1  Introduction

Meditation: is an effort to unite the body and mind with the psychic forces of the universe, or God.

But are we not already united with YHVH or God? No. All the noise that you hear in your mind is not exclusively a high-yoking with Him. In other words, even though everything may be God, there is a whole lot of junk food that we eat with our minds and bodies in part because of a lack of awareness. The physical analog is yoga, which literally means a “yoking”. Some exceptionally conservative Christians view yoga as a “bad thing” because the stretches are done to certain deities or aspects to try to achieve a greater unity with them and then therefore Brahma. Indeed, this could be an issue, but it is probably less of an issue than the support of oil companies by many of the same conservatives or the consumption of the many brands of pretty much anything owned by multinational corporations with less-than-Godly intentions. We might say then that the attitudes that exist about yoga in these instances are a case of an “awareness bias”. A foreign deity is bad news, but a foreign wealthy company does not trigger the same warnings. Perhaps we might call this spiritual profiling instead. If a person wanted to solve the problem, just use the name of the Messiah instead of the foreign deity.

Regardless, the point stands that all yogic practices were aimed ultimately at attaining a higher awareness and relationship with a deity or deities. Modern yoga, however many stretches it does, to the extent that it does not seek to achieve an awareness of anything cosmic, is missing a crucial piece of the experience. Indeed, most yogic practices were originally physical movements combined with a meditation and a certain breathing technique.

Each school of yoga had different techniques or meditations to accompany its movements. Each of these, in turn, were used to integrate the mind and the body into cohesion. The structure of the meditation was important because one wanted to be sure that the master of the technique could teach it to bring about the results of that specific technique for the practitioner. Sometimes new schools were born. The mystical realms have rules, but those rules can change as the understanding changes and as we evolve. The more of God we can handle, the more we can be granted access.

From a Buddhist standpoint, the cultivation is about awareness and realization of the Buddha-mind. Again we find techniques and meditations designed to produce certain results. Not surprisingly, there exist many different schools of thought.

From a Messianic standpoint, the cultivation is about understanding and being able to better embody the Shekinah or Holy Spirit. All the above are pretty much the same–they just have slightly different manifestations. God gives us the freedom to pick a path, but the landmarks along the paths are different. So too are the fruits. The technique can be somewhat abstracted from the path, but this is typically unwise. The technique, the tradition, the movement, the breath, the mind, and the realization of God are all One.