The author was practicing a specific kind of Buddhist meditation while at a 2-week meditation seminar. It sounds like he was meditating most of his waking hours?
This is not about “mindfulness” as you probably think of it.
One should meditate always, also also during their sleep. let alone while doing chores, walking and talking. Formal sitting meditation is just a minor part.
this is taking the advice literally IMHO. Most of the time you end up being in a calm and attentive state of mind where you are focusing on the present.
Good for you. Most of the time I don't. Being particularly prone to daydreaming (or deep unconscious though productive hyperfocused flow state at best) and having attention problems is what got me interested with the subject in the first place.
Not sure about during sleep, but meditation is nothing else then to life and think in the present, give your brain a task and focus just on that, then the next one. If you go into the future or past do it intended.
Not really. It is important to maintain conscious. When you simply "focus on just that" you may then just wake up once the task is complete and find out you've went through it automatically like if it was a [non-lucid] dream.
As about meditating while sleeping - I have not explored this part enough. Renowned Dzogchen teachers Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche have books on this subject. A Zen teacher quoted by Alan Watts also said "when you are hungry - eat, when you are tired - sleep" and explained that ordinary people don't actually follow this as they think about countless things while eating and see countless dreams while sleeping. If we go slightly farther than secular mindfulness dares to go and consider the Buddhist religious goal of after-death liberation, they say "dream yoga is not an essential part of practice, but how do you expect to stay conscious in death if you can't even stay conscious in sleeping"?
As for me, I consider unmindfullness a voluntary death, throwing parts of the life time you have been given (by the G-d, or figuratively - whatever you prefer to believe, this doesn't change the matter) away. You only live and actually own/use your time when mindful. When you are not it just disappears. AFAIK even Immanuel Kant believed something like this.
Why? Now I'm here and enjoy the moment. Now I'm not and the body just lives on its own doing it's job like a robot could when I could be dead and not mindful of anything. A minute is gone. To me this seems rather simple. Perhaps my verbal abilities are not enough to explain.
Once, as a schoolboy, I've heard about Buddhists who train to always stay consciousness while living, talking and whatever, I considered this amazing and have then progresses from 80% daydreaming an 19% struggling life to some way more (although still very far from 100%) present, more mine and more happy.
Well, you appear to be telling others that their lives and experiences have no value without mindfulness.
You also seem to be telling us that the only way you feel your life experience has any value is through this thing also, that your own experience is hollow or even non-existent without it. That seems somewhat extreme.
I would make the same comment to (for instance) someone telling us that they live every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no meaning.
"Being with Jesus" is a rather vague concept which. Different people may understand it differently. Often it even is primitivized to just attributing yourself to a church.
What I am telling, however, is a simple difference between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and living in awake state. Let's take it to the extreme: imagine you were given a choice to spend the rest of your life in deep sleep (the kind you can't remember dreams after) and wake up just minutes before die. Would you agree? Would you consider such life making much sense or value to you? I wouldn't. To me it seems almost the same as dying straight away.
In fact Christianity includes the doctrine of Nepsis which is very much related to this (although many people believe it only means avoiding alcohol).
> "Being with Jesus" is a rather vague concept which. Different people may understand it differently.
Which is why I said if someone tells me that "they live every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no meaning."
> What I am telling, however, is a simple difference between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and living in awake state.
Do you not see how judgemental that appears, that unless people join in with your special thing they are effectively automata, asleep, may as well be dead?
I'm glad you have found benefit in your path through life, but I'm not sure one should assume that yours is the only valuable way to live, or indeed the only way to actually 'live'.
I believe I get your point now, hopefully you will understand mine.
Looking from the outside, from the practical (economical) point of view the value/meaning of a unit does not depend on whether it is conscious or not - it just does the same job. Somebody probably can replace me with a future version of GPT3 once and not even my mom will notice (as she lives in a different country and my job also is writing e-mails).
Looking from the outside, from the moral, empathetic and spiritual points of view (although devotees of some cults will argue), and from my own actual view all lives are absolutely equally valuable and meaningful. I really feel and see this way, not because this is a moral or religious law.
I don't judge anybody based on anything, let alone on how mindful their are. I even go further and believe no criminal is actually a wicked person - they just feel and act the ways they do because they are not mindful about how bad (and conditioned) their actions are and how they could avoid them. In many cases this even is a scientific fact.
Looking from the inside, however, I indeed believe I enjoy more value out of my life if I am more awake, conscious for longer and more frequent periods of time. Simply saying it's not worth to pay for ticket and go to a cinema if you are deadly tired and will most probably fall asleep there anyway. One night on a vacation I got terribly drunk. The next morning we went to a museum and that was a waste because I could barely stand on my feet fighting drowsiness - there could be no paintings on the walls and I would not notice. The day passed as if there were no such day, I've got nothing but the next number on the calendar.
Do you understand what I mean? It absolutely isn't my goal to argue the hell out of us or convince you people with ADHD (like myself) are worthless, I only keep writing to make sure what I wrote is understood correctly (not necessarily agreed with).
I understand that's how you feel, that without meditation and mindfulness you do not feel fully awake and 'conscious', though I suspect what you mean by 'conscious' is different to what I might mean. I am glad you've found something that increases your enjoyment and appreciation of your life.
I enjoy and appreciate mine, too.
And hopefully we all learn pretty quickly that drinking too much can utterly ruin the next day....
Well, to me, the semantic definition of being conscious is simply to be awake, rather than asleep, insensible, anaesthetised, blacked out or whatever else.
You seem to have a slightly different definition, I think, based on these remarks -
"It is important to maintain conscious"
"I've heard about Buddhists who train to always stay consciousness while living, talking and whatever,"
"I enjoy more value out of my life if I am more awake, conscious for longer and more frequent periods of time"
I maintain consciousness whenever I am awake, because that's what being awake is, as far as I understand the word. The second quote, well being conscious is a pre-requisite for me talking (unless you count mumbling in my sleep, which does happen).
And I don't think in that last quote you're talking about deliberate sleep deprivation so you can be awake longer (you could be?).
It just made me think you were not using the word in the same sense I would. Do you think it's possible to be awake (i.e. not asleep) without necessarily being conscious? If so that would just confirm we have different definitions of that word.
I could be wrong.
(And I don't especially want to direct this conversation towards "what really is consciousness?" because it's a very slippery eel of a topic)
I see. Thank you for the explanation. Indeed, we mean slightly different things.
Have you ever (I would be surprised if you never ever had, but perhaps this doesn't happen to you often) went outdoors and then suddenly started wondering if you have turnt off the stove/iron, locked the door and taken the key with you? This happens to me every day because I always exit "unconsciously" in the meaning of the word I intended. When we go together with my wife she would ask me "have you taken the key"? I respond "yes" automatically (here I am speaking but "unconsciously") because such is the habit and I am "daydreaming" ("unconscious" as I label it) at the moment, we lock the door (it locks itself when closed) and then I always feel a boost of adrenaline (in such a degree I have even started taking beta-blockers as this caused heart ache) and think "have I? bloody hell! I probably haven't, we will have to call a locksmith, wait an hour and pay $100 to get back in" (and occasionally this turns out to be the case). Then I become "conscious" and tell myself it's not a big deal, whatever, check the pockets calmly (usually finding the key) and go on. The very phenomenon of such strong anxiety at the moment itself takes place because I still am not really "conscious" at it (if I were I wold understand it's not a big deal). This wouldn't occur if I were leaving the home "consciously". I could put a huge red "wake up" sign on the inside of my door but I know I will get used to it soon and it will stop working.
The "doorway effect" has even gotten some scientific recognition recently[1].
Another example of unconscious speaking is when I am reading or writing something and somebody talks to me - I get less than 30% of what they say and "consciously" answer "yes" to everything then have no idea what did I agree with (and often can't even remember I said anything). And this is not intentional behaviour - they started when I was reading and I was not "conscious" enough to make a "conscious decision" (I tend to believe this phrase is pretty standard English) and switching to just listening them.
The doorway effect is fascinating. I don't tend to experience worry on leaving the house as you describe (I know many do), but I certainly walk into rooms and forget why I'm there.
I would talk about the issues you raise more as issues of attention, focus and division of attention, than whether one is conscious or not.
Though semantically of course I agree that there is overlap between being conscious of something, of your surroundings, of other people, of your actions etc. When someone says just "being conscious" without a particular object, I think of something different. Language is a funny, imprecise and overloaded thing.
I feel like "awareness" might be a good term to describe what they are meaning by "conscious"
I think they mean conscious as in "to be conscious of", for example: I exited my house while daydreaming/thinking about other things, so I was not "conscious of" the fact that I did not bring my keys with me aka I did not have awareness or was not operating in the moment/mindfully because my mind was elsewhere
I think they're attempting to describe the difference between being present/aware of every moment we experience, vs. a habitual 'autopilot state' that we can find ourselves in (the phenomena of driving somewhere and then not even remembering the drive there, for instance) where we're really not aware of what's going on in our lives, because the mundane things are so habitual that we don't even need to be fully aware of what we're doing to do it - but that alternatively, choosing and teaching ourselves to be aware at all times, even during our mundane, habitual routines, is potentially a better way to exist
Exactly. The only problem with this explanation is "daydreaming/thinking about other things" doesn't really imply "my mind was elsewhere" it often is "nowhere" in these terms. Oftentimes I'm not unaware of something just because I concentrated my full awareness on something else, I may be completely unaware of one thing (I should have been concentrated at) and just slightly aware (like of in an ordinary non-lucid dream) of the other I've been distracted to. Or this can even be just one thing I'm concentrated at (and not thinking about anything else) yet not really aware of it (this happens often when reading (it harms retaining then), writing (making stupid mistakes), speaking (making you say things and make sounds you wouldn't want to), watching TV or, if you kindly excuse, nose picking). Whenever I am doing a pleasant activity (like just doing nothing or watching a TV show) I force myself (with partial success) to be aware of every moment of it so I actually enjoy it rather than fall into a sort of a hypnotic state and "wake up" once it is over. This improved my life a lot and I would hardly learn to do so without a clue from the Buddhists.
Thank you for your reply- I know what you mean by "nowhere"- and actually that's a good way to put it. I was having a hard time articulating that myself but I agree- often my mind is "nowhere" instead of "elsewhere".
Being mindful and doing nothing is still doing nothing.
You should be doing measurable work, otherwise your minute is gone, and it's just as gone whether you're mindful during that time or not. You still changed nothing, and you can't backtrack to tell if you were doing nothing or being mindful while doing nothing.
This is a matter of philosophy, your "world view". AFAIK Buddhists don't believe you have to change anything or even pursue a happy state. As for me at this phase of my development being mindfully happy (and not hypnotized happy like under narcotics or in a pleasant dream) makes the most sense (and happiness often comes when you do anything mindfully - AFAIK this is called "sukha"). And in fact this is not useless even from a practical (economical) point of view - this is genuine recreation letting you take the most out of your resting (and even doing chores) which makes you more stable and efficient after that.
If one does not, they end up with [often undiagnosed] mental health problems anyway. Everything is dangerous, you just should try your best to do it the right way under supervision of a qualified person and stop if it goes wrong.
> This is not what is being promoted by the mindfulness/buddhism-lite industry
Every industry is corrupt. But if you are lucky and smart enough you can actually get away with something good for you.
Out of curiosity, I have even attended a course in extrasensory abilities once. Paradoxically, besides some useful self-regulation and some trance-based techniques they also taught observing your thoughts and feelings detachedly and taking them critically which has boosted my rationality and helped me so many times. And good for them, they were pretty serious about making sure people with mental issues are not allowed to participate. Sadly most of the industry don't care.
> This appears to contradict "One should meditate always"
Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods of time in the beginning. You just do your best to awaken from unconscious daydreaming and stay conscious as often and for as long as you comfortably can. If you try and immediately find out you actually can (although not necessarily comfortably) maintain undisturbed conscious concentration for long periods of time you should go to a doctor or a Buddhist teacher experienced in meditation techniques and things which happen to people on this way. Choosing the latter absolutely doesn't imply you have to take the religion and believe in their saints - you only really need the psychotechnical (and the philosophical maybe) guidance.
I think that's the point of the article, though not just about people participating who have mental conditions - most of the industry does not care about the potential negatives.
> Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods of time in the beginning.
I don't think this is really the issue here, the issue is that doing so seems to have the potential to cause (or at least trigger) mental health problems for some practitioners, and the advice to just "do it more and practice better" when distressed is specifically called out as harmful.
I'm still on the theory that this person already has some problems.
He says he has no history of mental illnesses (except for mild anxiety and depression), but that what provoked him to pursue meditation was a bar fight that began with vague details around jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment.
> Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life.
I'm not sure that makes sense to me at all, and the overly romantic prose doesn't help with credibility.
> The terrain of fractured, disruptive and altered states of consciousness has often been explored in Buddhist teachings through the centuries, but when these practices made their journey into Western culture, a sufficient understanding of the downsides of meditation was lost in transit.
Why would one go on a serious retreat not led by a real Buddhist teacher? Is there a shortage of geshes already?
Buddhism is not a religion per se. I’m sure there are cults around it, but as Dalai Lama put it: if science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change. Good luck finding that sentiment in any actual religion.
If you require more proof, make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”.
> make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”
Seriously? Buddha-nature teachings are regarded as heretical by many Buddhists. They assert that all beings have this buddha-nature innately, and that it is indestructible, because it does not arise dependent on causes and conditions.
That is very much a religious view, and in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes and conditions.
Regarding anything as heretical is a religious view. Discard it and check yourself through experiential practice and logical exercise. There are many Buddhist/Bön teachers who will never insist on you accepting any idea/dogma nor judge you for thinking different and only guide you to how to actually see it, without harming yourself. Needless to say, as a rather-rational thinker, this is the kind of gurus I prefer. Orthodox dogmatists are there for a different kind of minds. People are different and there are to be ways and teachers optimal for all kinds of them.
> Discard it and check yourself through experiential practice and logical exercise.
Discard what? I have said elsewhere in this thread that I am a lapsed Buddhist. I hold no religious dogmas. It's not me that considers buddha-nature teachings to be heretical.
And what are "experiential practice" and "logical exercise"? These sound like some kind of private jargon you are using to support your "rather-rational" approach.
I mean you don't have to agree to dogmatic and mystical parts of what a practitioner teaches to still consider and use some techniques and/or philosophical ideas you can also find in their teachings.
Experiential practice is when you do something and experience the result. Rub your hands and feel warmth appear - this is an experiential practice of experiencing warmth in your hands. Meditating a certain way you can experience a particular state of mind. This is important because some things are either impossible or useless to describe - you have to experience them and a particular practice may trigger the experience.
Logical exercise is when you exercise logic and come to conclusions.
> They assert that all beings have this buddha-nature innately, and that it is indestructible, because it does not arise dependent on causes and conditions
Yes.
> in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes and conditions
With all due respect, make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”.
Studying koans is not a very good way of gaining understanding of something like Buddha Nature; they're designed to create confusion. I wasn't in a Zen tradition, and I'm no longer a Buddhist; I appreciate your respect, but I'm not about to start trying to figure out koans. [Edit: aren't you supposed to have a master, when you're working with koans?]
Note that I'm not declaring Buddha Nature teachings to be heretical; in general, I think the really deep divisions between the various Buddhist philosophical positions were (are?) more political than anything else, and I've never considered them important.
I've studied both the Uttaratantra and the Uttaratantrashastra, under the direction of a western academic who specialized in the subject (and also happens to be an ordained Buddhist nun). I've also done meditation practices designed to deepen understanding of Yogacara-style thought. I think I have a reasonably good understanding of the subject, for a lazy, lay practitioner.
The accusation of heresy is because it's very easy to misinterpret Tathagatagarbha teachings as monism.
> aren't you supposed to have a master, when you're working with koans?
Buddha is my master, teacher and guide, etc. This is all sorts of hilarious from a Zen perspective; interpreting Tathagatagarbha as monism, or Buddha as anything, heh.
“A teacher when one is required, no teacher when one is not required,“ or something like that. :) The Buddha is an existence proof of the possibility of direct independent observation and understanding.
