RE: Heart-Meditation and Jappa with the Support of Kundalini That was a generous personal sharing ... a rather orderly arousal/awakening in a devotional context employing quieting & simplicity, having perhaps more normative significance for those formed in the traditions of the West? than certain other meditative techniques? Is that the gist? Any mapping of various theological concepts interreligiously will always be more problematical, of course, than the mapping of any praxes and their ensuing phenomenal experiences and it is, indeed, the latter which provides the valuable take-away from this sharing, in my view. It was very engaging and in a sweet, gentle way. Further, the author was wise, I believe, to leave phenomenological categorizing (metaphysical references to kundalini/shakti/prana/energy) to science, as nothing is really lost in making vague rather than specific references to such realities, which hopefully will be explored more and more in clinical-like studies using rigorous methodologies. Finally, the author mentioned Zen & Buddhist approaches, contrasting them to this more Bahkti yogic-like path (author did not reference bhakti, which I found curious), and I would only point out that the author may have had a rather limited exposure to and knowledge of those approaches because there are some rather prominent devotional strains in Buddhism, in general, even Zen, in particular (not to mention there are devotional elements in various Hindu advaitan strains, too). It is perhaps an accident of history that the Zen strain that was popularized (and often misappropriated) in the West came mostly out of Japan and that led, unfortunately, to some rather radicalized notions of nonduality, at least, where the Kyoto school's philosophical tradition may have come into play. And this also led, in some cases, to some unhelpful quietest tendencies in the West's Christianization of Zen, at least where the Soto school of Zen exerted some influence. This is just to say that we would not want to close off our dialogue with a wide swath of other Eastern approaches, neither at the level of practice nor philosophy/metaphysics (nor theologically, but that is far more problematical) nor would we want to caricaturize them based on certain schools that are not representative of those traditions writ large.
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