Just as you would pop a pill when something goes wrong with your body, meditation was originally invented to remedy the ills of mind. Because it was subtle and mostly practiced in deeper and often inaccessible parts of East, it remained an enigma for much of West for long time. Even if some scientists decided to comment upon it, they usually took a derogatory tone to dismiss it as another charlatanism of East who have lost touch with reality and objectivity of scientific rigor. There were times when Zen meditators were labeled as psychotics and such a 'research' was published in respected journals.

But no more. In the last few decades, meditation has withstood the test of science and has pervaded our popular culture with respected universities like Harvard and Wisconsin running related programs backed by solid research. Now, popular magazines like Time run frontline stories to tell us that it works regardless of what skeptics still say.

What is meditation?

It is a powerful psycho-spiritual tool to correct the imbalances of our mind, thinking and emotional patterns and the way we look at world. The root word for medicine and meditation comes from the same Latin word 'med' that means healing. It cures the maladies of mind and soul, so to speak.

How it works?

In the last section, we have seen the ravages of stress on both heart and brain. Persistent practice of meditation tends to halt or even in some cases, reverse those damages. Recall from previous sections that our physical body is not as much solid as we have tended to believe in. In fact, it is a highly organized information system. In August 2003 issue of Scientific American, scientists have once again expressed confidence that our universe is a giant hologram in which information is primary property of our existence while energy and matter could be incidentals. If that is correct, it also makes each of us a hologram. Hologram is special property of an image in which each segment of the image contains the whole image.

If you cut a holographic image of an apple into a million pieces, each cut piece will contain the full image of apple. It might be that scientists are getting closer to find scientific evidence to the poetic claim of William Blake when he said: "To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour".

Let us take the following examples to understand what it means to be an organized information system. Think about a car lying in a garage which is completely rusted or a cup which you just broke when you were drinking your black coffee? What are the chances that the rusted car will restore itself to its younger days or the cup will leap to its unbrokenness? Practically none, you would mutter. Why? They cannot do so because they are bound by the laws of thermodynamics which has damned them to the inevitable entropy.

What makes you different from the chair you are sitting on? It is made of exactly same elements like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon etc. as your body is made of. So what makes a chair a dead element and your body a living entity? Where is the dividing line? It lies in our exceptional quality of awareness and consciousness which we can summon at will.

Awareness and ability to defy the principles of thermodynamics with conscious engagement in renewal and healing process, is what makes you unique and stand you apart from a cup or car even though you are also made of same or similar elements drawn from same periodic table.

Meditation, in its simplest form, can be called cultivating a renewed awareness. Ever since our birth, we start getting conditioned in one form or other. We get on autopilot of life and lose the ability of being aware and conscious. Mindful awareness is what is called Meditation. It helps you to retrain your thinking, emotions, and feelings towards a healthier state. It can also be called a psychological detoxification of our inner self.

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