08.20.09
Should you abandon forthwith ‘meditation’ practices??
More on today’s post: http://darwiniana.com/2009/08/20/robert-wright-and-the-technocratic-destruction-of-meditation/
The answer to the question is, yes, at once, and don’t look back.
The answer to the question is, no: mediate five minutes a month, just to remember, or remember to remember, that mediation is a rumor passed down from antiquity.
As current, ‘meditation’ hasn’t produced a single success in a century (in America). Why?
Consider, what is meditation?
The whole culture of false meditation will destroy the real thing.
And now the evolutionary psychologists want to control it to destroy it.
What to do??
Wright’s article on meditation raised, once again, a question that has often haunted me over the years, and one way to indicate my meaning is with a ‘shock tactic’ post title. It is hardly Wright’s fault! But such people will drive the last nail into the coffin. With Wright we have the impulse out front, to promote evolutionary psychology, Buddhism be damned: destroy it from within.
It seems strange or unreasonable, but the point is simple: you can’t listen to Mozart and Beethoven at the same time, much less Mozart and the Beatles.
Meditation in current culture is two things at once, a contradiction in terms.
That collision of two sounds is essentially your position in the current culture of the escalating collapse of ancient traditions of meditation, where meditation is a ‘desire’ to achieve some psychological state, usually a kind of stress-free state, or whatever.
Meditation, what is that? In the current culture the whole question of meditation has turned into a kind of therapeutic black magic based on manipulating the lowest form of consciousness. Meditation, remembered, must have been something different. The culture we live in has purloined the term to turn it into a social conditioning instrument, perhaps….
Actually, an archaeological expedition into meditation using the inherited forms in the middle of full noise might be more useful than ‘meditation’ jokes perpertrated by any number of New Age (commercial) orgs.
Just remember to ask yourself, what is meditation?
It should be noted finally that the Buddhist monks of antiquity were probably as confused as anyone today.
But still, the question remains. And you might realize that it is not worth the bother anymore: you need to invent some new method for yourself, which might happen on your archaeological expedition.
In the end, I can’t answer the question in the post title. I am not a guru. So it is up to you. I don’t think the current culture of ‘meditation’ has any connection to anything. I could be wrong.