Why buddhism is wrong

Distraught, she went to the monks who explained to her that she was having such trouble now because, in a past life, she was a murderous dictator who burned books, and so now, in this life, she is doomed to forever be learning challenged. Not, "Oh, let's look at changing your study habits", but rather, "Oh, well, that's because you have the soul of a book-burning murderer. To our ears, this sounds so over the top that it is almost amusing, but to a kid who earnestly believes that these monks have hidden knowledge of the karmic cycle, it is devastating.

She was convinced that her soul was polluted and irretrievably flawed, and that nothing she could do would allow her to ever learn like the people around her. And this is the dark side of karma — instead of misfortunes in life being bad things that happen to you, they are manifestations of a deep and fundamental wrongness within you.

Children have a hard enough time keeping up their self-esteem as it is without every botched homework being a sign of lurking inner evil. As crippling as the weight of one's past lives can be, however, it is nothing compared to the horrors of the here and now. Buddhism's inheritance from Hinduism is the notion of existence as a painful continuous failure to negate itself.

The wheel of reincarnation rumbles ruthlessly over us all, forcing us to live again and again in this horrid world until we get it right and learn to not exist. I remember one of the higher monks at the school giving a speech in which she described coming back from a near-death experience as comparable to having to "return to a sewer where you do nothing but subsist on human excrement. It is something to be Finally Escaped.

Now, there are legitimate philosophical reasons for holding to this view. Viewed from a certain perspective, the destruction of everything you've ever cared about is inevitable, and when it's being experienced, the pain of loss does not seem recompensed by the joy of attachment that preceded it.

And that yawning stretch of impermanence outside, so the argument goes, is mirrored by the fundamental non-existence of the self inside. Meditation, properly done, allows you to strip away, one by one, all of your merely personal traits and achieve insight into the basic nothingness, the attributeless primal nature, of your existence. Those are all interesting philosophical and psychological insights, and good can come of them.

Being hyper-sensitive to suffering and injustice is a good gateway to being helpful to your fellow man and in general making the world a better place. There is something dreadfully tragic about believing yourself to have somehow failed your calling whenever joy manages to creep into your life. It is in our biology, in the fabric of us, to connect to other human beings, and anything which tries to insert shame and doubt into that instinct is bound to always twist us every so slightly.

If the thought, "I am happy right now", can never occur without an accompanying, "And I am just delaying my ultimate fulfillment in being so", then what, essentially, has life become?

I've seen it in action — people reaching out for connection, and then pulling back reflexively, forever caught in a life of half-gestures that can't ever quite settle down to pure contemplation or gain a moment of genuine absolute enjoyment.

The usual response that I've gotten to these concerns is, "You're sacrificing truth and wisdom for the sake of feeling good. Because if so he would have to be mean….

Remember that in pure… mind essence there is no asking of the question why and not even any significance attached to it. I need to ask why , even if I never get a satisfying answer. When I took psychedelics, I was after truth more than happiness. The retreat has forced me to reconsider my doubts about whether meditation makes you nicer. As I said in my last post, meditation and other spiritual practices can help you savor each moment, no matter how tedious or annoying, for its own sake.

A side effect of that perspective is seeing all people as ends in themselves. Even those who bore, annoy or enrage you--spam callers, car salesmen, rude students--deserve your respect, at the very least. I experienced this feeling on my first day back from the retreat. Veterans had warned me that re-entry, especially to a clamorous city, would be jarring. But I was fine, more than fine. On my first evening home, I strolled beside the Hudson on a promenade thronged with people of all ages and ethnicities.

I found everybody, even vain young men strutting their stuff, fascinating, funny, adorable. There is a downside of this hyper-appreciation. But what should I do? Should I volunteer at the homeless shelter down the street from me? Donate half my paycheck to the poor? Fortunately my compassion feels shallow, so I probably won't have to make these tough choices. There are in fact significantly irrational elements in Buddhism but far worse are some of the very anti-humanistic elements—elements which effectively allow or encourage the anti-social and immoral behavior.

People can try to eliminate these aspects of Buddhism, but they are likely to eliminate so much that it's hard to call the leftover very Buddhist. For example:. Although Buddhism seems so different from religions like Christianity and Islam that it doesn't look like it should be in the same category, it still shares with other religions a very basic element: a belief that the universe is in some fashion set up for our sake—or at least set up in a manner conducive to our needs. In Christianity, this is more obvious with the belief in a god that supposedly created the universe for our benefit.

In Buddhism, it is expressed in the belief that there are cosmic laws that exist solely to process our " karma " and make it possible for us to "advance" in some fashion.

This is one of the most fundamental problems with religions—pretty much all religions. Although it's more of a problem in some and less of a problem in others, it's still a fairly consistent problem that people are falsely taught that there is something in or above the universe that has picked them out for special protection and consideration. Our existence is a product of luck, not divine intervention, and any improvements we achieve will be due to our own hard work, not a cosmic process or karma.

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. There are many! For him, this has the advantage of allowing us to understand states in which the sense of self is attenuated or completely absent. Whether or not these states are beneficial no longer belongs to science as a descriptive discipline.

And neither does the claim that a misunderstanding about the self is the cause of suffering: this is a normative, philosophical, and religious statement, not a psychological fact. The benefits of mindfulness, both Buddhist and secular, are inseparable from the communal and social settings in which the practice is located. The other is that the best way to understand the effects of mindfulness practices is to look inside the head at the brain.

These two ideas, which are mutually reinforcing, are again a category mistake, since they attribute to the brain what for Evan Thompson are attributes of the whole person. As much as a bird needs wings to fly, its flight is not inside its wings but is a relationship of the whole animal with its environment. Being a good father or mother consists of a set of cognitive and emotional capacities that must be applied to specific situations.

Those abilities depend in part on the brain, and training them changes the brain, but they are not private states of mind that exist within the brain.

This is similar to the relationship between being mindful and brain activity: mindfulness consists of a series of skills integrated and applied to a situation. It is a way of being, as I like to translate it.

Certain processes of the brain allow and underlie it, but do not constitute it in its entirety. Thompson goes further and challenges the idea that there is a one-to-one correspondence between cognitive functions and areas of the brain or neural networks. The activation of certain areas of the brain allows and facilitates attention, but does not constitute or generate it. As with the Yo-Yo Ma example, its activation tells us little about what mindfulness is. Meditation is presented as a laboratory instrument that discloses the nature of the mind, but also as a tool that shapes it.

Thompson recalls a meditation retreat for scientists: the teachers presented the practice as learning to see experience as it is, but also instructed them to view it as changing, unsatisfactory, and impersonal. Are we learning to see experience for what it is, Thompson wondered, or to conceive of it in a specific way determined by the Buddhist vision of a state of peace and non-attachment?

When it comes to dialogues between scientists and Buddhists, he knows what he is talking about. From his experience in these dialogues, he explains how certain questions were often pushed aside: Can scientists who are personally involved in meditation be impartial?