The ideas of yoga, sahaja, self-realization and meditation orbit around another central theme in the spiritual culture of the East which, simply put, relates to the idea that one’s perception of true reality is obscured by one’s own mental complexities (preconceptions, emotions, opinion and intellect). Meditation represents the opposite condition…
In order to contrast the traditional Eastern ideas of meditation with ideas that are currently prevalent in Western culture, it is useful to examine popular, broadly consensual definitions of meditation as an insight into how the modern Western consumer has come to conceptualise it. Both basic and advanced Google searches…
Practitioners of sahaja yoga meditaiton (SYM) consistently report that the state of mental silence is characteristically associated with other subjective phenomena such as a natural focusing of attention and a sense of wellbeing which somehow leads to improved physical health. A number of SYM practitioners do describe occasional transcendent experiences,…
Aftanas et al. (2001) conducted a well designed study of EEG on novice and advanced sahaja yoga meditation practitioners. During meditation substantial changes in midline alpha-theta power, rather than gamma power, distributed more or less symmetrically in the fronto-parietal parts of the brain, occurred in a pattern that was significantly…
Findings suggest that the mental silence experience may be associated with a specific pattern of activity in both the central nervous system and autonomic nervous system which is more complex than simple reduction of arousal and yet different from the cognitive changes seen in association with mindfulness meditaton. Thus, although…
The mechanism of action provoked by meditation is thought primarily to involve its ability to reduce stress. There are two main theories about how this happens. First, that it reduces somatic-arousal thereby reducing the reactivity of the individual to environmental stressors and, second, that it alters the individual’s cognitive appraisal…
The sahaja yoga meditator aims to achieve and cultivate the experience of “thoughtless awareness”. As in the notion of “mindful awareness” the meditator aims to sustain that experience even while not formally meditating. Unlike Mindfulness however, the state is not one of introspective, non-judgmental observation of one’s cognitions, but rather…
The mechanisms by which sahaja yoga meditation (SYM), or in fact any meditation technique, exerts its claimed effects are unclear. One very popular view, which has become more or less the default explanation of meditation effects is in terms of the physiological changes that characterise the Relaxation Response — that…
Dr Ramesh Manocha explains why strong controls are necessary when researching the real-world relevance of meditation in this excerpt from his thesis: “Some might argue that controlling for non-specific effects is an academic exercise with little real-world relevance. This is supposedly because factors such as the placebo effect, expectancy of…
Dr Ramesh Manocha summarises the findings of his thesis with respect to mental silence. “Despite the fact that scientific assessment of the mental silence approach is much less common than non-mental silence, approaches in the Western scientific literature the data in this thesis provide some compelling evidence to suggest that…
