The Origins of Meditation
WRITTEN BY SELOMON
The practice of meditation is beginning to explode in the western world to the point that schools are starting to use it in place of detention and with amazing results! So what is meditation? Where does it originate from? What I am about to tell you may come as a surprise.
There are many ideas about where it was first introduced to the civilized world. Some say from India when the Vedas were created around 1500 BCE. But that’s only part of it.
The earliest written records of meditation does originate in India from the Vedas. The Vedas are a series of writings that predates all religions we know of today. They discuss different philosophies, techniques, and meditative practices of Ancient India. Though it may be the first time meditation was written about, it was not the first sign of humans meditating.
According to Robert Puff Ph.D. “In the Indus Valley, archaeologists discovered evidence of meditation in wall art dating from approximately 5,000 to 3,500 BCE.”
One of the three earliest civilizations on this planet was the Indus Valley Civilization. It was the largest of the three with around one to five million people. From 1922-1927 archaeologist Sir John Marshall excavated the capital city of Mohenjo-daro and discovered a seal with a man sitting in a meditation posture.
The seals were apparently all over as Sir John Marshall said there were “considerable numbers in sites such as the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley”.
As far as I have been able to uncover, this was the earliest that any form of meditation has been found all over the world. This means that meditation has, at least, been around since some of the earliest known civilizations.
But how did the people of the Indus Valley learn about the practice? This is a question I am still looking answers for. If you ever stumble upon the answer, I’d love to hear about it.