Ronald Purser

The general thesis is valid, that commercial forces have watered down the spiritual conponent of mindfulness so that we end up with a shallow practice that can miss the point of what is really “going on”.

There are many problems with this reasoning as well. The Catholic church has a long history of political impact that includes some very likely healthy mechanisms like confession. But surely depending on where we look at it we would rather keep confession without the Spanish Inquisition. Instead the author seems to indicate that the original buddhist was somehow political in a good way. But politics is always more messy than that…

There is an appeal to marxist stereotypes in that they are translated to a context that does not involve the same capital as means of production. And the author seems to believe this route is automatically better than being ethically blindfolded into meditation states.

I think it would have been much more effective if the author explained what the added depth that can be gained from an integrated approach to meditation rather than political critique. Political thinking is rarely rational and it is not common for people to join together to make the world better. The author suggests buddhist thinking could do this but does not give evidence of how this would work.
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There's a good book about the shallow and exploitative nature of the commercialization of "mindfulness" out there. This isn't that book. This is 25% of the notes to writing that book, and the other 75% are assorted marxist rants about capitalism written from a terminally american point of view. American problems are extrapolated to the rest of the world; the author is seemingly unaware countries as widely separate as the US, Sweden and China all operate in a capitalist world - this book has no solutions but complete overthrow of the entire system in some unspecified hand wavy manner. It's also guilty of smuggling in not only this false dilemma (can't fix any problem in society unless you reject capitalism and overthrow the system, all answers to any problems is more marxism), but - especially toward the end, when you're good and softened up, the entire US left cultural baggage including Robin DiAngelo's insane views on race.

When the book can actually be arsed to deliver some information about the history of attempts to wedge soulless buddhist derivatives into jobs and schools it does a decent job of it. I'd have liked to know much more about the progenitors to the current situation like the attempts to launch Transcendental Meditation (which fell flat due to far clearer religious kookery baked in) only briefly mentioned here. There's also clearly one main player in the shape of Kabat-Zinn, but it's unclear if it's because he's so singularly responsible for the formulation and selling of mindfulness in the corporate space, or if it's just the one person the author did a deep research dive on.
Audiowise a good performance.… (meer)