Rarity is a matter of perception — at the time of the Teaching, the population of the world was a hundred times smaller. Oddity can be attested to, but what was once a rarity is now a minority statistic. As much as the population has multiplied, the number of pratyekabuddhas must have risen in tandem: to suggest otherwise would be to assign pratyekabuddhahood to external entities or mechanisms as something bestowed upon someone, but as it is, pratyekabuddhas arise independently — were that not the case, would they still be pratyekabuddhas?
> if science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change. Good luck finding that sentiment in any actual religion.
This is actually not that uncommon, despite some popular image problems.
For example, catholicism has a long history of scientific thought being used to change the common understanding of their scriptures. Even the infamous treatment of Galileo's asssertions about the Earth moving around the sun were more a question of scientific debate and politics than any religious dogmatism: a lot of powerful people in the church simply considered the heliocentric model better science and a settled matter, and used their political power to silence opponents.
In fact, today most christian churches regard the scientific understanding of the world (big bang theory, evolution, geological times etc) as correct, and consider the biblical accounts to be metaphors and reflective of a deeper truth about God's involvement in creation. I believe the same holds true for most muslims, though I am not sure; and I have no idea if it does or not in hinduism. Young Earth creationists and other groups taking the bible as literal truth (6000 year old earth, literal 6 days of creation etc) are a small but vocal minority.
> a lot of powerful people in the church simply considered the heliocentric model better science and a settled matter, and used their political power to silence opponents
It's good to remember that human nature hasn't changed and the same thing is almost certainly happening today too.
There are many types of Buddhism, and some types are definitely very religious.
Take Pure Land Buddhism[1][2], for example, one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan, believers of which essentially pray to the Buddha for salvation and hope to be reborn in a heavenly land. It has some interesting similarities to Christianity.
Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia has many magical, "superstitious" components, like believing that a red string connected to a statue of the Buddha can transfer magical power from the Buddha to what the string is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the time for protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists believe in magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist monks or that a Buddhist funeral would bring an auspicious rebirth.
Speaking of rebirth, the belief in reincarnation (which is central to most forms of Buddhism) is certainly religious in nature. Same with the belief in karma.
Also, one reason that Buddhism has been so successful around the world is that it can co-exist with and even absorb local religions to such an extent that many people who consider themselves Buddhists still believe in all sorts of gods, demons, or spirits, and for them Buddhism is not seperable from such beliefs.
It's only certain types of Buddhism in certain contexts which have been desacralized.
"as Dalai Lama put it: if science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change"
He might have said it but I'm skeptical as to just how much change he'd be willing to subject his version of Buddhism to.
Anyway, the Dali Lama is a representative of just one form of Buddhism: Tibetan Buddhism, which is far from representative of Buddhism as a whole, and one that's pretty far from being secular compared to, say, Zen or Chan.
Even when focusing on just the more secular forms of Buddhism, at what point does veneration of the Buddha become worship? Is faith in the effectiveness of the Eightfold Path, the Buddha, and the Sangha all that different from Christian faith in God or in the effectiveness of works, faith, or grace (depending on one's denomination) in being saved?
There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners, but if you look at how Buddhism is actually practiced in the places where it came from before it got to the West it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
> Speaking of rebirth, the belief in reincarnation (which is central to most forms of Buddhism) is certainly religious in nature. Same with the belief in karma.
By the way, it is worth mentioning, not all Buddhist take this literally. Alan Watts told there were some Buddhists, understanding kind of like this (in my own words, I can't find the original quote now):
At any given moment you are never the same person you were in the previous. Your personality changes, your body atoms get replaced with new ones. The past you is already in the past. Today you are distinct from yesterday you. You are reincarnating right now. Like an immutable value in functional programming can never be changed, you can (or you can't, this depends on the programming language) just assign a similar value derived from it with some change applied to the same identifier. So if you practiced well, the future you (in this life time from the conventional point of view) is a reincarnation of you which will reap the fruits of "good karma" (karma being just the causes (mostly mental) causing you to behave a certain way and get into certain situations because of this - nothing mystical). And the fruits are there: even if good doings fail (not necessarily) to lead you to good health and financial prosperity, mental practice results are here to greatly help you cope with any problems you face and also to help you behave in a more constructive way.
> Is faith in the effectiveness of the Eightfold Path, the Buddha, and the Sangha all that different from Christian faith in God
Unlike the Christian G-d, the Buddha does not judge, does not punish, does not forgive and has not died in tortures for your sins, this way enabling priests demand you feel guilty. AFAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal, not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to punishment.
> Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia has many magical, "superstitious" components, like believing that a red string connected to a statue of the Buddha can transfer magical power from the Buddha to what the string is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the time for protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists believe in magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist monks or that a Buddhist funeral would bring an auspicious rebirth.
> There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners, but if you look at how Buddhism is actually practiced in the places where it came from before it got to the West it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we have been born in the west and given highest monastic kinds of Buddhism right away instead of being born in a Buddhist country where only (mostly) monks can pursue enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and magick. I know a monk would probably laugh at this and tell I don't understand the point and I believe I know why, nevertheless I won't deny such an idea visits me occasionally.
"Unlike the Christian G-d, the Buddha does not judge, does not punish, does not forgive and has not died in tortures for your sins, this way enabling priests demand you feel guilty."
The gods are not the same, but the faith seems very similar to me.
What is the difference between a Pure Land Buddhist believing chanting the nenbutsu[1] ("I take refuge in the Buddha of Inconceivable Light!") in order to get in to ensure rebirth in to Amitabha's pure land and a Christian saying they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior in order to get in to heaven?
Not much, from what I can see.
Even in the more secular forms of Buddhism, Buddhists regularly follow the precepts, take refuge in the dharma, Buddha, and Sangha because they believe it'll get them to enlightenment. And some believe "just sitting" for 20 years or whatever will make them enlightened.
Interestingly, some forms of Buddhism preach that one should not be so goal-oriented and should "just sit" without reason or expectation. That also sounds not very different from blind faith to me, where the believer is encouraged to throw reason out the window and "just believe" or "just do" (whatever the religious authorities tell them to).
"FAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal, not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to punishment."
Well, the "punishment" in the case of Buddhism is supposedly just the iron law of karma and rebirth in to the world of suffering. It's not meted out by a god in Buddhism's case, but it still serves as a very effective stick on the Buddhist faithful.
"Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we have been born in the west and given highest monastic kinds of Buddhism right away instead of being born in a Buddhist country where only (mostly) monks can pursue enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and magick."
Is secular Buddhism the highest kind? Just as in any major religion, there is great disagreement among the various Buddhist traditions as to which is the truer Buddhism. Many of these branches don't accept each other's most sacred texts as being as authentic or as important as their own, which preach radically different understandings of the Buddha's teachings.
One of them really might be more authentic, and everybody's got their own opinion on that, but ultimately who's to say?
Buddha didn't teach rebirth. He didn't teach any metaphysics at all. Karma and rebirth were simply the sea in which The Buddha and his followers were swimming.
Having said that, it's hard to make sense of a lot of Buddhist teaching without karma and rebirth.
In the tradition that I followed, they said that experience was momentary (like, atomic); and the moments were separated by 'gaps'. Realisation was to be found in these gaps. In a way, that is like dying after every moment.
This was a tradition that venerated Padmasambhava, the composer of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; which highlights the opportunities for realisation in the gap between two lives.
Interestingly, these gaps also contain extreme terror, which you experience without the stabilising influence of a body. The TBOTD describes these terrors in a lot of detail.
The Dream Yoga is another way of exploring these gaps.
It was explained to me that the following are indispensable parts of Buddhist practice:
- Devotion
- Loving kindness
- Morality
- Generosity
I'm not saying that these kinds of things define religion; but there are few systems of thought that include these things, that don't also include supernatural beings.
It's hard to argue that Buddhism isn't a religion. It's certainly possible to construct something that's derived from Buddhism that isn't religious; but I don't think that's Buddhism.
/me not religious, nor Buddhist (any more), and now much more contented.
> How do you tell a real Buddhist teacher from a fake one?
This is notoriously difficult. Buddhist teachers are extremely reluctant to criticise one another; you won't get a straight answer if you ask "Should I go on a retreat with teacher X?". Ultimately you have to rely on your own intuition, which makes it a bit of a game of dice.
> What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?
Good luck finding a secular meditation tradition with more than about 20 years of accumulated knowledge underlying it. Find a real teacher with a lineage; if your inclination is secular, discount the religious elements of the teaching you receive.
A secular mindfulness teacher has no lineage support-structure to support their teaching activity. And generally, they don't have the experience and insight that comes from practising a wide variety of techniques in addition to mindfulness.
Vipassana has been mentioned, in the article, and here in comments. Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you have a self is itself a mark of psychosis. Vipassana is a form of mindfulness; but it's a big mistake to think that Vipassana practice can be secular. It's entirely founded on the (religious) view that belief in an independent self is the root of "suffering".
"Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you have a self is itself a mark of psychosis."
This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology.
If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already there). But according to mainstream Western psychology you're mentally ill.
In Western psychiatry, the loss of a sense of self is dissociation, and is a mark of psychosis (to diagnose psychosis, you'd need some other marks, especially delusions or hallucinations).
I was over-simplifying when I said "destroying the belief that you have an independent self" - the cause of suffering is attachment to the sense of an independent self. Attachment in general is seen as a cause of suffering, but attachment to the sense of self is the hardest attachment to get rid of.
The term "ego" is used in Western discourse about Buddhism, as a cipher for the attachment to the sense of self. That is not what is meant by "ego" in Freudian or Jungian psychiatry (basically, the focus of consciousness). I wish Western Buddhists would stop using that word.
Western psychiatry doesn't pretend to address anything like the state of nirvana. It's mainly concerned with curing pathological conditions. I don't think any reputable psychotherapy traditions propose to take you any further than a condition of being free of the most-obvious kinds of hang-ups (Jung and his followers might be exceptions - I'm not sure - Jung's views were very expansive).
The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.
> The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.
By the way, why does is not? What do you mean under Western psychology at all? Freud and Jung? If so, is it a mere incoincidence the models of the mind they invented are different from that of Abidharma or did they sort of look on the object from different angles?
When trying to model a mind there are obvious elements everybody can note (can they?): the mood, the memories, the focus of the attention, the sense of self, rational logic, computational intelligence, slow and fast decision functions, self-control, compassion, random thoughts popping up and making mental noise, attitude, instincts (like fear, jealousy, arousal, etc), probably some other. Why do different thinkers come up with different models?
Well, Western psychology purports to be "science". That means that results have to be replicable, testable, and observable. The Abhidharma was created by meditators, for meditators. Those people were not constrained by scientific method.
Some of the stuff in the Abhidharma reflects teachings of the Buddha; but most of it was constructed by monks, after the Buddha's death.
I don't know of anyother models of mind, other than Western psychology and Abhidharma. There must be other models; I'd be surprised if Vedanta, for example, didn't incorporate a model of the mind.
I suppose the dominant model of mind in a society reflects the preocccupations of that society.
"Western psychology purports to be "science". That means that results have to be replicable, testable, and observable."
Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the testability criterion was seen as inadequate and was replaced a while back with falsifiability[1], but even that has its own problems.
String theory's claims are supposedly untestable. Is it not a science?
I'm not a physicist, but I've heard there are cloud chamber experiments for which the only observer is the physicist performing the experiment, and are not reproduceable and yet are published in physics journals all the time.
That's not to mention that while many experiments are in principle reproduceable, in practice they usually don't get reproduced, and even if they were reproduced at one point they're not going to be continuously reproduced over and over again by each researcher (who has not the time, education, budget, or interest to reproduce every experiment they've ever read and not yet read but that is still an accepted part of the overall body of scientific knowledge).
Science, just like pretty much every other human cooperative endeavor, largely runs on trust... trust that what one reads and learns is mostly accurate. As skeptical as they make themselves out to be most scientists just don't run out and try to replicate every experiment under the sun or every a large fraction of them. They just trust the results they read are more or less accurate, or expect someone else to catch them.
Back to Western psychology. Some branches of it (like the Cognitive/Behaviorist branches) do purport to be more "scientific", but others like Freudian, Jungian, Humanistic, and Existential and Transpersonal psychology (not to mention art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, somatic therapy, life regression therapy, etc) aren't so big on the "science" bit, and aren't so interested in experiments or the scientific method at all.
I'd say one should judge by other symptoms: what emotions does the patient experience and how do they behave. If the patient is depressed, apathetic and/or persistently euphoric, walks naked in the middle of a city, ignores his chores or attacks people "because they are illusory and the hand isn't even mine so why not" that's an illness. If he behaves like an reasonable compassionate person and seems happy that's good - a reasonable degree of dissociation can actually make a person better, happier and more stable mentally.
Simplifying I'd conclude that this is not a binary but an spectral phenomenon: there are 2, both undesirable, poles of extremity and a harmonious middle. Naturally/culturally people are more inclined to self-association and a slight shift to the opposite generally is desirable. Dissociate from your mind but don't in a degree when you loose it.
I am not a teacher. I have practiced irregular Soto sitting for many years. I do occasional and informal reading of Buddhist texts.
By inspection (eg. sitting, paying attention, etc!), I discovered that we both do and do not have an independent self, at the very same time. They form a non-dual—-each arises in the combination of both and are mixed together in a way that trying to fix the boundary between them is folly.
I believe it is a major error to practice with the objective or possibility of annihilating the self. The self is an observable phenomenon. To reject it is crazy, as crazy as rejecting non-self.
IMHO a major milestone in practice is to grasp deeply the reality of non-duals, and leave behind the attachment to a dualistic belief in the self. This is nothing like annihilation.
As I became less desperately invested in a simplistic sovereign concept of self, my “self” became more confident, natural and wild. It's not going anywhere!
An unkind sentiment. Every individual is unique, and some can stomach challenges that would make others fall to their knees. It's our different strengths and weaknesses that make us.
While terse, the sentiment was to highlight that maybe it isn't swimming that is the issue at hand here. It's swimming the english channel every day.
A normal activity that when pushed to the limits of endurance, can overwhelm an individual. But that doesn't necessarily make swimming or meditation something to be feared or avoided.
As with many other types of exercise, practitioners are bound to have injuries. I'd even say the injuries the author suffered are equivalent to breaking a leg while running.
This is the take away for me:
> "I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health. "
While most people are safe --most of us struggle to keep a 30-min daily meditation practice- there is also a lesson to be learned: there is no such thing as a free, harmless lunch.
If someone spends one or two entire days doing little more than eating, and then has a horribly unpleasant night, I don't think that disproves the free harmless lunch.
Well, perhaps you haven't read the article; the OP is saying that meditation is dangerous, and that meditation teachers don't warn you of the dangers. Isn't that the opposite of your "take away"?
It is a verbatim copy from the article, somewhat hidden in one of the last paragraphs (perhaps you didn't read the whole article? sorry could not resist!). Which was kind of surprising given the previous content, but it makes sense.
This is needlessly dismissive and condescending. It's like saying "Congrats, you failed running a marathon" to someone who suffers an injury after 20 kilometers.
Since this is a long article, here’s a summary for fellow readers — it’s mostly about the negative side effects of meditation that the author believes is under-documented or under-reported due to the ‘hype’ of meditation as the 21st century cure-all. He talks about dissociative experiences (which is well documented in medical research), it being a pseudo-religion, and lastly, his belief that the extended use of meditation is the ‘opposite’ of stoicism in the way that it can render a person not less, but more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one of a traffic jam. He also attempts to make a biological argument on how this works by invoking something he calls the limbic system feedback loop, however I have found that argument unconvincing due to lack of any actual evidence.
'In modern mindfulness practice, many authors have named a similar phenomenon in meditation as the dark night of the soul after the poem. It is often described as a lengthened and intense state of depression or ennui caused by errant or irresponsible meditation practices. Author John Yates compares it to a Theravadan term, dukkha ñanas, or "knowledges of suffering".'
Meditating alone for starter? Meditating too long. Meditating before your day start and you get into stressfull situation.
It should be done step by step, carefully.
