A funny error in the article: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" was written by William James, not Henry James—it'd be a very different book if his brother

A funny error in the article: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" was written by William James, not Henry James—it'd be a very different book if his brother had written it. The article tries to give the impression that mindfulness meditation as it appears in the U.S. is more of a money making gimmick than an effectively distilled version of the Eastern tradition. Undoubtedly people will try to make money off of it and you'll have plenty of books/teachers who present it in a disconnected fashion whose only efficacy derives from the placebo effect (which will probably be enough for it to spread with good reputation through corporate culture). That said, there's a pretty long tradition of smart people who've been trying in earnest to interpret meditation practice and Eastern philosophical concepts in a Western framework. There's a lot of variety in the results, sure—but at the same time there's a core set of ideas and practices that have an internal consistency, and—in my opinion—which fill an important gap in the typical U.S. life philosophy. In particular, it offers a solution to the problem of, "what greater ultimate goal can I have for life than obtaining positive experiences and avoiding negative ones, if I'm basically an experience machine who will cease to exist after X years?"—without asking people to have faith in some positive metaphysical system. Additionally, meditation can be powerfully instructive in letting people see/remember certain aspects of being human that it's easy to lose after spending years feeling driven to accomplish some goals.