Words are good for charming us on courses that are beneficial to us. They can breathe life into tired and discredited ideas. That's how it works. I have had a long life during which this idea has surfaced many times in popular culture, thrown up by a tide that ebbs and flows and needs to make it new.
Traditional Hindu practices gave rise to Transcendental Meditation in the fifties, rediscovered by the Beatles in the late sixties, to be ridiculed in The Young Ones in the eighties.
Zen, centuries old, brought to the foreground by Herrigel in the forties, made central to poetry by the Beats in the fifties, and brought forward again in the seventies by Pirsig et al.
Nearer home, so to speak, is the central place of The Silence in the Quaker faith, drawing gently on them all.
There has to be a reason for the persistence of this practice. I suppose it must be a response to the persistent quest for it. Mindfulness, eh? So be it. It is with us because we need it and because it works.
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