Excellent points!
You missed a major point that self-proclaimed self-help McMeditators also fail to reveal: Anatta — a doctrine of “non-self”, that there is no unchanging, permanent soul in living beings.
When one recognizes a lack of inherently existing self to help then a next logical conclusion is helping others while practicing compassion — a word meaning “suffering with” via Latin.
Anattā doctrine denies that there is anything called a ‘Self’ in any person or anything else, and that a belief in ‘Self’ is a source of Dukkha (suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness)
This is an ancient idea from the Orient. It has recently, however, quietly crept into Occidental schools of thought.
But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality — and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You — the physical person as a whole — look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others. Whenever the organism needs this tool, the brain activates a [phenomenal self model] PSM. If — as, for instance, in dreamless deep sleep — the tool is not needed anymore, it is turned off. It must be emphasized that although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel.
from “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” by Thomas Metzinger http://amzn.to/2aee741
