The Moon
considerable practice. Mind practice, or mind
preparation or training, as it is sometimes called, is
standard fare in the orient.
East and West
We might wonder why this style of mind practice has
never caught on in North America. In part, this is due to
our whole take on meditation, and what we think it is.
Meditation in the West has come to mean something
almost like relaxation therapy—a way to relax and get
away from it all, to escape from the worries of the world
by the contemplation of some inner landscape.
Somewhere, perhaps early in this century, the word
meditation lost any semblance to its Eastern counterpart
and became definitive of what most in the West
understand meditation to be today—a way to relax and
get rid of tension.