Meditation and the Inner Voice

The relationship between murmuring and meditation, described by Stock, points to the role of voice (and hence breath) and repetition in meditative practice, seen as an effort to transcend two dichotomies: between mind and body and between present and future. The study of repetitive voicing—whether purely internal or physically enacted—establishes a historic sequence that links Biblical, Greco-Roman, medieval and early-modern wisdom literature. It sheds new light on both reading practices and rhetorical teaching, as for instance in the case of prosopopeia and illuminates therapeutic approaches based on long-term wellness or wisdom as contrasted with the acute intervention that typifies much traditional medicine. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period in which medical practitioners were often scorned) saw a revival of meditation in the work of such writers as Montaigne, Descartes, de Sales, and Pascal, each of whom propose ways to create new perceptions of the physical world through a reprogramming of the relationship between mind and body.