Philosophies of Eastern Religion/Meditation

[Angrboda]

Meditation has entered the mainstream of health care as a method of stress and pain reduction.

A wider, more flexible attention span makes it easier to be aware of a situation, easier to be objective in emotionally or morally difficult situations, and easier to achieve a state of responsive, creative awareness or "flow".

This is a claim. None of what you've presented is evidence for it.

If meditation is simply a technique for reducing stress, it has stiff competition from exercise, good sleep, and the occasional glass of wine. Meditation has been correlated with many changes in the brain, yet so far, there is no understanding of what these changes actually mean. They could be signs of changes leading to enhancement of cognitive function, or they could simply be change for change's sake. We simply don't know.

Dr. James Austin, a neurophysiologist at the University of Colorado, reported that meditation in Zen "rewires the circuitry" of the brain in his book Zen and the Brain (Austin, 1999).

Austin says a lot of things in his book, most of which are either speculation, exploratory comments, or unsubstantiated assertions. Zen and the Brain is a fascinating volume, but again, it doesn't show anything more conclusively than that changes occur. It doesn't demonstrate any significance to those changes.


I'm as intrigued by meditation as the next person, but at present we don't know enough about its actual effects to tout it as anything more than yet another way to relieve stress.