I believe its good to meditate if you actually accomplish something while doing so, but otherwise just sitting there won't accomplish much.

A study found that people who had been meditating for more than five years were physiologically 12 to 15 years younger than non-meditators.

Meditation decreases oxygen consumption, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure, and increase the intensity of alpha, theta, and delta brain waves--the opposite of the physiological changes that occur during stress.

Improved mental abilities: Increased intelligence, increased creativity, improved learning ability, improved memory, improved reaction time, higher levels of moral reasoning, improved academic achievement, greater orderliness of brain functioning, increased self-actualization.

Improved Health: Reduced stress and anxiety, reduced hospitalization, reduced incidence of disease, reduced need for out-patient medical care, reduced health care costs, reduce use of alcohol and drugs, improved cardiovascular health, reduced physical complaints, increased longevity

Improved social behavior: improved self-confidence, reduced anxiety, improved family life, improved relationships at home and at work, increased tolerance, improved job performance, increased job satisfaction

Meditation found to increase brain size---Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch. "These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives," Lazar notes. "This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators

Meditation build up the brain

Meditation may bolster brain activity ---Buddhist monks who spent years in meditation training show significantly greater brain activity in areas associated with learning and happiness than those who have never practiced meditation. They had a higher level of this sort of gamma wave activity before they began meditation and this difference increased dramatically during meditation. The extremely high levels of gamma wave activity are the highest ever reported.

Meditation balance the body's system ---Meditation produces long-lasting changes in the brain activity in areas involved in attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception

Research on stress and meditation

Meditator's brain shows a pronounced shift toward the left frontal lobe. People who are habitually calm an happy typical show greater activity in this area.

Meditator has higher levels of certain immune cells.

Meditation is involved in the global coordination of brain activity and could induce both short-term and long-term change in the brain.

Long term meditation practice changes the baseline state of the brain.

Meditation is shown to reduce risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure, stress and smoking. Comparing with other techniques, the Transcendental meditation group had a 23% decrease in deaths from all causes, a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease deaths, and a 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer

During meditation, the monks in the study was able to raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees, three monks could lower their metabolism by 64%

Meditators over 6-9 months showed a marked decrease in the thickness of their artery walls.

Void and Meditation:

Void type meditation is often criticized as having no purpose on the surface, because in clearing the mind and holding that state one appears to be doing nothing, and hence nothing of value.

Holding the mind clear puts one in an altered state of consciousness. This state deepens with practice. Only in a quite altered state can one approach a higher state of being.

During this quiet time the lower mind / ego is suppressed, and in this state it is slowly entrained to be quieter and more obedient at all times.

(Other conscious training processes are also required to help with the training of the lower self, especially self observation and introspection).

Also during this quiet time, the higher mind, superconsciousness, the higher self (there are many terms for our higher aspects) is encouraged to come to the fore, to be one with the meditator.

A quiet minded altered state takes the meditator closer to his/her higher mind. The higher mind is attracted to this and so also moves closer to the conscious mind. This association slowly evolves the meditator through close empathic association.

The essence of all spiritual development is to entrain the conscious mind to take on some of the 'knowingness' of the higher self.

The way of knowledge is, generally speaking, to absorb a lot of knowledge and to train the conscious mind and body according to a certain discipline. In essence, this involves taking control over ones life. This path has much merit and it suits a lot of people.

The way of knowing, however, is to quieten ones conscious mind so ones higher aspects can take root and flourish therein. Instead of learning and training and honing ones skills, one simply remembers and realizes and 'knows'.

A mixture of the above is probably best, as we all need some basic knowledge in order to achieve a state of nothingness.

The way of knowledge is to take control and make things happen, eg, creating ones own reality. In essence, if one masters this approach, its a bit like using God mode in a computer game. This kinda takes the fun out of things.

The way of knowing is to relinquish control. This is the essence of what I call Bee Following. Instead of trying to make something happen, one just expects things to happen. There is a profound difference between these approaches.

Mind you, it takes a lot of self control in order to be able to relinquish control, if that makes any sense....grin.

Take care, Robert