I think philosophers talked about habitus, and nowadays we might be able to "fix" phobia with a mix of MRI and reinforcement learning, slowly. Or how to reduce your fear of falling when rockclimbing, by falling "on purpose" when you are in between pitons by an increasingly large length.
In Buddhism, one big one would be not keeping in mind the primary goal of non-attachment. Non-attachment to bliss, horror, expectations, and certainly not to any goal.
The Biography of Naropa would make an amazing horror movie. Really wild read as well.
I would be very careful in comparing what St. John means and what is meant in the Buddhist sense. See [0] for those interested in a brief comparison.
Selected quotes:
"The ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God, while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or a state of nothingness)."
"For Buddhists, salvation is a privation of individual consciousness; for Catholics salvation is an eternally fulfilling relationship with a loving Creator."
"For both Buddhists and Catholics “detachment” is important, but for Catholics detachment is not an end in itself. St. Francis de Sales preached that man must desire to “possess his soul” rather than allow it to be possessed by worldly things. Catholics pursue this for the purpose of elevating their soul by offering it back to Christ. So detachment is a means to a rich and meaningful “higher awareness” (if you will) that reaches its culmination in seeing God face to face."
So this (temporary) dark night of the soul ultimately leads to a deeper, perhaps more mystical relationship with God.
I'm inclined to agree with you. The comparison being made between the two states seems almost like a way for this particular Buddhist to cast shade on the Christian mystical tradition. "Oh yes, we know about that; that's when you're not doing it properly".
> He talks about dissociative experiences (which is well documented in medical research)
Experienced this as well.
> it being a pseudo-religion
IMO, too simple. Many experiences feel quite pseudo-religion like.
> more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one of a traffic jam
Didn't experience this. In fact I believed I was more or less invincible and became pretty deluded. Thankfully a part always stays skeptical. Being skeptical saved me and it made me stop meditating for a while and now I have it at a level where it's beneficial.
Currently I meditate way less than I should. There have been a few months where it was as if I was only mind wandering the whole day (stressful period), so then I meditate a bit more to calm myself down.
Not the first time I hear about these negative side effects, but every time I’m reminded of the possibility I’m surprised.
It also reminds me however that my meditation practice is infinitely shallower than what people suffering negative consequences describe.
There was a time where I would practice very rigorously (for me at least) and all I can remember is that I felt more empathy and emotion but never in a bad sense. I remember getting tearful if I heard a story of human suffering, and I also remember getting quasi-orgasmic sensations with food. Never things like losing it at a traffic jam.
I wish I could recover the positives, but unfortunately I don't remember what my practice consisted of back in the day. Maybe I should go to a class or something.
I personally had intense experiences pretty quickly but didn’t overdo it after. I (now) have a healthy respect of psychedelic experiences.
As another commenter said, don’t overdo things.
Edit: whether you get more intense experiences likely is some function of how stable and sensitive you are, what other experiences you already had and how much you meditate.
I imagine that very grounded people don’t get problems as quickly. That’s a good thing, not shallowness.
> It also reminds me however that my meditation practice is infinitely shallower than what people suffering negative consequences describe.
Actually, the author describe people having similar negative experiences just from dabbling with meditation apps, so the catalyst is not necessarily a 14-day silent retreat, but rather something more intangible, in which case it could happen to anyone, really
These sorts of things have been dealt with for centuries by Buddhists, it’s a fairly common effect when you start with Zazen. This is why taking one part of the practice and abandoning the rest (most specifically, an experienced teacher) isn’t a great idea for everyone. Most of the time all you need to hear is “just let whatever comes up during Zazen go, and return to the moment” but alas, if you don’t things can go a bit wrong.
I don’t think it’s actively harmful, but the “mindfulness industry” is full of charlatans and poor advice, and it does make me rather sad that it’s being monetised in such a way.
This is exactly the kind of inappropriate advice that the author is cautioning against. He was not just starting out, he had experienced teachers, and the horriffic panic-attack-like state he was not something that could have been addressed by "returning to the moment".
He was an instructor in "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" -- sorry, this is not a real thing. He's been teaching things he clearly does not understand, and his mind was blown by this. When I say "a teacher would tell you to come back to the moment" it's not quite as simple as I make it sound, the key thing is who the advice is coming from (read: an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan mindfulness camp fleecing wannabe mindfulness bro's out of several hundred dollars to sit with no experience for 10 days).
I don't really have much sympathy here, it seems, but I don't really understand how one could not expect something like this to happen unless they really avoided speaking to anyone with actual experience (which, yes, means a zen monk, and not someone who spent 3 days in a Hilton doubletree learning how to teach people to 'breathe' and 'unlock their chakras' -- which is all bollocks.)
So, to clarify, you are aligning with the view he's opposing in the article that if someone has a profoundly negative experience due to meditation they're just "doing it wrong". That the practice, when done a certain way, carries 0% risk for very bad effects?
That just seems wildly unlikely to me. We're talking about a practice whose goal is to manipulate the brain, an organ that has been called the most complex object in the universe, something that centuries of science have only begin to understand, and that comes with vast and poorly understood diversity across people. There are first hand and scientific accounts of this happening, albeit rarely, to experienced and knowledgeable people. To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.
Well, keep in mind this is a practice that as far as we know people have been practicing for at least 2600 years, I think doing things like a 5-10 day Vipassana retreat is not a risk free thing, but you really shouldn’t be doing those unless you are ready.
I follow the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, my teacher would not allow me to go to Sessin (which is a multi day meditation retreat) until I had been practicing for like two years, and I had a lot of stuff come to the surface at my first one that really disturbed me… however, I had my teacher there, and he knew exactly what to say and do to help me through it as he has been through the same. He would not have permitted me to leave in such a disturbed state.
This guy would not be able to do that for his students, and even for himself he didn’t even know about such things. This is bad, and more stories like this will happen as long as charlatans are taking one aspect of an established practice and ignoring the rest.
As a whole, shikantaza when practiced with a teacher is safe. Things like breath awareness, vipassana and such I think are harmful, but that is due to my training and perhaps I am wrong, but for sure, meditation without the “rest” is largely a money machine these days, and people will be harmed by that.
Edit: I would also add that shikantaza as opposed to other forms of meditation is not about manipulating the brain in any way, but simply observing it. This is why we do not do things with a goal, such as counting of breaths or trying to still the mind. Simply sit, observe, and the stillness comes with no effort. There is no goal, and no enlightenment. There is no separation of practice and experience, the practice is enlightenment.
Reading about your experience makes me realize that the mindfulness industry is probably another case of trying to remove the human element to improve scalability, with terrible results.
Interesting. I had never even imagined that meditation could be so distressing. I don't know anything about Zen really, do you feel the article gives a good impression of being in a disturbed state from meditation or would you say it's likely inaccurate in general?
All zazen enables you to do is observe yourself and your reality very closely; this includes the good and the bad. Seeing under the veil of the stories we spin for ourselves to function can be extremely freeing but at the same time also very difficult to cope with.
I can’t make a call either way in the authors mental state, but clearly there was stuff going on unrelated to meditation which he clearly needs some help dealing with.
> I had never even imagined that meditation could be so distressing.
It was not evident to you that taking some time to be alone with yourself could be uncomfortable? It's almost a polar opposite to how most people live their lives. I am genuinely curious what made you believe otherwise - I cannot imagine it.
Why would it? You're stuck with yourself every waking moment. Every evening when you go to sleep you're trying to do 'nothing' where any random idea can pop into your head. Every morning you wake up and start out with your own thoughts. Are those times uncomfortable and distressing?
Every time I take a walk I'm stuck in my head too.
Most people I've met (perhaps this is a cultural thing) spend most of their waking life trying to stave off "boredom" (using phones, books, trying to mentally distract themselves towards specific things), which as far as I can tell now means "I'm alone with my own thoughts and nothing to distract me".
>To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.
... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-pedantic values of risk-free?
More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has been shown to have real and permanent (and positive) effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over thousands of years. Can you name any practice more effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will be interested.
> We're talking about a practice whose goal is to manipulate the brain, an organ that has been called the most complex object in the universe, something that centuries of science have only begin to understand, and that comes with vast and poorly understood diversity across people.
You seem to be comparing meditation to neurosurgery. I have no idea why you think this comparison is valid. Meditation is voluntary control of attention, which you've been doing all of your life, not neurosurgery. No doubt using this in novel ways will present challenges.
> To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.
Why? Democracy was invented thousands of years ago, and we've been through many other systems of govenment since, and yet now everyone believes that democracy is the best way to organize a highly complex global system of intelligent agents. Does it seem implausible to you that a system of governance that's thousands of years old is still the best we know?
Frankly, I have no doubt that a tradition that's thousands of years old and that has had hundreds of thousands of adherents in that time, could have worked out most or all of the challenges it raises. That's a huge sample set if you were analyzing this scientifically, and these spiritual practices were quite systematically explored.
No, he's stating what the author seems to have missed: mindfulness is not Buddhism; mindfulness is based on some Buddhist teachings. The author talks about meditation, mindfulness and Buddhism as if it were all the same thing, but that's not true. It just shows that whatever they're selling as "mindfulness" lacks what basic zen teaches. The author is blissfully ignorant of Buddhism and it's not his fault: that's how he learned it. What's his fault is that he's spreading what he learned as if it were truth, which simply isn't.
There's no worldwide buddhist conspiracy to shun the "bad" parts of meditation, the post author learned from teachers with no qualification.
If one is thinking about these experiences as "right" or "wrong", they have certainly failed.
Uncomfortable, sure. Experiencing the dark night of the soul is not meant to be comfy. It can be rewarding though. Sometimes it is merely insight into our physical and psychological make up though.
I don't care what kind of adventures one gets into but if you start getting extreme with them, you're eventually going to experience some really sketchy, uncomfortable, and even life-threatening situations.
"the key thing is who the advice is coming from (read: an actual zen teacher who has received transmission, not a charlatan mindfulness camp fleecing wannabe mindfulness bro's out of several hundred dollars to sit with no experience for 10 days)"
Why Zen specifically? There are many different types of Buddhism.
Even if it does have to be Zen, which kind of Zen? Rinzai or Soto, or some mix of the two (which some Zen schools advocate)?
And why Buddhism, anyway? Meditation is practiced in many different religious traditions.
"mindfulness" is itself rooted in the Theraveda -- not Zen -- Buddhist tradition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the "right" way to meditate must be a Buddhist way as opposed to, say, one of the many Hindu forms of meditation.
I can only speak from my own experience as a Soto zen Buddhist. It’s ridiculous really, to spend years staring at a wall.
Of course there are many paths, however I am only aware of the one I’ve been down. So, yeah, I have zen tinted glasses on such subjects and whatever I am saying should be taken with the appropriate sodium chloride.
No one is obligated to list every facet to anything just to tickle your "I'm included in what some random person is saying". The commenter is speaking out of their own experience. It's not about you. Actually add something regarding those other practices instead of virtue signaling.
Transmission simply means their teacher considers them ready to also become teachers, it’s not some whoo science fiction mind meld or something… There are some cases of teachers giving this out inappropriately however these are rather obvious if you were to speak to one who has achieved the real deal vs not..
Buddhism is largely an oral tradition, in that the teachers who exist today can trace their education back up a tree, this is all I mean by transmission.
Transmission refers to receiving chi, or a spark of energy from an advanced teacher.
Perhaps less snark, and more curiosity would serve you on topics like this.
I've had plenty of curiosity in my life time, and have drawn my own conclusions. Here's three of them.
1) There's no scientific evidence for chi. Or qi, ki, whatever you're calling it in an Asian language, because it's just, like, deeper.[1]
2) "Energy" is the most wooly thinking word ever in pseudoprofound proclamations. For the love of Jesus. (Who most likely existed, but was very definitely not the son of YHWH)
3) You can believe what you like, and I'll believe what I like. And if I ever develop fantastical beliefs, I promise I won't expect you to treat them as real things deserving of your serious consideration. And I'll hope you do me the decency of reciprocating that implicit respect.
Transmission occurs when one has fully internalised a practice that one has learned from a master (of that practice).
You may be able to teach yourself meditation from a book, without a teacher. But that can't confer on you the confidence that you're doing it right. Many practices depend critically on confidence. Of course, you have to be confident that your master has really mastered the particular practice; you gain that confidence by knowing that the master received transmission, from someone who received transmission... etc. That line of transmission is referred to as the "lineage" of that practice.
There are no ritual formalities for mindfulness; every monk learns mindfulness, from other monks. The first monks learned it from the Buddha; but if you're going to learn the practice from a layman, you need to start inquiring into your teacher's transmission lineage.
In tantra, there are rituals that accompany the process of mastery: permission to study the text, a reading of the text, a commentary on the text from the master.
But these rituals are not the transmission.
There's usually some kind of "inner" transmission that depends on a personal relationship between the master and the student. But even that doesn't seal the transmission; the student still has to internalise the practice, which might take years.
It's very interesting to look into the process by which tulkus "produce" innovative practices. Often, the teaching is delivered to the tulku by enlightened beings, who learned the practice from some Buddha other than The Sage of the Munis. The tulku must then practice the teaching, usually for many years, until the insight stabilises, before it's safe for him to disseminate it.
...I don't really want to hear about your religious beliefs, tbh, I've had a lifetime of it already, and I've decided you're all charlatans.
Especially if you unnecessarily revert to jargon when trying to explain your beliefs, you mention "tulku" four times, but define it zero times. This is indicative of in-group signaling.
May I suggest that you not read articles about Buddhist meditation then? Less still the comments? I sort-of supposed that nobody would read these comments if they weren't interested.
I avoid articles about pay in the SF area, AI models, Tesla cars, and many other topics. If I read one by accident, I just move on - I don't post a comment whingeing that I'm not interested.
I don't belong to an "in-group" here; I used to be a Buddhist, but I no longer profess any religion. The subject still interests me though; I devoted 40 years of my life to it, and unsurprisingly it has had quite an impact on me.
For what it's worth, a tulku in Tibetan Buddhism is a re-incarnating lama. I realise that I used the wrong word; what I meant was "terton", which is a revealer of hidden teachings. Those hidden/revealed teachings are a specialty of a minority of Tibetan Buddhists - so an "in group", almost by definition. Tertons an interesting subject - if you happen to be interested in such things.
A number of reasons. FWIW, I was trained in a Tibetan tradition.
- I had from the beginning espoused a non-religious view of Buddhism. About 20 years in, my teacher stated that Buddhism was definitely religious, and that devotional practices like pujas were non-optional. I didn't like it, but if you take on a teacher, it behoves you to at least try to go along with the teaching - which I did.
- I learned some things about Tibetan history that were the opposite of my earlier, naive beliefs. Pre-communist Tibet was not Shangri-La.
- While I never practiced tantra, the tradition was tantric; I eventually learned some important things about tantra that I found unacceptably obnoxious. I can't go into detail, because I don't want to undermine anyone else's commitment to tantra.
- The group that I had been involved with gradually changed, I became an outsider, and things got difficult. Friends in the group cut me off.
- The behaviour of Buddhist nationalists in places like Myanmar and Srilanka towards non-Buddhist minorities appalled me - this was the tipping point.
- I did my back in through long sitting sessions. The amount of my life that I had spent sitting was beginning to look like heavy expenditure for no obvious gain (I wasn't making much progress).
These are my reasons; they don't apply to anyone else, and I don't deprecate Buddhism or Buddhists. I just gradually came to see that I'm no longer one of them.
There is a great deal that I integrated from Buddhism. It remains the basis for my morality, and my world-view is still largely based on Buddhist thought. But I no longer do any kind of formal practice, and I don't identify as a Buddhist.
the article is about mindfulness and many Buddhist commenters have said the article is not about Buddhism, it's about a perverted form of meditation, but you're here defending Buddhists hijacking that topic and saying that everybody else should move on... not throwing shade, just sayin.
I've practiced zen and Tibetan Buddhism for years. They both contain lots of "spiritual bullocks woo" at times, as does most forms of Buddhism I've encountered. You really need to filter out the good parts for yourself, I find. There are many paths to "meditation" or "mindfulness"; I disagree that those are necessarily separate traditions. This sounds like a "No true Scotsman" type fallacy.
