Western "Buddhism" is totally messed up, and you can see this from the strange behaviors of its practitioners. The majority of Buddhists in the West aren't a pa

Western "Buddhism" is totally messed up, and you can see this from the strange behaviors of its practitioners. The majority of Buddhists in the West aren't a part of a community with a living Buddhist tradition, and they don't read or write in a language that has evolved with the particularities of the Buddhist religions. American Buddhists, in particular, don't have an idea of "initiation," "dharma transmission," and "religious community" which are so important to the Buddhist practitioners in Asia. It makes complete sense that this type of meditation doesn't work well. I am not familiar with the Pali or Hindi languages, but, for example, in Chinese, there are over 20 words that all mean "karma", and the language has taken on many loanwords and native associations as a result of Buddhist influence. In the West, this type of transformation was brought forward by Christianity, not from Buddhism. When you read a Buddhist sutra translated into English, you get six-syllable Latinate constructions that sound more like a neuroscience paper than a living religion, such as "contingently-originated phenomenon", which is actually just two syllables in Chinese. I am sure that there's even more ingrained Buddhist ideas if you are a native Pali speaker.