&gt; Your comment falsely assumes I don&#x27;t know Buddhism.<p>It&#x27;s simple to find out that the author of the book is a Buddhist monk. Of course your time is too precious for that so you&#x27;d rather blurt out the first thing that comes to mind and see if anyone takes the bait.<p>&gt; Buddhist &#x27;ontology&#x27; doesn&#x27;t form a legitimate basis for talking about meditation in a scientific&#x2F; technical manner, or even in a philosophically coherent manner. It simply doesn&#x27;t.<p>The Buddha was hardly a philosopher. I don&#x27;t know what you wish to get out of treatments on meditation, but I guess if you seek it for the mental masturbation aspect it might leave you unfulfilled.<p>As long as such talk about the meditation practice itself in a technical -- words and terms that at least try to precisely describe such subjective experiences as meditation brings -- that&#x27;s good enough for me. I don&#x27;t require such an old tradition to first be scrutinised by 1,000 scientists before I try it myself. I think I can risk sitting on a cushion.<p>&gt; I get that in the West it&#x27;s primarily a utility for making people feel happy and centered, which is overall a good thing, but it&#x27;s a little hypocritical of HN to dismiss someone like Eckhart Tolle or Chopra while enthusiastically &#x27;analyzing&#x27; our cognitive reality from the standpoint of Western Buddhism... they aren&#x27;t at different levels.<p>Yes, exactly. We&#x27;re the uniform &quot;HN&quot; blob which have now revealed our hypocrisy by not condemning such &quot;mystical&quot; words like &quot;mindful&quot; and &quot;concentration&quot;. And we&#x27;re all supposed to hate people like Tolle and Chopra. Sorry bro, I guess I didn&#x27;t get that memo.<p>You&#x27;ve perfectly revealed our blind spot by pointing out how the author talks about words like &quot;concentration&quot; and &quot;mindfulness&quot; as if he... was at liberty to use such words in his own, precise way. That he uses &quot;mindfulness&quot; in a specific way, when he wrote a book called &quot;Mindfulness in Plain English&quot;. The sheer nerve. Thankfully you aren&#x27;t tricked by such mumbo jumbo. I&#x27;ll inform the HN hivemind of this collective transgression immediately.<p>I don&#x27;t really know anything about Chopra. All I know about Eckhart Tolle is that he is very concerned with The Now.