There are a large number of reviews on the topic of meditation in the peer reviewed journal literature. Their conclusions are remarkably diverse, ranging from overwhelmingly positive to considerably negative. These disparities are explainable by factors such as the methodological standards set by the reviewers, whether or not the researchers were interested in differentiating between specific and non-specific effects and the researcher’s own affiliations. Generally speaking, the more rigorous the standards set by the reviewers, the less likely they were to express enthusiasm for meditation.

For more detail on how the meditation research can be sorted and analysed, check Dr Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

Meditation research to date has been plagued by conceptual and methodological problems. One of the most significant difficulties involves developing control strategies involving interventions which blinded participants might consider plausible, that have no specific therapeutic effects. Randomisation and management of other sources of bias is another area of concern; a large number of controlled trials have used non-randomised, dissimilar cohorts.

Dr Ramesh Manocha further discusses the specific problems of defining meditation at his blog.

Xu (1994) described and discussed the adverse effects of Qigong, which has been described as both a therapeutic practice as well as the “Chinese equivalent of Indian meditation”. The clinical consequences of inappropriate use of this technique has been described as the “Qigong deviation syndrome”, which has become a diagnostic term “now used widely in China” and is associated with a range of somatic and psychological disturbances. The commonest somatic symptoms include headaches, insomnia and discomfort caused by abdominal distension, while common psychological symptoms include anxiety, agitation and depression. Extreme psychological symptoms can include uncontrollable behaviours, psychosis and suicide.

For further reading regarding adverse effects arising from the use of Qigong, check Dr Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

As far as mindfulness meditation itself is concerned, the Sahaja Yoga Meditation (SYM) approach has some important similarities to mindfulness, in that it also emphasises awareness of the present moment and the idea of disengaging attentional processes from the flow of internal and external events (rather than reduction of physiological arousal). A critical difference however is that this state of “present moment awareness/passive observation” constitutes only the prelude to a more important and specific experience of mental silence — nirvichara Samadhi. Thus while SYM is a specific experience that can be preceded, if not facilitated by present-moment observation and other mindfulness methods, the sine qua non feature — elimination of thought activity — distinguishes it from mindfulness meditation.

You can find information about the implications of the similarities and differences between mindfulness-oriented meditation and mental silence based meditation at Dr Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

Since its inception, Sahaja Yoga has been propagated worldwide by a grassroots movement of volunteer practitioners. Its proponents claim that it is now practised in over 80 countries around the world. Instruction in the technique, in keeping with the founder’s philosophy, has been on a free-of-charge, non-commercial basis.

For more information on Sahaja Yoga head to Dr Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

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 to mental complexity because its essential element is the experience of a trans-mind state.

More information regarding the philosophy behind meditation can be found at Dr Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

The persistent association between the sahaja yoga meditation mental silence experience and health outcomes brings another area of discussion into focus. There is currently debate about how to define the term spirituality and how it might differ from terms such as religion or religiousness.

For more discussion of the spirituality and religiosity debate, check Dr Manocha’s blog.

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 were conducted using “meditation” and “definition” and “definition of meditation” as search terms.

An informal content analysis was performed to identify key terms and ideas. The two most common definitions of meditation are as a mental exercise that involves either “contemplation” or “continuous thinking” while the third most common definition is as an exercise involving focused attention.

The more specific notion that it involves control of the mind is considerably less widespread, despite the fact that these factors are repeatedly mentioned in traditional Indian texts. Interestingly, the more specific notion of reducing thinking activity appears to be little known, while the key notion of mental silence was mentioned only once.

Find more information about the Eastern and Western perspectives of meditation at Ramesh Manocha’s blog.

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, with concomitant benefits to physical and mental health, that in many ways reflect traditional descriptions of mystical experiences and states such as Sahaja yogic tradition, as well as modern SYM practitioners ascribe these experiences to a unique, spontaneous and more or less involuntary psycho-physiological process that occurs during meditation. The process is said to involve a system of yogic energy centres (chakras), interconnecting channels (nadis) and activating energy (kundalini). Modern proponents of the yogic tradition put this “psychic anatomy” forward as a kind of psychosomatic theory of health.

Ramesh Manocha.

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 repeatable from subject to subject. Most significantly these changes correlated significantly with the participants’ self-reported experience of mental silence and were more pronounced in the advanced meditators. Thus the mental silence state of sahaja yoga meditation was associated with changes in central nervous system activity that are both reproducible and correlate with subjective experience of meditation. This adds further support to the idea that mental silence may be as much a biological phenomenon as it is a conceptual one. In other words, mental silence may even have a neurophysiology unique to that state of consciousness.

Ramesh Manocha.