Why did meditation never become a widespread practice in the West?

is there a meditation that is, scientifically, considered the superior method for reaching calm and focus? Like, the objectively known benefits of meditation

You want this book, check it out and you'll find that it's legit. None of the spiritual junk.

that's only some east and some west. There are some Koreans as early as the 1300s writing about the dangers of Buddhism

If the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds were to truly unite it would bring a golden age. What is required is a framework that can translate properly.

(OP) #
Meditation was and is still popular in the West among circles which are actually religious.The Rosary (most popular Roman Catholic devotion) involves meditating upon Mysteries of the Virgin Mary’s and Jesus’s life.

>All western philosophy is descartesian
come on now.

how about Nishitani?

Only Buddhism posists self as illusion(I'm fairly certain, its the only one in history to do so). Hinduism fully accepts the reality of atman/self. Confucianism/Taoism readily accepts it as premise.

What does meditation mean in those context? Just praying?

Praying and meditation are fundamentally different.

I don't know, the promises on the front make me pretty skeptical, those aren't promises they should be making

We were busy with real life.

teach me how to achieve autistic enlightement

>Why did meditation never become a widespread practice in the West?
It never been a widespread practice in east either.

This.
Spend all the day sitting doing nothing but focus on your breath is the best way to negate reality

>What does meditation mean in those context?
Firstly we should clarify what meditation actually is. Meditation is merely directing your mind towards something/intently contemplating something. You can theoretically meditate on anything. I can mediate on a tree growing in my front yard. I can mediate on the works of Karl Marx.

Many westerners, and i'm not accusing you of this, don't actually know what meditation is and are under the incorrect impression that all meditation is transcendental meditation. i.e all meditation is directing your mind towards clearing it of all thoughts. This is the type of meditation that has the most exposure in media and pop-culture. Be it yoga types, new age types, or images of exotic Eastern Monks.

Meditation in the Roman Catholic sense and the Rosary is different. As opposed to directing your mind towards clearing it of all thoughts, you direct your mind towards the Virgin Mary as you contemplate one of 3 or 4 sets of mysterious pertaining towards her life. Each of these sets is composed of 5 groups of 10 decades, and after each decade you recite a Hail Mary. The substance of the contemplation aspect of the rosary have many variations. You'll focus on the physical events occurring, the virtues the Virgin Mary exhibited, how you can apply those virtues to your life, the mysterious nature of God's actions, allegorical and metaphorical interpretations, scriptures, ect.

Instead you guys were wasting away in some wheat field

Seems like you're spouting some garbage relativism.

He really isn't. Many types of eastern meditation were directed too.

In fact the word "meditation" is western, and is used to describe a wide variety of practices both in the European tradition and in the Asian tradition

No, i’m correcting the misconception that all meditation is transcendental meditation. nothing “relativistic” about it, and in fact nothing I said is controversial. It’s ok to be wrong sometimes, user. you’re in your late teens or early 20s and don’t know everything yet.

In the last 100 or so years, meditation has exclusively been linked with the eastern tradition. The recent idea about Christian meditation is just new age/syncretic talk. Thomas Merton is a heretic by any standard. Its not a defacto Christian stance. Christians don't have meditations. We have prayers. They're separate from the meditation used by eastern counterparts. Our prayers are there to link our body/soul with the words of God. Their meditations are for controlling the depths of their mind. Two work on separate principle, separate ideology, and separate methodology.

as well as explaning what meditations are in relation to the Rosary, which you asked.
>The recent idea about Christian meditation is just new age/syncretic talk.
what? from wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation
>Western Christian meditation contrasts with most other approaches in that it does not involve the repetition of any phrase or action and requires no specific posture. Western Christian meditation progressed from the 6th century practice of Bible reading among Benedictine monks called Lectio Divina, i.e. divine reading. Its four formal steps as a "ladder" were defined by the monk Guigo II in the 12th century with the Latin terms lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio (i.e. read, ponder, pray, contemplate). Western Christian meditation was further developed by saints such as Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila in the 16th century.

Because the West and Abrahamics have historically been extrospective while such eastern practices are of introspect.

