In the context of creating personal reality, meditation is but one step, essentially employed to still the incessant mind chatter, to gain access to higher intuitive functioning and allow instead of force.
This is a crucial skill to acquire. The value of meditation is expounded in numerous books, journals not to mention web pages. These include the release of life enhancing neurochemicals leading to stress reduction, healing, increased intuition, and many more. Meditation has been practised by people of all religions for centuries. Skilled meditators experience fundamental changes in consciousness. From a scientific standpoint these changes ensue from the synchronised working of both sides of the brain. Both parts function as a coherent whole and not in the lateralized ( out of phase ) fashion. Most people have a predominant hemisphere and this is characterised by the brain producing beta waves, which equates to normal consciousness.
In this fast paced world calm can be difficult to achieve especially, if some aspect of your life is challenging or worrisome. It has been estimated that the average mind thinks 60,000 thoughts a day, most of which are repetitive.
Traditional Meditation
Meditation is very simple in principle and there is no right or wrong way there are simply better ways. Assume a comfortable posture sitting in a chair, lying down or for the more adventurous the lotus position. The problem with lying down is you may to fall asleep. Straighten the back if sitting but without tension. Relax all muscle groups and engage the mind in focussing on the breath. Breathe in fully and slowly and out slowly. Intend nothing more than to be present and conscious only of the breath. Avoid trying to calm the mind, it will retaliate with a vengeance. For example try not to think of a pink elephant. Chances are you can imagine pink elephants in the most unlikely situations. Simply allow your thoughts to pass by observed but, without attachment. Continue to focus on the breath or a mantra if you are using one. As time progresses the conscious mind will eventually give up the incessant chatter.
Guided Meditation
Guided meditations are usually done while listening to a CD or tape and to soothing background music the author will lead you through a meditation and usually a visualization.
Induced States of Meditation
The drawback with traditional meditation is that it takes a considerable amount of practice (in the order of several hours a day for years) to reach heightened states of consciousness. .
Relationship between brain frequency and state
| Frequency | State | Activity or state |
| 0.5-4 Hz | Delta | Sleep |
| 4-8 Hz | Theta | Deep relaxation |
| 8-14 Hz | Alpha | Relaxed |
| 14-30 Hz | Beta | Normal activity |
Most of us not privy to a very cloistered community cannot afford to spend so much time in the pursuit of engendering a fully synchronous brain. Enter modern technology, brain research has provided a plethora of mind state altering techniques, employed in commercial programs to assist in reaching conscious states supposedly equal to long practiced meditators such as Zen Monks. This assertion is based on readings supplied the faithfull EEG machine. The readings from which present an overall pattern of brain activity. If the predominant wave pattern is in a specific range that is related to the state of consciouness, there is always other brain activity present. The important point here is that the EEG measures predominant brain state not consciousness itself. So there is no technological means available to measure or quantify consciouness directly. Reference can be made here to Dr. D. Hawkins who, through his work in behavioural kinesilogy developed a 'map of human consciousness'. The scale ranges from 20 emotion:humiliation and 1000 emotion:ineffable ie pure consciousness. The mid point at 500 is the emotion of reverence which equates to the God-view of love. Interestingly enough, anyone's current state can be derived by a simple muscle test.
Mind altering devices range from the simplest form, an example would be the steady drum beat used to bring about a trance state in shamanism. Another would be the steady 60 beats per minute baroque music used in the ThinkRightNow series. This pitch is well known to produce a relaxed state where brain waves generated fall in the alpha range and the mind is more receptive to suggestion. This relaxation protocol coupled with repetition of positive audible statements is responsible for the outstanding success of that enterprise.
There are yet others which use monaural, binaural or even dual binaural wave patterns coupled with encoded messages of a positive and resourceful nature. These are custom made and can be quite expensive.
Most require the use of headphones to produce audible signals which entrain the brain into low frequency modulations. The principle is simple enough, two independent signals reach either ear. The small difference in frequency is sufficient to entrain the brain into producing modulations in the required band usually alpha and below.
