I suspect that a tendency towards mysticism just sort of spontaneously accretes onto anything sufficiently esoteric; you can see this happening over the last few decades with quantum mechanics, and to a lesser degree with results like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Martial arts is another good place to see this in action: most of those legendary death touch techniques you hear about, for example, originated in strikes that damaged vulnerable nerve clusters or lymph nodes, leading to abscesses and eventually a good chance of death without antibiotics. All very explicable. But layer the field’s native traditional-Chinese-medicine metaphor over that and run it through several generations of easily impressed students, partial information, and novelists without any particular incentive to be realistic, and suddenly you’ve got the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
So I don’t think the mumbo-jumbo is likely to be strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it’d be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.
So I suspect it’s unlikely that the mumbo-jumbo is strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it’d be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.
It would be difficult to do it on your own, but it’s not very hard to find e.g. guides to meditation that have been bowlderized of all the mysterious magical stuff.
I suspect that a tendency towards mysticism just sort of spontaneously accretes onto anything sufficiently esoteric; you can see this happening over the last few decades with quantum mechanics, and to a lesser degree with results like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Martial arts is another good place to see this in action: most of those legendary death touch techniques you hear about, for example, originated in strikes that damaged vulnerable nerve clusters or lymph nodes, leading to abscesses and eventually a good chance of death without antibiotics. All very explicable. But layer the field’s native traditional-Chinese-medicine metaphor over that and run it through several generations of easily impressed students, partial information, and novelists without any particular incentive to be realistic, and suddenly you’ve got the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
So I don’t think the mumbo-jumbo is likely to be strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it’d be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.
It would be difficult to do it on your own, but it’s not very hard to find e.g. guides to meditation that have been bowlderized of all the mysterious magical stuff.