I’m quite sold on Meditation and do it pretty regularly. In a separate post, I’ll write about what about Meditation interests me. Here, I want to collect all the things about the cult of Meditation that offend me in some way. I’m mostly doing this for my own clarification so that I can articulate my concerns precisely and then move on and focus on the positive aspects of Meditation.

First the obvious stuff:

1. Religious Origins and Undertones

   Meditation became popular thanks to Buddhism, and perhaps Hinduism. I grew up in the East and have seen up close how much harm and suffering these (or any other religion for that matter) can cause. No matter how much one might sanitize Buddhism, you cannot get rid of the stench of religion from it. To their credit, these religions were the ones to study Meditation seriously. It’s time to thank them for their efforts but quickly move on to Science. It’ll make me greatly happy if we can figure out how to study Meditation scientifically and remove any vestiges of religion from it.

2. Imperfect Science

   We can all pretend that there are scientific experiments that prove the usefulness of Meditation. But really we are just making ourselves feel better and cherry picking results that validate our existing assumptions. Unless we conduct controlled studies on large populations or find precise physiological mechanisms behind Meditation it remains outside of Science’s purview. Just putting monks in fMRI machines tells us nothing about what happens to an average human when they meditate. I treat whatever I hear about Meditation as opinions, personal testimonies, but not scientific facts. I’m confident that we’ll gradually get better at this.

3. Woo Woo and Metaphysics

   Naturally, anything that talks about things that can “only be experienced” attracts a lot of charlatans and morons, each category feeding on the other thereby creating self-sustaining ecosystems. This cultural aspect of Meditation I sometimes find frustrating, sometimes ridiculous. When Meditation interacts with Yoga it creates a supernova of Woo Woo that claims to explain all of the reality using high brow Sanskrit terms. Really makes you thank the scientists of the past who decided to bid adieu to Philosophy!

The less obvious stuff:

4. Ethics and Morality

   Often Meditation is bundled with some kind of moral code or ethics. A true meditator is apparently a vegan who only eats organic kale. This is the aspect of Meditation I have the least patience for. Sitting with your eyes closed is not going to reveal the right way to live in the vast world outside. I resolutely resist the idea that I’m doing anything good for the world by meditating. I’m doing something for my own well-being and that’s the end of it. Meditation for me is no different from Yoga or Running or Weight-training.

5. Vilification of Thoughts

   Meditation teachers will say again and again that the goal of Meditation is not to get rid of thoughts but to simply become aware of them and not get constantly distracted by them (or to constantly identify with them, whatever that means). But then when they talk about their personal experiences they either talk about having no thoughts or just watching thoughts pass by as if thoughts are irrelevant. I LIKE having thoughts (of course, not all of them) and have no intentions of ever getting rid of them. In fact, when I meditate, I keep a diary with me in case an interesting thought decides to pay a visit.

6. Boring People

   I would never want to have a drink with a “professional meditator”. I suspect Buddha was one of the most boring people to hang around with. He might have started a new religion but how many best-buds did he have? I suspect one of the reasons all these monks hate their thoughts is because they do not have any interesting ones. Have they ever written a mathematical proof, or drawn a beautiful painting, composed a symphony, written a good piece of code, discovered radioactivity? How many Nobel laureates are Buddhists? The only thing these “professional meditators” do is talk about Meditation. Of course, they don’t like their own thoughts, they don’t hvae anything interesting to think about.

7. Escapism

   Buddhism bitches a lot of suffering. Apparently, there is nothing more important in life than not having it. Calm, peace, tranquility, equanimity - good; anger, sorrow, grief, anxiety, desire, aversion - bad. To me, this is escapist. Instead of facing reality, you’re trying to live in your own head, not experiencing the world fully and truly. Of course, I don’t actively seek out anxiety but I also do not want to never feel it again. Too much of anything is bad but so can too little of something be. These are natural emotions that we’ve evolved to feel. Our emotions might sometimes go out of control but that’s no reason to completely get rid of them. If you have a child that is behaving badly, the solution is not to excommunicate it. It is because of attitudes like this that the eastern cultures devolved and decayed in the past and have become the impotent mess that they’re today.