Mind The Corporate "Mindfulness"

[Hervé]

Why corporations want you to shut up and meditate

Zachary Siegel The Nation
Thu, 25 Jul 2019 00:01 UTC

People practice yoga on the National Mall near the Washington Monument in 2009. © Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Whatever ails you — be it anger, depression, or wanting a career change — there is a book on how mindfulness and meditation can help you attain your goals while bringing about a sense of contentedness. Rooted in a centuries-old Buddhist meditation practice, mindfulness, like the religion it originates from, is based on the Four Noble Truths, the first of which loosely translates to "Life is suffering." What causes suffering? Things like desiring and craving the unattainable and humans' greed and drive for dominance. And yet the poster children of greed and dominance, corporations with ethically dubious track records, from Goldman Sachs to Google and Monsanto, have implemented mindfulness-meditation training programs across all their levels. In 2018, Google's mindfulness guru, Chade-Meng Tan, quietly stepped down from his role at the company after an investigation uncovered past inappropriate behavior.

Stripped of all ethical and religious tenets, mindfulness meditation has morphed into a market-friendly practice, adaptable into any context. Even the US military deploys mindfulness among its commanders and troops, teaching them how to focus on their breath as they pull the trigger.

Today's corporatized mindfulness is largely a do-it-yourself practice (with countless books, meditation apps, podcasts, gurus, and seminars) filling the vacuum of a lonely culture obsessed with self-optimization, mind hacks, and shortcuts to self-care. Modern mindfulness is often sold as evidence-based, sanitized of any cultural baggage — neuroscience with a dash of what Jon Kabat-Zinn, known as the father of the modern-day mindfulness movement, calls "the essence of Buddhism." It's at once secular and clinical yet sacred.

Cementing mindfulness in the pantheon of evidence-based treatments was never the goal of his vision board.

"The whole idea was to transform and heal the world," he said in a 2017 interview.

"I know that sounds arrogant, but that was, in fact, the sense of it."

Kabat-Zinn — with glasses, gray hair, and a biomedical degree from MIT — is quick to note that he did not invent mindfulness in 1979 when he started the eight-week course called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, though he is largely credited for the ubiquity of mindfulness today, in particular among powerful corporations and the Davos crowd.

Kabat-Zinn is one of the main characters in Ronald Purser's new book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Purser, a professor at San Francisco State University who studies corporate culture, asks what if, instead of changing the world, mindfulness teaches people to be content with injustice and inequalities that pervade society?

In the wrong hands, he argues, mindfulness can become an instrument for corporate compliance. Rather than organize to change the need for self-care and breathing exercises in the first place, he writes, corporate mindfulness, or McMindfulness, becomes a pacifier that teaches workers to be comfortable with insecurity. Emotions like stress and anger are purely subjective, arising not from precarious labor conditions but from within — all in your head.

I talked with Purser recently to discuss how mindfulness got folded into corporate culture and how self-help teaches us to cope with the conditions of inequality instead of fight to end it. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

Zachary Siegel: Your book is about much more than critiquing supposedly woke CEOs at Davos. What's the issue with corporatized mindfulness, or McMindfulness, as you call it? Stress relief, breathing exercises — aren't these good things?

Ron Purser: The onus is completely put on the individual to make the right lifestyle choices, which downplays the whole notion of the social and environmental context. What's happening with corporate mindfulness is a complete denigration of critical thinking into the causes of stress, which are all privatized into the individual. There is also an implicit denigration of collective action and building solidarity. This trope is so common — "Change always starts from within. We first have to change ourselves, take self-responsibility, do self-care." It's really similar to the Protestant ethic in some ways. Rather than submitting to the will of God, instead there's a moral imperative to take care of your own health and well-being. The fact that these corporate initiatives are also [do it yourself] undercuts social change. It's sending individuals a message that they are the problem, they need to be calm, and they need to regulate.

ZS: There is a tension throughout your book between the internal and the external. What is the problem with framing mindfulness and self-help as solely a matter for individuals to do on their own?

RP: We're always in a mode of trying to remake ourselves, refashion ourselves. We're entrepreneurs of the self. Just look at the boom in meditation and mindfulness apps. The products are being hawked. Everything is about mustering our internal resources in an enterprise culture where subjectivity is monetized as mental capital and we're human capital.

