Drug addiction is a crime? Come on man.
Good luck getting everyone on board for the meditation high.
There’s the pie in the sky stuff and then there’s reality.
Did we stop arresting people for possession of drugs?
Bliss is just a temporary side effect of concentration meditation. It is just a better way to get high than using drugs.
A lot of people hear meditation and think it means practicing yoga postures.or being a contortionist. Not. Buddhist meditation can be done sitting or sometimes walking and has next to nothing to do with yoga postures.
As an aside, Buddhist meditation and martial arts seem to complement each other and are sometimes practiced side by side, especially in East Asia, even though they have different origins.
There is actually no single word that even translates as meditation. There are different disciplines; such as virtue cultivations, mindful awareness, and fixed concentration. Insight meditation combines those with various traditional rituals and tailors a practice to an individuals needs and abilities.
In the real world, most Asian Buddhists don't do this. The lay members do devotional chants and pray to celestial Buddhas to be reborn in heaven. The monks and priests do ritual blessings for them. Traditional monks go on retreats to meditate.
Buddhist style mindfulness meditation is popular in the west; where it is generally viewed more as a self help technique than part of a religion. Western Buddhists generally hone in on the practices and often view the beliefs as symbolism, window dressing, or cultural baggage.
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Praying to an external divinity for salvation strikes me as a bit pie in the sky; though there is some value in faith.
The benefits of Buddhist meditation / cultivation practices are real and down to earth. However, the practices are time consuming and challenging. I am dubious that the whole shebang ever catches on mainstream, but some pursue it, and it is an excellent model for self reformation and mental health.
*virtue cultivation: development of vigor, empathy, compassion, tolerance, equanimity.
*mindfulness: open presence, moment to moment awareness. Enhances visuospatial cognition, artistic ability, sensitivity to others.
*fixed concentration: focus on a single object. Directed attention, sustained focus, feelings of joy and blissfulness arise before a transition to calm stillness. Enhances general intelligence, cognitive ability related to abstract reasoning, reading comprehension, and so on. Probably not a good practice for people with untreated epilepsy -- may induce seizures.
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