This is really what led me to soto, I don’t buy into the ritual, the chanting (unless it’s at a sessin, and even then only for the bonding experience) and the codes and so on of a lot of the other sects. Soto to me is a very pure expression, I’m also not a big fan of the Sotoshu (my teacher calls them the “funeral directors association”) and the more established Soto schools like the SF Zen Center.
Soto, as I understand it, is all about just shikantaza. The rest is optional. I don’t shave my head and wear robes, I just sit.
It took me a while, but this shoe fits. I read Dogen and he seems to agree with this for the most part, but of course ymmv.
When I was a kid / teen, I could get into an altered state by repeating a word (any word) in my mind. After a short while, I would "disconnect" (I don't know how to describe it) :)
Can we step back here and realize we're talking about what amounts to breathing exersices here? There is no need to be gatekeeper here - you don't get magic Jedi powers by practicing breathing a bunch.
This is exactly what I took from it. He uses the terms "mindfulness" and "Buddhism" interchangeably, but they're not. Buddhism has ways to deal with meditations that "go bad", but mindfulness takes the Buddhism out of the practice.
> "I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA. I was unsettled yet intrigued by Britton’s message. Some of the adverse experiences she had described were similar to challenges I had faced. But, at this point I was a decade into my intensive mindfulness meditation practice. I was too deep to get out. "
There's just so many things that is bad with this new-new age wave.
First of all, doing spiritual practices generally do not go hand-in-hand with taking drugs. Just taking marijuana or hash may bring panic attacks, and even psychotic episodes. If you rely on drugs to keep your emotions in check, you're already dealing with them wrong. Meditation together with drugs won't help that, but may worsen things if done intensively.
Second, there's no such thing as "intensive mindfulness meditation practice". Mindfulness is gentle and short, and more about stillness than meditation.
Third, "intensive meditation" is something everybody should be wary about. Max 20 minutes is recommended per day, and there is no need to do more in order to "get anywhere faster". Most important of all, do it with an experienced teacher you trust. The most important ingredient in meditation is to let go and relax, and is not yet another "work".
In the end, something can always go wrong. Not everyone can deal with meditation, and not sure if there's a way to ensure to filter out people. Often people come to classes because they have some issues, not when everything's alright. So there are already things to deal with. Recommended is that people doing medication like antipsychotics, should be prescreened from joining class.
In the end, meditation is a powerful tool. But not sure the stress of Western life is the right way to channel the clarity and calmess one may get from it. You may come back from long retreats, but need tools to deal with the stresses in modern day life. So just meditation may be too confusing or not enough, to deal with one's life once more.
Agree with everything, although I would say at least in Soto 45 mins seems to be the maximum for one period during sessin, and 15 of that will be kinhin (walking meditation), I tend to do about an hour a day in two sessions, but any longer and there isn’t really any reward.
Drugs are a hard no, I mean do them all you want but don’t combine the two.
Of course, different traditions will have different meditation techniques of varying lengths. There are many, and best to follow one path where people don't experiment too much on you and themselves. That the same techniques have been practiced for a looong time (think: like a vaccine!).
As a "beginner" meditator, 20 mins a day is plenty though. As an "experienced" meditator 20 mins is enough too (you may in time meditate anytime/anywhere).
It's when people take on themselves to "do much more", mix several spiritual practices or follow cults that do extreme regimes that things might sometimes get crazy. Most people do OK, but there are people who need medication or have deep-rooted issues that maybe should not be doing meditation, at least not until those issues have been settled.
Another issue is that some deeper practices were basically developed for monks, to be learned after years of initiation and acceptance.
Because they destabilise the mind, which is particularly dangerous when pursuing powerful spiritual practices where balance and stability of body, mind, emotions and energy are basic requirements.
An imperfect analogy is taking drugs and then driving fast on a windy mountain road.
The point is to stabilize and calm the body-mind-spirit complex, a harmony which is called yoga.
Taking drugs, even alchohol, stresses the body and mind, and may distort and cloud the spirit. This work against yoga / equanimity / clarity.
There are traditions that uses drugs ritually, so is part of those traditions. Though, it is often a more perilous and dedicated path. Not everyone needs to live life as a sage or munk.
So doing sadhana (practices) will work over time. It's not a competition.
Intensive meditation does seem to be oxymoronic, too.
Meditation will take you down many unknown paths: difficult paths, painful paths, joyful paths...
An intensive meditation sounds more like a doing, like hitting the gym hard on a 30 day diet plan, rather than a state of being meditative and progressively turning inwards. You can't intensively find your inner peace, as an intense thing isn't a peaceful thing.
To my mind, intensive meditation is still going to result in something that feeds the ego, rather than something that feeds the soul. You wouldn't call it intensive if it wasn't ego-driven.
Marijuana intensifies many aspects of the mind. It's dangerous, but it like jumping into deep water to learn to swim, or training to drive on a fast, manual car. If you can bring your mind back from psychosis, you can bring it back from the lesser anxiety you felt before.
I think it's a bit of a I want my cake and I want to eat it too mentality, or maybe just ignorance. The Buddha did teach to refrain from taking intoxicants, I guess there was a reason he said that?
For some reason, since meditating fairly regularly over the last 5 years, I seem to be quite attune to the troubles drugs and alcohol cause me. It's probably one of the dangers of new practitioners who download applications and get started without any background fall into, they haven't read some of the wise teaching that other may have been exposed too.
I'm not a Buddhist per-se, but I do believe the teachings exist for a reason.
I also remember having a very rough time early in my practice, I think I did too much too early and I was also using Marijuarna which seemd to make some of the issues worse. I backed off that and I recovered and meditate now with no issues.
>Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice; Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological, clinical one.
Interestingly this is covered in the context of psychedelics too (which in my opinion are often touted in a similarly misleading way) by Dr Rick Strassman's fascining DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Making things like this too clinical or for lack of a better word mundane can alter their effects enormously.
Mindfulness is a category of meditation, which has been somewhat bastardized in the West. Most Buddhist practices incorporate both mindfulness and focus-oriented types of meditation.
Agreed that you shouldn't conflate them, but there are many types of meditation that you can practice and:
- not all are rooted in spirituality
- some are directly related to mindfulness
I find that if I meditate regularly, I'm more likely to catch myself practicing mindfulness by accident in my daily life. In those moments I usually discover something about my surroundings that I didn't know before. Really practical stuff, like an unexplored trail that's a better way to take on my commute home from work.
Intentionally practicing mindfulness is fine, but for me it's the cases of being mindful without explicitly setting the intention that make it worthwhile. They're really pleasant, nothing spiritual about it.
And meditation is linked to those moments because, if I'm lucky, it causes them.
Mindfulness is one of the 7 factors of awakening. It's a skill, a pre-requisite to the work of insight and transformation that is the path of Buddhism.
It's literally just the skill to not get distracted by the small waves.
My teacher would, and has, yes. But I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that, or even get into that situation in a hippy dippy setting with a bunch of dreadlocked “teachers” who have studied just one aspect of the Buddhist tradition from deepak chopra, no.
The stuff that comes up, including the hallucinations, are brought to the surface through your practice, but they are not caused by it. The only way to deal with them is with an experienced teacher, therapist or with self discipline (the latter i only include as seemingly this is what shakyamuni apparently did).
Everyone is different, I agree, but sitting with inexperienced people and expecting some enlightenment experience is definitely going to go wrong for you.
One take I heard about yoga that kinda applies here is "if yoga is injuring you, your understanding of it is wrong"
I think the underlying issue with all these asian-spiritualism-turned-western-nouveau-health is that western people sometimes come in wanting things to be intense, clinical and goal-oriented. But that's literally the opposite of what most of what these disciplines are all about. Asian health upkeep practices (yoga, tai chi, meditation, radio taiso, etc) are mostly about gentle but consistent practice to keep gears oiled for the long run. Most of those aren't even meant to be healing disciplines.
if yoga is injuring you, your understanding of it is wrong
That feels a lot like either victim blaming, or being fed a No True Scotsman truism and accepting it.
One could say the same thing about staying within their skill level for any high-risk adventure sport. "If that advanced ski course is injuring you ...."
It's interesting that you brought up high risk sports. The context of that quote was related to people injuring themselves by being too aggressive on stuff they should know better (one example was a relatively advanced practitioner pulling a calf muscle on a downward dog of all things). That's an example of a type of injury where the person sets goals (e.g. stretching to some specific previously achieved limit) without paying attention to the current state of the body (e.g. it's a fairly well known phenomenon that muscles are tighter in the morning than early evening, especially before warm ups).
Yoga isn't about quantified stretch goals, it's a daily fitness regime. So if you pull a leg muscle by going on a super deep downward dog first thing in the morning without warming up because you're aspiring to reach some guru-like level quickly, instead of seeing yoga as a fitness program to carry your body to old age, then yes, your understanding of the practice is wrong.
At that point it's just a truism. Most sports injuries, aside from the ones caused by physical contact with another player, are the result of some mistake in form that, in hindsight, could have been prevented.
"western people sometimes come in wanting things to be intense, clinical and goal-oriented."
That describes me exactly. I spent forever look for a "quantified meditation" course.
I even kept a mediation journal where I could track how many times I lost track of my breath in a 5 minute session. I started out around 50 and was desperately trying to get to 0.
I even used an app that counts taps, that I would rest under my finger, so that I could mark each failure as quickly and easily as possible. Without trying to "remember" the count of failures because it would distract me from the breath.
I felt that if I could get to 0, that I wouldn't be ready for enlightenment, but I would at least achieve ACCESS CONCENTRATION and be able to enter the stream. At that point, it could become a spiritual practice, but I wanted to develop sufficient concentration abilities and conquer my ADHD before thinking too much about what mediation was actually for.
It's been really hard for me to let go of the idea that my meditation needs a score to track my progress.
Goal-oriented meditation is not Buddhist meditation.
I once read a book by Aleister Crowley, that included a series of meditation practices intended to increase your personal power. The instruction was very similar to the instructions I had received for a type of mindfulness.
I never tried Crowley's practices; but still, for weeks after reading that book, I had a feeling of dread, as if something awful was following me around.
Tai Chi is intense and goal-oriented; it's a martial arts system. The katas look like some kind of calm "yoga in motion", but the katas are not the core of Tai Chi.
I mean, yes and no. It's a martial arts system in the sense that it incorporates combative mechanics, and I do know of people who attempt to incorporate it into combat against resisting opponents, but some people take issue w/ calling it a martial art because of quack "masters" claiming to be invincible (but then getting their ass kicked within seconds by some MMA dude), and also partly because the popular calisthenic variety is not combat-oriented.
IMHO the biggest dissonance between western idea of "intense" vs eastern is that westerners think of intensity as optimizing for burst amplitude (in martial arts' case, specifically honing combative prowess), whereas easterners think of it as a matter of consistent holistic development (core strength, balance, attention, etc).
> the “mindfulness industry” is full of charlatans and poor advice
Thank you for saying this.
There is an endless, dangerous trend of dismissing monastic traditions like Zen and trying to extract meditation from its context, under the assumption that teachings and formal practice are unnecessary.
It happens in scientific research on meditation as well as on popular McMindfullness.
Isn't this a common/popular stereotype in so many movies? Hoity-toity protagonist believes they're more educated/better than the savages who follow old tradition, then have to eat some humble pie.
There are equal number of these where after a short training montage the protagonist is not only an expert in said tradition, but in many cases better than the long term practitioners.
So maybe people are focusing on the second lesson rather than the first.
Every industry is full of charlatans and poor advice. Unfortunately, some cost you more than just lost money or lost time.
In this case, however, the participants may more likely be vulnerable. They are seeking some solution to their problems, and mindfulness is promoted as one. As the author makes the case, it really was a solution to his problems. But it seems he took it too far.
It's definitely possible to do malpractice when you are it alone. I never had a teacher and I did get burned on misinterpretations. Though looking back, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but it did cause me some suffering.
2 major mistakes for me was going too much in either direction (relaxation vs. force).
I had a phase where I wanted to relax too much, or just let it come or let it manifest, either by trying to chill so much as to become sleepy, or by just trying to see with the naked eye. In either case it was a thought loop trap.
And I had a phase were I was too obsessive and used a lot of force. Like I really wanted to concentrate too hard and that also screwed me up a bit.
In either of these cases I could make a statement that meditation screwed me up, but I persisted with it and I can say that after 4 years, the benefits were very well worth the effort.
Also a big mistake was skipping the instructions. I.e. instead of just counting the breath or following the breath, I jumped at the unassisted version. I think if I just sticked to the very simple instructions and tried less of inventing my own way or outsmarting what's in the book, I would not run into these issues.
Note that I'm talking about zazen too, while the article is about mindfulness, it's a bit different although I never tried mindfulness.
I did a 10 day meditation (vipassana) few years ago. I remember some fellow meditators (majority of the sessions are in a hall full of meditators) having emotionally intense experiences (someone would cry inconsolably, someone will shout for few moments suddenly). I personally per say did not experience any such external emotional outburst but definitely got better clarity and calmness towards daily routine life.
The output of meditation is supposed to be a clearer mind from before and it may take a while to reach the desired state of mind. Stoicism should not be misinterpreted as having no zest for life. One psychologist I know told me something that made an impression on me "Just because life is going to end or that many good things come to an end eventually doesn't mean you should not enjoy the present". I am sure different people have different outcomes but I think the purpose of meditation is to learn the joy of life. One could see stoicism as being pessimistic towards life. I personally see meditation as a tool that hopefully helps you derive the joy of living in every moment of your daily existence while not being attached to it so that that if the circumstance changes, you don't lose the joyfulness and adapt to the new things in life knowing that the change won't last either.
I did a 10 day Vipassana course a few months ago. I went in with no expectations, except to disconnect from the online world for 10 days. The course had a subtle yet profound effect on me. But I couldn’t put my finger on it till I incorporated the practice in my daily life.
Since then, I have been practising Vipassana and/or Anapan every day (sometimes twice a day) and I realised that my entire life had been coloured by my anxiety. Now, when my anxiety shoots up, I am much more aware of it than before and can actively self-soothe. Every time I meditate, it feels like someone threw cold water on a hot metal plate. Another way I like to think about it is that I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve “cleared” my mind, so much as “defragmented” it, like a good old spinning hard disk. Usually tears form in my eyes in most sessions.
I continue to practice it every day. I am very grateful to have been through this experience. I experience a little bit more compassion towards myself, and hence, other people. I have a long way to go but this first step has given me much hope for the future.
My experience was very high level of calmness in day to day life. I sort of felt like Neo of the Matrix where I knew what to do in any tough situation and my action was based on objective analysis of the situation vs mind getting colored with different emotions. All tough decisions seemed less difficult to make because you can now separate emotions from the situation. To give an example - As soon as I reached home after finished the course, I learnt that my grandmother is in coma after suffering from a brain stroke. Everyone around me was in a panic state as to what is happening and what to do. I could think more clearly and immediately went into action mode (is she getting right care, how do we get a second opinion, what are our options etc). I accepted reality as it is. Similarly, I had to make a major decision that I was confused about (which is why I went the course in the first place), I think I was able to make the right decision (it's been few years since the decision was made and I am happy about it).
You also become comfortable as to who you are vs seeking validation about yourself.
I just got back from a 10 day Vipassana course a week and a half ago. So this whole thread is timely.
I went with no expectations except wanting to give the technique an honest try. On Day 5 I experienced anxiety and a panic attack. Never had one before - ever. I didn't know what I was feeling. On Day 6 it got worse. On Day 7 I almost quit but after talking to the teacher and course manager decided to persist. On day 7 I cried thru all the meditation sessions. I also felt some incredible highs which many people compare those achieved thru drugs - which I've never used myself. On that day I experienced feelings of extreme compassion and gratitude. On Day 8, my anxiety and panic attack got worse. It culminated in me passing out in the meditation hall. I passed out briefly but at that point I decided I had had enough and asked to leave immediately.
