Eastern meditation usually focuses on your breathing, a certain
word or something similar. This practice
is quite different from Christian meditation:
I will
meditate on your precepts
and fix my eyes on
your ways. ...
Even
though princes sit plotting against me,
your servant will
meditate on your statutes. ...
Make me
understand the way of your precepts,
and I will meditate on
your wondrous works.
(Ps. 119:15,23,27)
Mindfulness has even reached into many public schools, often in
very subtle ways and going under unusual names to camouflage the connection to
Eastern mysticism. Here is an excellent
and well documented paper by a lawyer on the dangers of on stealth Buddhism. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction (MBSR), said that this technique will
... take the heart of something as meaningful, as sacred if you will, as Buddha-dharma and bring it into the world in a way that doesn’t dilute, profane or distort it, but at the same time is not locked into a culturally and tradition-bound framework that would make it absolutely impenetrable to the vast majority of people.
Christopher Dingwall-Jones, writing for the Church Times, has noted some lesser known aspects of mindfulness:
As far back as 1992, David Shapiro, a professor in psychiatry and human behaviour at the University of California, Irvine, observed in a study of the effects of meditation that, out of 27 subjects, 63 per cent had experienced negative effects, such as anxiety, depression, sobbing, and mild dissociation.
Some mindfulness practitioners have become detached from
themselves or had dark psychotic hallucinations. Others feel a sense of terror or may turn
suicidal. When mindfulness was taught to
inmates, it did not have the positive effects hoped for. The title of the paper with the research on
this is quite explicit: "Is There a Dark Side to Mindfulness? Relation of
Mindfulness to Criminogenic Cognitions."
Criminals usually have these characteristics: "... feeling more
deserving and entitled than other people, a failure to accept responsibility, a
negative attitude toward authority, a tendency to focus only on short-term
outcomes, and being fairly insensitive to the impact of criminal behavior." Mindfulness training did not cure these ills.
Let's follow the example of the first Psalm:
Blessed
is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor
stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his
delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he
meditates day and night.