But we don't look at how external resources in the social and political environment are really what helps us become more resilient. Do we have sick days at work? Do we have money in a savings account? Do we have neighbors who can help us out? Do we have health care? All of these things are much more conducive to building resilience than these gadgets and techniques being marketed.

ZS: Your book chronicles various spiritual movements rising and falling in America — the rise of New Age in the 1970s and Transcendental Meditation in the '90s. Who is behind the mindfulness boom?

RP: In terms of other social movements, the mindfulness movement is an elite social movement, which started with white elite males like Dale Carnegie and the prosperity-gospel guys. It's quite unlike more grassroots activist movements like the civil rights movement, where you could see a more communitarian strand of mindfulness, run by people of color. There was coming together, talking about our oppression, sharing our vulnerabilities and working together to resist. That was very spiritually and religiously motivated and required a tremendous amount of mindfulness, but in collectives. Nonviolence takes a lot of mindfulness to pull off, but you can't do it alone. It's a stark contrast to what we see with these very rich, wealthy white men who are the promoters, who I call mindfulness merchants, and they're spouting that mindfulness is good for everybody, it's universal. These differentials in power trouble me, and I think we need to interrogate these differentials.

SOTT Comment: Purser's point may be better taken if he removed the identity politics approach. Maybe the color of skin of those hawking mindfulness isn't as important as the colorless corporations they represent. If mindfulness has indeed become a tool of oppression, or a means of the slaves to accept their oppression, it's affecting all of us equally, regardless of skin color and group association.

ZS: So who really benefits? If the goal of corporatized mindfulness is to get employees to be more productive rather than simply practice awareness of the present moment as an end in itself, then mindfulness is good for the people up top.

RP: I really take aim at the corporate mindfulness merchants. I've been to a number of their conferences and workshops. I participated in the first Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute [course], which is Google's mindfulness program. So I've tried to see what was actually going on, and I was already quite skeptical, but boy, after coming back from those conferences, I was like, "Well, you've got to be kidding me."

ZS: What was going on in Google's mindfulness program?

RP: The Search Inside Yourself seminar promised the program "increases productivity, enhances leadership effectiveness and supports happiness." What more could an employer want? The workshop was an amalgam of childish icebreakers, turn-to-your partner exercises, three-minute breathing meditations, and a hodgepodge of superficial materials on emotional intelligence as a pathway to career success, along with the usual neurobabble that meditation changes your brain.

ZS: Executives at Monsanto and Goldman Sachs and commanders in the US military are all learning about mindfulness. But you throw a wrench in the notion that ethical behavior naturally flows from mindfulness.

RP: That's the trickle-down theory of mindfulness, that if we train mindful leaders or bring in mindfulness programs, teach a little bit of individualistic mindfulness to employees or leaders, that gradually we can expect some sort of corporate transformation. So bring in mindfulness programs and, over time, we'll start to see much more humane work environments, more organizational citizenship. Social and environmental responsibility will start blossoming.

Look at Google, the poster child of mindfulness. Look at the litany of privacy violations and everything they're doing in surveillance. Goldman Sachs got on the bandwagon more recently to this, as did the military. Bill George used to be the president of Medtronic [a medical device company that settled lawsuits over misleading patients and doctors about adverse effects of its products], and he came out of Harvard Business School and is a Davos regular. He made a statement at Davos a while back saying the main business case for mindfulness is that if you're more focused on the job, you'll become a better leader and that can help executives and staff behave less aggressively.

Almost at the same time he said that, a 21-year-old at Merrill Lynch died of an epileptic seizure after working 72-hour workweeks. Goldman Sachs heard about this and announced new rules that they would cap workdays for interns at 17 hours. So, are we witnessing mindful leadership with that decision?

Mindfulness will offer some form of stress relief to a small group of employees. It's individualistic, it's therapeutic. But the whole systemic and structural apparatus of the company is completely untouched and not called into question. Think of the Silicon Valley companies. They're exporting mass distraction. It's such an irony. The externalities of these companies are designed for distraction, and yet at the same time, these small groups of employees are becoming less distracted so they could focus better on their work, so they could produce these technologies of mass distraction.

