Re:The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money
by westoncb on Sunday April 19, 2015 @11:24AM
(#9403485)
A funny error in the article: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" was written by William James, not Henry James—it'd be a very different book if his brother had written it.
The article tries to give the impression that mindfulness meditation as it appears in the U.S. is more of a money making gimmick than an effectively distilled version of the Eastern tradition. Undoubtedly people will try to make money off of it and you'll have plenty of books/teachers who present it in a disconnected fashion whose only efficacy derives from the placebo effect (which will probably be enough for it to spread with good reputation through corporate culture). That said, there's a pretty long tradition of smart people who've been trying in earnest to interpret meditation practice and Eastern philosophical concepts in a Western framework. There's a lot of variety in the results, sure—but at the same time there's a core set of ideas and practices that have an internal consistency, and—in my opinion—which fill an important gap in the typical U.S. life philosophy. In particular, it offers a solution to the problem of, "what greater ultimate goal can I have for life than obtaining positive experiences and avoiding negative ones, if I'm basically an experience machine who will cease to exist after X years?"—without asking people to have faith in some positive metaphysical system. Additionally, meditation can be powerfully instructive in letting people see/remember certain aspects of being human that it's easy to lose after spending years feeling driven to accomplish some goals.
The article tries to give the impression that mindfulness meditation as it appears in the U.S. is more of a money making gimmick than an effectively distilled version of the Eastern tradition. Undoubtedly people will try to make money off of it and you'll have plenty of books/teachers who present it in a disconnected fashion whose only efficacy derives from the placebo effect (which will probably be enough for it to spread with good reputation through corporate culture). That said, there's a pretty long tradition of smart people who've been trying in earnest to interpret meditation practice and Eastern philosophical concepts in a Western framework. There's a lot of variety in the results, sure—but at the same time there's a core set of ideas and practices that have an internal consistency, and—in my opinion—which fill an important gap in the typical U.S. life philosophy. In particular, it offers a solution to the problem of, "what greater ultimate goal can I have for life than obtaining positive experiences and avoiding negative ones, if I'm basically an experience machine who will cease to exist after X years?"—without asking people to have faith in some positive metaphysical system. Additionally, meditation can be powerfully instructive in letting people see/remember certain aspects of being human that it's easy to lose after spending years feeling driven to accomplish some goals.