We, moderns but especially Americans, have a fundamental misunderstanding of cognitive development: we assume that higher-level functioning is always desired and so disparage and neglect fundamental cognitive skills.

Meditation can be seen as the ultimate in ā€œ[restructuring the] lower-level componentsā€ of the mind. We abandon all the higher-level cognition built upon words and concepts and return, as much as possible, to the preverbal experience in order to ā€œre-engage and reshapeā€ our way of being in the world.