ZS: In breaking down the science behind mindfulness, you write, "The widespread belief that there is compelling clinical proof that 'mindfulness works' is simply not supported by the scientific evidence." Is "evidence based" built on a house of cards?

RP: One of the problems is a big gap between the rhetoric on the so-called science of mindfulness and the actual science. If you read the journal articles, there are a lot of qualifications and hedging. But when it is translated into the public domain — like in Harvard Business Review, which claimed, "Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain" — that's where you see sweeping claims exaggerating the efficacy.

I'm not an expert in analyzing scientific studies. But I was trying to point out the gap between the hype and the science. There have been some meta-analytic studies going on that are showing the efficacy is quite weak and that there are methodological issues. The studies don't have active control groups, and the sample sizes are small. Another key issue is experimenter allegiance and confirmation bias. You'll find that some of the scientists who are lead authors on these studies are also strong advocates for mindfulness. They are mindfulness practitioners themselves, and so when a meta-analytic study controls for who the experimenter is, the efficacy goes down even more.

ZS: You point out that meditation and mindfulness aren't helpful for everyone. What's the harm in slowing down, pausing and breathing?

RP: I've often wondered, and this is speculative, but some of these scientists in the contemplative science community — are they using science as a way of evangelizing mindfulness? They truly believe it is good for everyone, and that's not the case.

Mindfulness is a very unregulated industry. Unlike psychotherapy, where you need a license and have board reviews, it's not like that in the mindfulness world, where anyone can hang out a shingle. I know for a fact that some corporate mindfulness trainers just take an online course and in eight or 10 weeks they reinvent themselves. They were probably corporate trainers in some other area, and now they're experts in mindfulness training.

It seems innocuous. What's wrong with a three-minute breathing exercise? What's wrong with that, you know? Well, nothing particularly. But can we aim a little bit higher?

Zachary Siegel is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired, among others.

Related:

• How mindfulness privatised a social problem

• The mindfulness conspiracy

• Does anyone really know what that generic term, mindfulness, really means?

• Mindfulness has become an over-hyped racket with junk science supporting it, say researchers

• PTSD and trauma: When mindfulness isn't the best approach

• Don't try to force mindfulness -- use meditation to get there

[Hervé]

How the question "Who benefits from this?" can change your life

Caitlin Johnstone caitlinjohnstone.com
Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:01 UTC

"Cui bono?" is a phrase you'll often see used on conspiracy-minded Youtube videos and discussion forums. It's Latin for "Who benefits?", and it refers to a perspective in legal analysis that the one who stands most to gain from a crime is often the perpetrator. It's the "motive" part of "means, motive and opportunity".

The term comes up in conspiracy circles a lot because motive is often the biggest plot hole in the official story promoted by the authorized narrative managers of the political/media class about a given event. The alleged Douma chemical attack last year, for example, had no discernible benefit to the Assad government whatsoever, but would have benefited the cornered Al-Qaeda affiliates in the city by provoking air strikes from the west, so there remains a lot of skepticism from those who don't automatically believe their government and the plutocratic media when they say that Damascus was responsible. Such skepticism is dismissively branded "conspiracy theory" by the establishment narrative managers, but it is fully justified.

So it's a useful concept for analyzing world events in a way that punches through the fog of imperial propaganda. But the question "Who benefits from this?" can, and should, be taken much further.

Don't just ask "Cui bono?" of potential false flag events. Ask it about every belief in your head. Rigorously holding that candle up to the ideas in your own mind will reveal a lot of junk floating around in there that benefit other people, both the powerful and the not-so-powerful.

To pick one of many possible examples, it's very interesting how many of America's ostensibly anti-establishment movements encourage their adherents to support one of America's two mainstream establishment political parties. The so-called "Resistance" and the progressive movement both herd people who might otherwise support actual leftist movements into the oligarchic folds of the Democratic Party, as does even the lesser-evil voting promoted by those closer to the fringe like Noam Chomsky. On the right you've got the warmongering corporate whore party of the Republicans being enthusiastically backed by the MAGA crowd, who you'll routinely see backing garden variety GOP agendas like the Supreme Court nomination of a longtime Bush lackey in the name of fighting the establishment. Closer to the fringe you've got the insufferable QAnon cult, who consistently argue that every Trump move from Assange's arrest to bombing Syria is a brilliant 5-D chess maneuver against the Deep State.

