I read a book called positive addiction by someone called Glassner recently which talked about making running or meditation forms of positive addiction for those who'd struggle with experiencing other sorts of deadly or harmful addictions. Thought that was interesting.
I've decided that I cant really meditate, I dont really have the patience at this stage in life and prefer reading, surfing the net, stuff like that.
Meditation is a subset of trance. And we enter and leave trances all during the day.
A trance occurs when our critical mind starts to go to sleep and our creative mind starts to wake up.
So we have the driving trance, the television trance, the internet trance, the sexual trance, the exercise trance, the trance of ritual, the trance of art, the trance of religion, and just before we go to sleep, we enter the hypnogogic trance, and just as we wake up, we also enter the hypnogogic trance.
Most of us though are unaware of the physical and mental changes that occur as we enter and leave a particular trance. However it is easy to learn to enter and leave a trance, and so we become sensitised to all the other trances we enter and leave during the day.
A trance can be induced by any repetition. And the kind of trance we induce depends on what parts of our critical mind we put to sleep and what parts of our creative mind we wake up.
And so we can design a trance for a particular purpose.