>t. Yuri "Please if you send me back I'll surely be sent to the gulags" Bezmenoz

more from same link here>Christian meditation is a term for a form of prayer in which a structured attempt is made to get in touch with and deliberately reflect upon the revelations of God.[115] The word meditation comes from the Latin word meditari, which means to concentrate. Christian meditation is the process of deliberately focusing on specific thoughts (e.g. a biblical scene involving Jesus and the Virgin Mary) and reflecting on their meaning in the context of the love of God.[116]

The Rosary is a devotion for the meditation of the mysteries of Jesus and Mary.[117][118]“The gentle repetition of its prayers makes it an excellent means to moving into deeper meditation. It gives us an opportunity to open ourselves to God’s word, to refine our interior gaze by turning our minds to the life of Christ. The first principle is that meditation is learned through practice. Many people who practice rosary meditation begin very simply and gradually develop a more sophisticated meditation. The meditator learns to hear an interior voice, the voice of God

I like to "meditate" by working out, being productive with physical hobbies or read/study. Emptying my head during a long session of darkness makes me feel useless.

How cucked by protestantism am I?

>Emptying my head during a long session of darkness makes me feel useless.
Not all meditaiton is emptying your head. Much isn't, but based on your description you don't meditate at all.
>How cucked by protestantism am I?
Probably very.

Sound like sutra and mantra chanting but the difference in those broadly speaking is it's often not the meaning of the texts that are considered of the utmost importance but the sound and the intonation of the syllables in them that bring one to greater stages of contemplative advancement.

...

Commercial self help mindfulness for the modern skeptic atheist.

Theravada/Hinayana (read: ASEAN schools) meditation techniques are proven to reduce metabolism, body temperature, oxygen consumption, and is associated with diminished functional beta adrenaline receptors. Many schools use these techniques but they crop up the most in Theravada. White Buddhists have repackaged this as "transcendental meditation", popularized mostly by the Eraserhead man.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/002239999090005O

Kozhenikov studied this tradition and compared it to Tibetan tantra/tummo/forceful breath/Vajrayana, which excites you and does the opposite. I don't have the links on me but all her studies are on Plos One and corroborated by Kox analysis of Wim Hof's tummo techniques.

>t. irreligious psy student
I'm currently doing my thesis on Vajrayana if you have more questions, the exercises are a lot more than sniffing air and staring into your own bellybutton.

I can definitely can get a sort of sutra/mantra vibe from the structure of Catholic prayers, but a main difference is that the prayers are often recited in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. So you sort of loose that similarity of sound.
If you get to the level of Gregorian chants, you start to see more emphases on specific sounds. youtube.com/watch?v=CBwh1OXw6uI Whether or not this is analogous to mantras/sutras I can't say, but it's apparent.

Yogic schools' practices sound similar aswell.
youtu.be/BESrdlf-cPg

With Gregorian chants it's probably for the requirements of getting the melody correct. I recently discovered old Roman chanting and it looks like a missing link between Catholic chanting and Orthodox.

It might be. You make a good point, I guess you'd have to know the intentions of Old Roman Chanting to see the significance of Gregorian Chants being an evolution of that. Here is how the Rosary Prayers sound in Gregorian Style. youtube.com/watch?v=aSuQEZCFvB8

Questions like that is usually answered with "it did"

There's a large amount of overlap between schools, especially between translations too. Secrecy of the religious groups involved doesn't make it easier, and without a large background on the subject it's hard to distinguish if something like "Deity Visualization" or the Six Yogas of Naropa are techniques to themselves, or only part of a large exercise routine that predicates unique effects. If there's a slippery effort in even nailing down one exercise, it's of course very challenging to replicate a phenomena scientifically, esp. pharmacologically, separating mystic components from metabolic ones.

As far as Kox is concerned the tummo technique alone appears sufficient to yield transient respiratory alkalosis, which in a circuit raises adrenal medullae epinephrine response, retaining heat, and influencing pain-perception as a result of blood PH increase from the alkalosis. The intersection with long-term cardiotropic effect or psychoactive cascades is not known yet, but interesting. It ignites some pertinent questions about the role of muscarine and atropine in Tibetan medicine, for sure!