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I borrowed the title of this episode from a May '24 National Geographic article, which attempts to answer the question using science -- lab studies, brain scans, heart monitors, fMRI results, etc. The article also conflates meditation with Mindfulness, which is one of the most popular forms of meditation being practiced and taught today. In this episode, my guest, Professor David McMahan, and I don't seek to answer this question of whether "meditation actually works" but instead turn the question on its head and ask: what kind of work does meditation do? The answer, Professor McMahan, argues depends on the socio-political, historical, and cultural context - the "social imaginary" - that the practitioner finds themselves in. And so "the work" that Mindfulness meditation may have done for the Buddhist Indian ascetic twenty five centuries ago, for whom these practices were actually developed, is entirely different than the work meditation may do for the middle-class professional living in New York (or Tokyo or Mumbai) today. As Professor McMahan illustrates in his book, "Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds," The Standard Version of Mindfulness today understands meditation to mean the "non-judgmental awareness of the present moment," and the practitioner is asked to forego any expectations or goal-oriented behavior. This modern description of meditation as bare-awareness, present-focused, as accepting oneself as we are with no judgements and goals has very little in common with the ways in which meditation is described in the early Buddhist Pali canon. And yet there is a tendency for many teachers and practitioners of Mindfulness today to believe that this practice - at least its "essence" - has been passed down from the time of the Buddha to today, completely unchanged, and being able to produce the same "results" and create the same spiritual subjects.
