You might be interested in doing a little light reading here:
http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/index.html
Eastern or new age type of meditation is not Christian. We are not supposed to empty our minds so that “spirits” can fill them. We are told to meditate on Scripture, but that is thinking about it, not emptying our minds of thought. Yes there were mystics in the church, but my belief, and others’ belief, is that this was not a good thing, but led people to pantheism and panenthesim.
“Awakening to the presense of god” is really about what I described in my previous post. It is not the God of the Bible that meets people in that kind of meditation. “Be still” does not mean to empty our minds and do eastern/new age meditation.
"Neither shall they say, Lo here or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:21
Meditation is not thinking. It is the deliberate cessation of thinking - the voluntary turning off of the ego/mind. When you learn how to stop those uncontrollable thought processes, you can at last discover the kingdom of God within you. You are not a separate, tiny, crawling, subservient worm who must live in terror of Hell - you are already in fact a part of God and part of the kingdom. You have just forgotten.
But since it became a hierarchical power structure the Christian Church has been terrified of meditation, because people who learn how to practice it have no more need to pay protection money to Earthly intermediaries. Unfortunately, theologians' teachings on the subject have frightened and misled a lot of people. It is a self-evident truth that it isn't meditative Buddhists or Taoists who have a history of flying airplanes into buildings and burning witches.
In ten years of practicing Tibetan Buddhism I have never done that nor been instructed to do that. In fact I was told in harsh terms not to do that.