1. PREFACE
What is M/meditation/s?
Meditation sounds like an eastern activity done somewhere in India or anywhere in South or
Southeast Asia. It is a stereotype hobby of Zen masters and their lousy apprentices who submit their
mind and body to stillness and calmness toward the achievement of something. Meditation for
layman‟s mental on-the-spot dictionary is synonymous to focus, blood-oozing and mental freezeness.
A self-seeking, soul-searching, introspective and intrapersonal communicative mechanism executed
to understand a thing.
I have a list of my presumed activities occurring in a normally-sane conscious person and this can
render the difference of „meditation‟ from other mental processes. What I have provided are not
lexical definitions, but real examples of them.
Thinking- What would be my job someday? Why the sky is blue? 15 + 12 +54 = (sound of calculator)
81! All men are mortal…therefore I am. If x is y, then y is x.
Imagining- a green small apple on the brown square old table, a brown triangle
Dreaming (as in sleeping)- I am flying in an unknown ocean of clouds. Suddenly I lost my flight, free-
fell then I got woken up. Thanks that it‟s just a dream.
Recalling- I can see the face of Angelina a thousand times whenever I want to do so. Search is Over,
a hit song of Survivor, plays in my head anytime.
Unintended recall- A so-called Last Song Syndrome in my thought. I want to die.
Meditation- Thinking + Imaging + Recalling and the rest when added may/can help, which these
combination of mental processes direct to something replenishing to spirit or intellectual nourishing
*courtesy to other mental activities I was not able to address
Meditation is a combo-meal of mental dishes that take place in random parts of the brain, oh I mean
mind. Sorry Descartes. Every day, or every night for nocturnals, we do not stop using our minds.
Thinking with a partnership to imagining and some recalling may be labeled already a meditation. A
yoga-doer in his/her meditative practice, in the sense of focusing him/herself to sort of a mental and
there is an inclination to a great will of thinking or de-thinking1. Still, their religious meditation is and
our daily meditation have common in the respective sense that we meditate toward something with
our brain functioning and in mystical meditation whereas practitioner becomes sturdy as stone with
their mental will that turns away them from external noises that can frustrate their hard concentration.
Execution of mental processes and gradual going down to hard concentration. Mastery over thoughts.
Thinking what should be thought of. Avoiding the images of FHM cover page models. And the latter
makes me hate that kind of hardcore meditation.
1
Resist to think, avoid oneself from thinking of
2. So Why meditate, Descartes?
So the bottomline had been elevated to the top. Descartes‟ meditation is not far from Asian type.
Religions Asians do meditate toward something self-fulfilling, mystical and inclined to tradition or
beliefs. Descartes, on the other foot, accomplished his meditations as a scholar, Christian apologist
while holding his a paper and ink in front of fireplace amidst the frigidness, and a 98% awake-
conscious philosopher. Descartes had his meditations publicized because of his strong defense to
Christianity rather, as to found the criterion of truth is secondary. He constructed his vanguard to
Christianity in terms of philosophical analysis and discussion rather than quoting a holy verse from
the book called Bible. His aim is to demonstrate the existence of God and the dualism of nature, by
which mind exists distinctly from the body. The Treatise is meant mainly to prompt the hearts of non-
believers in his time. Although criticized by his own contemporaries, one was Pascal who asserted
that Descartes had reduced into a Being halfway to Deist and even atheistic that no more used the
essence of a true God. Descartes‟ ontological and cosmological demonstration of God‟s existence is
one of the famous yet „collapsed‟ argument in theistic apologetics. His arguments may be the
additives to Christian format of proving the existence of God since Aquinas and other medieval
thinkers. Christian philosophers nowadays ought to be masters of defense of the Christian God
(omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, Holy and eternal), and it is nevertheless quite a harder business
than arguing for a “Force”, „First Cause‟, Being which Descartes had proven more likely to exist.
Cartesian demonstration was revived attempt in supporting the faith pillars and hopes in theological
knowledge. However this attempt now seen a weak argument that has not been anymore subscribed
in mainstream philosophical formal debates because of later objections, and further thawing away of
his arguments in later progress in philosophical thought. On the contrary, the essence, that
Descartes‟ attempt cannot be underestimated because of the renewed method devised by Descartes,
is still in traditional scheme of providing evidence to God‟s existence.
The Meditations that aspires in proving the existence of God from vantage point of the Cogito, or the
thinking I, the existence of external bodies and the dualism of substance in nature go to his main
target, that is, the proof that a Supreme and Good Being called God exists. This is philosophical
attempt revitalized since the traditional arguments for God‟s existence that set forth chiefly the
efficiency of human reason. God is the end and master of philosophy; faith being the servant of
reason had ended. The existence of God can be proven metaphysically that suspends the occupation
of faith that had been the religious period to all questions that address the existence of God, so to the
purpose of Meditations. A God, which is showed forth to exist with the help of natural reason, seems
to be the most acceptable kind of God to universally appeal to most of believers.
3. Meditations 1 and 2: I, have a dream. Therefore a dream.
I have a dream; A song to sing. To help me cope. With anything
-I Have a Dream, ABBA
Descartes was in his utility of his constructed method in its application in his Meditations on First
Philosophy. The methodic doubt which was introduced in Discourse is deeply and recurrently
employed by Descartes in digging the soil for his arguments further laid in Meditations. His
attachment to doubting and assumption of non-existence of bodies outside him was a technique to
him in acquiring the true knowledge, contrary to the Skeptics‟ doubt that was the doubt as end itself.
His precept of doubting the very foundations of Sciences and the knowledge it has in content was
extended to his boldness of doubting his own existence and the existence of things outside his
consciousness.
Descartes‟ yielded virus of doubt in himself, the only truth left in him, that he is certain he doubts. He
assumed that he was all-possibly either dreaming or hallucinating or in an state of human being we
see normal people as experience of extremely subjectivity, ruined reality as in dreams, the world
inside the mind of an insane or a comatosed person and perceive the world as how the mentioned
conditions cause the subject to experience. For Descartes, the hypothesis
