Inducing creativity is an objective of meditation. Many brilliant minds have used meditative states to discover, elaborate, or better understand their next great idea. When the mind slows down it relieves its stresses, then ideas reach the mind without obstacles.

Awareness is an objective of meditation. Being aware helps one to have a better knowing of the self. Being aware of what appears before you during meditation helps one to understand their imagination. Being aware of the breath during meditation helps one to know their breath. Meditating in nature helps you to know your natural self. Being aware of your thoughts during meditation helps you to understand your thoughts. It’s helps you to understand how your mind works. The thoughts that arise after long periods of thoughtlessness are usually thoughts of a brilliant nature. Being aware during meditation enables one to understand how fluctuations with sound, the breath, nature, visualization, and thoughts will focus the mind, and help you to know yourself better.

It is my belief that the main objective of meditation is to get to the place where you are one with your focus and your thoughts to the point where there is not a thought about it. Just by simply being, and experiencing the moment as transformative thoughtlessness, the mind expands. Thoughtlessness evolves into a variety of mental and physical states which make you feel blissful of pure. Some say that they cannot meditate because too many thoughts come up. I don’t think that an objective of meditation is to stop the thinking process. I believe in directing your awareness to meditate upon something like sound, or visualization. By doing this consistently the mind will achieve thoughtlessness. Just by coming back to your mantra, breath, sound, or visualization you are meditating. All it takes is conscious commitment, and consistency.

During meditation it is common to feel like you are one with the world, and in these moments it feels as though you are a part of everything. It feels as though you are a part of your surroundings, the trees, the mountains, the entire landscape, the entire Earth. But the opposite feeling is also common, the feeling of being nothing. I don’t mean in a negative sense like feeling puny. It’s a feeling of being completely separate from the body. The only thing you exist as in this moment is consciousness. Nothing else is felt. These moments to me are feelings of pure meditative bliss.

Feeling uncomfortably taller than yourself, or uncomfortably smaller than yourself can be common during meditation. Sometimes you may feel like you are above your head, and your chest is where your head should be. And sometimes you may feel smaller than yourself. It feels as though your head is below your chest. These feelings usually happen to me if I go for 2 or more days without meditating. I suspect it is an imbalance because it no longer occurs after 2-4 meditations.

Some people speak of having a the third eye during meditation. The third eye is a feeling during meditation where both of your eyes seem to turn into one eye in the middle of the forehead. Experts have said that this activates the pituitary gland. Ancient peoples said that the third eyes was the seat of the soul. When I first discovered my third eye, it seemed as though the eye was always looking down. Years later I noticed that my third eye was looking up. I do not suggest making your third eye appear unless you have already found it in a meditative state. It is a discovery during meditation, not a form of meditation.

Sometimes a state of trance will be present when you are immersed in thoughtlessness. Many people do Transcendental Meditation, also known as TM. It is taught a form of meditation, but for met the transcendental state is a feeling during meditation, more than a way to meditate. Like the third eye, it comes a result of meditation. I’ve found that a transcendental state is present when the mind is occupied in thoughtlessness. I believe that a trance or transcendental should just be felt, and not forced. Just let it happen. As trance or transcendental states become more common, be aware of the thoughts that arise during these moments. These thoughts are sacred, and can be of importance in your life. If you let the thought flow through and continue, make sure to journal about it. The thoughtlessness during a transcendental state is pure clarity.

At times during meditation it may feel as though you are engulfed in energy. It may produce thoughts or give you hot and cold sensations. Just be in the energy, and allow it to move through you. Experience the moment without thinking about it. At times it may also seem like you are engulfed in a colored light. Experience the feeling without putting emphasis on it. By just allowing the light or energy to just be, you may experience it, and it may bring you a message, or higher feeling.

I have heard people refer to the thoughtlessness during meditation as the gap. Opening the gap slows down the mind and allows creativity to emerge. The gap is the space between thoughts. Achieving thoughtlessness is spacing out the time between thoughts. Opening the gap seems to create less stress on the mind. It doesn’t slow down the thought process, it makes thoughts more acute.

