Buddhist Meditation, Pseudoscience & Sam Harris

what significance would it have if I
were to tell you that there is a method of paying attention to your breathing as the air enters and exits your nose that is scientifically proven to have the result of helping you memorize a list of 16 numbers and to then repeat them back to the person who has said them to you I think that the vast majority of people would say well that's a completely trivial scientific finding and why on earth would anyone have done the research a minority of people who are maybe interested in the philosophy of Education might instead say well that's interesting for a start but if people improve their um cognitive ability in memorizing a list of numbers after being given instructions on paying attention to their breath and furgoneta sitting there knows how does that compare to paying attention to the end of a pencil how does that compare to some other educational method if the purpose is to train people to be able to do certain meaningless tasks like memorize a list of numbers so you perform well on cognitive behavior tests what is the most effective method what gets the most dramatic results now if you know anything about the history of science you can get dramatic improvements in how people perform on tests of this kind by for example administering cocaine doesn't mean cocaine is good for you in the interwar years after World War one there were military experiments and some people in the military were delighted with how well men-at-arms seemed to respond to being given say a teaspoon of cocaine and suddenly they're shell-shocked in their fear of battle and their sense of exhaustion and demoralization all disappeared and not only were they alert and well behaved as soldiers but they suddenly had renewed energy to march long distances until now cocaine was at that time a very new and not widely understood drug and inspired many crazy theories today nobody would describe cocaine as seriously having positive cognitive benefits however we can't Lee say that those early evaluations of cocaine wore evaluations just driven by a scientific interest in what the outcomes really were the reality is that when I look at someone like Sam Harris who is allegedly a skeptic but who is not skeptical at all when he applies his mind to Buddhism and meditation on the contrary I regard him as the lowest order of cult flunky in this respect um unlike even a scientist investigating cocaine in say the 1920s or 1930s he's not sincerely interested in the scientific content of these findings nor is he sincerely interested in the history of the religion I find that very sad I find it even more sad to see the fans of sam harris or supposedly people drawn together by some kind of critical response to religion in the modern world I find it very sad to see the excuses they're making for their their hero on this topic now I'm gonna make a big concession here I think that mythology can really be meaningful I think it can be very meaningful in people's lives I often use the example of Shakespeare I've met people I'm actually not one of them Shakespeare doesn't mean much to me but I've met people for whom reading Shakespeare is a tremendously important and meaningful part of their identity for whom it's almost a religion in an old-fashioned sense I think you can look at a legend from Buddhist tradition of mythological account and at a minimum I think we should all be able to agree as atheists as nihilists or as religious people that a legend of that kind can be meaningful in the same way that Shakespeare can be meaningful that mythology can play an important role in life in the 21st century even when we simply recognize that it is mythology that we don't presume it has supernatural powers we don't presume for example that by chanting the text we can bring about some kind of magical change in the world but with this concession haven't been stated I think we must have the utmost skepticism true rigorous scientific skepticism when someone makes a claim about the the cognitive effects of having a group of 63 university students who say they're interested in meditation focus on their own breathing and follow some other instructions of that kind and we then construct a report a seemingly scientific report saying that this proves the value of a Buddhist meditation as having positive cognitive effects it is only in the context of a certain sort of echo of the religious tradition that people would construe that scientific finding as having some sort of deeper and broader meaning having just read the actual lab report the actual peer-reviewed medical publication that sam harris cites as as proving that in the site meditation of the passing of meditation from tera vaada buddhism improve cognitive function I see so many serious errors in reasoning in in construing what the results are what their significance is and you know Sam Harris seems to be the victim of the worst kind of california-based Buddhism in that he has been completely guileless completely defenseless in accepting modern lies about what the ancient religion is and how the religion found in the Pali Canon relates to what both scientific and not so scientific peddlers of the faith or are calling capacity' sam harris on his blog and in his book waking up he completely uncritically claims that these meditative practices are representative of the most ancient and authentic form of Buddhism of terabyte of Buddhism he gives his own set of meditation instructions it's a list of nine points and he thinks that this along with the different isolated words he takes