If those in any of these various factions began sincerely asking the question "Who benefits from my believing this?" about the various reasons they hold for espousing their respective political positions, the answer would come back clear as day that of course the ones who benefit are the plutocratic class which owns both mainstream political parties and the opaque government agencies with which that class is aligned. In the flurry of reasons being proffered in favor of supporting a given faction, it's easy to overlook the fact that some very powerful people are likely to benefit from that support.

All the information going around about what's going on in the world is like this. News media must be consumed with an acute awareness that there are extremely powerful people who have a vested interest in manipulating the way you think and perceive. It's just a fact, and if it isn't at the forefront of your consciousness, your worldview will necessarily be severely malformed. Cultivating a reflexive curiosity about who benefits from a given narrative being promoted nips this in the bud.

But this isn't just limited to news media. We get tons of stupid ideas in our heads from things like advertising, which obviously benefit no one but the advertisers and their employers. Women in particular are plagued with body image problems from being pummeled from a very early age with corporate psyops designed for precisely that purpose, and as a result we feed billions of dollars into various interests who profit from our belief that we shouldn't have small tits or wrinkles or body fat.

Religion is another one. There are of course many immensely wealthy and powerful structures today which benefit from adherents to religion, but most of those who've benefited from widespread religious indoctrination aren't even alive anymore. Governments and world religions have historically been inextricably intertwined with and supportive of each other, because religions can be used to manipulate the masses into believing that it's virtuous to be poor, humble, meek, submissive and obedient, to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", and to believe it would be generally sinful to use the power of their numbers to kill their rulers and seize their wealth. The answer to "Who benefits from my religious beliefs?", if you're Christian, is something along the lines of "All existing Christian churches, all existing political structures built around exploiting Christian beliefs for political leverage, every preacher, pope and bishop who's ever lived, and every western ruler since Emperor Constantine."

Many of the beliefs which have been put into our heads for someone else's benefit don't profit the powerful at all; many of them have been implanted by our own loved ones. It's unfortunate, but friends and family members will often have a vested interest in putting beliefs in our heads which don't benefit us but them. Such beliefs often revolve around keeping us from getting above our station, from feeling too good about ourselves so that we don't go off and improve our lives instead of staying in the confining circles we were born into. Others can include believing positive things about loved ones who were actually destructive and abusive to us. Some of them are as simple as beliefs about how we are and how we should be that kept us from talking back to our parents, which if left unexamined can create submissive psychological postures in us that can stay with us to the grave. We form a lot of the beliefs we have about ourselves from the feedback we get from other people, so even something said decades ago by a schoolmate who was only interested in keeping us from rising above them in social status can continue to warp our self image.

From ground-level to the highest echelons of power, there are people who have been benefiting from the beliefs in our heads. Only by doing the necessary inner work and asking "Cui bono?" of all the ideas we believe about our world, our society, our community and ourselves can we sift apart the untrue from the true and construct a clear-eyed worldview which benefits no one but ourselves and our fellow man. Someone's benefiting from the beliefs in our heads, and, very often, it ain't us.

_______________________

[christian]

To me it looks as if humanity is gradually becoming more aware of and interested in meditative practices. That in and of itself looks like a good thing to me. Those who would like to control the people can't just sit there and let it all play out, of course. What they can do and are doing is to take advantage of this genuine desire for mindfullness and add a tint of it to their agenda to make their agenda more palatable. They use "mindfullness" as a bait, the hook is their agenda. Serves to further their agenda and also serves to make people wary of "mindfullness," as the article in the OP may do. As Alex Jones would say, "There's a war on for your mind."

[Hervé]

Right, something from over here:

[...]

This same retired propaganda operative, who goes by the pseudonym of Ellis Medavoy (I interview him 28 times in one section of my collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED), explained this “psyop calculation”:

“The target of a terrific psyop is yearning and longing. That’s what I looked for when I was working: what people long and yearn for. Something unformed and undefined but very powerful. That’s what I wanted to tap into.