I have heard many people say that they can’t meditate because they can’t stop their thoughts from arising. It’s human nature to think! Your thinking process will never go away. Allow thoughts to arise without giving them focus. The conscious mind doesn’t stop thoughts, it thinks. Using meditation techniques or methods, it gives your mind a focus to put you in a meditative state. By staying focused on the meditation process consistently, thoughts will come up less and less.

Sometimes while meditating it may feel as though you just want to go to sleep. If you must sleep, then consciously stop the meditation, be aware, and go to sleep. Some people say during meditation that they feel as though they are dreaming awake. Tests have shown that deep meditation does reach brain levels in between sleep and awake.

When I have my first conscious thought after a deep meditation, it often feels like I have been meditating for a short time, maybe a few minutes. But then I realize that 20 minutes has passed. I can only explain it as the gap between thoughts is timeless, but my physical body is a part of time. Whatever it means, I come back more conscious and aware in the present moment.

At times I have had several wonderful meditations, and then one day comes and I have a very uncomfortable meditation. It seems I cannot meditate. I try and try, but it’s difficult to let the mind be at ease, and it is not enjoyable. I believe it to be an energetic blockage. I make sure to continue meditating daily without miss after having an experience like this. It has usually proven to me to be a sign that a self discovery is available. After 3-4 meditations the blockage goes away, and my meditations become better than ever. I feel that through the evolution of our own meditative state we go deeper and deeperbreaking through barriers in the mind.

During meditation strange things can happen that are not always easy to explain. Sometimes you may hear voices or words. Sometimes you may hear odd things like industrial noises or even a high pitched buzzing sound. Sometimes I have seen symbols like diamonds, or a triangle. Anomalies are not uncommon during meditation. It’ possible that you may not hear, see, or experience anything out of the ordinary during meditation. But the important thing I emphasize is to not plan your experience during meditation, and do not expect anything to happen. Simply let the experience unravel on its own.

Dan Clurman interviewed Eckhart Tolle for the article “Stillness and Presence” from the Fall 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind.

Eckhart Tolle: You don’t have prepared questions. That’s very good. [Laughter]

Dan Clurman: Being aware that silence says it all, to begin speaking does feel somewhat silly. On the other hand, sometimes words carry the perfume of the silence, or point back to the silence. In reading your book and listening to you speak, it seems that what you are saying points back to stillness—and that is how you live your life.

ET: Yes. I’m aware that a sense of stillness comes through in the book. Somehow, there’s a certain power that goes beyond the words, and that’s the place where art originates. A work of art comes out of a state of deep stillness. Somehow, and nobody knows how, the essence of the unmanifested, of the stillness, flows into the work.

DC: The work becomes a carrier of the stillness. A person can also become a work of art, in that sense.

ET: When someone becomes transparent, then something shines through that person that has nothing to do with the person or any of his or her personal history. What is required is becoming so transparent that the self or ego dissolves.

Paper Frog links to a Slate.com video interview with Joseph Goldstein, who has been teaching at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts for many years. Robert Wright, the interviewer, who obviously has an interest in meditation, isn’t afraid to ask the probing, naive, or self-interested questions. It’s a good watch, particularly if you’re new to meditation, or have questions and concerns about it. While Goldstein’s approach has a Buddhist flavor to it, the interview contains a lot of insights.

Here’s one exchange I like, as taken from a transcript of the interview, in which Goldstein elaborates on the difference between detachment and non-attachment:

Joseph Goldstein: …This could be clarified by the distinction of two words which often get confused. You know often people understand in Buddhism that there’s a great value on detachment and that sounds a little grey. You know just to be detached from everything.

Robert Wright: Right.

JG: That’s not what the teaching is about. The teaching is about non-attachment. Detachment implies a sense of withdrawal.

RW: Withdrawal from?

JG: From whatever.

RW: Including joy, including…

JG: Anything!

RW: Right.

JG: It’s like a pulling away from. Non-attachment doesn’t imply withdrawal it simply implies not holding on. So that’s a very different experience, it’s a very different mind-set. That’s really what we’re practicing.

Technical note, watching the interview on a Mac, I was only successful using the Real Player option.

