Hinduism and Meditation

Author(s):  
Gavin Flood

Meditation has been integral to Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions, in particular involving visualization or visual contemplation, practiced as part of ritual and also in its own right in order to achieve the goals of liberation from the cycle of reincarnation and also to achieve pleasure or power in this and other worlds. Visual contemplation is particularly focused on the body envisioned as being pervaded by a vertical axis at a subtle level, along which are located different levels of experience associated with different levels of the hierarchical cosmos. Power is awakened through meditation that rises up through these levels up to the very highest realization. This visual contemplation is thought to be of the subtle body as the support of the soul that leaves the physical body at death. There is also meditation without visualization that emphasizes the flow of pure awareness. This essay examines these practices in the major Hindu tantric traditions focused on the deity Śiva with some reference to the traditions of the Goddess, Viṣṇu, and Buddhism. These traditions influence the later Yoga tradition and have been transformed in the modern West.

Author(s):  
Anurag Asija

In modern life, people generally try to accomplish too much in too little time, consequently they accumulate a lot of stress in their lives. In that time, yoga plays an important role to alleviate the stress and rejuvenate the body. In the times, yoga was a form of Bhakti. Rishi Patanjali, rightly called the father of yoga, who around 200 b.c. gave us the present literary form of yoga doctrine in his famous treaties Yoga Sutra. In modern times, the value of yoga is being increasingly recognized for general and it’s preventive and curative effects. Yoga does not conceive man having a physical body but on the contrary, it emphasizes the greater values of the mind which characterizes his personality, Thus, yoga leads to ultimate physical health and happiness together with the achieve of mental and patience.


Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Ignacio Lago ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Elisabeth Gidengil ◽  
Thomas Gschwend

Voters face different incentives to turn out to vote in one electoral arena versus another. Although turnout is lowest in European elections, it is found that the turnout is only slightly lower in regional than in national elections. Standard accounts suggest that the importance of an election, in terms of the policy-making power of the body to be elected, drives variation in turnout across elections at different levels. This chapter argues that this is only part of the story, and that voter attachment to a particular level also matters. Not all voters feel connected to each electoral arena in the same way. Although for some, their identity and the issues they most care about are linked to politics at the national level, for others, the regional or European level may offer the political community and political issues that most resonate with them.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren James Reed

Abstract In various ways the movement and experience of the body is instructed by others. This may be in the dance class or on the playing field. In these interactions, one person claims knowledge of the other’s body and rights to instruct how that body functions, moves, and feels. By undertaking a close analysis of embodied and spoken interaction within performance training sessions from a multimodal conversation analytic perspective, this paper will identify one kind of broad sequential trajectory – from intimate contact to public display - that shows how an instructor claims rights over the internal workings of another’s body by traversing different levels of proximity and sensorial modalities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110040
Author(s):  
Josefine Dilling ◽  
Anders Petersen

In this article, we argue that certain behaviour connected to the attempt to attain contemporary female body ideals in Denmark can be understood as an act of achievement and, thus, as an embodiment of the culture of achievement, as it is characterised in Præstationssamfundet, written by the Danish sociologist Anders Petersen (2016) Hans Reitzels Forlag . Arguing from cultural psychological and sociological standpoints, this article examines how the human body functions as a mediational tool in different ways from which the individual communicates both moral and aesthetic sociocultural ideals and values. Complex processes of embodiment, we argue, can be described with different levels of internalisation, externalisation and materialisation, where the body functions as a central mediator. Analysing the findings from a qualitative experimental study on contemporary body ideals carried out by the Danish psychologists Josefine Dilling and Maja Trillingsgaard, this article seeks to anchor such theoretical claims in central empirical findings. The main conclusions from the study are used to structure the article and build arguments on how expectations and ideals expressed in an achievement society become embodied.


Author(s):  
João Pessoa ◽  
Nuno Fonseca ◽  
C. Guedes Soares

The paper presents an experimental and numerical investigation on the motions of a floating body of simple geometry subjected to harmonic and biharmonic waves. The experiments were carried out in three different water depths representing shallow and deep water. The body is axisymmetric about the vertical axis, like a vertical cylinder with a rounded bottom, and it is kept in place with a soft mooring system. The experimental results include the first order motion responses, the steady drift motion offset in regular waves and the slowly varying motions due to second order interaction in biharmonic waves. The hydrodynamic problem is solved numerically with a second order boundary element method. The results show a good agreement of the numerical calculations with the experiments.


Author(s):  
Joa˜o Pessoa ◽  
Nuno Fonseca ◽  
C. Guedes Soares

The paper presents an investigation of the slowly varying second order drift forces on a floating body of simple geometry. The body is axis-symmetric about the vertical axis, like a vertical cylinder with a rounded bottom and a ratio of diameter to draft of 3.25. The hydrodynamic problem is solved with a second order boundary element method. The second order problem is due to interactions between pairs of incident harmonic waves with different frequencies, therefore the calculations are carried out for several difference frequencies with the mean frequency covering the whole frequency range of interest. Results include the surge drift force and pitch drift moment. The results are presented in several stages in order to assess the influence of different phenomena contributing to the global second order responses. Firstly the body is restrained and secondly it is free to move at the wave frequency. The second order results include the contribution associated with quadratic products of first order quantities, the total second order force, and the contribution associated to the free surface forcing.


