Again, the same applies to all the other aspects of the path. Some people claim to claim to experience jhanas; and then some other people say that they are mistaken. Similarly, people study and read and reflect for many years, and get into lengthy and bitter disputes with others as to what constitutes Right View, or what an arahant is like.Zom wrote: ↑Tue Jun 12, 2018 12:42 pmBut that practice is meant to get jhanas. Meditation is only for that, according to texts. Nowadays, of course, meditation became a panacea - but in good old times it was not. It was a special method to get particular special results known as jhanas.You may be right, but only if you had set out to reach those jhanas and nothing else.
I'm sure some people might do that, but I don't personally know of any. Most meditators seem to take a view broadly similar to mine expressed above, which is that meditation has a range of limited benefits, depending on where one is with the practice and what else is happening in one's life.Yes, they write about this in books - but this is because meditation is a trend, and so they ascribe to it all possible benefits one can imagine.
From my experience I can say this is not so
We seem to gone round in a circle and come back to this. Your experience is perhaps less valuable to others than you might imagine. There are people who tell me from their experience that Jesus is our Lord and Saviour. Basing one's conduct upon another's claimed experience requires that one overcomes the problem of induction; what holds for them may not hold for oneself. Perhaps a claim that meditation does not work in certain contexts means no more than the claimant having missed out on the type of meditation that would have worked, had they been fortunate enough to have encountered it.