On Sam Harris and Stephen Fry’s Meditation Debate

Interesting thoughts about meditation here:

Meditation, by contrast, is more palliative than instrumental, especially in its modern secular applications. It’s meant to soothe mental dis-ease, not to unlock accomplishment previously unobtainable to our species.

Source: On Sam Harris and Stephen Fry’s Meditation Debate – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

It clearly bears more thinking about, but my almost automatic response is to point out that the earliest traditions of meditation that we know about were not the “palliative” mindfulness meditation currently being taught to a mass audience, but the meditative practices of shamans and such, whose purpose was to induce altered states of consciousness along the lines of those produced by psychedelic chemicals.

Those practices were precisely to unlock capabilities otherwise unavailable.