There are some who’ve stated that one of Aleister Crowley’s greatest achievements as a magician and mystic was to recognize and utilize practices of Far East Asian mysticism to power European magical ceremonies putting great store in meditation and yogic work. Here’s an interesting piece about scientific measurement of some of the effects of meditation. It’d seem Crowley knew what he was talking about.
This post was initially noted on Daryl Serrano’s FB feed.
Here’s a more in depth piece from Time Magazine in 2005, again discussing scientific documentation of the effects of meditation: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1015863,00.html
And a last piece – discussing how meditation allows one to activate two neural networks at once – when normally only one is active at a time: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/27/oneness-feeling-experienced-by-monks-explained/
An interesting thing to ponder is WHY should a living organism have these capabilities which seem to have little or not survival value – for the individual or the species. Are the experience meditators report generated by the neural hardwiring, or was the hardwiring “intended” to give sentient beings access to such experiences (not suggesting that the process leading to this didn’t take billions upon billions of years to unfold)?
