Meditation: Article

What is also new is that the latest converts are on-the-go urban, educated, well-heeled Reebok runners. In fact, at the conclusion of the 10-day vipassana workshop I attended on the outskirts of New Delhi, the line-up and pedigrees of limousines that came to fetch the 60-odd participants were like a fashion parade of automobiles. Surprisingly, too, most converts to the contemplative practices of Buddhism are the elite and intellectuals.

Interestingly, some of the Buddhist systems taking hold in India had Far East origins. Take the example of the Soka Gakkai sect, founded by Nichiren Daishonin, a 13th century Japanese monk believed to be the last Buddha to appear on the earth after Gautama. The sect's main practice is chanting the mantra, namyo-ho-renge-kyo (literally, "I bow my life to the law of cause and effect"). Not strictly meditation? But then Daishonin taught that one should meditate vociferously, with eyes open!

Meditation is now even studded with glamor. It is getting immense publicity through free, sometimes inadvertent, endorsements by movie stars and sundry celebrities. Clint Eastwood has been practicing transcendental meditation (TM) for years. The rumor is that Canadian musician Leonard Cohen spent six months every year in a Zen monastery in the US. Mitch Kapor was both a disc jockey and a TM teacher before he wrote software history by creating Lotus 1-2-3.

Even the hard-as-nails pragmatic corporate sector seeks stress management through meditation. According to an Indian business magazine, a large number of top Indian CEOs religiously practice meditation and yoga. Once they are hooked, the idea filters down the line. Blame it on economic liberalization, says DR M.B. Athreya, a proselytizer of Indian values in management. "Liberalization has increased competitive pressure, leading to all-round stress," he observes.

Meditation is also finding use as a therapeutic tool in medicine. A growing number of corporate and up-market hospitals use it as a complementary therapy. DR Ornish's program too is being cloned. In New Delhi, DR Bimal Chhajer, who briefly trained with Ornish, has started the Saaol heart program, in which the Jain system of meditation, preksha dhyan, is a key component. In one exercise, Chajjer makes the patients visualize a green light penetrating into the arteries to open cholesterol blockages. It works, he says, because psychoneuroimmunology, a cutting-edge science, has indicated that whatever you think in a positive way is fulfilled by the brain and the body by secreting appropriate chemicals.

Besides psychosomatic diseases, meditation is also being used to treat behavioral and psychiatric problems. In Mumbai, western India, psychiatrist Rajendra Chokani uses vipassana for his patients and claims a success rate of 80 per cent. " I recommend it to neurotics, (but not for serious mental cases) and most of them recover enough to go off drugs completely," he says. Vipassana is also being used by various Indian drug rehabilitation centers.

What is perhaps giving impetus to the wide acceptance of meditation is the considerable research conducted on it. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the first one to parade research findings to promote TM in the '60s and '70s. Since then, other gurus have been eager to use scientific validation as a marketing ploy. Briefly put, meditation gives rise to a distinct neurophysiological state. Even as it leads to a state of relaxation comparable to deep sleep (indicated by parameters such as slower breath and heart rates), the mind becomes more alert than during the waking state, as recorded by the EEG. Deep relaxation releases stress, unblocking energy and creativity. Long-time meditators show an increased productivity at work and they also score better on personality development and self-actualization scales.

Although most people take to meditation to cope with the pressures of modern life or as a self-improvement program, spiritual evolution comes inevitably. According to Mahesh Yogi, as well as some other gurus and mystical systems, there are four more states of consciousness beyond waking, sleep and dreaming, which we are all familiar with.

The fourth is experienced momentarily during meditation when the thinking process ceases but awareness is not lost. This is called pure consciousness, because consciousness here is conscious of nothing but itself. In yoga, this state is called samadhi, and in Zen Buddhism, satori. With regular practice over years this state starts to coexist with the first three. It is called cosmic consciousness. Then the realization is: I am the eternal, immortal Self. You may call it enlightenment, but there is scope for more evolution. The sixth state is God consciousness in which the world and everything in it is seen suffused with God light. The acme of spiritual evolution is reached when beyond the subtlest level in the phenomenal world, the omnipresent Absolute is realized. This is called unity consciousness.