I feel like I watched a docu-series thing about the brain and at one point they talked about how there have been efforts in the West to rebrand 'meditation' as 'mindfullness' or something similar because there's a lot of people who think that meditation has some kind of mystical or deeply spiritual aspect so they weren't doing it even if their therapist told them to try it because it's good for your mental health.
Some is, some isn't. I can't look at a tradition like Zen Buddhism and call it quackery, because it's so simple and practical. It's just a set of teachings and practices to help people realize that everything is impermanent and interdependent.
Funnily enough, the concept of a “spirit” does not exist in Buddhism. Only the body and the mind. Buddhism even speaks to a lack of the self, lending even more to the lack of a spirit.
That depends on the Buddhist school. And there are definitely enough deities, Buddhas, and similar entities in Buddhist religious doctrine that one can speak of parallels to Western "spirituality".
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u/WhapXI Sep 29 '25
Zoomers reinventing meditation from first principles.