This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing) experience in practical ethics, as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).

The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)

I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.

All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.

Hmm, no, sorry if that's how it seemed. I mean the tens of thousands of books, talks, testimonials, etc, that make specific claims like attaining freedom from suffering using various specific strategies and meditation practices.

> You need reasons actually grounded in preferably personal practice.

My personal practice is a few thousand hours of meditation. It's obvious to me that the practice is working, but I can't say exactly what it's doing to my brain, and I can't prove it to anyone else (unless I would already appear odd on a brain scan)

I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.

Why do you find this hard to believe? Meditation and mindfulness is a skill, there are in fact various techniques or approaches one can take to improve the effectiveness. Being opposed to charging money for this is one thing, denying its existence is something else.

This is not obvious to me. This is the message the meditation industry is trying to sell, and I'm not buying it. We have a long history in the West of selling pre-packaged individually-wrapped enlightenment products and claiming they come from the East, where enlightenment was invented. But that's marketing, not reality.

> Other gurus teach that meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.

This makes me wonder: have you ever felt overwhelmed by anxiety? Or experienced a panic attack? Or like you had so much stress that you couldn't eat, sleep or focus at all?

If so, you said that you tried meditation: did it help you at all?

Honest question, because from these statements sound to me like you perhaps don't see the value proposition of meditation.

From your perspective, given you seem convinced that meditation is the same as a nap, sure. That itself seems to me like an absurd proposition.

At the end of the day, if you want to think that then that's fine. I think it's silly, like claiming that weightlifting and stretching are the same - and I doubt there are many studies comparing the two.

> Right, meditation isn't even a defined concept

It's many concepts under one umbrella. Meditation is just maintaining focus on one thing, to the exclusion of all else. It can be your breath, your internal emotional state, or even nothing (as per zazen meditation).

As the old saying goes, you can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, so unless you have an actual logical argument or evidence for them being the same thing, then there's little point debating it.

I have noticed meditation being pitched more and more as a self-help/productivity tool/cure all for a range of issues. Is the main difference between 'traditional' (for lack of a better word) and Western meditation just the motive behind it, or is there something else Westerners are missing?

> Isn’t that… the point of meditation?

Absolutely not! The secularization of meditation in the west has completely divorced meditation from it's original purpose (in the Buddhist context). Meditation is a complete mental training program. Monks did not just sit there on a cushion; they worked with teachers, reflected on ideas, and gained insights.

There is a mistaken view that meditation is just sitting there, but meditation is an active practice that includes eating, walking, cleaning, etc.

Being divorced from tradition is what makes it aimless and pointless.

I am not personally against secularization, but if we are going to extract ideas from these traditions, we should honor them and make them work effectively in our modern lives.

I can go with that.

>It needs direction

You mean like a goal?

>Something which karma yoga may provide for societal concerns

I think it's closer to aesthetics.

>There are over 100 meditations defined in Indian traditions. They're all useless without direction.

Meditation can be approached as an experiment and an exploration. No goal necessary.

And when investigating a true mystery I think that a goal is inappropriate.

... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-pedantic values of risk-free?

More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has been shown to have real and permanent (and positive) effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over thousands of years. Can you name any practice more effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will be interested.

Or lying. I doubt the meditation center in the article updated the claims on their site after these events.

well said, i think this applies to meditation too. Often people get into debates about what meditation actually is, as if there was one perfect answer, but the reality is that meditation can be different things depending on an individual's skill and their path.

I'm guessing it's the pretense that you can simply teach anyone to meditate whether or not they want to learn. Also, it suggests a system where a form of torture is potentially justified because you shift responsibility to the person being tortured. "They took the class on meditation and signed on the line that they understand how to endure solitary, so their suffering is their own fault!"

While there is always an airy of "hoaky mysticism" to most religions, one possible self-consistent explanation is that that this "hoaky mysticism" of eastern religions might in fact be the logical consequence of thousands of hours, days, weeks, months, years, of meditation. Maybe western self improvement is just in fact a precursor to a precursor to the final enlightenment that hey, none of this self-improvement shit matters?

"works" to what end?

What a load of crap. There is no way you'd experience that after meditating once a week for eight weeks.