I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.
I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.
The problem, at it's core, is that the human mind is not a rational thing. Rational frameworks (at least the ones we have currently) do not play well with real-but-irrational things.
This is why early psychoanalysis and Gestalt works focused on symbolism as an abstraction of the human mind. Of course those areas are generally fraught with missteps and bad theory, but progress was still made.
If you want a real no-fluff experimentalist view of the psyche, look into psychonetics, a Soviet toolkit. To quote (from memory) from it's material:
"You may hear the sound of God talking to you. Do not be alarmed, even if you are an atheist. Remain calm and do not respond to the voice."
I would not rush to dismiss all of it as disingenous just because some interpretation of it does not resonate with you. And it is ok if it doesn't resonate with you, we don't all have to agree on it.
For example, from[1]:
> From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious—reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.
> Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super-quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.
That's just one of the many effects noted in the article.
If that's the best you've got I'll pass.
All I am saying is that meditation brought up a lot of things that I had buried in my past. Anger (being betrayed by people), hatred (being whipped with a leather belt by my step-father when I was a kid) - these are all real emotions that you have to process because in small little ways they do have an influence on your psychological behavior. And, thus, on the behavior of who you "think" you are as a person.
However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.
I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.
This 2017 publication sums it up nicely: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691617709589
"works" to what end?
In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything at all, why would anyone experience even adverse effects? Clearly meditation does have effects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=mindfulness+meditation
It seems to be a staple for therapists and psychologists to improve emotional intelligence. It gives you clarity about what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and what you're going to feel soon. From there it can be used for a whole host of other maladies: addictions, anxiety, depression, etc.
I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.