“If I could tap into that, people would buy in and surrender a significant part of whatever their personal world looks like. Because they want to believe they’re coming together with like-minded others. They’ll also believe the path laid out for them is correct and proper and wonderful. This is really a fake religion we’re talking about.

“A fake religion. It’s really for children, and most people turn out to be children. Give them a group of high-minded ideas, and they’ll grab on and think everything they’ve done up to that moment is a prelude to THIS.

“We [operatives] are playing a symphony, you see, and once they listen to the prelude, they’re hooked. They stay. They long for the climax, which doesn’t exist; not the way they imagine it. To them it’s all about ‘arrival in the promised land,’ as if that’s some kind of gift that’s wrapped up under the tree, waiting to be opened.

“We give them a fake god, a dead-end god. If they were once burning with authentic faith, we derail that and take them to another place…”

[...]

[Gaia]

So basically "follow the money"

[Hervé]

Posted by Gaia (here)
So basically "follow the money"

Correct in most instances and, with others; it's "Follow the loosh"...

[Ron Mauer Sr]

My mindfulness, advice for myself is

"Follow what feels good.

Question everything including my own suspicions.

Take a few chances sometimes for a little excitement."


And possibly most important, "Read again: Illusions by Richard Bach."

[RogeRio]

My post here was moved .. ok .. it is here
Out of context I posted It !! good job ..

at least, I would like to know what wrong I did, to being pushed away

who move my post, makes me lost confidence .. then, please ... move this too
<< -- My dog is up to bit, who cross the fence again ..

--- edit ---

I too answered a question about my post (also quoted from Ron Mauer Sr post above),
that you also move to here

this prove I post here and not there, under other thread

this is what I call a good service to "legitm integrity" of forum data discussion
thank you very much .. to move my posts out from this thread .. you're the boss

[Craig]

Posted by Ron Mauer Sr (here)
Question everything including my own suspicions.

Guilty as charged here, only now starting to try to look at my suspicions from another angle.

[Rich]

Posted by rogparan (here)
My post here was moved .. ok .. it is here
Out of context I posted It !! good job ..

at least, I would like to know what wrong I did, to being pushed away

OH!...I was kind of surprised that I posted in a thread I never read...guess my post was moved too....or maybe I simply didn't notice what I was doing.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Rich (here)

Posted by rogparan (here)
My post here was moved .. ok .. it is here
Out of context I posted It !! good job ..

at least, I would like to know what wrong I did, to being pushed away

OH!...I was kind of surprised that I posted in a thread I never read...guess my post was moved too....or maybe I simply didn't notice what I was doing.

Posted by rogparan (here)
My post here was moved .. ok .. it is here
Out of context I posted It !! good job ..

at least, I would like to know what wrong I did, to being pushed away

who move my post, makes me lost confidence .. then, please ... move this too
<< -- My dog is up to bit, who cross the fence again ..

--- edit ---

I too answered a question about my post (also quoted from Ron Mauer Sr post above),
that you also move to here

this prove I post here and not there, under other thread

this is what I call a good service to "legitm integrity" of forum data discussion
thank you very much .. to move my posts out from this thread .. you're the boss

Explanation from Bill:

Yes, the posts were out of context. This new thread isn't about meditation. It's about how the global controllers (whoever they are!) might want us to take up meditation, and similar practices, simply so that we'd not be a problem to them.

The same was done in the 60s and 70s with the introduction of LSD and other drugs to the increasingly problematic American counter-culture. And very possibly, with the Laurel Canyon music industry as well, which now appears to have been at least partially a CIA operation. See this thread: (Dave McGowan was the researcher who brought all this to light)

• Dave McGowan R.I.P. Nov 22, 2015

And in particular, this compilation of Dave McGowan's long series of web articles:

• Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
  http://projectavalon.net/Weird_Scene...ve_McGowan.pdf (114 pages, 67 Mb)

The topic here is about how we might be distracted, sidelined, and marginalized, willingly buying into something that seems to be valuable, but actually merely being controlled and handled — just in another way.

