While Mindfulness may be defined as a state in which one passively observes the ebb and flow of thoughts while not getting involved with them, the ancient Eastern meditator seeks to unite their awareness with the “space between the thoughts” in order to achieve mental silence, such as in the practice of Sahaja Yoga meditation. [...]
Psychologically speaking, the objectives of yoga mirror those of conventional methods designed to enhance self-control and self-regulation. For example, yoga-psychology proposes that negative-affect states, even transient ones, are pathological states of mind. Such states include gloominess, doubt, procrastination, sloth, attachment, hallucination, inability to concentrate and instability. Ideas like this delineate an understanding of health that, [...]
William Shakespeare describes an understanding of the unity between mind, mood, the organs of the body and general health in Twelfth Night:
when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill’d the flock of all affections else
That live in her; when liver, brain and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill’d
Her sweet perfections with one Self king!
Dr [...]
Eastern mystics have often asserted that the presence or absence of altered states of consciousness (such as mental silence) comprise the crucial difference between religious ritual and religious experience. Western scholars such as William James (1902) mirror the Eastern ideas:
In just the degree that we come into a conscious realisation of our oneness with the [...]