Sat, 11 Feb 2012
Lobotomy with Fries
Someone on Reddit pointed to this rant, Mindful Lobotomy. The author's point is fierce emotions are good. I've got nothing to say to that but suit yourself, go ahead and smash your furniture. But I did comment on Reddit on the creepy culture of mindfulness that has grown up around Buddhism:
Buddhism is a long path, three kalpas long according to the traditional formulation. What is not helpful is when stages along the way are presented as goals of the path. After a year or so someone who practices meditation will develop a certain sense of calmness and detachment from their emotions. It's wrong to present these results as the goal of meditation when when they actually are the precondition for the actual work of meditation: looking at the mind to discover that our thoughts and emotions do not constitute a self and that in fact there is no self.