[RogeRio]

please, look at the END of my post moved:

Posted by rogparan (here)

About this valued thread, I improve saying that having meditation as its mass-purpose means, these people will not come to an constructive end, because meditation its a middle way, not the end.

of course, I introduce some personal meanings about meditation, to justify ONE CONCLUSION, ON CONTEXT

I guess you all not readed the end .

i don't speak english well ... maybe neither portuguese.

[Rich]

sorry rogparan the language barrier might be the problem because I still don't understand your post. not saying that I understand the posts with good english or even my own language all the time either.

[AutumnW]

Is the "be in the moment," Ekhart Tolle movement similar or part of mindfullness? I was growing tired of that one. Corporations love this kind of thing, for sure. It's easier for them to fool slaves into blaming themselves for their conditions than taking an actual whip to them.

[Cara]

Here is a podcast interview with the author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, Ron Purser (the book mentoined in Hervé’s opening post).

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BLXGzIeh2Qw

Published on Jun 24, 2019
It seems the more mindfulness is mainstreamed, the more its claims are being questioned. Ron Purser, Professor of Management at SFSU and author of the new groundbreaking book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, has been a longtime critic of the widespread mainstreaming and overselling of mindfulness practices. He views mainstream mindfulness as an amplifier of Western consumerist individualism and a banal form of capitalist spirituality; one he claims utterly avoids cultivation of social and political transformation. Ron challenges the widely accepted narrative that stress is self-imposed and mindfulness is the cure-all, and offers ways for mindfulness delivery in healthcare and business settings to cast off its neoliberal shackles, and be redirected toward collective awakening. Ron and I have known each other for quite some time. He is erudite and engaging. I"m sure you will enjoy this stimulating, thought-provoking conversation.

Ron's website: https://www.ronpurser.com/author

Ron Purser is Professor of Management in the College of Business and the Educational Doctorate in Leadership program in the College of Education at SFSU San Francisco State University. His scholarship currently focuses on mindfulness in organizations, and how Buddhist psychology and Buddhist social theory can inform social change and transformation. In addition, Prof. Purser writings have been exploring the challenges and issues of introducing mindfulness into secular contexts, particularly with regards to its encounter with modernity, Western consumer capitalism, and individualism. Dr. Purser is an ordained Zen Dharma Teacher in the Korean Zen Taego order of Buddhism. Tarthang Tulku Time, Space, and Knowledge

[Hervé]

Objective:Health #26 - Mindfulness - Corporate Scam or Key to Nirvana

Sott.net
Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00 UTC

The term 'mindfulness' is everywhere. With celebrity endorsements from the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn, headlines featuring the latest studies with bold claims to Google employees and Davos World Economic Forum attendees, everyone is getting in on the biggest craze in consciousness since The Secret.

It's taking the world by storm, reportedly now a $4.2 trillion industry. More than 100,000 books on Amazon have a variant of "mindfulness" in the title. Besides books, there are workshops, online courses, glossy magazines, documentary films, smartphone apps, bells, cushions, bracelets, beauty products and other paraphernalia, as well as a lucrative and burgeoning conference circuit.

But does anyone know what this over-hyped and commercialized term actually means? Is there anything behind 'mindfulness', or is just another empty New Age term like spiritual, energy or karma?

On this episode of Objective: Health, we take a look at mindfulness, and discuss how it's not so black and white. We look into the origin of the term and the true practice behind what has become a tool of corporate compliance, stripped of all its original ethical and religious tenets. Join us for an enlightening discussion.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2QWDjNRl5kc

And check us out on Brighteon!

For other health-related news and more, you can find us on:

• ♥Twitter: https://twitter.com/objecthealth

• ♥Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/objecthealth/

And you can check out all of our previous shows (pre YouTube) here

Running Time: 00:56:13

Download: MP3 — 51.1 MB

[petra]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
This new thread isn't about meditation. It's about how the global controllers (whoever they are!) might want us to take up meditation, and similar practices, simply so that we'd not be a problem to them.

Makes sense to me Bill, but I suspect there's more to it. I think there's a very fine line between "Transcendental Meditation" and actual "Trance"...

Being afraid of meditation is foolish I know, but I just can't shake the idea that thought (control?) is a really big part of the so called "mind-war"