INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 612 Amsterdam, April 2nd, 2016 DOES THE BUDDHA PILL REALLY WORK? - Seven Myths About Meditation - BARCLAY POWERS The scientifically objective book, The Buddha Pill, by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm does a great job of evaluating meditation, and the distinctly romantic and unscientific approach that many Western researchers, scholars and practitioners have blindly accepted. The secularized mind is desperate for any form of alleged authentic spirituality, and the authors of this important book are rightly astounded by the many well-known psychological blind spots and religious bias issues that dominate much meditation research and instruction. What becomes obvious after reading The Buddha Pill is that in many cases Western Buddhists, scholars, practitioners and scientists suffer from well-known severe psychological blind spots and religious romanticism. Because Buddhism claims to be nontheistic it has become the spiritual lifestyle of choice for a secular 21st century Western audience. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/powers21.html EX OLOGY RITUAL - BOOK TWO: The This-Worldly Collapse of the Kosmos - SCOTT PARKER I've written here previously about the disenchantment with Wilber that developed for me over the following few years. During that time and subsequent decade, I never looked back at SES. But this winter I took it off the shelf and, with a marker in hand, set about looking for a different story within. Erasure is the poetic practice of transforming a found text into an original work by erasing (or, frequently, blacking out) the source text. I wanted to do an erasure of SES as a way of digging further into my intellectual past. There's no overstating the degree to which SES shaped my thinking when I was younger. I wondered if I could, in a way, unlock the book from within, using its own language to represent my reading of it and my ongoing relationship with this history. Some readers may consider this erasure a hostile act. I hope they don't. The intellectual life is one of constantly reading the past in order to write a new future. In concretizing that process, ex ology ritual is my tribute to this life. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/parker5.html