Problems of Decontextualising the Eight Fold Path

Absolutely!

Thank you Dogo Barry Graham for expressing an explanation so well, almost like a “koan” of our times. Several months ago, reflecting on the apparent conflicting results of “mindfulness meditation” in scholarly literature, I was tempted to conduct my own meta analysis and put forth this argument that you posted here, but that work remained unfinished.

There are two sides to the story. On the one hand, there are followers who follow the “secular” meditation process, bereft of its deeper underpinning of the eightfold paths, on the other hand, there are practitioners who stress that you can just take out just two “folds” of the eightfold way and you will be alright.

Problems of decontextualising a the whole into parts.