Meditation

A meditation, in this literary sense, is a written work or discourse intended to express its author's reflections or to guide others in contemplation, often consisting of an author's musings on deeper philosophical or religious questions. Marcus Aurelius used the writing therapeutically, aiming for short, memorable passages, while Descartes's own Meditations invite the reader into a sustained exercise of deliberation, examining ideas of the self that are normally unconscious in order to clarify them in the reader's mind. Other meditative writing functions more as therapy, a way to vent and process emotion, in contrast to the Cartesian and Stoic view of meditation as a form of contemplation.