Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became a societal sin

Re:Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became ... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday June 22, 2023 @02:43AM (#36428736)

Our earliest written records mention meditation within religious contexts. Both predate history. All modern organised practices of meditation derive from religious sources, but organised practices of meditation is a subset of meditation—mindfully training attention and awareness to achieve “a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state” [1]. (Seen another way: almost all our historical sources about medicine mention it in a religious context. That doesn’t mean medicine comes from religion.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

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Re:Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became ... by bowsamic on Thursday June 22, 2023 @02:47AM (#36428769)

This contradicts your singing example, since not all singing derives from religious sources, so why bring it up? You are making the same point as me right now: all modern meditation comes from religious sources

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Re:Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became ... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday June 22, 2023 @02:50AM (#36428784)

> not all singing derives from religious sources

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.

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