Meditation: the Madness at the Core of Buddhism, Ancient and Modern.

I've got a question from a member the
audience named Jay asking me about the central concepts of meditation in ancient Buddhism the ancient form of Buddhism from which all the modern variations their religion are derived in the analytical discussion of religion in the 21st century we have to do two things that modern Western academia is terrible at doing you might even say we have to do two things that universities in the 21st century are incapable of doing I think it's very difficult for anyone to really struggle with the limitations that are set on rational inquiry in the 21st century the limitation that present prevents people prevents the professor or the students from bluntly singing or engaging in a discussion of the fact that this is [ __ ] anyone who is just gonna pick up the raw doctrine of Mormonism and frankly analyze it and discuss in the classroom has to deal with [ __ ] and what if he used slightly more polite terms or not it really needs to be that rough that incisive and that honest we need to deal with the extent to which religious doctrine is untrue and bad and dangerous and wrong and it wasn't even written by people who had good intentions the founders of Mormonism did not have good intentions that's one that's reasoned enough in historical memory that we know with great precision exactly what happened and why but going to any university classroom and you will see the tremendous difficulty with which professors struggle to very vaguely communicate to their students that there's something wrong even with Scientology let alone Islam let alone Buddhism right and it's not enough to just communicate to your students here is what's wrong with this religion which is it's gonna be a lot that's going to be most of what you deal with in the province of religion um it's then also necessary to explore why did people enjoy making themselves slaves to this ideologies so it's easy for us here on YouTube to do step one of that rational course it's easy for us to sit down and say ok let's talk about all the ways in which Mormonism it's just [ __ ] let's sit down here and really talk in a forthright and open way about why Scientology is just [ __ ] we can do that here on YouTube and culturally if not politically professors and students cannot do that in university classroom and it's it's a really fundamental problem with our universities and the universities do indeed train people in terms of not just how to think but more importantly the custom of what is thinkable and what is unthinkable and I can remember a time when some of those habits of mine were conditioning to me when I was very young and was just like oh no you can't question the ways in which Islam is a good religion or Muslims are good people or you can't question the idea of the extent to which the people who created the religion in the first place had good intentions and then all the problems with the religion must just be later corruptions or later misinterpretations the crap that do it this kind of you know charitable polite apologetics in the history religion no no no here on YouTube at least step one we can be blunt about but then there's a further challenge because once we have faced up to openly and honestly that most of what we're talking about here it's just the accumulation of pernicious lies with the veneer of respectability put over it repackage and sold to you as custom tradition faith right we then have to explain to ourselves and others we have to engage in a kind of analysis version why did people not only accept this they didn't just accept this grudgingly they became passionate enthusiastic proponents and export exponents of these beliefs they made themselves slaves to this ideology willingly right you have to look at the popularity of Islam the popularity of Mormonism the popularity even of Scientology and the passion of the faithful the people is described with what their motives are what it means to them what it is they feel is good about it and this is by no means to say that you look at the advantages and disadvantages of religion in my opinion what you have to understand is both of these categories are disadvantages both of these are tragic reflections of human nature I mean which is more terrible the ways in which the doctrine itself is [ __ ] or the ways in which human beings are eager to subjugate themselves a base themselves make themselves slaves proponents exponents missionaries for these doctrines these are two different categories of tragedy it's not that it's not that we're talking about advantages and disadvantages I'm two contrasting sides of the coin okay there's a footnote here I have to add about Buddhist meditation and jhana itself if you search right now within Google you'll find various people talking about jhana telling you what this word jhana means allegedly telling you what the history or foundation of Buddhist meditation --all practices right I'm gonna put out here the hypothesis that not a single one of these videos is based on quoting and explaining to you what the actual ancient text says so if you search YouTube for Jesus Christ sermon a sermon on the mount explained I think you can find many many many YouTube videos of Christian preachers explaining to you what the Sermon on the Mount meant but directly quoting the text may be discussing with you issues and translation from Greek to English whatever may be wants them all the talk but a few Hebrew words where it's really exegesis it's explaining the meaning of the text and then explaining what the doctor means today where it's very directly based on that by contrast what you are seeing in Buddhism with attempts to explain jhana and meditation reflects a profound discomfort with the text there was a professor I don't know if he's now retired or deceased Lance cousins he is a great example summer he went through his whole career telling students oh no no there's um there's nothing in the Pali Canon about meditation this new texted I can we were talking about this with other specialists other experts who actually read and translated the original ancient text it's like somebody should do a research project to figure out who was the first person to make this excuse because it really is a gurus excuse it really is saying oh no you have to trust me you have to trust what I'm telling you because there's nothing in the ancient text that's gonna answer this question like you have to believe in my personal authority my personal charismatic interpretation erosion and that's not true at all all the professors who stood up in university classrooms around the world and all the Buddhist monks who tell you that meditation is not explained or not recorded in the ancient texts of the Pali cannon they are lying to you and they're only two possibilities either they're they know that they're lying or they're unaware that they're lying because they're imitating something that another