meditation

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   continuous and profound contemplation or musing on a subject or series of subjects of a deep or abstruse nature

   the habit of meditation is the basis for all real knowledge

2. 2
   noun

   focused contemplation, often on religious or philosophical subjects

   At our last retreat, we had a meditation on nothingness that lasted eight hours.

3. 3
   noun

   Any of various types of achieving more or less altered states of consciousness, such as vacancy of mind or prolonged contemplation on a single sensation or thought, through relaxed or focused mental and physical activity generally of a nonstrenuous and non–substance-induced nature.

   Free-associating on paper is valuable—letting loose, as I described in the last chapter, and writing whatever you feel like writing, any way you want. It’s valuable when you’re learning to write to help you deal with fear, and it continues to be a useful technique for starting a piece of writing or moving beyond a point where you’re stuck. It’s a good way to develop characters and story by drawing on unconscious associations, free-associating about something (a process that used to be called meditation before meditation came to mean emptying your mind). […] Writing to communicate is a different matter. Professional writers, without exception so far as I know, consider unstructured, unedited free association to be at best only the first stage of writing. Not even Jack Kerouac wrote that way, although he tried to make it look as if he did.

4. 4
   noun

   A contemplative discourse, often on a religious or philosophical subject.

   Her book is less a cookbook than a meditation on the craft of cookery.

5. 5
   noun

   Careful and thorough thought.

   deep meditation

6. 6
   noun

   A devotional exercise of, or leading to, contemplation.

7. 7
   noun

   A musical theme treated in a meditative manner.

Etymology

From Old French meditacion, from Latin meditatio, from meditatus, the past participle of meditārī (“to meditate, to think over, consider”), itself from Proto-Indo-European *med- (“to measure, limit, consider, advise”).