimenters, sometimes having two spots a couple of inches apart at totally variant temperatures. He stopped his heart beat at will and slowed it down or speeded it up as required, moved a pendulum inside a glass jar by concentrating on it, and did other things that blew the minds of the Mayo observers. He had hoped that by demonstrating that these ‘supernatural’ phenomena were actually available to any human who would do the training, that the West would be more amenable to the Eastern ideas.

What happened could have been predicted by any health writer. The Mayo Clinic did not publish the results for decades because the researchers thought they would be considered as flakes by their fellow scientists who just ‘knew’ that such things were impossible. The same thing happened to scientists who could find no flaws in statistical research on astrology.

But one good thing did happen. A medical doctor invented the name ‘relaxation response’ for the common meditation experience, and it became possible for physicians who had been meditating for years to come out of the closet without committing professional suicide as flakes, kooks or whatever other epithets journalists and other doctors would pin on them.

The work of the famous quantum physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein, produced the idea of two universes the implicit and the explicit that merged at an interface. This theory made it scientifically possible to include all psychic phenomena as natural. His holographic idea that every part of the universe contained every part of the universe became part of the arsenal of such distinguished speakers as Joseph Chilton Pearce.

This man is a world famous expert on child development. His first two books were The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg. They dealt in detail with facts that scientists continually ignored because they couldn’t explain them. Facts like the fire walking ceremonies in parts of the world that have taken place annually for ages, and the bending of spoons by young children using mind alone. Facts that had scientific verification but not publicity.

Then he wrote The Bond of Power with deals with how the work of a guru, or spiritual practices can heal the breaks in child development caused by current technological interferences with the natural childbirth practices, and how it can be proven that meditation allows full development to occur even after the medicos have interfered with the birth.

His two books Magical Child and Magical Child Matures deal with child development as it could occur if medicine and technology didn’t interfere, and then The End of Evolution is a warning note along similar lines. All of these should be read by any woman considering having a baby, or who already has one that she can’t figure out.

Dr. Deepak Chopra, with his first background in the Transcendental Meditation of the Maharishi now goes even further and explains meditation and healing in terms of quantum mechanics, and what can only be called real science.

East-West bookstores and magazines and the popularity of California style Zen made it possible for a general exposure of the viewing and reading public to the undeniable esoteric side of the Oriental martial arts such as Kung Fu, (David Carradine as Grasshopper), T’ai Chi, Aikido and Kendo.

Channeling became a popular method of ascribing authorship to a ‘greater than human’ source. One famous and widely used book, A Course in Miracles was channeled by a very reluctant near atheist psychologist whose source called itself Jesus. That book would not have had a chance before the Maharishi ideas began to percolate into society because of the fame of the Beatles.

The new Zeitgeist made it possible and profitable to reprint the old war horses of my youth, books authored by Dion Fortune, Madame Blavatsky, Ernest Woods and Edgar Cayce. These came out in editions that made them best sellers in the new psychic markets. And many people realized that these books and that knowledge had been around for many decades. They just hadn’t known about it.

The Wasteland mentality of the martial and ecological disasters that we were perpetrating on what was now considered the body of Gaia, the Earth as a living being, formed a climate favorable to the popularization of the Grail Mysteries and work with genuine Faery folk that had not been noticed before either.

All of the authors and areas mentioned so far are connected in some way with meditation.
Look any of them up on Amazon.com or Google. They are all worth following.

A glance at New Age bookstores today shows how many authors and writers have successfully jumped on this bandwagon. When I was a young man there was only one bookstore in the whole of London dedicated to what we now call New Age material, Watkins of Cecil Court. My contacts in book marketing tell me that the fastest growing segment in book sales is in the New Age section. Last year 2008, there were over 4000 books published on how to be happy, for example. Not a popular subject in the bookstores fifty years ago.

Matters that were esoteric in the extreme a hundred years ago are now so familiar that even humorous titles can be offered to the general reader. Barnes and Noble catalogues have advertised such gems as: 101 Ways to avoid Reincarnation, or getting it Right the First Time, The One Minute Meditator, and The Tao of Shopping. Words like Chakra and Karma don’t raise an eyebrow.

The millenia old subject of meditation has shared in this splurge of popularity, since so many areas covered by the blanket term New Age have meditation as an integral part of the work.

Many of the new writers employed by publishers anxious to fill a void in their catalogues are coming up with new and evocative ways to avoid the old fashioned term ‘meditation.’ Guided meditations, pathworkings, and contemplations are all mixed up together in a chaotic mass which is labeled 'meditation' in the bookstores, but only for want of a single, universally agreed upon term for the mental practices involved.

And then, since World War II the media has changed drastically. The read and learn generations have been overtaken by the view and listen generation.

Robert Monroe was a sound engineer who discovered that by using headphones with tones of different frequencies entering each ear that there was a modulation effect, and the brain seemed to adjust its own operating frequency to a harmonic or difference of the frequencies used. During his experiments he found himself conscious but out of his body, which he could see, while he was travelling apparently astrally.

This effect was repeatable by using specific pairs of frequencies, and didn’t require all the preparation work of the old books on astral travel. Monroe called his system Hemi-Sync and wrote a book about his travels in the astral, which strangely enough duplicated many of the experiences of the original Gnostic mystics in the first and second centuries. This discovery of frequency modulation of brain waves started a whole new trend in the self help industry.

Nowadays we see advertisements such as “Learn to Meditate like a Zen Master in Ten Minutes,” using audio tapes or CD’s based on off-shoots of the Monroe discoveries. Of course the names of the newer techniques are more esoteric than ‘meditation.’ They use “Neuro Matrix Entrainment” and other such inventions of the mail order copy writer.

Meditation through non-audible subliminal suggestion on tapes or CD’s are extensively hawked as the ultimate means to self-enhancement.

Video of course did not get left behind. The catalogues contain dozens of pictures of serenely beautiful young women dressed in leotards or body stockings, with the expressions of mediaeval saints and the bodies of professional dancers. They are almost always in the full lotus position with hands in one of the mudras.

The videos their faces and forms sell are of course the only kind of yoga that most Americans even hear about, Hatha Yoga. Even then it is touted as a set of easy stretching exercises designed to relax the body and reduce stress. God and Spirit are conspicuous by their absence from the blurbs.

Computer software now has the capability of playing CD’s and DVD’s and You-Tube is there for anyone who can make a video. And of course we now have virtual reality software. If technology could do it we would all be in wonderful shape by now, but it is the technology and its 24/7 life that has bred the anxiety that is the cause of Society’s malaise and more technology doesn’t solve the problem.

Thoughts on these practices, as they apply to serious meditators, and the hidden errors and illusions implicit in so many of them form the subject matter of my book. This posting is a sample of the introductory material. Next posting will deal with the nitty gritty of what kind of meditation leads to enlightenment.. Happy Trails.