professor told them or another Buddhist monk we're told told them or both they've learned this this behavior but many people will go to any lengths to avoid dealing with what the ancient scriptures actually say in Buddhism and that's why you get bizarre claims made like for example Buddhists will tell you including Buddhist monks and including white people who have PhDs in Buddhism and our professors there are Buddhists who tell you with no humor with no irony they'll tell you in Buddhism there is no legend of the creation of the universe of how the world was yes there is yes there is and most of them have read it they've actually read the text they're lying to you because they're uncomfortable dealing with that text that's implications their religion many of them will just lie to you straight to your face that will say oh no there is no doctrine of hell there's no concept of Hell in the ancient scriptures in the Pali Canada whoo does anyone want to estimate how many pages describe hell or what what percentage of all the pages in the H cannon are devoted to the description of Hell it's a lot ok there are very detailed descriptions of Hell and again with those people when someone like me talk to them I can ask them you know have you actually not read one page out of the pumpkin or are you intentionally lying about this are you aware that you're lying so the simple facts of what the texts say about altered states of consciousness nobody wants to deal with and that's your first big red flag that as soon as you start looking into this you're gonna find that it's [ __ ] it's just [ __ ] now in the same way let's just say the self-help elements of the Church of Scientology are [ __ ] however there's then this next step of offering an analysis of why do people like it why do people become enthusiastic why they become faithful towards it so on and so forth right and there is something there to be analyzed you know what Scientology what what the cult of Scientology offers people to hook them and draw them in and what they find rewarding about it that may be worth understanding although we can only take that second step if we've already established look the doctrine itself is [ __ ] there's no way there's no way to proceed to step two without really in a sound and sincere way dealing with step one I would say that also by the way about the rise and fall of the cult of Rajneesh also known as the cult of osho it is quite interesting to look at interviews with people who were members of that cult and try to figure out what was it that liked about it why did they make excuses for all the things that were wrong about it why did they become passionate devotees of this why did they from my perspective make themselves slaves of this ideology and that's all the more tragic right I mean but you could you could apply this even to political extremism in our own times but you can't take that step without really first fully recognizing the doctrine itself is bunk and hokum so in this way I have to acknowledge the following if you squeeze your arm muscle not even lifting an object if you just sit there right now and close your eyes and mentally clench the muscle in your arm as tightly as you can for as long as you can and then you release it you will feel a very peculiar kind of tingling in your arm the mental exercises that induce these so-called altered states of consciousness are very much the mental equivalent of this right so it's kind of hilarious to me the extent to which people who are proponents of the jhanas tend to indict themselves through in this way revealing that it doesn't matter what object you meditate on what it is you're meditating about just as long as you're clenching your mind in this way that you have this super concentrated use of your mind you will get the same results so this is one aspect of it and this is why Buddhists modern but us today certainly they are just as comfortable endorsing navel gazing that's a form of meditation if you didn't know and it's not just a sarcastic term in English navel gazing wall gazing visualizing something like a white circle in your fine a completely abstract just just imagine this white circle and then focus on it focus on it they'll also just as easily endorse sitting and staring at a skull like you know where you place an object in for any focus on meditating on the skull the idea that just if you keep your mind in this super concentrated super focused state of attention that then you're going to experience an altered state of consciousness thereafter right this is very much like using the muscle of your arm in a kind of strenuous and somewhat unnatural way and then you have a completely meaningless feeling it's a feeling an altered state of mind is just a feeling that's all there is to it has no narrative content that's one element of what's going on here another is the very real element of hallucination and the real experience of making the transition from being awake to dreaming sometimes very rapidly now some of you in the audience won't have experienced these things some of you will have experienced them in numerous conditions I have gone to respectable Chinese Mahayana temples where they were giving the meditators hallucinogenic tea one of the temples what they were doing that I challenged one of the administrators both say look you know this contains loosen nuts and like I know I can read the label on the tea um you know do you really think it's ethical or moral to be giving people a hallucinogenic drug and even though it's very mild it's not nearly as strong as LSD and then you sit there and close your eyes and gee what do you know you kind of see things you know yeah uh-huh I have meditated with a Zen master who was giving me in the other meditator is a really heavy dose of caffeine just through traditional basically like a Japanese tea ceremony it was actually Korean tradition but style serving tea in this case wasn't so different so if you get really pumped up on green tea so you get a lot of caffeine going and then you sit there you know in a meditative posture holding your body completely still with your mind your eyes closed your mind is racing because you're high on this caffeine this is another type of meditative experience and as many of the meditative instructors and gurus will tell you oh it doesn't matter what you think about you can think about nothing at all you can keep your mind in this blank state or focus on a white circle or in the Zen tradition repeat the same phrase over and over again they're most meaningless the most meaningless thing imaginable can still get the same results so this would be like by saying to you my method of getting this tingling feeling in your arm it doesn't matter if you squeeze one object or another in your hand while flexing the muscle in your arm you'll still get the same miraculous results but of course ironically traged there's nothing there's nothing miraculous with the results okay um if you have