“Can anybody meditate?” is the title of a chapter from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s deservedly bestselling book “Wherever You, There You Are.” It’s a good question to ask, as many people think they don’t have the temperament for meditation, have tried it briefly only to give up, or simply see it as an esoteric discipline without application to their lives. It’s unfortunate, because meditation is a simple way for everyone to access life fully and deeply. Here’s the rest of Kabat-Zinn’s chapter:

I get asked this question a lot. I suspect people ask because they think that probably everybody else can meditate but they can’t. They want to be reassured that they are not alone, that there are at least some other people they can identify with, those hapless souls who were born incapable of meditating. But it isn’t so simple.

Thinking you are unable to meditate is a little like thinking you are unable to breathe, or to concentrate or relax. Pretty much everybody can breathe easily. And under the right circumstances, pretty much anybody can concentrate, anybody can relax.

People often confuse meditation with relaxation or some other special state that you have to get to or feel. When once or twice you try and you don’t get anywhere or you didn’t feel anything special, then you think you are one of those people who can’t do it.

But, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still, although stillness does deepen in meditation and can be cultivated systematically. Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It’s not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are. If you don’t understand this, you will think you are constitutionally unable to meditate. But that’s just more thinking, and in this case, incorrect thinking at that.

True, meditation does require energy and a commitment to stick with it. But then, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “I wont stick with it,” rather than, “I can’t do it?” Anybody can sit down and watch their breath or watch their mind. And you don’t have to be sitting. You could do it walking, standing, lying down, standing on one leg, running, or taking a bath. But to stay at it for even five minutes requires intentionality. To make it part of your life requires some discipline. So when people say they can’t meditate, what they really mean is they won’t make time for it, or that when they try, they don’t like what happens. It isn’t what they are looking for or hoping for. It doesn’t fulfill their expectations. So maybe they should try again, this time letting go of their expectations and just watching.

Wired reports on the Dalai Lama’s meeting with scientists at the Mind and Life Institute conference in Washington D.C. in November. This part caught my attention:

While Western researchers are exploring the effects of meditation on physical health, Alan Wallace, a leading Tibetan scholar and one of the Dalai Lama’s translators, pointed out that when faced with physical ailments, Tibetans traditionally turned to doctors or healers, not to meditation. The purpose of meditation, added the Dalai Lama, is not to cure physical ailments, but to free people from emotional suffering.

While meditation has recently been gaining attention in the media as a result of medical research proclaiming its health benefits, it’s good to have a reminder that meditation goes beyond stress relief. In the act of being aware, deeper forces are at work. Awareness grounds us in what we can call reality, life here and now, rather than in mental abstraction.

A Voice of America article on the Dalai Lama’s visit to D.C. includes this excerpt:

Mind and Life Institute chairman Adam Engle compared meditation to exercise, saying a healthy mind is as important as a healthy body. “So, in the same way that you’ve got a myriad of physical exercises to help your body, there are a myriad of mental trainings. And this is not well known. Most people, when they think about meditation, they think about turning your body into a pretzel and zoning out somewhere,” he said. “But it is really just a word for mental training.”

Meditation is often presented as a form of mental training in which the mind applies its focus on an object (the breath, a sound, a mantra, a visualized image). On this site we would like to offer an alternate view of meditation as a kind of mental un-training. Instead of focusing the mind on an object, the mind can be left to rest as it is. Paltrul Rinpoche (1808-1887), a Tibetan meditation teacher, describes this poetically:

All you practitioners, male and female, who wish to realize the faultless and correct point of view, should let your mind rest fully awake in a state of unfabricated emptiness. When your mind is quiet, then rest in that quietness without trying to fabricate anything. When it doesn’t think, then rest in that non-thinking. In short, no matter what takes place, let your mind rest without fabricating anything.

Don’t try to correct, suppress or cultivate anything.

Don’t try to place your mind inwardly. Don’t search for an object to meditate upon outwardly. Rest in the meditator, mind itself, without fabricating anything.

One doesn’t find one’s mind by searching for it. The mind itself is empty from the beginning. You don’t need to search for it. It is the searcher himself. Rest undistractedly in the
searcher himself.

“Have I now grasped that which should be observed?” “Is this the right way or not?” “Is this it or not?” No matter what takes place rest in the thinker himself without fabricating anything.