I've spent the last week+ trying to recover and hoping I didn't do any permanent damage to myself. In the past week I have experienced much minor feelings of anxiety but have been able to deal with them. I believe I will be ok but this has been an illuminating experience. Before this, I too never ever thought that meditation and/or mindfulness could have any negative or adverse reactions. So this is all new. I just wanted to pass on my experience objectively.
The one thing I really would say is that I wish these courses did a much better job of screening/counseling folks before they embark on the course and also have a better plan for how to address those people who experience something like I did. In that moment, I wanted to know that I was ok and felt like I wasn't getting the answers I needed. All I was told was to continue to work thru it. I am not sure that is the best thing for everyone. My body clearly was telling me otherwise.
Note: I am no teacher of Vipassana and merely a student (that too not advanced), so my thoughts should be taken with a grain of salt.
The folks running the course do have a screening by asking you certain questions in the enrollment form and they do ask you to talk to someone if you are confused or concerned about any question. It is not a strong screening but screening nonetheless. How effective it is, I don't know and it also comes down to how forthcoming the student is in clearly stating his/her condition.
Having said the above, people do experience intense emotions like you mentioned as I observed first hand. My take based on what I learnt in the course and afterwards is that throughout life since we are born, we experience life and it builds up certain kind of emotions in ourselves. Depending on who had what experience in life, the build up can be very strong. Vipassana attempts to rid you of the emotional build up that one has accumulated. The act of crying or shouting, or anything else is an act of getting the emotion out of the system and be left with a cleaner state of mind. How long the emotional outburst will continue will depend on how much one has accumulated in life.
I would summarize this as - In order to fill a cup with afresh, you must empty it first. You can't fill an already full cup.
One may also want to read U G Krishnamurthi. One of his quotes that I really like is `When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself.` another way to interpret this is that emotional build happens when you action is in conflict with your inner self and over a period of time, the build up keeps growing resulting in problems (I have had emotional build ups that I have worked very hard to get rid of).
Trying to «gain» something from mindfullness/budism is a bad one. Is adviseable that people with drug use history refrain from using drugs for an extended period of time before taking on other mind altering experiences. I believe the grove of the brain need some repairing. Disrupting natural processes like breathing is not adviseable for beginners and probably unnecesary anyway. Beware of powerfull exercises and quick fixes, people get damaged by reckless/selfish/clueless gurus very often.
Usually slow, gentle exercising over longer period of time is more benefical. For sone meditation in motion like Tai Chi works best. And finally you will not stop being an idi0t just by meditating, you are likely to turn into an idi0t with a lot of energy! Probably the biggest pitfall.
I think it's also worth noting the extent of time and focus he dedicated to this practice before the negatives appeared.
Putting in 10% of what this guy put in would likely give you measurable benefits without the disassociation risks, unless you already have some mental peculiarities.
> it’s mostly about the negative side effects of meditation that the author believes is under-documented or under-reported
Before this article, I didn't know meditation could have any adverse effect. Until today, I haven' read a single depiction, a single mention of meditation going wrong. Except in fictions.
So this claim that one does not simply learn about the negative side effects of meditation sounds very plausible to me.
This is true at least in part due to the monetization of mindfulness, as a previous poster stated. The import of mindfulness into western culture strictly as a tool to manage stress has turned it into a cure all for general audiences.
There are certainly risks. A long retreat may exacerbate existing psychopathologies like depression due to the extended isolation.
I'd liken meditation to something like exercise. Exercise is good in general, but you still have to manage and work around injuries. I wouldn't suggest you walk 5 miles with a sprained ankle. And so it is with meditation.
But yes, I also figure this isn't talked about enough - especially in the context of mindfulness as a product.
Ok, fine. First define "normal", then answer the question of "normal according to who".
If it was just that simple, you wouldn't have entire industries (self help seminars, retreats, religious cults of all kinds, pop psychology, and so forth) built on looking for an alternative.
I see a lot of defensive comments here, but this post made me aware of the fact that there are a lot of documented cases of adverse effects of meditation as well. TLDR:
> Willoughby Britton is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and associate professor at Brown University
> The meat of Britton’s talks was the results of a 2017 paper she co-published with her husband, Jared Lindahl, called the Varieties of Contemplative Experience1. In it, they examined distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
This is probably a relatively naive observation, but I've found that the way some people describe meditation and how their mind change is sometimes the same as how people describe their experience under psychadelics. These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it's chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours.
You experience your surroundings spatially through your senses every day. In the ordinary state of consciousness, this is sometimes called sense-experience. Now imagine experiencing your consciousness — cognition, feelings, memories — as the state of a boundless ocean, ”you” in this case being the ocean experiencing itself in this way.
As someone who dabbles in mushroom based psychedelics you are right. The sudden awareness of yourself, and even moreso the sudden awareness of 'not yourself' can be pretty frightening. I have had bad trips before, and they usually began with an untethering of yourself. Once you start floating outside of your life/personality, you can become very distressed with what is left. It can become almost scarring to see yourself from afar suffering so badly, but that be not yourself. It's hard to put into words, but that experience of intense disassociation, and the pain of being an observer to it is very real.
Definitely, there's more than one way to get to a different state of mind.
Christian religions for example set a certain stage, create an atmosphere that puts people in a shared mental state. Meditative, perhaps. I can see (although never experienced myself) how that, if you let it "in", can lead to a "religious experience" / awakening of sorts.
Worst one was that one time I was in an American evangelical church, the type where there's lots of music and the like. But also weird behaviour; during the sermon, lots of people around me had their hand up and were whispering "jesus", it was eerie as fuck to be honest. That line of churches does a lot with altering brain states though, one article I read mentioned measuring brain waves and seeing them enter an "alpha" state, similar to hypnosis and making people very susceptive to suggestions. Another example is exorcisms, where people go - let themselves go? - into a state of dissociation, speaking in tongues and spasming. I kinda see that as letting their own inhibitions go and letting the impulses take over.
TL;DR not a scientist, just armchair theorizing and waffling.
"These bad side effects of meditation sound a bit like a bad trip, but without being able to tell yourself that it's chemically induced and thus will stop in a few hours."
It's not uncommon to forget one has taken psychedelics when one is having a powerful trip, and just telling yourself that it's chemically induced and will stop in a few hours doesn't necessarily help.
That's not to mention that while under the influence of psychedelics a single minute might seem like many lifetimes, or you could feel like you're in an infinite time loop and are never getting out, etc.
That's totally fair. My point was, your experience (usually) stops at some point without you having to do anything. That doesn't seem to be the case with meditation.
>When Buddhism Goes Bad - How My Mindfulness Practice Led Me To Meltdown
Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life, not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday totally non-bhudist life).
Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats and the like, but then you're a tourist to the whole thing, and what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what makes it work - which is all about context (even if there's a plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture, snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).
Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more right.
>I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators.
Aka, some random guys who've read some books, perhaps studied under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist luminaries for lucrative western audiences....
>As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats. I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.
In other words, they've made a mess of different practices, cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always separating it from its context, from the culture they live in, from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from "medidation" itself).
So to your mind this can all be neatly dismissed as "doing it wrong"?
The guy in the article was a teacher himself, not someone just casually dabbling, and mentions that the people studying the negative effects are encountering trainers and teachers more often than casual meditators.
Those are a dime a dozen. It's a scam industry, not very different from most martial arts schools or "holistic medicine", or things you can find in Sedona, AZ...
You might find one rooted in the tradition/culture (and living it) practicioner in 1000, if you're lucky, but not in "mindfulness retreats" and corporate seminars.
So one in a thousand practitioners might be doing it right, maybe.
In which case the article is spot on correct - the western mindfulness/buddhism stuff is mostly potentially dangerous and, as promoted, can lead to all sorts of harmful effects which are often brushed under the carpet.
He was teaching "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction", which isn't really a thing. If anything, it's an example of the very commercialised kind of mindfulness teaching that he's railing against.
If you visit the website mbsrtraining.com, the second link on the main menu is "Buy MBSR". Looks like the course materials cost just under $200. You also need to buy videos, attend retreats, co-facilitate retreats, and have supervision, as well as doing a lot of private meditation, if you want to be an accredited teacher. Sounds like a significant investment of time and money.
I can't find out from the website what licence these teaching materials are distributed under; that's a bit shifty, because I bet you're not allowed to reproduce them or distribute them.
Anyway, I wouldn't make that investment, just to sort myself out; I'd expect a return on investment. You get that by gathering paying students.
There is a "householder" tradition in Tibetan Buddhism: you can be an advanced practitioner and teacher, while running a family and a farm. The classic example is Marpa. Marpa was no tourist.
The rat race is no "family and farm" style environment, though, and the modern culture, workplace, lifestyle, and even personal mindset, of laymen doing this on the side in the west is so remote to the culture of those householders as to be alien (and totally counter and detrimental to those traditions).
As for Marpa, he is not exactly a good example for a "householder" even of that era, as he was heavily involved, and worked/sacrificed enormously for his practice. So, yes, he was no tourist. But modern dabblers are.
> You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side
Well, you can, actually. Many people do, and they're not fakes (or "tourists"). It's not easy, and Eastern teachers aren't best-positioned to help Westerners with the difficulties.
There are Western teachers who have been trying to develop ways of teaching Buddhism to Westerners that address the problems. I believe Trungpa was the best of these teachers (he obviously wasn't a Westerner, but he understood Westerners better than any other Tibetan teacher, I think).
I studied under a Western student of Trungpa. I think my teacher was too afraid of letting-go of the ethnic and cultural baggage; all of his teachers were Tibetan masters, and I think perhaps he felt diminished for not being a real Tibetan.
So I don't think the Western teachers have nailed it yet. I'm sure some Western teacher will eventually figure-out a teaching programme that works fairly reliably for Westerners.
But they won't be able to "de-fang" Buddhist practice; it's intrinsically dangerous.
(background: I have been doing zen meditation for 20 years. Several hours per day and participated in 50 intensive retreats or so).
Absolutely. If you meditate so much that it starts to work, it's like any effective medicine or treatment. It has potential for adversarial side effects. Even mentally healthy people get into some crazy states and can experience meltdowns while meditating. I have seen several cases of people having full blown psychosis needing psychiatric care.
Saying that if you get into a bad place you are not meditating right is also wrong. Buddhist tradition knows about these, but they are described in a way that often makes people think it's some kind of philosophical otherworldly metaphor. They can be pleasurable or horrifying or just weird. Japanese zen tradition calls all these just makyō (the realm of demons).
Everyone who has meditated long enough has encountered them. You can read sutras to see Buddha fighting with crazy. Almost every honest autobiography from famous meditation teachers has mentions of them. Zen Master Hakuin had probably the most famous complete meltdown. He called it Zen sickness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness He had to stop and seek help.
Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.
--
Making things worse: Meditation attracts people with mental issues, and many treat them as a substitute to medication or therapy. Meditation is neither. It can be used as part of therapy, but it's not a substitute. Better get your therapy/medication right and then meditate moderately if that feels fine.
This doesn't match my experience. Professionals can help you only to the extent they understand themselves. Do they understand nature of consciousness, mind, thought? Most likely they do not. Meditation is supposed to bring one to the state where you get control over those things and if it happens there is no question of mental issues for this person anymore.
That's overly idealized and wrong view. Meditation together with mental treatment often works really well but they are not direct substitutes. There are meditation therapies that mix the two.
What meditation does to the mind is not completely separated from the mental health, but it's not on the same line either. Understanding the nature of your mind heals only minor neuroses, and sometimes with depression.
You can be mentally ill and still have "prajna wisdom" or being "realized" in a very fundamental way. "Prajna wisdom" does not translate directly into normal wisdom or mental health (can help in some cases). The history is full of mentally ill meditation masters, "funny monks" and "crazy wisdom" that is crazy in real way and just not metaphor.
In religious settings people have tendency to attach attach every good thing to meditation in linear way. Morality, mental and physical health, everything. In reality you get "something completely different" (in the Monty Python way). It can help you in other things but it never solves other problems in your life.
The root teacher of Jamgon Kongtrul The Great was a man called Patrul. Patrul was a notorious drunk, and was known to beat up his students. He was still a kind man, and a legendary teacher.
Having psychological flaws doesn't disqualify you from being a realised master and a great teacher.
In the case of Hakuin he said himself he was very ill.
In many other cases the description of "demons" and other things match what is now called psychotic episodes. There is difference with struggling with practice and being unwell.
>Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.
That sounds wrong to me, meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not to give anything. Also doing or not doing anything at all is not safe. There is no safety - once we are alive we will die.
> meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not to give anything
Those are all metaphors to describe something "Die before you die so you don't' have to die before you die", "See your true face before you were born", "enlightenment", "entering the stream of holy", "satori", "be one with everything", "be nothing", "emptiness". None of those descriptions will help you understand. You either meditate or not. Then you can describe what happens to you in your own words contradicting everybody else.
"Well, there is sitting meditation,
there is walking meditation.
Oh, and then, of course,
especially in the West,
there is talking meditation.
No good."
> In the aftermath, I floated for months in a state free of discontent.
This is interesting. As a human, I always have something to be discontent about. It never stops, and it is not supposed to stop - as those are my instincts driving me.
I love my mindfulness moments, and being able to look into my emotions. But I wouldn't want to stay months without discontent.
Overall, several of the author's quotes point to a very extreme practice. He is mixing internal state and reality as if it was one and the same. These two factors are bound to lead to problems.
But I don't see most people doing 30 min per say having these issues.
I also experienced something similar. While meditating at work I experienced a state of profound bliss and extreme bodily sensations. What followed this was a disintegration where I dropped into an existential crisis that lasted for about a year. However during this time I faced a number of demons which I hadn’t been able to face up until that point. Now, about 5 years later I am in a good place and am ramping up my meditation practice once more.
Meditation is what it says on the tin, a way to uncover real truth. It’s powerful and dangerous. It’s a path for truth seekers, who are willing to pay whatever it takes to see what is truly there. For me its a blessing.
For most these experiences are ones of positive disintegration rather than negative. After the dark night of the soul has passed we find ourselves more fully integrated than before.
For many that’s not something they were after and in this way I agree with the article, meditation is being miss sold.
If you are open to sharing, what did you do, if anything, to make it through the year of crisis? Did you stop meditating like the author, seek outside help, continue meditating or something else?
I went to a therapist to work through the things that had come up. The existential crisis also led to a re-evaluation of the nature of reality - I now hold a panpsychist position. But the philosophical stuff, no therapist was going to be on my level and able to help. So that stuff I worked through on my own.
I stopped meditating as a practice immediately. I toyed with it sometimes during everyday life, watching the trees go passed on the train, trying to be indifferent as strong emotions rocked me. I was mostly too preoccupied with redefining who I was to be bothered by further exploration.
Also note that I was not strongly aware of the connection between the experience I had meditating and the psychological disintegration that followed. I considered it a possibility, but not a strong one. For me it was just an evolution that was in progress. A darkness that had to be faced and an existential horror that I had to make peace with.
It's only after the fact that I can clearly see the connection. Perhaps it is coincidence, but I think it is more likely not.
> This terrain was fresh. I had never previously experienced a psychotic episode and have no history of mental illness besides occasional bouts of mild anxiety and depression.
...
> Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life.
YYMMV, but I feel the author is having problems they dont want to really accept. That is what the contradiction in the two quotes above indicates.
Aside from that, I couldn't help but think about people having access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability suddenly skyrockets. Or, put another way, even Siddhartha didn't find awakening in the samana practices. They were only the first step (of three) to reach his goal. You can overdo everything, even the very very nice things.
I think the biggest problem is that people who had an ego death experience are trying to experience it again by dosing up when it is largely a set and setting issue. Firstly, you can't have a life-changing, ecstatic experience of being connected to the universe every couple of weeks. Secondly, if you don't have some philosophical or religious framework to frame the experience, I imagine it can be really devastating.
