Meditation is to religion what the laboratory is to science.
Nowadays it is difficult to find people who have not heard of meditation. The majority of them, however, have only a vague notion what it is about and how to practice it. Some people equate meditation with a way of emotional healing and stress reduction, others reduce it to a Hindu or Buddhist method of religious worship. At the extreme, people who practice meditation have been labeled as spacey, emotionally impaired, oversensitive individuals, rushing to fix themselves with the latest New Age contraptions, or as antisocial escapist-yogis having no interest in the world. All these criticisms have some basis in reality, for such qualities may be found among people who practice meditation or live in spiritual communities.