What should be evident at this point is that the idea of sahaja and the traditional psycho-physiology used to explain it, encompasses not only the idea of transformation of consciousness, but also that the ultimate basis of health and wellbeing (or disease) is psycho-spiritual in nature.
The Indian view does not relegate spirituality to an [...]
First - there is insufficient evidence to support the idea that meditation, as conceived and tested by scientific researchers in the West, is any more effective than simple relaxation or rest.
Second - the use of high face-validity control groups is critical in meditation research because of the need to exclude the important confounding effects of non-specific factors [...]
It seems obvious that the non-specific effect of any intervention is closely related to its credibility and plausibility as a therapeutic intervention i.e. its “face validity”.
Now, some of the effects associated with meditation must be non-specific, i.e. comprising a mixture of placebo, therapeutic contact, spontaneous improvement, and so on, whereas some, hopefully, are specific to [...]
In his study of 1,599 members of the baby-boomer generation conducted in the US in the early 1990s, the American researcher Roof (1993) demonstrated that there had been major defections from organized religion in the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with an increase in New Age type movements which emphasized the superiority of direct spiritual experience [...]
In a 2001 US study Meisenhelder surveyed a sample of 1,400 Presbyterian pastors and found that they had considerably better health in comparison to US normative values. After controlling for age and other demographic variables, a small correlation was found between frequency of prayer and certain important health dimensions, particularly mental health (r = 0.117, [...]
Herbert Benson (1974, 1975, 1978) argued that Eastern meditative traditions, Western religious practices and even secular activities such as hypnosis or simple rest were essentially the same despite their philosophical or metaphysical differences. He coined the term “Relaxation Response” and proposed it as a universal physiological process underlying apparently divergent tasks such as listening to [...]
The emphasis on personal development of consciousness and experience in Eastern religiosity creates a paradigm in which the achievement of health (in all its dimensions), is one stage on a more fundamental continuum of “consciousness development”. The starting point of this continuum is mundane, everyday life and the endpoint is variously described as enlightenment, sahaja [...]
In this excerpt from his thesis Dr Ramesh Manocha further discusses how the link between religion and mental health is not always positive.
As stated previously, the association between religiosity and mental health is not always positive. Larson’s (1992) review of studies exploring the relationship between religious commitment and mental health reported that while 72% described [...]
In this excerpt from his thesis, Dr Manocha discusses the changing perception of religion and spirituality.
Zinnbauer (1997) stated that spirituality is commonly regarded as an individual phenomenon and identified with experiential phenomena such as personal transcendence, supra-conscious sensitivity and meaningfulness. Religiousness is frequently identified with formal structure, religious institutions, prescribed theology and ritual. Modern scholars [...]