Consumerism paired with sensationalism. Some people take psychedelics like others consume television... To amuse themselves. Remember what Tim Leary wrote in the psychedelic experience? If you have hallucinations, you're doing something wrong. But that is getting a bit off-topic regarding the original post.
man, I love Alan Watts. We're so lucky to have so much of his actual speech recorded as the tone of his voice and the way he communicates ideas are really fascinating
A former student of Alan Watts, then a Taoist monk, found Orthodox Christianity after his searching, and has become a revered Priestmonk across the Orthodox world - he offers his own journey and offers the Eastern Orthodox Christian perspective of seeking God and His revelation.
https://orthochristian.com/81732.html
https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/father_...
>The impersonal concept of deity was actually an experience of the non-being from which we have come [already], and that the true understanding of God - the highest, fullest understanding of God is God as person, as I AM - He has revealed Himself as I AM. Archimandrive Sophrony, from His Life is Mine
In my own journey out of buddhism, taoism, stoicism, psychadelics, Fr Seraphims writings helped clarify why their was still a hole in my soul, and why western Christianity made no sense to me.
In the Orthodox Christian perspective, they are the Church that followed the Council of Jerusalem (the Book of Acts), the earliest writings of the Church (St Ignatius, the Didache, etc.) then all the councils which codified the canon of scripture, the Ecumenical Councils, etc. Every council must affirm previous dogma; believed everywhere, by all (Orthodox Christians), and at all times - so the below article on the Essence and Energy distinction of God, by St Gregory Palamas, affirms the early writings of St Basil and the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church who were fighting heretical notions of what God is - the Church defined what He is not. The Cappadocian Church fathers affirm the Apostles and scriptures, etc.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/florov_palamas.aspx
This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox Christian temples. The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054, and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations, and yet now are splintered into thousands on thousands of beliefs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkmh68urI6A
One of the major problems with American 'orthodox' are that they embrace only the easy parts of orthodoxy. Often I've heard that 'orthodox dont believe in original sin' and other such nonsense. These beliefs are widespread in westenized, modern orthodox but aren't true of much of orthodox practice in the east. St Gregory Palamas was a wonderful theologian, but we have tried , only in the last century to built a system of thought around him that his works simply dont and cant support. This is obviously due to an awareness of the more codified thought of the western church. Sometimes, I've even heard orthodox claim that the latin fathers are manifest heretics when they have been saints in the east for centuries! One of my American friends almost treats St AUGUSTINE as someone to be dismissed.
The consensus of the fathers includes all of the fathers, if you must cherry pick a subset or an individual to make a point its simply not in the apostolic tradition.
> The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054
The political/administrative disputes of 1053-1054 that directly produced the Great Schism didn't involve theological change on either side, so this (or the inverse, painting the Orthodox as the moving party, which I’ve also seen) position is simple factional-identity reinforcing revisionism.
> and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations
Quite a few of the things Protestants objected to in the Roman Catholic Church were features it still shared with the Eastern Orthodox Churches (and many of them, both in the shared category and not, were not issues of dogma), so no, that’s not true in much the same way as the preceding claim about 1054 wasn't, even before any debates about which issues of dogma or other doctrine may or may nor have been innovations.
Thanks for sharing, lots of good references and well written.
I especially like the one from Florovsky. I'd just like to leave a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm for those who may be wondering what this is all about.
What specifically? You haven't explained what made no sense to you and what finally made sense to you in Eastern Orthodoxy (I would also avoid lumping Protestantism in with Catholicism under the label "Western"). Could it be that you simply did not understand? Here, I would stick to traditional Catholic teaching as the point of reference as the veritable source for orthodox doctrine and tradition, not some Protestant innovation or corruption.
Mind you, the Catholic Church understands God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens. Thomistic metaphysics uses this term. Thus God is understood as Existence itself, as Being, not a being (you might say that God does not exist, but rather is, or to abuse the terminology, is existence). God is the "to be". This is to be identified with the "I Am" of Exodus 3:14.
> This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox Christian temples.
The Catholic mass is liturgically, etc. the continuation, fulfillment, and perfection of the sacrifices made at the Temple of Jerusalem. The altar is where the perfect, unbloody sacrifice of Christ is offered at each and every mass. This sacrifice is the very purpose of the mass. (Following the destruction of the Temple, the Jews have no priesthood, no temple, and no sacrifices, only synanogues.) So that is no news from a Catholic POV (it may be for poorly catechized and Protestantized Catholics today, but that's a different story).
> The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054 and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations, and yet now are splintered into thousands on thousands of beliefs.
I'm not sure you have an entirely accurate view [0].
> Thus God is understood as Existence itself, as Being, not a being (you might say that God does not exist, but rather is, or to abuse the terminology, is existence). God is the "to be". This is to be identified with the "I Am" of Exodus 3:14.
That's very interesting, and brings it much closer to a kind of pantheistic or even Vedanta-ish conception of god. But it's also simply not true for the how the vast majority of Catholic priests teach the religion.
I'd go a step further and state there is no such thing as a bad trip. There are just situations where loss go of control can result in the surfacing of things that are unresolved... and unpleasant. No one has a bad trip without the latter.
Another reason why psychedelics should come with clear warning labels that describe bad outcomes for specific situations.
Let's not jump to conclusions. I wouldn't propose a ban on anything when a warning label or full disclosure would do just fine. I've edited my comment accordingly
How's that different from a "good" trip that make you believe you're in direct contact with god or even god himself though ?
It goes both ways, you can't say the "good" experience is the truth and the "bad" experience is false. They're both the same thing and are just a mirror of your internal state, your job is to analyse them and decide what value you want to put on them. There is no "objectively" good or bad
I think a looot of people are conditioned by what they read on internet about psychedelics, they spend hours watching videos and reading about experiences before trying it for themselves and are already fully trapped in some form of mental cage of what they experience will/should be.
I'm not saying people should casually use psychedelics without any knowledge of them, especially not at 16 and especially not in a basement. I researched the safety of it and the general effects (during/after the trip) to make sure I'd be physically able to go through it. Once I learned there was virtually no risks for the dose I "knew" I was in a good mental state to have the experience.
It has to be something you want to try (not something your friends semi forced you to join), you have to be aware it can be unpleasant, and you have to do it in a safe place (both mentally and physically), given that not much can go seriously wrong.
My first time was 200ug of lsd in the middle of a desert at night by myself, I had the idea after reading 1/4th of a book from Alan Watts, the way he talked about psychedelics made me curious and I didn't want to be too influenced by his experiences/descriptions which made me decide to stop reading and try it out.
It was my best trip, I gave up and replicating the experience after 4 or 5 times (over 3 or 4 years) and I stopped thinking about psychedelics since then.
Since then I learned two things:
- I'm much prefer tripping alone than with people, especially if the people I trip with aren't very long term/close friends I 200% trust on everything.
- Tripping inside isn't particularly enjoyable, I can't imagine tripping in a basement. I vividly remember feeling claustrophobic during my first trip, and that was in the middle of a desert probably 50km away from any man made structure
Terrors; visions of blood; intense paranoia; and the certainty that the experience is never going to end. That's not the surfacing of unresolved 'stuff'. That's being poisoned.
In my youth, I took a lot of acid, and I loved it. but I never thought it should be legalised; it's dangerous stuff.
My psychologist taught me that fear, anxiety, etc. destructive emotions are surface events, bubbling up from somewhere deeper. Mindfulness can be used as a resource for us to be with that fear; in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh "those painful emotions are like a child crying out. A child needs love and attention. Hold them with love, be with them."
Once we can be with it, then we can start to follow it down to its roots. Shining light into the darkness is how we heal.
Unfortunately the author seems to have gone astray down a false path that seems to be very common in western civilization called spiritual bypassing. Basically spiritual bypassing is when you use things like meditation and spirituality to get around your deep seated psychological wounds. Doing this is just a form of avoidance and repression which causes the wound to fester, which can eventually culminate in more severe symptoms like what the author describes.
If someone puts a posting on the net, they likely have to accept that there will be reactions to it. That said, I am not looking forward to a fist-fight with a wanna-be-monk, so distance is probably the key. Dont you feel a fist-fighting drinker is a rather comical mindfulness practicioner? A bit like the gay nazi, or whatever stereotypical contradiction you wanna imagine.
"I couldn't help but think about people having access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability suddenly skyrockets."
I'm not sure about that. Psychedelics can bring to the surface all sorts of unconscious traumas, repressed memories, and/or issues people have trouble dealing with on a conscious level -- fear of death being a classic source of difficulty during "bad trips", but also other things such as physical or emotional pain, or making you face the way you've been treating others or been treated by others, etc.
Many people just can't handle that... especially if they've been running away from facing those things their whole lives, which many, many people are.
Suddenly - bam - you're face to face with your own death, say, living through it in excruciating detail.. and, yeah, that can be very tough to deal with, and many people react to a "bad" experience by trying to run way even further, but once you're on the psychedelic rollercoaster there's rarely any easy way out until the psychedelic wears off, and most psychedelic therapists these days suggest that instead of running away one should run towards the uncomfortable material, facing it squarely and surrendering to the experience, and this often results in cathartic relief and a "good" trip afterwards.
Of course doing this with a trained therapist who can help you before, during, and after the psychedelic session is better than trying to deal with it alone, which many people just aren't prepared to do.
I believe a lot of people are doing meditation in a similar way as they would do a workout session and it simply doesn't work. It's supposed to be your time off and enjoyable. I've seen a lot of starters that are extremely focused on doing at least 30 mins a day, and it's just incredibly hard. Start small, start with whatever you're confortable with, it could be a minute for all it's worth and increase progressively but make sure that that minute is mindful.
Definitely, to the point where in addition to getting a stipend to go to the gym from a previous employer, they offered to pay for a mindfulness / meditation assistance app.
I mean they could also reduce the pressure to perform and to be on top of everything a bit. I get that enthusiasm is contagious and FOMO is a real problem in tech, but the company should have done more to slow people right the fuck down.
> And I didn’t have a history of any major trauma prior to the retreat
Yeah, right.
> in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar … I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life …
> That … represented a constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships …
Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.
Heh, a very similar thing happened to me actually, and while I agree about the fist-fight comment, I honestly didn't have any childhood trauma. Came from a loving, pretty privileged family, but I still went off the rails with a 10 day silent retreat!
It's extremely easy to dismiss people like this, but, have a care, there are real people on the other end of your dismissive comments.
Suggest you book an appointment with a professional to talk about your childhood and family dynamics. Everyone has a different sense of normal unless we compare.
Heh, I have seen professionals, one literally said "I don't know why you're coming to see me!" ;)
What I'm curious about: Are you suggesting that it is childhood trauma that will trigger a bipolar episode (rather than the 10 days of silent meditation 10 days in a row!)
If "everyone" has childhood trauma, why don't we see a higher incidence of bipolar disorder in the population?
I don't want to dismiss your personal experience, this is just a general comment. "a loving, pretty privileged family" is not uncompatible with "childhood trauma".
The author claims not to have "history of any major trauma prior to the retreat" while also describing a decade of anger and negative emotion culminating in a serious fistfight.
unacknowledged childhood trauma is a real thing, it's not uncommon and does not constitute "dismissive comments" in any way.
Ironically, you are being very dismissive of eurasiantiger.
Yeah, on the surface level it looks like the author exchanged an intensity for impulsive and aggressive behaviour with an intensity for mindfulness and meditation.
I wonder if this is a symptom of going far too much in a direction people don't normally do, similar to how people can and do die from water intoxication but almost never under regular conditions. The naive guidance of the meditation teachers saying "more of a good thing is always a good thing" with regards to meditation having the same role as organisers of a water drinking contest.
I think it's just more likely that unacknowledged trauma originated in childhood. It's certainly possible to have unacknowledged trauma as adults, but it's less common because 1) it's closer in calendar time and therefore easier to remember and 2) you are more developed and able to actually identify what is traumatic.
> Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.
My ex is a very experienced and well-trained child psychotherapist. She insists that all adult psychological problems are caused by childhood trauma.
She seems to rely heavily on R.D.Laing for that (she trained at the Tavistock); I thought Laing had been discredited, but it seems that nowadays he's back in favour.
[Edit] I don't agree with my ex. I think she must have fallen down an antipsychiatry rabbit-hole.
We don't really have the language to discuss the subtle emotional states involved when experience turns uncomfortable. Music with movement is better at communicating it.
People are going to keep poking around in their minds and finding things that disturb them. There is a lot to be said for learning to stay with the difficult things, if you can not yet afford yourself faith.
Ha! I thought it might have been vipassana. My own experience of this (a 10 day silent retreat, not having done meditation before) was a full blown manic-psychotic experience (never having had any such thing before, nor in family history). If you're interested, I made some audio files [0] talking about what happened.
I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat. I honestly think it's like taking a regular person and allowing them to go down a grade 4 or 5 river. They might make it, but they might get seriously hurt too.
I actually raised this point with the local (New Zealand) health and disability ombudsman. I said that vipassana ought to have a psychologist to assess people as they left, or at least _something_ like that. Nothing changed as far as I am aware.
I hope the author continues to get better. It was a long journey for me.
It was a long time ago now, 11 years or something. I think I was probably fairly happy, but, maybe at a little bit of a loose end.
The main reason I went on it was because doing a meditation retreat was suggested at a leadership seminar I went to! I was keeping a blog and I thought it would be "interesting" to go on the course. I was right about that ;)
Bi-polar is specifically screened for as a contra-indication for retreats, at least Goenka ones (along with Reiki practice, interestingly). They may still allow a diagnosed individual on, but are supposed to give extra attention.
What retreat did you go on, and did they ask about bi-polar experience pre-retreat?
They screen for a variety of things, but people aren't always honest. Psychosis and bipolar are two criteria. There may be more. They will also reject people if they are just clearly off their rocker -- Vipassana at these centers is specifically NOT for people with serious mental illness.
Reiki is a problem, I speculate, because it puts you in the habit of imagining sensation beyond your body, and this may lead to some problems. There may also be a spiritual aspect to it. One counter-point is that there is one meditation practice that goes beyond the body: metta. So maybe its a specific issue with Reiki (like how you'll never see a teacher wearing black and/or red at a retreat).
Sorry for the late reply. I'd never had a bipolar experience before the retreat. It is my firm opinion that 10 days of a complete silent retreat was too much stress and triggered it.
I believe teachers and assistants are supposed to keep an eye out for things like that, specifically. Sorry it didn't work out like that for you; and best of luck
I've read quite a few blog and social media post of bipolar people not responding well to meditation. Neither have I. I actually thought I might have seen your post before.
People don't seem to accept either that 1. You're tired and have been willing to try a lot, 2. Even the mystical panacea doesn't help.
Ah, that's a pity. I was hoping something like a sensory deprivation tank or whatever would accelerate the process. I, sadly, do not wish to assign that much time to this.
> I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat.
I did a Vipassana 12 day retreat (years ago) but I didn't find it to be that wild.
The hardest part for me was actually sitting down 15? hours a day. Had I known what I was going to do I would have prepared by doing exercises to strengthen my back.
One item that i found intriguing is the research that negative experiences are more common than people think.
One must wonder, why this is not common knowledge?
Also, are there causation links, or not?
My personal conclusion is that the sample is biased -- that is, some people seeking meditation are looking to self-medicate (subconsciously or not) on personal issues they wish to overcome.
It would seem that perhaps a non-trivial portion of meditation practitioners are ending up with worse outcomes than they started out.
One is left to wonder whether meditation practice should come with warning labels ( just like medication does for adverse effects)...
A lot of it can come from those self-help books that are, in reality, thinly veiled sales pitches intended to market the author as some sort of consultant.
You'll only ever read about the happy path or the success story, with some lip-service paid to how difficult it is to actually do in practice. You'll rarely get the raw detail of it, or a fully authentic account.
I'm not talking about quality literature here, but the short 250-pager you'd pick up in an airport bookshop that makes you feel good by the time you finish.
This "Buddhist meditation retreat" in a tiny cabin in the North Carolina mountains goes way beyond the practicing mindfulness the author describes it as.
I've had some very negative anxiety-driven experiences with dissociation (depersonalization / derealization / de-something-zation), usually when traveling to somewhere I'm unfamiliar with. It usually only lasts for 5 to 15 minutes rather than hours, but it does sound a lot like what he describes.
