The purpose of hypnosis is to change the usual “conscious” awareness to something different. The purpose of hypnotherapy is to utilise the methods of hypnosis to make ‘interior’ changes in the individual.
The purpose of meditation is not so easily stated. A quick web search will produce delights such as ‘Types of Meditation – An Overview of 23 Meditation Techniques’.
Do you have time to explore twenty-three methods? No, nor me.
So let’s try to tidy up the purposes of meditation, and separate these from the many methods.
What’s it for?
Meditation as far as this author is concerned is a method of ‘taking your measure’ — finding out what’s going on ‘in there.’ It is NOT a method of ‘purposefully changing what is going on in there’ — that’s hypnotherapy.
Meditation is a means of apparently entering the apparent body using your attention and perceiving what is going on ‘in there’, observing without deliberately changing anything.
The qualifier here, ‘deliberately’, is there because in practice the mere observation of anything will in fact result in a change in it, to some degree. If you don’t accept this you can check out quantum physics, where it’s a given1, but really this happens at every level.
Moreover, the aim is to find out what is going on and then stop meditating. There’s no need to carry on for seventy-two years once what is going on is seen. There’s something else that will be done instead, but we’ll perhaps come to that later… Of course, it may take regular checks for a while to get the full picture, and occasional checks thereafter, but the purpose is to see what’s going on once and for all, not to gain a lifetime hobby.
Is it worthwhile?
The unexamined life is not worth living
Socrates
So there you are. Of course, some wit came up with the counterpoint:
The unexamined life is not worth examining
Anon
I’ll leave it to you to decide what to do. But really, the only way to see what is going on in there is to look.
Now, as to means…