from from Pali appear in the Pali Canon so if you don't know Polly is the name of a language the Pali Canon is a corpus of ancient Buddhist texts really the text we talk about here are the suit of attack the collected sayings of the Buddha or whatever you want to call it I don't know why I mean if you're a fan of Sam Harris if you appreciate what the guy has done in taking a sort of historically critical view of Islam Judaism and Christianity you should be hurt by this and say why has he so totally failed to take a similarly critical historical view of Buddhism and specifically of Buddhist meditation the claims he makes about Vipassana are completely false the claims he makes about breathing meditation are completely false if you do a google search for my name plus breathing meditation you'll find a shocking article in which I discuss what the ancient texts actually say about breathing meditation and Buddhism that's one of my articles that sent shockwaves around the world although asthma damage a clean affiliate said to me she had always been aware of this because of her own background in Sanskrit and what-have-you there were definitely people who read those texts primary source texts who had the skills in poly or Sanskrit of both who did not find what I was saying surprising but people who are the victims of this kind of mainstream packaged Buddhist meditation experience they definitely were shocked in general the people who promote veep asana as some ancient oath entick form of Buddhism they have to deal with the reality that in the ancient texts he does not exist at all it's a totally false and fictional claim to say that this is the form of meditation that the Buddha taught or even the Buddha has a fictional character in the suit of attacker that in these texts that this is something the book did not true at all and it's also partly based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word if he pass enough frankly not going to get into detail or many other doctrinal elements of Buddhism that are totally misunderstood by sam harris and that he simply he never even did sort of a google search on he never looked at what's available in the english-language academic literature on Buddhism much less did he do original research you take the time to talk to somebody who would really have have expertise in this area now why does all that matter if Sam Harris's claim is that there is an intrinsic value to meditative practice denuded of its religious attributes so the the claim sam Harris would have us believe is that you can extract these meditative practices from Buddhism regard them as scientifically valid and they still have meaning well I really think nobody could take that seriously if they look in a detached way at the scientific literature and you know as I open this video by asking what is the meaning of paying attention to your breath as it goes into your nose and out of your nose what is the significance of that and why would that be a more significant pedagogical tool than an ideal of Education taken from ancient Greece or ancient China ancient Rome or a brand new idea developed through really scientific methods for what helps people perform these cognitive tasks better so the actual you know when you go through the footnotes when you read the fine print on what the so called mindfulness training is it's revealed as something that is meaningless something that has absolutely no scriptural authority no religious authenticity so that is a completely modern 20th century invention not part of nature Buddhism and then on the other hand the tests being performed to show changes in cognitive ability those are also meaningless so it can only be in the context of somebody seeking to validate a prior religious conceit a prior religious belief it's only in that context that this would be meaningful now I would put you the proposal if paying attention to your breath going in out of your nose has this effect maybe paying attention while drawing a picture maybe learning to shoot basketball hoops maybe going to the gym maybe singing in a church choir and learning but through listening how to analyze the different notes and registers getting really good at performing in a choir or some of the theory behind music maybe those things also would have the type of very modest statistical change in your ability to perform these these tasks these tasks that have considered us metrics for supposed improvements in cognitive behavior I citizen of just been looking at the real the scientific studies on us and of course my perspective on this is partly skewed because I'm aware of the long history of pseudoscience funded by supported by groups like TM the transcendental transmittal meditation group you know and the reality is that the journal sent the journals but consciousness and cognition as a journal for example at Sam Harris relies on hold the journal itself has a bias yes this is peer-reviewed but this is a journal that's almost totally devoted to promoting this type of theory so sorry if you have experienced that peer review works you know if you publish something in a Journal of Catholic studies it's not going to be very surprising that you pass peer review with a thesis that is you know flattering to the interests of the editors of that journal so the peer review is not an objective standard it's an intersubjective standard and it is mostly a method of censorship not a method of scientific verification I wish it work I wish it were but peer review is is what it is so from my perspective Sam Harris is in a sort of EE damn situation here what he says