Relating this to meditation: On the rare occasion that I try meditating, it doesn't trigger anything negative, but I have found that I can induce such negative dissociative experiences on purpose (at least to some degree) by inducing a certain meditative-like thought pattern. It's hard to describe, but it has to do with time. It's like the mind is usually thinking at least a fraction of a second ahead, it's focused at least just a little into the future. If you break that, then meaningfulness seems to collapse and... it's not good, and you have to snap out of it.
I wonder if meditating is triggering something like that for the author.
Instead of meditating, mindfulness, thinking about your own thinking and purposefully trying to dissociate from yourself by conscious force, it may be more helpful just to find something that helps you relax. The point is to clear away stressful thoughts and thought patterns by letting the mind focus on something else rather than nothing (or itself).
What you describe in your example about mind stop being focused on the future sounds like when sound and video on TV is not synchronized and you become aware that you are watching the TV
Haha... I hate that. I studied animation for a while years ago and became hyper aware of sound / video synchronization for a bit, it was super annoying. (Not nearly as bad as derealization though)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 409 ms ] threadThe author was practicing a specific kind of Buddhist meditation while at a 2-week meditation seminar. It sounds like he was meditating most of his waking hours?
This is not about “mindfulness” as you probably think of it.
Not really. It is important to maintain conscious. When you simply "focus on just that" you may then just wake up once the task is complete and find out you've went through it automatically like if it was a [non-lucid] dream.
As about meditating while sleeping - I have not explored this part enough. Renowned Dzogchen teachers Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche have books on this subject. A Zen teacher quoted by Alan Watts also said "when you are hungry - eat, when you are tired - sleep" and explained that ordinary people don't actually follow this as they think about countless things while eating and see countless dreams while sleeping. If we go slightly farther than secular mindfulness dares to go and consider the Buddhist religious goal of after-death liberation, they say "dream yoga is not an essential part of practice, but how do you expect to stay conscious in death if you can't even stay conscious in sleeping"?
As for me, I consider unmindfullness a voluntary death, throwing parts of the life time you have been given (by the G-d, or figuratively - whatever you prefer to believe, this doesn't change the matter) away. You only live and actually own/use your time when mindful. When you are not it just disappears. AFAIK even Immanuel Kant believed something like this.
This sounds both judgemental and obsessive, just so you know.
Once, as a schoolboy, I've heard about Buddhists who train to always stay consciousness while living, talking and whatever, I considered this amazing and have then progresses from 80% daydreaming an 19% struggling life to some way more (although still very far from 100%) present, more mine and more happy.
You also seem to be telling us that the only way you feel your life experience has any value is through this thing also, that your own experience is hollow or even non-existent without it. That seems somewhat extreme.
I would make the same comment to (for instance) someone telling us that they live every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no meaning.
What I am telling, however, is a simple difference between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and living in awake state. Let's take it to the extreme: imagine you were given a choice to spend the rest of your life in deep sleep (the kind you can't remember dreams after) and wake up just minutes before die. Would you agree? Would you consider such life making much sense or value to you? I wouldn't. To me it seems almost the same as dying straight away.
In fact Christianity includes the doctrine of Nepsis which is very much related to this (although many people believe it only means avoiding alcohol).
Which is why I said if someone tells me that "they live every moment of their lives through Jesus, and that without his love life can have no meaning."
> What I am telling, however, is a simple difference between automatic functioning in semi-hypnotic state and living in awake state.
Do you not see how judgemental that appears, that unless people join in with your special thing they are effectively automata, asleep, may as well be dead?
I'm glad you have found benefit in your path through life, but I'm not sure one should assume that yours is the only valuable way to live, or indeed the only way to actually 'live'.
Looking from the outside, from the practical (economical) point of view the value/meaning of a unit does not depend on whether it is conscious or not - it just does the same job. Somebody probably can replace me with a future version of GPT3 once and not even my mom will notice (as she lives in a different country and my job also is writing e-mails).
Looking from the outside, from the moral, empathetic and spiritual points of view (although devotees of some cults will argue), and from my own actual view all lives are absolutely equally valuable and meaningful. I really feel and see this way, not because this is a moral or religious law.
I don't judge anybody based on anything, let alone on how mindful their are. I even go further and believe no criminal is actually a wicked person - they just feel and act the ways they do because they are not mindful about how bad (and conditioned) their actions are and how they could avoid them. In many cases this even is a scientific fact.
Looking from the inside, however, I indeed believe I enjoy more value out of my life if I am more awake, conscious for longer and more frequent periods of time. Simply saying it's not worth to pay for ticket and go to a cinema if you are deadly tired and will most probably fall asleep there anyway. One night on a vacation I got terribly drunk. The next morning we went to a museum and that was a waste because I could barely stand on my feet fighting drowsiness - there could be no paintings on the walls and I would not notice. The day passed as if there were no such day, I've got nothing but the next number on the calendar.
Do you understand what I mean? It absolutely isn't my goal to argue the hell out of us or convince you people with ADHD (like myself) are worthless, I only keep writing to make sure what I wrote is understood correctly (not necessarily agreed with).
I enjoy and appreciate mine, too.
And hopefully we all learn pretty quickly that drinking too much can utterly ruin the next day....
> I suspect what you mean by 'conscious' is different to what I might mean
What do you mean? I would sincerely appreciate if you could dedicate some more time and try to explain.
You seem to have a slightly different definition, I think, based on these remarks -
I maintain consciousness whenever I am awake, because that's what being awake is, as far as I understand the word. The second quote, well being conscious is a pre-requisite for me talking (unless you count mumbling in my sleep, which does happen). And I don't think in that last quote you're talking about deliberate sleep deprivation so you can be awake longer (you could be?).It just made me think you were not using the word in the same sense I would. Do you think it's possible to be awake (i.e. not asleep) without necessarily being conscious? If so that would just confirm we have different definitions of that word.
I could be wrong.
(And I don't especially want to direct this conversation towards "what really is consciousness?" because it's a very slippery eel of a topic)
Have you ever (I would be surprised if you never ever had, but perhaps this doesn't happen to you often) went outdoors and then suddenly started wondering if you have turnt off the stove/iron, locked the door and taken the key with you? This happens to me every day because I always exit "unconsciously" in the meaning of the word I intended. When we go together with my wife she would ask me "have you taken the key"? I respond "yes" automatically (here I am speaking but "unconsciously") because such is the habit and I am "daydreaming" ("unconscious" as I label it) at the moment, we lock the door (it locks itself when closed) and then I always feel a boost of adrenaline (in such a degree I have even started taking beta-blockers as this caused heart ache) and think "have I? bloody hell! I probably haven't, we will have to call a locksmith, wait an hour and pay $100 to get back in" (and occasionally this turns out to be the case). Then I become "conscious" and tell myself it's not a big deal, whatever, check the pockets calmly (usually finding the key) and go on. The very phenomenon of such strong anxiety at the moment itself takes place because I still am not really "conscious" at it (if I were I wold understand it's not a big deal). This wouldn't occur if I were leaving the home "consciously". I could put a huge red "wake up" sign on the inside of my door but I know I will get used to it soon and it will stop working.
The "doorway effect" has even gotten some scientific recognition recently[1].
Another example of unconscious speaking is when I am reading or writing something and somebody talks to me - I get less than 30% of what they say and "consciously" answer "yes" to everything then have no idea what did I agree with (and often can't even remember I said anything). And this is not intentional behaviour - they started when I was reading and I was not "conscious" enough to make a "conscious decision" (I tend to believe this phrase is pretty standard English) and switching to just listening them.
This is what I meant.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-throu...
I would talk about the issues you raise more as issues of attention, focus and division of attention, than whether one is conscious or not.
Though semantically of course I agree that there is overlap between being conscious of something, of your surroundings, of other people, of your actions etc. When someone says just "being conscious" without a particular object, I think of something different. Language is a funny, imprecise and overloaded thing.
I think they mean conscious as in "to be conscious of", for example: I exited my house while daydreaming/thinking about other things, so I was not "conscious of" the fact that I did not bring my keys with me aka I did not have awareness or was not operating in the moment/mindfully because my mind was elsewhere
I think they're attempting to describe the difference between being present/aware of every moment we experience, vs. a habitual 'autopilot state' that we can find ourselves in (the phenomena of driving somewhere and then not even remembering the drive there, for instance) where we're really not aware of what's going on in our lives, because the mundane things are so habitual that we don't even need to be fully aware of what we're doing to do it - but that alternatively, choosing and teaching ourselves to be aware at all times, even during our mundane, habitual routines, is potentially a better way to exist
Being mindful and doing nothing is still doing nothing.
You should be doing measurable work, otherwise your minute is gone, and it's just as gone whether you're mindful during that time or not. You still changed nothing, and you can't backtrack to tell if you were doing nothing or being mindful while doing nothing.
This is not what is being promoted by the mindfulness/buddhism-lite industry that the article is talking about.
> you just should try your best to do it the right way under supervision of a qualified person and stop if it goes wrong.
This appears to contradict "One should meditate always"
Every industry is corrupt. But if you are lucky and smart enough you can actually get away with something good for you.
Out of curiosity, I have even attended a course in extrasensory abilities once. Paradoxically, besides some useful self-regulation and some trance-based techniques they also taught observing your thoughts and feelings detachedly and taking them critically which has boosted my rationality and helped me so many times. And good for them, they were pretty serious about making sure people with mental issues are not allowed to participate. Sadly most of the industry don't care.
> This appears to contradict "One should meditate always"
Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods of time in the beginning. You just do your best to awaken from unconscious daydreaming and stay conscious as often and for as long as you comfortably can. If you try and immediately find out you actually can (although not necessarily comfortably) maintain undisturbed conscious concentration for long periods of time you should go to a doctor or a Buddhist teacher experienced in meditation techniques and things which happen to people on this way. Choosing the latter absolutely doesn't imply you have to take the religion and believe in their saints - you only really need the psychotechnical (and the philosophical maybe) guidance.
I think that's the point of the article, though not just about people participating who have mental conditions - most of the industry does not care about the potential negatives.
> Almost nobody can meditate intensely for long periods of time in the beginning.
I don't think this is really the issue here, the issue is that doing so seems to have the potential to cause (or at least trigger) mental health problems for some practitioners, and the advice to just "do it more and practice better" when distressed is specifically called out as harmful.
He says he has no history of mental illnesses (except for mild anxiety and depression), but that what provoked him to pursue meditation was a bar fight that began with vague details around jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment.
> Why did I start meditating? The short answer is that in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar over some jambalaya, a steamy kiss, and a stray comment I didn’t take fondly. The evening ended hours later after I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life.
I'm not sure that makes sense to me at all, and the overly romantic prose doesn't help with credibility.
Why would one go on a serious retreat not led by a real Buddhist teacher? Is there a shortage of geshes already?
What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?
If you require more proof, make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”.
Seriously? Buddha-nature teachings are regarded as heretical by many Buddhists. They assert that all beings have this buddha-nature innately, and that it is indestructible, because it does not arise dependent on causes and conditions.
That is very much a religious view, and in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes and conditions.
Discard what? I have said elsewhere in this thread that I am a lapsed Buddhist. I hold no religious dogmas. It's not me that considers buddha-nature teachings to be heretical.
And what are "experiential practice" and "logical exercise"? These sound like some kind of private jargon you are using to support your "rather-rational" approach.
Experiential practice is when you do something and experience the result. Rub your hands and feel warmth appear - this is an experiential practice of experiencing warmth in your hands. Meditating a certain way you can experience a particular state of mind. This is important because some things are either impossible or useless to describe - you have to experience them and a particular practice may trigger the experience.
Logical exercise is when you exercise logic and come to conclusions.
Yes.
> in direct conflict with the traditional teaching that ALL phenomena without exception arise dependent on causes and conditions
With all due respect, make it a priority to seek understanding of ”Buddha-nature”.
Try the Koans.
Note that I'm not declaring Buddha Nature teachings to be heretical; in general, I think the really deep divisions between the various Buddhist philosophical positions were (are?) more political than anything else, and I've never considered them important.
I've studied both the Uttaratantra and the Uttaratantrashastra, under the direction of a western academic who specialized in the subject (and also happens to be an ordained Buddhist nun). I've also done meditation practices designed to deepen understanding of Yogacara-style thought. I think I have a reasonably good understanding of the subject, for a lazy, lay practitioner.
The accusation of heresy is because it's very easy to misinterpret Tathagatagarbha teachings as monism.
Buddha is my master, teacher and guide, etc. This is all sorts of hilarious from a Zen perspective; interpreting Tathagatagarbha as monism, or Buddha as anything, heh.
And as a teacher, The Buddha has certain limitations - like when you ask him "I'm having problems - am I doing this right?" - answer came there none.
Sincerely, a stream-enterer.
This is actually not that uncommon, despite some popular image problems.
For example, catholicism has a long history of scientific thought being used to change the common understanding of their scriptures. Even the infamous treatment of Galileo's asssertions about the Earth moving around the sun were more a question of scientific debate and politics than any religious dogmatism: a lot of powerful people in the church simply considered the heliocentric model better science and a settled matter, and used their political power to silence opponents.
In fact, today most christian churches regard the scientific understanding of the world (big bang theory, evolution, geological times etc) as correct, and consider the biblical accounts to be metaphors and reflective of a deeper truth about God's involvement in creation. I believe the same holds true for most muslims, though I am not sure; and I have no idea if it does or not in hinduism. Young Earth creationists and other groups taking the bible as literal truth (6000 year old earth, literal 6 days of creation etc) are a small but vocal minority.
Also they have a mega-rare tld: http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en....
It's good to remember that human nature hasn't changed and the same thing is almost certainly happening today too.
There are many types of Buddhism, and some types are definitely very religious.
Take Pure Land Buddhism[1][2], for example, one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan, believers of which essentially pray to the Buddha for salvation and hope to be reborn in a heavenly land. It has some interesting similarities to Christianity.
Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia has many magical, "superstitious" components, like believing that a red string connected to a statue of the Buddha can transfer magical power from the Buddha to what the string is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the time for protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists believe in magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist monks or that a Buddhist funeral would bring an auspicious rebirth.
Speaking of rebirth, the belief in reincarnation (which is central to most forms of Buddhism) is certainly religious in nature. Same with the belief in karma.
Also, one reason that Buddhism has been so successful around the world is that it can co-exist with and even absorb local religions to such an extent that many people who consider themselves Buddhists still believe in all sorts of gods, demons, or spirits, and for them Buddhism is not seperable from such beliefs.
It's only certain types of Buddhism in certain contexts which have been desacralized.
"as Dalai Lama put it: if science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change"
He might have said it but I'm skeptical as to just how much change he'd be willing to subject his version of Buddhism to.
Anyway, the Dali Lama is a representative of just one form of Buddhism: Tibetan Buddhism, which is far from representative of Buddhism as a whole, and one that's pretty far from being secular compared to, say, Zen or Chan.
Even when focusing on just the more secular forms of Buddhism, at what point does veneration of the Buddha become worship? Is faith in the effectiveness of the Eightfold Path, the Buddha, and the Sangha all that different from Christian faith in God or in the effectiveness of works, faith, or grace (depending on one's denomination) in being saved?
There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners, but if you look at how Buddhism is actually practiced in the places where it came from before it got to the West it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Land_Buddhism
[2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-pure-land/
By the way, it is worth mentioning, not all Buddhist take this literally. Alan Watts told there were some Buddhists, understanding kind of like this (in my own words, I can't find the original quote now):
At any given moment you are never the same person you were in the previous. Your personality changes, your body atoms get replaced with new ones. The past you is already in the past. Today you are distinct from yesterday you. You are reincarnating right now. Like an immutable value in functional programming can never be changed, you can (or you can't, this depends on the programming language) just assign a similar value derived from it with some change applied to the same identifier. So if you practiced well, the future you (in this life time from the conventional point of view) is a reincarnation of you which will reap the fruits of "good karma" (karma being just the causes (mostly mental) causing you to behave a certain way and get into certain situations because of this - nothing mystical). And the fruits are there: even if good doings fail (not necessarily) to lead you to good health and financial prosperity, mental practice results are here to greatly help you cope with any problems you face and also to help you behave in a more constructive way.
