Meditation for all

Dr. George King equated the state of meditation with the great mystic states known in the East as Samadhi, in which the life force within man is brought in its entirety into the higher psychic centres. To many people, however, meditation is a lesser, but nonetheless essential technique, that leads to deeper understanding.

Dr. King with his usual brilliant simplicity outlined the road of mental and psychic control as a progression from concentration to contemplation and, finally, meditation.

In concentration mental forces are focussed on a single objective and thus gain great power. Others have referred to this as 'one-pointedness': just as the point of a knife has the power to penetrate because the whole force behind the knife is brought to bear on it, so too mental forces when concentrated achieve great power.

The next stage, contemplation, while retaining this concentration of mental forces, allows 'mind' impulses to return along the same path. Thus the person who contemplates can gain great knowledge about the object of the contemplation-even down to its atomic structure, according to our Master. This he said was the basis of all clairvoyant abilities.

Finally in meditation the soul becomes bathed in the light of the spirit and the meditator becomes one with the object of the meditation. Thus he or she would know what it was to be that thing and why it existed.

The Christian mystic tradition, on the other hand, views meditation as being a lesser form of mental control and contemplation as being much greater. This is simply due to a difference in the way that the words are used. Buddhist and Hindu traditions often use the word to denote the process of going within, and this is probably the meaning that has gained the greatest currency in the western world over the last 50 years.

In common parlance meditation is now viewed as the process in which the mind is calmed, focussed and concentrated; a 'meditation' can be a visualisation exercise with a specific objective or the process of concentrating or contemplating on a symbol.

Though this is very different from Dr. King's definition, such meditation techniques are valuable and bring a wide range of benefits. Indeed the theme of The Meditation Plan, by Dr. Richard Lawrence, Executive Secretary for Europe of The Aetherius Society is that meditation can benefit every single aspect of our life. His book contains 21 such areas with related exercises.