I escaped from new age spirituality and some of its main constituents: whitewashed Buddhism, and repackaged eastern myticism awhile ago, and I have the testimony somewhere to prove it, I think.
I can't really escape it though, because while it rocked its heydey many moons ago in hip places like Boulder, Colorado or California (same place different locations), or Austin TX, or Ashewille, NC, the East Coast in general - Mindfulness and Meditation have come to the hinterlands (the Midwest) and have swept the healthcare industry, the media and educational institutions as a health modality dealing with issues of stress, trauma, mind clarity, increased work performance and other "potential" (not proven) benefits.
Hence, this scholarly, published work:
Mind The Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research
on Mindfulness and Meditation
By: ,1 Marieke K. van Vugt,2,† David R. Vago,3,† ,4,† ,5,† ,6,† ,7,† ,8,† ,9,†* ,10,† ,11,† ,12,† ,13,† ,14,† and 15
Over the past two decades, writings on mindfulness and meditation practices have saturated the public news media and scientific literature (see ). While not an isolated case, much popular media fails to accurately represent scientific examination of mindfulness (see e.g., Goyal et al., 2014), making rather exaggerated claims about the potential benefits of mindfulness practices (Gibbs, 2016; Gunderson, 2016). There have even been some portrayals of mindfulness as an essentially universal panacea for various types of human deficiencies and ailments (see e.g., Gunderson, 2016; Huffington, 2013).
My own experiences include having mindfulness and meditation presented to me as a therapeutic modality that is theoretically based in a mish-mosh of science and medicine (evolution, fight or flight, homeostasis, the nervous system); Buddhism ( attaching to thoughts, awareness of thoughts, letting go of thoughts, judging thoughts, suffering); pop psychology (mind/body connection); new age spirituality (setting intentions, group mind, clearing and centering) and combinations of such things.
Becasue mainstream instiutions: hospitals, clinics, schools and so forth are incorporating mindfulness and meditation into what they endorse and offer, there has been widespread attempt to divorce meditation from its religious and philisophical roots, which are deeply entrenched in Buddhism. Buddhism cannot be parsed out from meditation for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that Buddhism is based on the concept that everything is mind, and that by working with one's mind in meditation one can eliminate poisonous and dangerous thoughts and advance to purer states of being. Meditation is part of the path of Buddhism and the concepts that people use to teach Mindfulness and Meditation as a beneficial practice are not just based on Buddhism, they ARE Buddhism Read on:
Buddhism began by encouraging its practitioners to engage in smrti (sati) or mindfulness, that is, developing a full consciousness of all about you and within you -- whether seated in a special posture, or simply going about one's life.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
Mindfulness is a community, a healing modality, a spiritual practice, a worldview, a philosophy and a state of being. Moreover to teach Mindfulness is a vocation and therefore a business opportunity. There are many practitioners heeding the call to spread the gospel of Mindfulness and making a good living at it, feeling good about themselves and, as they see it, helping others, helping the world be a better place one mind at a time.
In order to feel the full effect of the community, one has to buy into the whole package, be excited by the ancient wisdom, coming down from the original language, that is no longer a language, which they beieve to be Sanscrit, the language of the sutras; however, not to burst the woooo...we..be..privy.. to.. the ancient mystical knowledge-bubble; archeologists differ on which is the oldest language: Tamil, Sumerian; and the Jewish Midrashim speaks of the Adamic language as being the original language of ADAM and possibly EVE. They were speaking with God and the animals, so it follows they would have to use something of a language. Everything about "mindfulness" as a modern therapeutic intervention is a fantasy about combining modern scientism and medicine with ancient wisdom because of course, the ancients were really more aware of science and medicine than the current era, because they got it handed down from eons of contact with cosmic beings, or something like that. Circular thinking, irrational conclusions and faulty logic are some of the hallmarks of this type of training.
The CIA, Tibetan Buddhism and Mindfulness
Some articles/links:
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