While I certainly agree that we should not take ourselves too important and everybody is in need of more humility, however humility and “being one with the universe” through meditation is also a man-made concept, not less faulty than others.

There are some conceptual statements that I do not agree with:

“When people try to force their imaginings onto the world, bad things happen. Nature doesn’t even fight back; it just functions in its way. When we lose harmony with it, we suffer.”

I see some Rousseau in there, the idea that going back to nature and live with nature in harmony as the only way to be happy is a few centuries old. It is a fallacy to believe in the anthropomorphised “harmony” of nature, there is no such thing. Nature is about survival, every biologist will tell you that. If some species breaks out of the “harmony” of their eco-system, sometimes they made a mistake and die out, most of the time a new eco-system evolves around them, until things change again for better or worse for individual species. There is no perfect clockwork, no higher harmony, no eternal balance and definitively no imaginable state where there is no suffering or imperfection.

“Humanism is appealing only from the false perspective that puts humans at the top of the enlightenment chain.”

Well, I do not agree there but I can see you point. The fact is, that humanity as a whole constitutes the highest form of enlightenment, or intelligence, or computational power, that we know about in our observable universe. Are we humans a finished project? Of course not. We still have to evolve and to strive to be ever more and better than we are now. I might argue that we are on the “top” of the enlightenment chain now compared to everything else we know about in the universe. These caveats take into the time constant (there might be higher forms of enlightenment in future times) as well as our own ignorance (there might be other things in the universe we don’t know about yet).

“This is the lesson of meditation: we are all nothing. In being nothing, we are as vast as the universe itself.”

This sentence is non-sensical. What does it mean? The essense of nothing is devoid of anything, so we cannot be nothing, as well as our universe is not nothing, by the definition that it is something. This statement is a hopeless mystification of the human condition, the old “being one with the universe” metaphor. You are one with the universe because you are a product of its laws. Even if our universe is just a simulation, which is more probable than not.

Then again, I do understand the spiritual appeal and cannot claim that at times, I was also susceptible to this kind of thinking. It has some unification-appeal to understanding our complex universe and ourselves, and this “concept” however irrational, is appeasing for the mind. It tells our mind to not occupy with this problem anymore, and we might feel at peace because of the reduced analytical strain on our brain. But that is physiology, not transcendance.

So is meditation, in it’s essence, a method to appease an ever inquisive mind with concepts to unify the un-unifyable. And many take that leap and behold it as truth or transcendence, because it is so much more comfortable to have your mind at peace than struggle.

Real transcendence would come from mastering reality, not just one’s own feeling of discomfort.