[lammaredder]

Originally Posted by Element So when we have suffering, we can look into the higher teachings

How can you look into higher teachings when you are repeatedly taught mundane dhamma and you continue to seek peace from them For my money, I think a lot of people really underestimate the value of the so-called "mundane dharma." Sharon Salzberg puts it this way: "In order to live with integrity, we must stop fragmenting and compartmentalizing our lives. Telling lies at work and expecting great truths in meditation is nonsensical. Using our sexual energy in a way that harms ourselves or others, and then expecting to know transcendent love in another arena, is mindless. Every aspect of our lives is connected to every other aspect of our lives. This truth is the basis for an awakened life. When we live with integrity, we further enhance intimacy with ourselves by being able to rejoice, taking active delight in our actions. Rejoicing opens us tremendously, dissolving our barriers, thereby enabling intimacy to extend to all of life. Joy has so much capacity to eliminate separation that the Buddha said, 'Rapture is the gateway to nirvana.'"

The contemplative practices are nice and all, but they're really only intended at a very specific audience of people for a very specific purpose: to disillusion one from worldly life and thus free one from the clinging that leads to further becoming. This is not a goal that most people -- whether in the Buddha's own time or today -- will really identify with or share. And yet a lot of (admittedly well-intentioned and earnest) people end up banking on Buddhism's meditative practices as "the answer" -- a sort of cure-all for all of life's psychological ills and champion them as the "missing ingredient" for everyone. I think this is a misguided misappropriation of the original contemplative practices meant for renunciants.

People end up getting hung up on this system of meditation, when simple changes in conduct are a far more effective antidote to what ails them. The psychologists, IME, are simply taking what elements are relevant to a wider lay audience and creating self-contained systems that are designed for a specific audience for a specific purpose, just as the Buddha did. His lifestyle and the body of his philosophy wasn't meant for everyone, but there are definitely aspects of his teaching that might help certain problems and others that, to be frank, are rather an irrelevant waste of time and a detour for most people going about their lives. I think we do a disservice to "mass-market" teachings not intended for mass-consumption.