We're so used to being able to learn about things on our own schedule. This kind of thing happens on its own schedule. I don't really blame people for being upset and dismissing it when it hasn't happened for them yet.
It's all over the place on social media. What gives you the sense that is has disappeared?
That's a far cry from the scientific, serious, mainstream approach that was common for those topics 120 years ago.
The practitioners (i.e., not academics) back then (Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, Henry Munro, and many others) were much more knowledgeable and interested in studying the phenomena they were investigating and applying than are today's practitioners, who seem instead much more interested in fooling people and making easy money than in advancing the discipline and making new breakthroughs.
I just pulled out of my library the book "Suggestive Therapeutics" by Munro, and it is, however naive in parts, a serious and passionate investigation of hypnotic phenomena. It is evident, even just by reading the text, that these were serious people who thought they could make a huge difference in the lives of others.
Can we say the same about today's practitioners?
This just sound like you need to follow better social media circles. There's a bourgeoning scene around people such as Gwern, Nick Cammarata, Aella with a lot of high-quality discourse on the topics you mention.
As these concepts became popular in the west past few years, they became very commercialized. For eg. Yoga was always about mindfulness, it became more about stretching and poses. All of these concepts metamorphised into something else. As the transition happened, the value got diluted. As it because diluted, it became taboo and sometime butt of jokes (for eg. Crazy yoga lady was thrown around quite often).
Overloaded with the pretense of it more likely, for the benefit of tourists who go there in search of a quick pseudo-mystical high.
> As these concepts became popular in the west past few years
That's a common misconception. Mysticism and related experiences actually have a history in Western culture going back thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal and in fact encouraged for young people to seek unity with God through direct mystical interaction, and the many mystical writings from that time (most of them authored by ordinary monks/nuns and priests) are a testament to that.
I recommend the 1915 book Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill as an example of what modern Western mysticism can look like. It's available on Standard Ebooks in a high-quality, free edition[1]. The author, who wrote during WWI, considers mysticism a natural part of everyday life, without ever feeling the need to reference "The East" or other New Age tropes.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/evelyn-underhill/practical...
I am more astonished with the banality and closed-mindedness of the society I live in.
Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?
I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.
Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.
Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/about...
I really like the website/app called Waking Up by Sam Harris, I think it fits your description.
Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains
Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)
I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.
If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.
In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.
> all modern meditation comes from religious sources
I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.
> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).
> I have seen no evidence of this.
That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.
Do we need a let me Google Scholar that for you? Meditation is intensely researched by serious people not beholden to pseudoscience.
Here is a hospital promoting meditation:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/mental-...
Journal on mindfulness:
https://www.springer.com/journal/12671
Meditation research group Harvard:
Email me if interested (address in profile).
But it’s interesting to note how these practices have evolved to meet new cultural circumstances. It feels like more of it is motivated by goals of productivity and status on one side, and distrust of authority on the other, new age, side.
It’s all still absolutely mainstream and in public discourse. But of course, it’s changed. We shouldn’t expect cultural practices to not have evolved since the turn of the 20th century. After all, the culture has changed a LOT since then. These cultural practices exist to meet the needs of people and communities. Those needs change, the practices will change with them.
I think you need an edit. Here:
> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering the human condition.
To use eugenics as an example. Those who speak about it always, without exception end up isolating a single group that they believe is inferior. These people often hold adjacent beliefs that make the lives of other humans significantly harder, to say the least.
I'm having trouble understanding where this slippery slope is coming from. It's one thing if you were talking about assisted suicide, I can see the argument there, but eugenics is something that is forced upon the population. And no, having to watch two people of the same gender kiss on TV is not forced.
An extremely large proportion of the US population would not agree with this if you include polygamy in "whatever non traditional arrangements they want".
I'm quite averse to that because I believe that myself and significant portion of other people tread a very fine line on the edge of sanity and I wouldn't want to risk anything that might tip us over the edge.
Old favorite: https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1
"Die Traumdeutung" (Interpretation of dreams) is one of the best books I've read. Its really philosophical masterpiece. I mean the ~500 site book, not the small one.
You are not going to have the same discussion in print that you have electronically and on social media. It doesn't matter what the subject is.
"Public discourse" really doesn't even mean the same thing to compare today with a 100 years ago.
A 100 years ago the person batting an eyelash would have simply not bothered to consume the media.
You also can't forget that we were a deeply religious society a 100 years ago and all those subjects listed had the appeal of forbidden fruit. That might even be a bigger change than the medium.
I've been reading a lot of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century over the past few years. The sheer breadth of ideas that were being casually discussed in magazines that regular, educated people subscribed to is astonishing. Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.