Sociologists study meditation as a social phenomenon, using it to explore larger questions about social life and organization. Meditation serves as a new institution balancing the secular and mystical, and being together versus being alone. It embraces individualization and secularization while being based on collective circles where affective effervescence is produced and people seek mystical, transformative, or therapeutic experiences. The chapter covers three themes: meditation as a religious and spiritual phenomenon embedded in contemporary themes of individualization, secularization, and religious syncretism; its popularization as a social movement in a globalized world; and the micro-social world of meditation practice, focusing on social relations and the social self.
Religious practitioners actively cultivate experiences of being overtaken by a divine or transcendent force. Through ethnographic studies of Buddhist meditation retreats and Torah study in a Haredi yeshiva, the paper shows that achieving submission requires deliberate, embodied effort. In Torah study, students alternate between vigorous debate and surrendering to 'divine thinking' within partnerships. In Buddhist meditation, practitioners shift from conscious bodily performance to passive synchronization with 'ultimate reality.' This paradox—exercising agency to reach states that negate it—reveals how religious doctrines become personally felt through practice, making religious experience an accomplished, interactive achievement.
Buddhist meditation, particularly vipassana, is growing in popularity in Israel as a way for practitioners to find a stable sense of self amid doubt and uncertainty. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter describes how Israelis use meditation to withdraw into the body, temporarily freeing themselves from local social ties while simultaneously fostering universal, humanistic identifications. Four dimensions of this transcendence of local context are identified: rejecting particularism, treating the meditation center as a space without place, distancing social roles during practice, and connecting to humanity through loving-kindness. Practitioners experience this withdrawal as a deeply personal yet universally anchoring practice.
Somatic inversions—experiences where usually unnoticed bodily processes become the focus of awareness—can make religious phenomena feel present to the senses. Drawing on studies of Eastern Orthodox fasting and Theravada Buddhist meditation, the authors argue that such practically cultivated bodily experiences, while not inherently religious, encourage attributions of religious significance and open the door to further engagement and elaboration.