Woo
"Woo" is any of the nonsense that surrounds meditation. Things like chakras and energy and the "law" of attraction. Also anything involving an afterlife or spirits (including angels/demons) of any kind.
I don't really care what people believe and I get that that stuff can make an unawakened "human" feel better. My primary objection is that it's a distraction from reality and ultimately people are better off focusing on NOW rather than an afterlife and they're better off focusing on verifiable things rather than wishful thinking.
TODO: Make this into something...
Any woo is too much woo. Humans LOVE stories and it's really important that they stick with true stories. If you give them woo they start telling woo stories and get distracted from reality.
2019-04-13: Finished the main book yesterday and the Afterward today. A lot of good stuff here but there was some woo and some dogma mixed in. Why do people think the woo is necessary? Buddha doesn't need magic elephant stopping powers. He just needs to be the totally normal human who figured some things out and taught some others and they taught and someone wrote it down and eventually we read it and BOOM! No magic needed.
All awakening is is a tiny shift in perception. It's waking up to reality by learning to ignore the stories we tell ourselves. It's learning that there is only now. It's learning to be here now. It's not magic. No deities needed. No spirits or magic energy. Just be, here, now. And doing that shifts your whole perspective. You see that the person making you miserable is you. Yeah, other people might be dicks and they might treat you bad but they can't get inside your head unless you let them in. Not even that, you have to BRING them in. But we do that all the time because we don't know any better.
We're story machines. We tell stories and we believe them. Other people tell stories and we believe them. Meditation is how you practice letting go of stories. You watch your breath and a thought pops up. Where did that come from. Did you choose to have that thought? Nope, it just showed up. You watch your breath and a feeling arrives. Did you choose to feel that? Nope, it just showed up. What's up with that? It's YOUR head, right? And you're in control, right? Nope.
You're just a story. The reality is that you are a bunch of stuff that runs in your subconscious. A bunch of instincts pushing you to stay alive and mate. That's all that's down at the bottom, stay alive and mate. But then humans got smarter and they came up with complicated social structures that enabled mass cooperation because cooperation makes survival and mating more likely. So they developed a new layer of instincts to handle all the complicated social stories and a big part of the new layers job is stories. Stories that you can tell others about why you're so useful and why they should keep you around. And your "instincts" tell you a story about you, and you believe it. It's a story about how "you" are a single entity that lives in your head and observes the world and makes rational decisions. But your instincts don't care if the story makes you happy, they only care if you survive and mate.