about Buddhist meditation is totally invalid from the perspective of Buddhism and only shows the terrible ignorance of Sam Harris about Buddhism he does not know what he's talking about in the least and you know that in itself is really depressing the cult if you do know something what ISM if you do care about the history of Buddhism although in my case I'm a secular outside observer at this point I'm a former scholar of Pali the ancient canonical language it is what it is but connected to that is a deep sense of denialism fundamentally cult-like and unscientific and unprofessional in which he's misrepresenting completely modern innovations mindfulness based stress reduction MBSR pioneered by Jon kabat-zinn he's misrepresenting this as if yet were validated by a rose from represented ancient Buddhist tradition now if it doesn't if we're just looking at these modern meditation cults if we're just analyzing them as phenomena of modern religion then they stand on the same level as something like Scientology now I cannot tell you as an objective scientific fact that nothing the Scientologists do get positive results a significant part of what Scientology does for people is basically ripped off of modern psychotherapy they sit down and talk to people about their dreams they talk to people about their problems they talk to people about their prior incarnations they talk to people about their feelings I think inevitably that probably has some kind of positive benefit that's measurable scientifically it probably has a positive cognitive benefit as well as an emotional benefit as well as relieving anxiety and depression but Scientology is bad and evil and immoral and wrong and yeah I would be horrified to see someone doing exactly what Sam Harris does here for Scientology why is it that the fans of Sam Harris are so uncritical and do not feel horrified at all to see their supposedly secular supposedly skeptical leader endorsing the lowest grade of modern white Western pseudo Buddhism would it be better if he engage with real Buddhism my answer is yes I think that if his engagement with Buddhism if Sam Harris was engaged with the reality of what it's like to be a small-town Buddhist monk performing funeral rituals in Cambodia I think that would be meaningful even if you know the engagement was completely critical even if he saw nothing of value in the life of a village monk who performs funeral rituals Sam Harris has just become another mainstream media flunky to put the stamp of approval on so called the passion of meditation out of his own complete ignorance the real history of the Posada arises I mean that the single most influential figure is actually not SN Goenka if maja C SIA da from Myanmar mohassess Ayodhya was really the guy who made the leap into the English language with promoting this idea maja Seaside AHS ideas about meditation were 100% modern 100% original 100% new and they did not have the objective of helping you to memorize a list of sixteen numbers this death is deeply problematic the cognitive claims being made for the effects of Buddhist meditation have absolutely no relationship to what the outcomes are supposed to be in the religion now I don't want this video we're going to much longer but again we have a kind of double deception if I'm so Sam Harris then I am lying to you about what meditation is in Buddhism I'm lying to you about what modern meditation practices are unlined you about what they are supposed to accomplish what the promised benefits are what the objectives of the method are and that also um I'm lying to you fundamentally in claiming that this is a scientifically valid enterprise that I'm engaged in when in reality everything he's doing is departing from and concluding with a religious tradition that he himself doesn't understand and is trying to validate it for a modern reading audience by claiming that it's going to have medical benefits that are if you actually read the peer-reviewed articles extremely marginal marginal at best perhaps comparable to getting a gym membership you know in terms of an apart from being marginal they are profoundly irrelevant to both the practice being they're taken there were relevance to spending hours of your life paying attention to your breath as it goes into your nose and out of your novels and they're also totally irrelevant to the mythological tradition and the philosophical tradition of Buddhism let's be honest if there's something that makes Buddhism worth talking about today it's the philosophy and you can look into what those texts actually say about so called breathing meditation you can look into what the text actually say about so-called the passing on and really if you want to know about meditation you should be looking into jhana jha na jhana is really meditation of the ancient provision yeah you can look at those things but I mean no nobody in their right mind would start a discourse of this kind by saying hey you know what I bet if we get a bunch of university students and pay them to take place too sorry and pay them to participate in a scientific trial we can get them to perform better on cognitive ability tests by having them spend hours paying attention to the sound of their own breathing the nature of the claim and the assumption that it proves something worthwhile is profoundly problematic and I think it's irrelevant to all of the questions about Buddhism in the 21st century that are really worth asking and that you might have hoped and intellectual like sam harris would engage in the same way that he engages with real problems in christianity and islam