>>12895976I wouldn't say I have a negative view of the practice itself, it's just sitting and minding your breath, but I have my reservations about what it really is based on my own experience of how little it impacted by actual life and well-being compared to how others decided to believe it'd change theirs, how it's been misinterpreted trough history and how it's kept as a kind of sacred orientalist fetish by many otherwise rational people. If you're intellectually honest, the insights you "discover" have been known to philosophy and therapeutic psychology from as far back as William James or even David Hume. And I do dislike, deeply, how meditation is promoted as a cure for all the things you mention when there are no conclusive studies on any benefits, while there are, believe it or not, credible ones about how intensive meditation can make mental illness worse and has even caused some people psychotic episodes. Beyond that, you have to keep in mind the origin of contemplative practices as part of religious traditions that aim for a very specific mental state that we could call an extreme case of depersonalization without straining the definition, as an antidote to conscious suffering (it's not suffering if it's not happening to me, or if there's no 'me' to suffer). Those states very much exist, and are accessible via strong concentration, psychedelic use, or even severe brain trauma, but they don't last long off the cushion, and at some point, if you haven't bought completely into a religious belief, you have to wonder if they would be desirable as your default conscious state. I personally don't think they are, I went and came back and found life as usual much more worth living, but that's just me.