experience with illness you may have experienced the extent to which the human mind will laughs in hallucination just through exhaustion illness in the ancient world people were sick all the time you know very unglamorous diseases like amoebic dysentery lead to hallucination i have had from tropical fever if you just get a fever you can go straight from being awake into hallucinating you know semi dreamlike state and so on and again you may even with jet lag or something if you ever the experience if you're riding a bus you're looking or you're awake you're awake you're awake and then whew you're asleep you go straight from being awake to being asleep and you're you know it has the same effect of hallucinating I mean dreams are much more intense in terms of narrative content then any drug-induced hallucination so you can imagine with a lot of these ritual traditions we have people who are sleep deprived they're at least high on caffeine if not a third if not other drugs you know if you get people who are in this upright posture you can very easily go from being awake and in the strangely focused state to slipping into a dreamlike state and what you see is neither more nor less meaningful than any dream I can remember reading one book from one Buddhist monk that was honest about that and he reflects I mention this in YouTube video before but he reflected that in his hallucinations or in his dreams in his visions if you like you know he could recognize the elements of his own fantasy he recognized that when he met the Buddha the Buddha resembled a particular style of statue of art that was his preferred style of statue of depicting the Buddha and he knew intellectually that's not what the Buddha actually looked like in India that's a style of making stat that develops centuries later like he he was capable of interrogating his own religious experience and discovering it to be nothing more than a dream or hallucination so we have both three components to this in some there is the sad reality that the original texts the original doctrine of the jhanas it's just [ __ ] and the second step is most of the modern interpreters proponents of this doctrine they're aware of the weakness of the text so they direct your attention away from it it's like no no no don't read what the text actually says they're not going to explain this to you in the same way a Christian would explain the Sermon on the Mount but working from the text and explain to you step by step no no no no they are much more likely to misdirect you to talk to you about something like V pass and now V passing that doesn't even exist in the ancient text this is a completely modern movement it's really anti Buddhist or unblessed but it's been attached on me but no no don't don't pay attention to what the hate should take say so there's the the weakness the ancient texts one of the modern responses is to distract you away from that direct you away from that and then try to present you with some kind of newfangled doctrine of meditation and then there's the sickening human psychology of how people get attached to this their egos latch onto it and they make themselves slaves to the city ology I was once in a discussion that included bhikkhu bodhi famous Buddhist monk several other people sitting in a circle and for whatever reason people were attacking the egotism of people like myself people who were really had a scholarly approach to actually studying the ancient texts and knowing what the text meant and it was sort of very self-serving you know they were all patting themselves on the back as if all the people in the room except for me you know they were all profound and wise enough to not spend their time studying what the ancient texts actually say so be like a bunch of Christians saying their profound enough to just engage in prayer and not read what the Bible actually says they don't worry them as those of that and you know isn't it sad that studying the text leads to this terrible ego trip that you know the people who study the history of the religion and the actual doctrine in Scripture that they know what the religions about and other people don't that's that's really very sad as opposed to people who just live in pious ignorance right and I countered this argument that he had not just one person was presenting but several people were all kind of agreeing with one another and I said to them look I think studying the ancient texts you know someone I should does it it's humbling because no matter how much you know you're aware even just by looking at the books on the Shelf you haven't read yet you're aware of how much more there is to know so you see your knowledge in that context is it got to tell you something I meet people all the time who pay for a weekend course in meditation and who come back literally believing that they are a bodhisattva that they are an incarnation of a deity or uh the future Buddha or whatever people can convince themselves that they're on almost any religious ego trip imaginable because what meditation does is basically give them an opportunity to indulge in their own self deceptive fantasies to indulge in dreaming both literally and not so literally and whatever experience they have whether it be a mild tingling of the mind whether it be an altered state of consciousness whether it be as something like the hallucination whatever they see whatever they feel they can cling on to that as a token and think that most dangerous thought of all they can think I'm special Hey what does them is in this sense much more dangerous than Christianity because every day millions and millions of Christians pray but incredibly few have the delusion that God spoke directly to them instead what they live with is the existential terror of the silence of God that here they are praying and nobody talks back right and people do think that God is talking to them directly they are regarded as insane there are exceptions there are Christian cult groups and there are people who think that there are a prophet and so on but for the most part that is the state of Christianity in 21st century and Buddhism is at the opposite extreme where if somebody sits down again quite possibly after drinking a hallucinogenic tea or in whatever conditions if someone just sits down and when they're meditating they happen to see some colors and shapes just some the mildest level of you know the altered state of consciousness or others they just they visualize something anything they can stand up off of that prayer mat saying saying that they're on a mission that they're special that they now have a sense of purpose that's been revealed to them that they know something nobody else knows that they've had revealed to them some kind of divine and transcendental wisdom and this motivates people to suicidal acts of devotion it is not merely we may say that this way madness lies but in this way we reveal the madness that is at the core of Buddhism both ancient and modern