No matter what kind of thoughts occur, excellent or terrible, good or bad, joyful or sorrowful, don’t accept or reject, but rest in the thinker himself without fabricating anything.

I recently watched the documentary “Wheel of Time” by the indefatigable German director Werner Herzog. The film depicts the pilgrimage of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan Buddhists to the spot in Bodhgaya, India, where Siddhartha Gotama, more commonly known as the Buddha, was said to be enlightened. A side trip in the film covers the occasionally perilous journey of thousands of Tibetans to circumnambulate Mount Kailash, which is regarded as holy. In Bodhgaya the Dalai Lama leads the assembled monks and laity for several days in a ceremony called the Kalachakra initiation. The Dalai Lama is interviewed briefly for the film, and is his usual genial, insightful self. However, the Bodhgaya gathering itself appeared to be steeped in the rituals, tradition, and hierarchy of religion. The display evoked a spiritual striving that seemed at odds with Paltrul Rinpoche’s words that, “One doesn’t find one’s mind by searching for it.”

A comprehensive study summarizing the scientific research on meditation is available free online from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The publication (also for sale in book format) is titled “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” (1996) by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan. In the helpful introduction Eugene Taylor discusses the historical roots of meditation, outlines meditation’s introduction to the modern West, and provides an overview of meditation as a subject of scientific study in the West, India, and China.

When it comes to defining meditation, Taylor writes:

As for modern developments, in trying to formulate a definition of meditation, a useful rule of thumb is to consider all meditative techniques to be culturally embedded. This means that any specific technique cannot be understood unless it is considered in the context of some particular spiritual tradition, situated in a specific historical time period, or codified in a specific text according to the philosophy of some particular individual.

Taylor is indicating that meditation doesn’t exist as we popularly conceive it — in an abstract or general form — only as distinct techniques which have emerged from specific philosophical and religious backgrounds. As an example, Taylor points out that the widespread and well-regarded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, “combines elements of Vipassana, a Theravada form of Buddhist meditation from Burma, and Zen practices from Japanese Buddhism with Hatha yoga, a tradition from the Indian subcontinent.” (An entry at TricycleBlog, the weblog of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, offers some thoughts about the MBSR program’s secular presentation of Buddhist meditation.)

When meditation is put under the scientific microscope, Taylor refers to two points of confrontation. The first is whether a rationally-based scientific method can adequately evaluate the realm of “intuition and insight”:

Science, the product of Aristotelian thinking and the European rationalist enlightenment, now turns its attention to the intuitive transformation of personality through awakened consciousness (and other such Asian meanings of the term enlightenment). This means that the faculties of logic and sense perception, hallmarks of the scientific method, are now being trained on the personality correlates of intuition and insight, hallmarks of the traditional inward sciences of the East.

To grasp what meditation is has proven to be no easy task. The underlying and usually hidden philosophical assumptions of traditional, rationalist science do not value the intuitive. They do not acknowledge the reality of the transcendent or subscribe to the concept of higher states of consciousness, let alone, in the strictest sense, even admit to the possible existence of unconscious forces active in cognitive acts of perception.

Secondly, Taylor asks whether science itself will be transformed by the encounter:

The essential difficulty here is not just the reformulation of meditation techniques to fit the dictates of the scientific method, but rather what might be called a deeper, more subtle, and potentially more transformative clash of world epistemologies. It is not simply that meditation techniques have been difficult to measure but rather that, in the past, meditation has largely been an implicitly forbidden subject of scientific research. Now, however, major changes are currently underway within basic science that presage not only further evolution of the scientific method but also changes in the way science is viewed in modern culture. An unprecedented new era of interdisciplinary communication within the subfields of the natural sciences, a fundamental shift from physics to biology, and the cognitive neuroscience revolution have liberalized attitudes toward the study of meditation and related subjects. Meanwhile, the popular revolution in modern culture grounded in spirituality and consciousness is having a growing impact on traditional institutions such as medicine, religion, mental health, corporate management strategies, concepts of marriage, child rearing, and the family, and more. Increasingly, educated people want to know much more about meditation, while our traditional institutions of high culture remain unprepared as adequate interpreters.

