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Buddhist meditation. People always want to make exceptions to the
rule when the subject comes to Buddhist meditation. People always want to make statements without
having done any reading, without providing any footnotes or any sources,
Buddhist meditation is certainly a subject that everyone feels that they're an expert
on, even more than, say, Yoga. At least people go to some kind of school
or quote some book, when they make a claim about Hindu Yoga.
Plenty of that is *** too, don't get me wrong,
but wow, modern, western people will make up anything about Buddhist meditation,
and, of course, East Asia has been racing to catch up in the *** Olympics.
And Why? Because there's money involved! I've heard many atheists say on Youtube that
the ultimate scam in the world is to convince people that they have to pay you money so
that you can run a church, on behalf of an invisible god.
No, I beg to differ. Running a church and doing all the things a church does, that's
a lot of work, that costs a lot of money. If you can get people to line up and pay you
money so they can sit in silence, that's the ultimate scam. Oh, wait, to compete with it,
what if people pay you just to learn how to breathe?
Yes, "breathing meditation". [In] Buddhism we have some of the most lucrative scams in
the game, as far as religion goes.
When atheists, uh, get animated about creationism... Creationism, for those of you who don't know, is an example I'm drawing from modern,
Protestant Christianity (maybe some Catholics are interested [in it], too).
Creationism is the idea that we can scientifically prove that god created the world, and that
the biblical account of, the biblical description of the origin of the world, is totally incompatible
with the theory of evolution, and with geology and other findings of modern science.
Creationism: what makes it so embarrassing? So difficult to listen to?
What makes you wince and feel uncomfortable, when people are giving apologies for, explanations
of, creationism? It's not that they're wrong about particular
facts. Being wrong is something that happens to human beings,
and, y'know, we're all infinitely ignorant. It's easy to sympathize with someone who's
just factually wrong, and it isn't even that they're wrong ethically or morally...
...although, obviously, there's a lot wrong [ethically] with their position [too]...
What makes it hard to even listen to a creationist argument is that they're trying so hard to
use the bible to answer questions that are neither asked nor answered in the bible.
I remember a video that was posted by James Randi (a magician, who later became a kind
of cheerleader for skepticism and atheism), and he was asked a question from the audience
by a woman who was quite offended by his atheism. This woman demanded of him, from her position
as a Christian creationist, "Well, how do you explain gravity? How do you explain time?"
And, actually, James Randi, he got flustered, he didn't give a very good reply.
But, what makes it so absurd for the creationist to attack modern science isn't that their
particular answers are wrong. This woman, for example, in attacking James Randi, she
thought of the bible as a book that did have an answer to the question, "What is gravity?"
[and] "What is time?" Those questions are neither asked nor answered in the Bible!
If you think modern science doesn't answer them sufficiently, well, at least you can
go to a bookshelf and get out a book (or any number of books) that are titled, "What is
gravity?", "What is time?", [written] from various perspectives and disciplines, asking
these questions philosophically, in terms of theoretical phyiscs, all kinds of material
on that. And it's totally lacking in the bible! The
bible doesn't give you an answer one way or the other, y'know, [e.g.] the famous trial
of Galileo Galilei, well, y'know, the bible doesn't really contain a doctrine about the
earth rotating around the sun or the sun rotating [around the earth]. It's not important, from
the perspective of the bible, although a few little quotations were brought together [in
the trial] and the fear of Heliocentrism [was a factor], obviously, there's a long story
there, some of you will now, some of you don't. But it's painful to see Christians getting
upset over something that they should really be indifferent to.
There shouldn't be a conflict over the geological age of the earth. Obviously, [that's] my opinion,
but the whole enterprise of creationism is based on this ludacris need for the bible
to answer questions it doesn't even ask. This is a video about Buddhist meditation.
Let me tell you, when modern, western people look for "meditation" in the ancient sutras,
they're asking questions that aren't even there.
Their idea of what the word meditation is, what it means, has nothing to do with anything
dealt with in the canon. I've seen so many claims that Buddhist meditation
is, "a science of the mind", that it is equivalent to modern C.B.T., cognitive behavioral therapy,
another great way to make money, let me tell you, [there's] no scientific basis to it,
but hey. Y'know, the idea that Buddhism is psychotherapy, that Buddhist meditation has
some kind of medical function for the mind, comparable to the wildest fantasies of eary
Freudians, when they were devising psychotherapy --fantasies they later gave up on, of course,
because their pseudoscience never got the results [they] hoped for.
Um, y'know, you're asking questions that are totally irrelevant to the interests of the
ancient texts and the ancient religion. This video, I'm going to keep it short, I
could do a long series, but that would probably be depressing for everyone involved.
What happens when you really do meditate, when you achieve jhána, the sequence of jhánas,
set out in the Pali canon? Do you get in touch with your inner child?
Or feel better about your bourgeois life, or some *** like this? Do you get the outcomes
of modern psychotherapy? Of the modern science of the mind? The desiderata of cognitive behavioral
therapy? No. It is an experience that makes it impossible
for you to live in society. You must renounce all your worldly possessions, you must give
up sex for the rest of your life, and your transformation isn't merely mental, it's also
supernatural. You gain the ability to walk through walls,
and fly through the air like Superman. And, just in case some of you are tempted
to believe that this, also, is science, like, "Well, hey, c'mon, maybe some people in ancient
India really had the ability to fly through the air like Superman", the original, ancient
descriptions of what that's like themselves make it impossible to believe that anyone
ever did this. We all know that if these people could fly
through the air like Superman, the first thing they'd be complaining about is getting the
wind in their eyes, and how hard it is to see anything, and a number of other practical
factors, [such as] freezing in the upper atmostphere, but no, we get poetic descriptions of the
joy of flying through the air, and feeling the surface of the sun with your fingertips.
This is an ancient, magical view of the world, that presumed the sun [to be] much smaller
than we know it is, in terms of modern science, that the sun was much closer to the earth
than we know it is, according to modern science, and that the sun isn't nearly as hot, as we
know it is, because that's the vision, it's a vision any
child could come up with in their dreams, but it's obviously not a vision that reflects
[the experience of] someone who actually achieved this superpower through meditation.
Let me tell you, no matter how hard you meditate, you're neither going to get the phony, pseudo-medical
results, claimed by modern snake-oil salesmen, cynically, in the name of Buddhism,
nor are you going to get the results promised by the ancient texts, which are magical, which
are supernatural in their nature, and which, frankly, deserve respect --deserve
to be studied-- like any ancient religion, whether it's Socrates, Aristotle, or the Han
dynasty philosophers of ancient China, but this should not be regarded as science.
In a sense, it's disrespectful both to us as a modern audience, and [to] the ancient
texts to evaluate them in that way. Appreciate what is ancient as ancient, and
let's appreciate what's modern and scientific as modern.