Ben’s Reviews > Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds > Status Update

But you can't be authentic by being self-absorbed. We're social animals in social worlds & to live at all let alone to live well means continually negotiating with the bits of the external world that impinge on & thereby partly define our sense of self. This is more not less important in free societies as the freer others are the more they can impinge on us. Authenticity implies some degree of identity with the Other

These historical & philosophical similarities between Buddhism & Western thought have led to the bastardisation of meditation as well as the near-total emancipation of it from its rich cultural/historical contexts. Without these contexts, which in the past have tied meditation to highly particular traditions, rituals, ethics, etc., meditation has radically changed into a tool that, like the West, can be narcissistic.

The modern Western understanding of Buddhism & meditation is profoundly tainted by the background assumptions of Western civ as a whole. Buddhism, alone among non-Christian religions, colonised the West because it was uniquely able to dress itself in the universalist languages of science & the post-Enlightenment projects of autonomy & authenticity. Hence also its widespread co-option as a tool for self-development.

Doctor & patient together negotiate their illness. The same happens with meditators, whose experiences of meditation are shaped in radical ways by the guides who help them interpret their exotic experiences. Meditation, then, even & especially the radical modern kind which falsely believes itself shorn of all cultural baggage, inculcates a deeply realised & believed but largely unconscious metaphysics & worldview.

Medical diagnostic criteria legitimate not only illnesses but their symptoms. People seeking help unconsciously act out in ways newly recognised as legitimate symptoms of specific diagnoses. One reason for the rise in diagnoses of certain illnesses is not merely that our doctors' understanding of them has improved, but that patients' understanding unconsciously makes them act in ways that reliably lead to diagnosis.

To steal a simile from Grothendiek, reading complex humanities texts that provide deep context is like placing a walnut shell in water. The shell softens slowly & imperceptibly over time, until one day, without anything special happening, the shell falls away to reveal the nut inside. Likewise, imbibing lots of cultural & historical context slowly softens prejudices & ideologies until at length it reveals: the world.

This is because importing ahistorical ideas about meditation has wrought immense psychological & social harm. Certain demographics of people in modern West are especially susceptible to the harms of meditation but, because of the way meditation has been transmitted to the West, they are completely ignorant of these harms & unprepared to combat them. These harms were well known in their cultures of origin.

The study of the history of ideas is not simply a matter of scholarship but of morals: essential to the proper function of any society is the ability of its citizens to situate ideas in their proper historical context. This prevents ahistorical distortions, omissions, and lies from spreading through its culture and damaging its institutions. This is true even of topics as niche as the cultural history of meditation.

Crucial insight: the widespread modern conception of meditation (which is almost always taken to mean basic mindfulness meditation) as an objective, empirical, values-free, "science of the mind", is almost certainly false. "If there is any realm in which the observer affects what is observed, it is consciousness". And if there is any practice that closely observes, and thus affects, consciousness, it is meditation.

Scholarship of the highest order: cautious, nuanced, detailed, full of caveats, sceptical, learned, and open to a wide variety of sources of information. It explores the relationship between meditation and Buddhism as they were practiced and understood in ancient India, and the kind of mindfulness meditation which is pushed everywhere in the modern world as the essence of Buddhism and the essence of meditation.