Passage Meditation
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| Author | Eknath Easwaran |
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| Language | English (orig.) & trans.: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Korean,<refname=korean03/> Lithuanian, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Telugu, |
| Publisher | Nilgiri Press; others |
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Publication date
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1978 (original); 2016; others |
| Pages | 237 (1978); 270 (2016) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 950007677. |
Passage Meditation is a book by Eknath Easwaran, originally published in 1978 with the title Meditation. The book describes a meditation program, also now commonly referred to as Passage Meditation. Easwaran developed this method of meditation in the 1960s, and first taught it systematically at the University of California, Berkeley.
The program is an eight-point program intended for the "spiritual growth" of the practitioner. The first step in the program involves meditating on a text passage, and since the 1990s the method as a whole has come to be known as "Passage Meditation" (not Easwaran's term). The book has been frequently reprinted and translated into 14 languages. It is reported that more than 200,000 copies were sold in the period of 1978 to 2001.
The first edition of the book had the full title Meditation; commonsense directions for an uncommon life (1978). A second edition in 1991 was subtitled a simple eight-point program for translating spiritual ideals into daily life, and a third, revised edition of the book was published posthumously as Passage Meditation; Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart Into Daily Life (2008).
A fourth, revised edition was published as Passage Meditation: A Complete Spiritual Practice: Train Your Mind and Find a Life that Fulfills (2016). The fourth edition included a new part, not contained in earlier editions, with approximately 80 pages of "Questions and Answers" to numerous questions about meditation (pp. 182–264).
All editions of Passage Meditation contain a chapter dedicated to each of the eight practices or "points" of Easwaran's method of meditation. Each edition also contains a preface by the author in which he explains how he discovered the passage meditation method.
Meditating on a passage is the first point in Easwaran's eight point program of Passage Meditation, and he recommends practicing it for 30 minutes each day on first rising. The other seven points are to be woven in at various times throughout the day or week. Each of the book's eight main chapters are dedicated to explaining one of the eight points:
Meditation on a passage involves silent, focused repetition during meditation of memorized selections from scriptures of the world and writings of great mystics. According to Easwaran, the practice of meditating on a specific passage of text (Easwaran suggests the Prayer of Saint Francis or Psalm 23 as examples) has the effect of eventually transforming "character, conduct, and consciousness." The term passage is chosen to describe a spiritually-inspired text that one meditates on, during an extended period of time set aside for meditation, as compared to a mantram (or mantra). Easwaran collected an anthology of selections from the world's spiritual texts, God Makes the Rivers to Flow, for use in meditation.
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