Bagpuss The Gnome:
Fitter Stoke:
"This is great--it's so much better that the meditator doesn't get stream entry. I like that he fails, and that the teacher is disappointed [...] Does this mean I am enlightened?"
That one is my favorite. Describes the Western dharma experience perfectly.
Doesn't it just? I swear at one place here in the UK the teacher would likely faint at the temerity of even suggesting stream entry as a serious goal!

If the comment had said, "I like that he fails, and that the teacher is happy," it would have been a perfect fit.
I used to sit with a group of people at someone's house nearby. They were all very nice, and the couple who owned the place was gracious enough to allow people, some of them strangers, to use their home as a practice space for a full day of silent meditation. And so I would try to remind myself of this, over and over, when the spirit of defeatism was especially thick, which it often was.
Everyone was really sickly looking: pale to the point of being translucent. And at the end, when it was time to share the results of the day's practice, there were nothing but reports of being tired, being sad, being defeated, and being "okay" with all of that.
I'm not proud of this, but when it was my turn to share, I would just lie and say, "Nothing really to report. It was great to share today with you all. Namaste," even if I had just accessed whatever jhanas and gotten a fruition so strong it nearly picked me up off the cushion.
The guy running it once said, "We've all been doing this for years now, and we know we're not going to see anything new" - and he said it as something positive. I'm almost certain no one in the room was above the A&P.
The culture is really about celebrating being frail, celebrating sucking, celebrating failure. I saw the same thing at a major retreat center (a center which I'm sure all these people have been to many times). If you come out and say, "I did these practices like this, these were the results, I got into these states, and I've passed through these stages," you're going to be ostracized. Anything other than, "I failed, and that's super," is going to be treated as suspect.
For some reason I was under the impression that things were not this bad in the UK.