State-Enlivening and Practice-Makes-Perfect Approaches to Meditation

Abstract

Meditation procedures can have different types of effects and operate by very different mechanisms. Effects of Mindfulness and Vipassana procedures are often closely akin to what the meditators do in meditation and are understood as emerging via practice-makes-perfect mechanisms. Effects of major procedures from Zen and Transcendental Meditation (TM), by contrast, are often very different from what the meditators do in meditation and are traditionally understood as arising from states enlivened by the meditation techniques, rather than practice-makes-perfect mechanisms. Intensely concentrative γ-electroencephalogram (EEG)–related Zen koan work and effortless ά-related use of mantras in TM are reported to produce the same basic state of pure consciousness/emptiness and types of out-of-meditation effects. These include enhancement of activities incompatible with, rather than expressions of, the activities of the procedures said to produce them. Numerous studies of the TM technique support these observations. They show, for example, enhancement of highly focused, concentrative activities (academic performance, reaction-time, etc.) that are so different from the effortless, explicitly focus-eschewing, ά-associated activity of TM that they are regularly referred to as “ά-blocking.” Such effects do not appear to be explainable as practice-makes-perfect effects. Psychological, gross-physiological, and EEG-related mechanisms have been proposed to explain how state-enlivening procedures might produce their effects.