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WillowOne's Positions

Meditation and Mindfulness

My Positions

  1. Meditation is a useful secular practice: training attention, observing the contents of one's own mind, and reducing reactivity. It is the part of the religious inheritance most worth keeping.
  2. Claims that go beyond this (enlightenment as a metaphysical state, levitation, chakras, group meditation lowering the crime rate) are unsupported and in some cases fraudulent.
  3. The evidence for health benefits is real but modest and heavily oversold. Meditation is roughly as good for you as regular exercise and decent sleep, and it is not a replacement for treatment.

Notes

  1. The evidence. The 2014 meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine of 47 randomised trials found moderate evidence that mindfulness programmes reduce anxiety, depression and pain, small or no evidence for other outcomes, and no evidence that meditation outperforms active treatments such as exercise or therapy. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is recommended by NICE for preventing relapse in recurrent depression, on reasonable evidence. Beyond that the literature is thin, small, and often conducted by enthusiasts; a 2018 review by twenty researchers in the field, titled "Mind the Hype", said as much. Adverse effects (anxiety, depersonalisation, resurfacing trauma) occur in a minority, perhaps one in twelve, and are rarely mentioned by the people selling apps.
  2. What it actually does. Sitting still and attending to the breath, or to whatever arises, makes one thing obvious very quickly: thoughts appear without being summoned, and the sense of a thinker standing behind them is itself just another thought. This is a phenomenological observation, not a metaphysical discovery, and it is entirely consistent with the view that the mind is what the brain does and that the self is a model the brain builds. It is, in fact, the most direct evidence an ordinary person can get for that view. Sam Harris's Waking Up makes this case without the religious apparatus, and Susan Blackmore makes it from the Zen side.
  3. Where it goes wrong. Transcendental Meditation sold a mantra for a fee and then sold "yogic flying", which is hopping on a mattress. In 1993 its founder's organisation flew four thousand meditators to Washington, DC, predicting a 20 per cent fall in violent crime; the murder rate that summer was the highest on record, and the organisation reported a success relative to the crime rate it said would otherwise have occurred. Chakras, kundalini, "energy" and the rest are the spiritual explanation attached to a secular effect (New Age Beliefs). The practice does not need any of it and works the same without it, which is the test.
  4. Secular Buddhism. The meditative techniques come mostly from Buddhism, which also comes with rebirth, karma, hungry ghosts and a cosmology. The techniques can be lifted out cleanly, and have been, in the same way that the social goods of religion can be provided without the doctrine (The human need for religion). The Buddhist who objects that this is theft has a point about history and none about efficacy.
  5. The claim I accept. A practice that lets you notice anger before you act on it, boredom before you reach for the phone, and craving before you obey it, is useful to anyone and needs no spiritual justification. It is attention training, and attention is the one resource that everything else in a life depends on.

Sources

  • Goyal, M. et al., "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis", JAMA Internal Medicine 174 (2014)
  • Van Dam, N. T. et al., "Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation", Perspectives on Psychological Science 13 (2018)
  • Farias, M. et al., "Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: a systematic review", Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 142 (2020)
  • Park, R. L., Voodoo Science (2000), chapter on the Washington, DC, Transcendental Meditation study
  • Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014)

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