Author(s):  
Amy Hetherington

A lama is a spiritual leader or guider of the dharma in Tibetan Buddhism. When a lama dies their spirit is said to move into the body of an infant born shortly after their death, and this child is called a tulku. The word tulku translates to the Sanskrit word nirmanakaya. This means "pure physical body," and is in reference to a fully enlightened being. In the following essay, I engage in a discussion about the childhood experiences and notions of individuality of Tibetan tulkus. Due to the shortage of academic material on this topic, I draw on personal written accounts of specific tulkus and from these make my own inferences and conclusions. By exploring notions of discipline, familial relationships, personal autonomy, identity, and exploitation, I argue that the recognition and identification as a tulku does not allow one to experience an ordinary childhood and deprives one of pursuing a normative or undisturbed upbringing. In this essay, I utilize the term ‘normative’ to mean any version or rendition of childhood that the child would have experienced had they not been identified as a tulku. I hope my findings will be useful in further discussions about whether a child’s putative identity changes their right to access a typical childhood characterized by family, leisure, and personal exploration, or whether their tulku status overrides and reconditions this right.  


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 333-349
Author(s):  
Isabelle Choinière ◽  

The mediation of the performative body raises the question of the re-evaluation of the lived body in relation to phenomena of re-creation or re-composition involving the sensible and somatic body when it is affected by technology and incorporates its effects. To understand this phenomenon, this essay examines the interrelation of the notions of corporality (a notion which concerns the physical body in its materiality, or the anthropomorphic body), corporeality, and embodiment through a transdisciplinary approach and as an anchoring to a dynamic of self-eco-organization. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy underpins the very foundations of this research and will allow us to reflect on the new status of the contemporary body in technological contexts. Two main notions will be used. “Corporeality”, as a form of the lived body and a transdisciplinary concept and embodiment as an act of integration by the body – here in a technological environment. In the evolution of the interrelation between the body and the changing environment, the two are in trans-relation, a trans-formation occurs. To conclude, we propose to analyze these new “realities” in a Merleau-Pontian and Nietzschean interconnected approach, that is, through a philosophy of becoming, a philosophy that flows through the body: being a body, doing, risking and creating – a philosophy that resonates with this trans-formation.


Author(s):  
Rosemary Gallagher ◽  
Stephaine Perez ◽  
Derek DeLuca ◽  
Isaac L. Kurtzer

Reaching movements performed from a crouched body posture require a shift of body weight from both arms to one arm. This situation has remained unexamined despite the analogous load requirements during step initiation and the many studies of reaching from a seated or standing posture. To determine whether the body weight shift involves anticipatory or exclusively reactive control we obtained force plate records, hand kinematics, and arm muscle activity from 11 healthy right-handed participants. They performed reaching movements with their left and right arm in two speed contexts - 'comfortable' and 'as fast as possible' - and two postural contexts - a less stable knees-together posture and more stable knees-apart posture. Weight-shifts involved anticipatory postural actions (APA) by the reaching and stance arms that were opposing in the vertical axis and aligned in the side-to-side axis similar to APAs by the legs for step initiation. Weight-shift APAs were correlated in time and magnitude, present in both speed contexts, more vigorous with the knees placed together, and similar when reaching with the dominant or non-dominant arm. The initial weight-shift was preceded by bursts of muscle activity in the shoulder and elbow extensors (posterior deltoid and triceps lateral) of the reach arm and shoulder flexor (pectoralis major) of the stance arm which indicates their causal role; leg muscles may have indirectly contributed but were not recorded. The strong functional similarity of weight-shift APAs during crouched reaching to human stepping and cats reaching suggests that they are a core feature of posture-movement coordination.


2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amélia C. Seidel ◽  
Fausto Miranda Jr. ◽  
Yara Juliano ◽  
Neil F. Novo

OBJECTIVE: This study has been designed to correlate the diameter of the greater saphenous vein in different levels of the lower limbs with the body mass index of each individual to determine a possible relation between them. METHODS: Fifty-two lower limbs in 26 volunteers (six males and 20 females) without a chronic venous disease record, aged 21-68 were evaluated. Prior to color-flow duplex scanning the body mass index was defined. The deep and superficial venous systems and perforator veins were assessed as described in the literature. The diameter of the greater saphenous vein was measured with ultrasound longitudinal imaging in seven different levels. For the statistical analysis, Student t test for paired data and Spearman test were used. RESULTS: The difference observed in saphenous venous in the second and third levels when compared to the lower right and left limbs was not considered significant and a single group was formed to correlate with body mass index. The correlation was considered statistically irrelevant. CONCLUSION: By correlating the diameters of the greater saphenous vein with the body mass index of each individual it was noted that the relation between them is not significant, therefore it can be assumed that tall thin individuals can have greater saphenous vein with similar diameter as short fat individuals.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document