The body of “The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” is authored by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan. Following their own overview of the scientific studies on meditation, they provide a detailed summation of the scientific research by organizing it into three categories: physiological effects, behavioral effects, and subjective reports. The research is then broken down by category as follows:

Physiological Effects

The Cardiovascular System
— Heart Rate
— Redistribution of Blood Flow
— Blood Pressure and Hypertension
— Other Cardiovascular Changes

The Cortical System
— EEG: Alpha Activity
— EEG: Theta Activity
— EEG: Beta Activity
— EEG: Hemispheric Synchronization
— EEG: Dehabituation
— Specific Cortical Control
— Other Cortical Changes

Blood Chemistry
— Adrenal Hormones
— Thyroid Hormones
— Total Protein
— Amino Acids and Phenylalanine
— Plasma Prolactin and Growth Hormone
— Lactate
— White Blood Cells
— Red Blood Cell Metabolism
— Cholesterol

The Metabolic and Respiratory Systems
Muscle Tension
Skin Resistance and Spontaneous GSR
Other Physiological Effects
— Brain Metabolism
— Salivary Changes
— Effectiveness in the Treatment of Disease
— Treatment of Cancer
— Changes in Body Temperature
— Alleviation of Pain
— Exceptional Body Control

Behavioral Effects

Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities

Perceptual Ability
— Reaction Time and Perceptual Motor Skill
— Deautomatization
— Field Independence
— Concentration and Attention
— Memory and Intelligence

Rorschach Shifts
Empathy
Regression in the Service of the Ego
Creativity and Self-Actualization
— Creativity
— Self-Actualization
Hypnotic Suggestibility
Anxiety

Psychotherapy and Addiction
— Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
— Addiction and Chemical Dependency
Sleep
Sex Role Identification

Subjective Reports

Equanimity

Detachment
Ineffability
Bliss
Energy and Excitement
Altered Body Image and Ego Boundaries
Hallucinations and Illusions
Dreams
Synesthesia
Extrasensory Experiences

Clearer Perception
Negative Experiences

Searchable Bibiliography

Related

The Mind and Life Institute is a “working collaboration and research partnership between modern science and Buddhism.”

You have touched on an important and controversial topic. I participated in the TM basic course here in Finland 5 years ago. Learning the meditation technique was the good thing. However, there was already then something really strange going on in the TM movement (World Government, etc.) and I decided not to participate in the extended course. What made me sad is that there was no critical public discussion within the TM movement, all messages from gurus were taken as a given. At least to me this is a sign of a very closed religious community The mantra system in TM is based on some Sanskrit words which are seen by some scholars as variant names of Hindu gods. These mantras are provided to the student by the TM teacher in a private tutoring session and the mantras are selected with a pretty simple system based on age and sex of the meditation student. On the Internet (e.g. Freedom of Mind Center) and in many analytic books covering meditation movements there is this list of TM mantras available. (Please, make your own search, during my TM basic course I had to make a promise that I will not reveal my mantra!). When I later heard that the mantra I was given may be a Hindu god name variant, I felt a bit odd. Joke: In Finnish language this mantra given to me does not mean anything imaginable and I don’t know much about Indian belief systems, so hopefully there is no harm done to my head

Talking about TM in schools: I very much encourage teaching meditation in schools but I find TM meditation very unsuitable in its present form. Group meditation is a great experience and at school it could remove anxiety and stress. At least in Finnish schools children between 12-18 years are very closed and separated mentally from each other. In that sense meditation could help them to be more open, creative, and enable them to smile However, meditation has such a bad reputation especially among some praying, religious people that they are afraid of it. (Some people just don’t get it that in meditation you do not pray or beg anything So, let’s hope there will be a truly independent meditation technique on the way to schools and workplaces. Could it be based on ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti or some other positively critical thinkers?

Take care,

Mikko A.
Innovation, Creativity and Learning Researcher
Beyond Creativity

P.S. Thank you for this fantastic blog, Meditation. It has given me so many insights. Please, allow people to comment on blog entries more easily

Mikko also requested that comments be allowed on blog entries. By way of explanation, I haven’t included a comment section on the blog due to concerns about the tenor of the discussion. I’ve noticed that internet message boards about meditation, ironically, attract posters who are more interested in opinionated assertions than constructive dialogue. However, emails are always welcome, and I thank you for reading.