What are the origins of meditation?

At present, meditation is a discipline on the rise, especially in the Western world. Since the hippie movement in the 1960s popularized some of the techniques of oriental spirituality and incorporated into the changing and fast-paced globalized world, this type of perception of reality and of life has only gained followers.

But what exactly is meditation? AND... What is the origin of meditation? In this article we will investigate the origin of this discipline and we will try to draw a chronological line that takes us from its beginnings to the present day.

The origins of meditation: the vedas

The origins of meditation lie in India. At least, this is proven by the oldest texts that have been found in which it is mentioned, although it is believed that the tradition is much older and we could go back 5,000 years ago. Is about the so-called Vedic texts or Vedas, written in the Indian subcontinent around the 2nd millennium BC. c.

What are the Vedas? In Sanskrit, the word veda literally means "knowledge." Within Hinduism, therefore, these texts written in Sanskrit are considered to contain sacred revelation and are therefore essential to the Hindu religion.

The Vedas are made up of 4 great texts: the rigveda (the oldest), the Samaveda, he Yajurveda and the atharvaveda. In them, the origin of everything is reduced to Unity (the Sanskrit ekam), which would later give rise to the "deceptive" plurality that we perceive in the world. This concept of original unity, together with the cosmic order that moves everything (the rita) is the basis of the Vedas and, by extension, of the Hindu religion..

The Vedic texts not only present a concrete vision of the world and the cosmos, but also tell stories of gods and goddesses (since the Hindu religion is polytheistic), as well as historical facts concrete. Taken together, the Vedas represent a complete spiritual vision and cosmogony.

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Vedic tradition and meditation

So what do the Vedas and Hinduism have to do with meditation? We have already commented that they are the oldest texts in which we find references to this practice, with a very specific meaning: becoming aware of the endless cycle that is existence.

For the Hindu religion, everything is in constant motion. If something differentiates this religion from other religions (like, for example, Christianity) it is its belief in the eternity of cosmic actions.. That is, while Christianity is rather linear (the world begins with creation and will end with second coming of Christ), in Hinduism nothing stops and everything moves in a constant and inexhaustible.

In this concept is circumscribed, of course, the belief in reincarnation. Just as in Christianity the soul is one and, once the body is dead, it will be judged in the afterlife, in the case of Hinduism the human soul is in constant incarnation. Each life corresponds to a state of purification, to which we lead the whole karma of previous lives, that is, the energy of our past actions. How we behave in the present life and the karma What we leave will depend on our next reincarnation.

So that, The original Hindu meditation had as its main objective the awareness of this endless cycle, and was accompanied, in general, by fasting and abstinence. Meditation was exercised by concentrating the mind on a specific object and repeating the corresponding mantra (sacred word).

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sacred contemplation

Hindu meditation was a contemplation of a spiritual type. We find references to it in the Vedic texts dhyana, which could be translated as “moving towards the mind”. The objective was, then, to direct the mind towards the reality of the cosmos and to delve into its mechanism.

From this perspective we see the difference between this contemplation and our word “meditation”. This last term comes from the Latin meditatio, which would come to mean something like thinking before undertaking something. The difference between one and the other is clear: while in the East contemplation is something spiritual, meditatio Latina takes us back to a kind of temperance, to the containment of actions in favor of a prudent and reflective.

It will be precisely due to oriental influence, which will deeply permeate Christianity and Judaism (and, later, Islamism), that, In the first centuries of our era, in Europe, meditation began to be seen as something related to sacredness and union with God. Thus, the first hermits who retire to the desert or the mountain in complete solitude, do so to meditate in the most "eastern" sense of the word.

It is also in this sense that the first monks and nuns did it, when they gathered in caves or small hermitages to dedicate their lives to contemplation. Not in vain, we must bear in mind that the monastic movement comes from the easternmost part of Europe, in full contact with oriental religions.

Already in the Middle Ages we see that meditation is fully identified with religion. Those who meditate direct their thoughts to God and rely on sacred texts, be it the Bible or the books of the various doctors of the Church, or also in hagiographies or lives of saints. We see how the concept of medieval meditation is very similar to that developed in the East in the second millennium BC. c.

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A new meditation for a new age

At the dawn of the contemporary world, this type of meditation loses its strength, perhaps as a result of the radicalization of positivism and, above all, due to the growing capitalization of society. However, during the 19th century, in the romantic era, we find the concept of "contemplation" related to the relationship between man and nature, in clear harmony with the ancient religious contemplation that tried to decipher the functioning of the cosmos.

A clear example of this is the famous painting by the painter Caspar David Friedrich Walker before a sea of ​​clouds, where the solitary traveler remains engrossed contemplating the tangle of clouds that float between the peaks. In this case, it is the individual self, the consciousness of the human being as an individual, facing the immensity of the world.

The last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th are perhaps the most materialistic in history; at least in the West. In the artistic and intellectual field, there are multiple reactions to this lack of spirituality that only grows. In the 1960s, the hippie movement revived forgotten oriental techniques, albeit quite adapted to their philosophy, and brought spirituality and meditation back into vogue.

Currently, meditation is very present in our globalized society. This is, however, a very different meditation from the one that originated in India millennia ago. Because although some groups that know their roots use it for spiritual elevation, in the In most cases meditation has been reduced to a simple technique for relaxing and controlling a mind runaway

This is the case, for example, of mindfulness, created in the 1970s by Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944). Although Professor Kabat-Zinn is a great connoisseur of oriental techniques, such as yoga and zen, his technique of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (REBAP) is focused on reducing the anxiety that the western type of life produces in people, so it is far removed from the original idea of ​​unraveling the principles of the universe.