It is believed that meditation has been practiced since well before the commencement of written history, beginning with elementary meditation techniques such as stargazing or staring into a fire. When most people think about meditation as a whole, it is the eastern version that comes to mind. This is likely because the roots of one of the primary categories of meditation are in the Asian Dharmic religions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism. Also, modern media almost always portray meditation in an eastern context. Meditation can be secular in nature, and has been utilized as a beneficial practice by followers of virtually any belief system over the centuries.
The first written record of an actual meditation technique was put down 5000 years ago in Hindu scriptures. Building on this, Siddhārtha Gautama, also called Gautama Buddha (563 BCE to 483 BCE) was responsible for spreading meditation across the Asian continent during and after his life. However, the benefits of meditation didn't remain limited to only Buddhists and Hindus. Cultures across Asia adapted meditation methods to compliment their own religious beliefs and spiritual practices, resulting in a broad range of meditation traditions and styles. Meditation in Asia is also a part of activities that have no base in religion, such as the martial arts. Yoga is an increasingly popular form of meditation, which incorporates certain physical poses in order to assist in centering the mind. The majority of eastern meditation styles are called "japa" meditation, which means that a mantra, word, or even sound is repeated in order to achieve the right focus. Other eastern styles employ focus on an object, concentration on breathing, or involve chakra meditation. Virtually all kinds of eastern meditation are recognized as having health advantages on a physical and mental level.
Western styles of meditation, including contemplation and prayer, began in ancient times as part of Greek and Egyptian mystery religions, Judaism, early Christianity and Islam, and extend into the practices of these paths today. In these religious traditions, Western style meditation plays a key role for many religious people, especially monks and other contemplatives. Pagan and indigenous religions also often include meditation training, mostly of the Western Visualization or contemplation type. In some form or another, meditation appears in just about every one of the world's mainstream religions and spiriyual pathways, aboriginal religions, Native American traditions, and of course, Dharmic religions.
Western-style meditation is comparable to eastern meditation, but many people accustomed to contemporary western society find it to be more practical and suited to their uses. Though the goal remains the same - inner awareness and self-improvement - its techniques include those that help the practitioner find guidance and understanding in order to reach a specific goal.
In the West, meditation as an element of eastern philosophies and practice was popularized through the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson as American Transcendentalism, a movement developed in the 1830s and 40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the concept of an ideal spiritual state that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition. Henry Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, which translated and made Hindu meditation texts available to the ordinary reader. Similarly, New Thought practitioners-followers of the healer Phineas P. Quimby-also included meditation techniques such as guided visualizations and the mantra into their healing regimes. The World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, was a landmark event that increased Western awareness of meditation. This was the first time that Western audiences on American soil received Asian spiritual teachings from Asians themselves. Thereafter, Swami Vivekananda taught meditation to the spiritualists and New Thought practitioners in New Hampshire and went on to found various Vedanta ashrams around the country in his wake. Anagarika Dharmapala lectured at Harvard on Theravada Buddhist meditation in 1904; Abdul Baha followed with a 235-day tour of the US teaching the Islamic principles of Bahai, and Soyen Shaku toured in 1907 teaching Zen and the principles of Mahayana Buddhism. During the 1920s, American popular culture was introduced to the meditative practices of the Hindu yogi Paramahansa Yogananda. Gurdjieff, the Georgian mystic who had toured the US in 1924, was spreading the gospel of meditation in action to American expatriates in Paris by the 1930s. A young Hindu trained in theosophy named Jidhu Krishnamurti had been touring the US around that same time. Settling in Southern California in the 1940s, Krishnamurti would soon be joined by English émigrés fleeing the European war, such as Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and Aldous Huxley, who were themselves writers and practitioners of the meditative arts.. By the 1950’s, Asian perspectives began to significantly influence the American counterculture through still more writers like Jack Kerouac, Thomas Merton, J.D. Salinger, Alan Watts and Gary Snyder. With the help of Watts, D. T. Suzuki came from Japan and introduced Zen to a new generation of Americans. Suzuki settled in New York, where he accepted a visiting professorship at Columbia. His seminars were open to the public and subsequently had a wide influence. John Cage heard him, as did J. D. Salinger. Soon, Suzuki was profiled in The New York Times, and many of his previous works on the history and philosophy of Zen, published in relative obscurity, were translated and reprinted for American audiences. It was also during this time that Michael Murphy first came under the influence of Speigelberg, and began the practice of meditation. With the assistance of Abraham Maslow, Watts, Willis Harman, Aldous Huxley, George Leonard and others, Murphy would soon collaborate with Richard Price to launch Esalen Institute, which quickly became the world's premier growth center for human potential. By the early 1960s, the college experience and a new open-mindedness were being experienced by a significant segment of the post war baby boom, a generation which numbered some 40 million people born between 1945 and 1955 who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This led young people in their teens and twenties to collectively open the doors of inward perception, experiment with alternative lifestyles, and question established cultural norms in Western society. As a result of these events, there has been a tremendous growth in meditation as a developmental practice in the United States from the 1960s to the present. In the mid-1970’s, a Chicago-based consortium of meditation practitioners developed the Neroja Meditation System, enhancing Eastern meditation methods and insights with psychological technique and research, biofeedback, and group dynamics, specifically designed to apply to a Western mindset.
Now, after forty years, these developments have produced advanced Western practitioners, who themselves are qualified teachers, senseis, roshis, swamis, and tulkus. We know them as Ram Dass, Sivananda Radha, Jiyu Kennet Roshi, Maureen Freidgood, Jack Kornfield, Robert Frager, Richard Baker Roshi, and many others. They have begun to teach these Asian traditions to Western audiences. In so doing, they are also participating in their modification by forming new lineages of meditation practice that, while informed by Asian influences, turn out to be uniquely Western. Such teachings are already being transmitted to a second and third generation of younger people in the United States and Europe as well, altering irrecoverably the shape and direction of both secular and spiritual life in contemporary Western culture.
Meditation as a Scientific Study
Within this context scientific interest in meditation has grown significantly over the past quarter of a century. This has occurred partly on the justification that science might be able to show us objectively what meditation is and what its effects are, but also because the scientific method represents one of the few ways in which our culture can peer into the depths of another culture so radically different from our own.
The adoption of meditative and other Eastern practices into the field of psychotherapy, as well as it’s promotion by many physicians and scientific researchers, such as Dean Ornish, Herbert Benson, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Deepak Chopra, has helped meditation to emerge as a mainstream American practice. The popularity of meditation rose in North America during the 1960's and 1970's, fed by the attention it had received from pop icons such as the Beatles. In conjunction with this popularity - primarily among American youth - scientists began to explore the potential medical benefits that meditation has to offer. It was soon accepted as a practical holistic approach to healing, and is now regularly practiced for the promotion of healing and the control of stress. Western style meditation is also beneficial to help people to reach a happier and more positive perspective when managing their daily lives. When practiced daily, decisions are made with more clarity, and crises are managed quickly, effectively, and with a minimum amount of upset. It is the crisis management aspect of western meditation that is so frequently appealing to people born and raised in the Western world.
Many practitioners feel as though their minds are much clearer in times when difficult decisions - at work, and in their personal life - must be made. Furthermore, life is often perceived as much fuller when meditation is regularly practiced, as it allows for a much truer level of self-awareness.