Sunday, May 24, 2009

Cognitive Meditative Therapies: Guided Meditation

By G.M. Williams

Meditation is getting its first update since Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder introduced Neuro-Linguistic Programming back in the 1970s. Cognitive Enlightenment Therapy (CET) says that if enlightenment is the realization of certain fundamental truths about the nature of reality and the individual's relationship to it, then combining meditation with the scientific study of the nature of realities and individuals is the most efficient way to achieve it.

Where Bandler and Grinder introduced transformational grammar to psychotherapy to come up with techniques for self-directed reprogramming that are much embraced by motivational speakers everywhere, CET uses what the founder (inventor?) of Cognitive Enlightenment Therapy calls 'transformational ideas.'

CET is not for everybody. The process replaces NLP's transformational grammar with transformational ideas. If you are not a good student and critical thinker, you will find CET frustrating in the extreme. You will be asked to meditate on connections between some apparently unrelated fields.

Cognitive Enlightenment Therapy points out that the order in which one thinks certain thoughts influences what conclusion are reached. For this reason, according to the anonymous creator of the technique, the transformational ideas are to be studied in the order that they are presented. The readings include subjects as diverse as biology, cosmology, gender and physics. After each reading comes a statement about a relationship between the most recent reading and previous readings. The statement is then used as the focus point for meditation, as if it were a mantra.

One of the most intriguing things about Cognitive Enlightenment Therapy is that the creator of the therapy is unknown. According to legend the subject was first introduced by an anonymous poster known as El Be in a meditation forum in 2006. The poster's ideas proved so popular that they put up a blog to answer frequently asked questions. That blog has since been taken, but a new one is promised.

The growing Cognitive Enlightenment Therapy online community is discussing when and where this promised new blog will appear. A number of posters to forum discussions quote from the original blog, but there is argument over the authenticity of many of the quotes. The most widely discussed issues from the original blog are the link between dissonance resolution theory and gender, and the request by El Be that users not discuss their experiences using CET.

"It is that recommendation that I find most disturbing," says linguistic professor Dr. Elizabeth Silverstein, who is studying CDT but not practicing it. "Isolating practitioners from each other is a fine way to prevent criticism. You have to wonder if this El Be person is attempting a form of remote brainwashing."

Many of the posters to the Cognitive Enlightenment Theory forum believe Dr. Silverstein is way off track. As one poster puts it, "I've been following the original reading - meditation couplets for over a year now, and frankly, I understand the nature of reality better now than I did after three post-graduate degrees. El Be's insistence that mass doesn't warp space, it is warped space, has totally revolutionized my view of General Relativity, and I teach the subject. If El Be starts a cult, sign me up. - 14130

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