Meditation

The foundation of the whole tradition of "meditation" was established in the "Yoga Sutras" written by Patanjali. Patanjali is said to have lived in India 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, and expounded in his sutras (verses) practically all aspects of what meditation is.

We could know everything about meditation by only reading and practising "Patanjali's Yoga Sutras"; the annotation by Vivekananda (found in his "Raja Yoga"), the commentary by Abhedananda, the translation by Christopher Isherwood and Prabhavananda, are highly recommended, as reference books.

Incidentally, some people are inclined to believe that meditation means transcendental meditation a la Maharishi, but his method seems to be Mantra (recitation) Yoga, and nothing but an exercise which dulls, tires, and hypnotises our brain.

It is amazing that nothing new has been invented or discovered about meditation for so long a period, and that meditations which were claimed to go beyond traditional meditation have turned out within the pale of the meditation a la Patanjali. For instance, Osho said that modern people are living in a busy society and cannot sit for hours to meditate, and invented "Dynamic Meditation", etc., in which meditators move their body radically or dance. But Guhen existentially found that such "dynamic" meditation is in the final analysis not unlike traditional sitting meditation, in the sense that meditators have to spend several dozens of minutes, to achieve and maintain meditative states.

In this very sense, the mental techniques/exercises of NLP bring the same meditative states to the practitioner (strictly speaking, not during the very exercises, but rather after them, in ordinary daily life). We can say here that meditators do not any more need to meditate by sitting or dancing for hours, but can achieve the same state of consciousness, by doing simple mental exercises for minutes (sometimes for seconds), even when they are working at the desk in their office. (!)

The Guhenian system stipulates that NLP can be used as a methodology for meditation which is the most suitable to busy modern people, and which can transcend (or rather replace) for the first time the thousands of years old methodology created by Patanjali.