Meditation or self-indoctrination?
Is meditation a technique that opens the mind to a direct and unmediated experience of subtler aspects of reality? Or is it just a way of hypnotising the mind into "experiences" of "truths" prescribed by scripture and ideology? The answer undoubtedly depends on the type of meditative technique. The buddhologist Paul Harrison argues that early Buddhist meditation was much more closely related to scripture than we now usually assume.