What Exactly is Meditation?

[To our readers: as preparation for Tyler Staton’s Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, the following is excerpted from Ray Yungen’s great book, A Time of Departing. (pg. 15-16)]

According to Ray Yungen:
The meditation most of us are familiar with involves a deep, continuous thinking about something. But New Age meditation entails just the opposite. It involves ridding oneself of all thoughts in order to still the mind by putting it in the equivalent of pause or neutral. A comparison would be that of turning a fast-moving stream into a still pond. When meditation is employed, stopping the free flow of thinking, it holds back active thought and causes a shift in consciousness. This condition is not to be confused with daydreaming, where the mind dwells on a subject. New Age meditation works as a holding mechanism until the mind becomes thoughtless, empty, and void (pg. 15). [Ray Yungen then proceeds to explain breathing exercises and/or the mantra as part of the meditation process.] Ray Yungen writes:

The two most common methods used to induce the thoughtless state are breathing exercises, where attention is focused on the breath, and mantras, which are repeated words or phrases. The basic process is to focus and maintain concentration without thinking about what you are focusing on. Repetition on the focused object is what triggers the blank mind. (pg. 15)

Since mantras are central to this type of meditation, it is important to understand the proper definition of the word. The translation from Sanskrit is man, meaning to “think”, and "tra," meaning “to be liberated from.”[1] (pg 15)

Thus, the word literally means to escape from thought. By repeating the mantra, either aloud or silently, the word or phrase begins to lose any meaning it once had. The conscious thinking process is gradually tuned out until an altered state of consciousness is achieved. (pg. 15-16)

Source Notes:
1. Swama Rama, Freedom From the Bondage of Karma, pg. 66
[All writing is Yungen’s except for this brief Swami Rama quote.]

https://thewordlikefire.wordpress.com/2023/02/17/what-exactly-is-meditation-by-ray-yungen/