How can meditation help?

Each individual experience of reality is linked to a different mind condition (or consciousness). The most important of these are: being awake, dreaming and deep sleep. There are states such as meditative, for example prayer, and meditation can create such altered states of consciousness.

The purpose of meditation is to develop the mind, and the development of the mind leads to personality development. The effects of meditation are also shown in several films. “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana” presents the results of a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in an Indian prison. A brief summary about this can be found in in the video section of this website.

Among the psychological theories, there is “Integral Psychology” founded by Ken Wilber. Wilber created a model for personality development and mind development, where there are different levels. Practicing meditation helps us get to higher levels of this development scale.

You can also start your own practice in meditation with the help of some audio materials we give you on this website. There is a brief introduction material available: Introduction >>

In the book of Ken Wilber, “The Integral Vision” it describes several important intelligences:
• cognitive development (being aware of the moment and what the moment contains)
• development of identity (how I identify myself)
• emotional development (experiencing and expressing emotions)
• psycho-sexual development (experiencing sexual identity)
• development of needs (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)
• moral development
• development of values (what is important in life, in my opinion)
• interpersonal development (how to relate to other people)
• development of aesthetic sense (the artist in you, susceptibility to natural beauty)
• spiritual development (what it is that I believe, starting from the material world to the spiritual unfolding)

The tradition of meditation comes from the East. The most important techniques are the Buddhist Vipassana meditation and the  yoga meditation described by Patanjali.

Meditation came to the western scientific world through the work of Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn, who started to teach and spread MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress reduction) based on Buddhist traditions. The MBSR programme was created at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979.

We give a summary of the results of scientific research in the last part of the meditation content of this webpage.