In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Ramesh Manocha discusses the taxonomy of meditation and where mental silence based meditation might fit.
In the context of Cahn’s proposition of categorising techniques according to their underlying experience, mindfulness meditation and Sahaja Yoga meditation (SYM) may belong to similar places on the physiological and clinical spectrum since both compel the subject to attend to mental content, regardless of their state of physiological arousal, whereas relaxation-orientated methods might belong to an entirely different part of that spectrum. On the other hand, the possibility that mental silence orientated forms of meditation, such as SYM, might be associated with relatively unique physiological changes suggests that a taxonomy based on the physiology of different states of consciousness may be possible.