Unlike the Christian G-d, the Buddha does not judge, does not punish, does not forgive and has not died in tortures for your sins, this way enabling priests demand you feel guilty. AFAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal, not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to punishment.
> Buddhism as it's actually practiced in parts of Asia has many magical, "superstitious" components, like believing that a red string connected to a statue of the Buddha can transfer magical power from the Buddha to what the string is tied to. Believers pray to Buddha all the time for protection, luck, or even wealth. Some Buddhists believe in magical effects from tattoos made by Buddhist monks or that a Buddhist funeral would bring an auspicious rebirth.
> There's been a concerted, conscious effort to desacralize Buddhism to make it more palatable to Westerners, but if you look at how Buddhism is actually practiced in the places where it came from before it got to the West it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we have been born in the west and given highest monastic kinds of Buddhism right away instead of being born in a Buddhist country where only (mostly) monks can pursue enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and magick. I know a monk would probably laugh at this and tell I don't understand the point and I believe I know why, nevertheless I won't deny such an idea visits me occasionally.
The gods are not the same, but the faith seems very similar to me.
What is the difference between a Pure Land Buddhist believing chanting the nenbutsu[1] ("I take refuge in the Buddha of Inconceivable Light!") in order to get in to ensure rebirth in to Amitabha's pure land and a Christian saying they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior in order to get in to heaven?
Not much, from what I can see.
Even in the more secular forms of Buddhism, Buddhists regularly follow the precepts, take refuge in the dharma, Buddha, and Sangha because they believe it'll get them to enlightenment. And some believe "just sitting" for 20 years or whatever will make them enlightened.
Interestingly, some forms of Buddhism preach that one should not be so goal-oriented and should "just sit" without reason or expectation. That also sounds not very different from blind faith to me, where the believer is encouraged to throw reason out the window and "just believe" or "just do" (whatever the religious authorities tell them to).
"FAIK the Buddha taught you should pursue the Eightfold Path as a tool to attain your ultimate goal, not as a law breaking which is evil and a subject to punishment."
Well, the "punishment" in the case of Buddhism is supposedly just the iron law of karma and rebirth in to the world of suffering. It's not meted out by a god in Buddhism's case, but it still serves as a very effective stick on the Buddhist faithful.
"Some times I contemplate what a blessing it is we have been born in the west and given highest monastic kinds of Buddhism right away instead of being born in a Buddhist country where only (mostly) monks can pursue enlightenment and the laymen only know worship and magick."
Is secular Buddhism the highest kind? Just as in any major religion, there is great disagreement among the various Buddhist traditions as to which is the truer Buddhism. Many of these branches don't accept each other's most sacred texts as being as authentic or as important as their own, which preach radically different understandings of the Buddha's teachings.
One of them really might be more authentic, and everybody's got their own opinion on that, but ultimately who's to say?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nianfo
Having said that, it's hard to make sense of a lot of Buddhist teaching without karma and rebirth.
In the tradition that I followed, they said that experience was momentary (like, atomic); and the moments were separated by 'gaps'. Realisation was to be found in these gaps. In a way, that is like dying after every moment.
This was a tradition that venerated Padmasambhava, the composer of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; which highlights the opportunities for realisation in the gap between two lives.
Interestingly, these gaps also contain extreme terror, which you experience without the stabilising influence of a body. The TBOTD describes these terrors in a lot of detail.
The Dream Yoga is another way of exploring these gaps.
This is a big generalization without a clear definition of what is "sacred".
> it's pretty clear that it's a religion.
I understand what you mean but using the world "religion" creates a lot of generalizations.
- Devotion
- Loving kindness
- Morality
- Generosity
I'm not saying that these kinds of things define religion; but there are few systems of thought that include these things, that don't also include supernatural beings.
It's hard to argue that Buddhism isn't a religion. It's certainly possible to construct something that's derived from Buddhism that isn't religious; but I don't think that's Buddhism.
/me not religious, nor Buddhist (any more), and now much more contented.
"Do not accept my words simply because I have said them; test them yourself, to see if they are true."
This is notoriously difficult. Buddhist teachers are extremely reluctant to criticise one another; you won't get a straight answer if you ask "Should I go on a retreat with teacher X?". Ultimately you have to rely on your own intuition, which makes it a bit of a game of dice.
> What if you are interested in secular meditation and do not believe Buddhism or other religions are truthful?
Good luck finding a secular meditation tradition with more than about 20 years of accumulated knowledge underlying it. Find a real teacher with a lineage; if your inclination is secular, discount the religious elements of the teaching you receive.
A secular mindfulness teacher has no lineage support-structure to support their teaching activity. And generally, they don't have the experience and insight that comes from practising a wide variety of techniques in addition to mindfulness.
Vipassana has been mentioned, in the article, and here in comments. Vipassana is a set of techniques for destroying the belief that you have an independent self. Not believing you have a self is itself a mark of psychosis. Vipassana is a form of mindfulness; but it's a big mistake to think that Vipassana practice can be secular. It's entirely founded on the (religious) view that belief in an independent self is the root of "suffering".
This way of looking at it reveals a clash between Buddhism and mainstream "Western" psychology.
If one experiences the self as unreal, the world as unreal, others as unreal, according to some forms of Buddhism you're on your way to enlightenment (if not already there). But according to mainstream Western psychology you're mentally ill.
Which is it?
I was over-simplifying when I said "destroying the belief that you have an independent self" - the cause of suffering is attachment to the sense of an independent self. Attachment in general is seen as a cause of suffering, but attachment to the sense of self is the hardest attachment to get rid of.
The term "ego" is used in Western discourse about Buddhism, as a cipher for the attachment to the sense of self. That is not what is meant by "ego" in Freudian or Jungian psychiatry (basically, the focus of consciousness). I wish Western Buddhists would stop using that word.
Western psychiatry doesn't pretend to address anything like the state of nirvana. It's mainly concerned with curing pathological conditions. I don't think any reputable psychotherapy traditions propose to take you any further than a condition of being free of the most-obvious kinds of hang-ups (Jung and his followers might be exceptions - I'm not sure - Jung's views were very expansive).
The Abidharma is the closest thing in Buddhism to psychology; it presents a detailed, practical (for meditators) way of thinking about the mind and how it works. It doesn't resemble Western psychology at all.
By the way, why does is not? What do you mean under Western psychology at all? Freud and Jung? If so, is it a mere incoincidence the models of the mind they invented are different from that of Abidharma or did they sort of look on the object from different angles?
When trying to model a mind there are obvious elements everybody can note (can they?): the mood, the memories, the focus of the attention, the sense of self, rational logic, computational intelligence, slow and fast decision functions, self-control, compassion, random thoughts popping up and making mental noise, attitude, instincts (like fear, jealousy, arousal, etc), probably some other. Why do different thinkers come up with different models?
Some of the stuff in the Abhidharma reflects teachings of the Buddha; but most of it was constructed by monks, after the Buddha's death.
I don't know of anyother models of mind, other than Western psychology and Abhidharma. There must be other models; I'd be surprised if Vedanta, for example, didn't incorporate a model of the mind.
I suppose the dominant model of mind in a society reflects the preocccupations of that society.
Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the testability criterion was seen as inadequate and was replaced a while back with falsifiability[1], but even that has its own problems.
String theory's claims are supposedly untestable. Is it not a science?
I'm not a physicist, but I've heard there are cloud chamber experiments for which the only observer is the physicist performing the experiment, and are not reproduceable and yet are published in physics journals all the time.
That's not to mention that while many experiments are in principle reproduceable, in practice they usually don't get reproduced, and even if they were reproduced at one point they're not going to be continuously reproduced over and over again by each researcher (who has not the time, education, budget, or interest to reproduce every experiment they've ever read and not yet read but that is still an accepted part of the overall body of scientific knowledge).
Science, just like pretty much every other human cooperative endeavor, largely runs on trust... trust that what one reads and learns is mostly accurate. As skeptical as they make themselves out to be most scientists just don't run out and try to replicate every experiment under the sun or every a large fraction of them. They just trust the results they read are more or less accurate, or expect someone else to catch them.
Back to Western psychology. Some branches of it (like the Cognitive/Behaviorist branches) do purport to be more "scientific", but others like Freudian, Jungian, Humanistic, and Existential and Transpersonal psychology (not to mention art therapy, dance therapy, drama therapy, somatic therapy, life regression therapy, etc) aren't so big on the "science" bit, and aren't so interested in experiments or the scientific method at all.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Simplifying I'd conclude that this is not a binary but an spectral phenomenon: there are 2, both undesirable, poles of extremity and a harmonious middle. Naturally/culturally people are more inclined to self-association and a slight shift to the opposite generally is desirable. Dissociate from your mind but don't in a degree when you loose it.
By inspection (eg. sitting, paying attention, etc!), I discovered that we both do and do not have an independent self, at the very same time. They form a non-dual—-each arises in the combination of both and are mixed together in a way that trying to fix the boundary between them is folly.
I believe it is a major error to practice with the objective or possibility of annihilating the self. The self is an observable phenomenon. To reject it is crazy, as crazy as rejecting non-self.
IMHO a major milestone in practice is to grasp deeply the reality of non-duals, and leave behind the attachment to a dualistic belief in the self. This is nothing like annihilation.
As I became less desperately invested in a simplistic sovereign concept of self, my “self” became more confident, natural and wild. It's not going anywhere!
A normal activity that when pushed to the limits of endurance, can overwhelm an individual. But that doesn't necessarily make swimming or meditation something to be feared or avoided.
This is the take away for me:
> "I believe that these practices, with the correct framework, dosage, and education, can be a valuable tool for improving mental health. "
Well, perhaps you haven't read the article; the OP is saying that meditation is dangerous, and that meditation teachers don't warn you of the dangers. Isn't that the opposite of your "take away"?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
Don't need meditation to get there. But more importantly, you're supposed to keep going and find peace with it. Not stop and run away in terror.
You have yet to succeed at awakening.
This is needlessly dismissive and condescending. It's like saying "Congrats, you failed running a marathon" to someone who suffers an injury after 20 kilometers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul
Ah, note the last paragraph in this article:
'In modern mindfulness practice, many authors have named a similar phenomenon in meditation as the dark night of the soul after the poem. It is often described as a lengthened and intense state of depression or ennui caused by errant or irresponsible meditation practices. Author John Yates compares it to a Theravadan term, dukkha ñanas, or "knowledges of suffering".'
I can't imagine what an irresponsible meditation practice would look like. Any pointers?
It should be done step by step, carefully.
I think philosophers talked about habitus, and nowadays we might be able to "fix" phobia with a mix of MRI and reinforcement learning, slowly. Or how to reduce your fear of falling when rockclimbing, by falling "on purpose" when you are in between pitons by an increasingly large length.
The Biography of Naropa would make an amazing horror movie. Really wild read as well.
Homeopathy is useless, which is why you can't harm anyone with it.
Meditation does work, which is why it can also be dangerous.
Selected quotes:
"The ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God, while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or a state of nothingness)."
"For Buddhists, salvation is a privation of individual consciousness; for Catholics salvation is an eternally fulfilling relationship with a loving Creator."
"For both Buddhists and Catholics “detachment” is important, but for Catholics detachment is not an end in itself. St. Francis de Sales preached that man must desire to “possess his soul” rather than allow it to be possessed by worldly things. Catholics pursue this for the purpose of elevating their soul by offering it back to Christ. So detachment is a means to a rich and meaningful “higher awareness” (if you will) that reaches its culmination in seeing God face to face."
So this (temporary) dark night of the soul ultimately leads to a deeper, perhaps more mystical relationship with God.
[0] https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/catholicism-and-b...
Enlightenment is the same regardless of the path you take to get there. When “this” and “that” are gone what is there?
That should be can render I think, the author seems well aware that what happened about him isn't bound to happen to anyone.
Experienced this as well.
> it being a pseudo-religion
IMO, too simple. Many experiences feel quite pseudo-religion like.
> more susceptible to breakage from smaller stresses, like one of a traffic jam
Didn't experience this. In fact I believed I was more or less invincible and became pretty deluded. Thankfully a part always stays skeptical. Being skeptical saved me and it made me stop meditating for a while and now I have it at a level where it's beneficial.
Not the first time I hear about these negative side effects, but every time I’m reminded of the possibility I’m surprised.
It also reminds me however that my meditation practice is infinitely shallower than what people suffering negative consequences describe.
There was a time where I would practice very rigorously (for me at least) and all I can remember is that I felt more empathy and emotion but never in a bad sense. I remember getting tearful if I heard a story of human suffering, and I also remember getting quasi-orgasmic sensations with food. Never things like losing it at a traffic jam.
I wish I could recover the positives, but unfortunately I don't remember what my practice consisted of back in the day. Maybe I should go to a class or something.
As another commenter said, don’t overdo things.
Edit: whether you get more intense experiences likely is some function of how stable and sensitive you are, what other experiences you already had and how much you meditate.
I imagine that very grounded people don’t get problems as quickly. That’s a good thing, not shallowness.
Actually, the author describe people having similar negative experiences just from dabbling with meditation apps, so the catalyst is not necessarily a 14-day silent retreat, but rather something more intangible, in which case it could happen to anyone, really
I don’t think it’s actively harmful, but the “mindfulness industry” is full of charlatans and poor advice, and it does make me rather sad that it’s being monetised in such a way.
Just sit.
I don't really have much sympathy here, it seems, but I don't really understand how one could not expect something like this to happen unless they really avoided speaking to anyone with actual experience (which, yes, means a zen monk, and not someone who spent 3 days in a Hilton doubletree learning how to teach people to 'breathe' and 'unlock their chakras' -- which is all bollocks.)
I follow the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, my teacher would not allow me to go to Sessin (which is a multi day meditation retreat) until I had been practicing for like two years, and I had a lot of stuff come to the surface at my first one that really disturbed me… however, I had my teacher there, and he knew exactly what to say and do to help me through it as he has been through the same. He would not have permitted me to leave in such a disturbed state.
This guy would not be able to do that for his students, and even for himself he didn’t even know about such things. This is bad, and more stories like this will happen as long as charlatans are taking one aspect of an established practice and ignoring the rest.
As a whole, shikantaza when practiced with a teacher is safe. Things like breath awareness, vipassana and such I think are harmful, but that is due to my training and perhaps I am wrong, but for sure, meditation without the “rest” is largely a money machine these days, and people will be harmed by that.
Edit: I would also add that shikantaza as opposed to other forms of meditation is not about manipulating the brain in any way, but simply observing it. This is why we do not do things with a goal, such as counting of breaths or trying to still the mind. Simply sit, observe, and the stillness comes with no effort. There is no goal, and no enlightenment. There is no separation of practice and experience, the practice is enlightenment.
I can’t make a call either way in the authors mental state, but clearly there was stuff going on unrelated to meditation which he clearly needs some help dealing with.
It was not evident to you that taking some time to be alone with yourself could be uncomfortable? It's almost a polar opposite to how most people live their lives. I am genuinely curious what made you believe otherwise - I cannot imagine it.
Every time I take a walk I'm stuck in my head too.
... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-pedantic values of risk-free?
More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has been shown to have real and permanent (and positive) effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over thousands of years. Can you name any practice more effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will be interested.
You seem to be comparing meditation to neurosurgery. I have no idea why you think this comparison is valid. Meditation is voluntary control of attention, which you've been doing all of your life, not neurosurgery. No doubt using this in novel ways will present challenges.
> To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.
Why? Democracy was invented thousands of years ago, and we've been through many other systems of govenment since, and yet now everyone believes that democracy is the best way to organize a highly complex global system of intelligent agents. Does it seem implausible to you that a system of governance that's thousands of years old is still the best we know?
Frankly, I have no doubt that a tradition that's thousands of years old and that has had hundreds of thousands of adherents in that time, could have worked out most or all of the challenges it raises. That's a huge sample set if you were analyzing this scientifically, and these spiritual practices were quite systematically explored.
There's no worldwide buddhist conspiracy to shun the "bad" parts of meditation, the post author learned from teachers with no qualification.
Uncomfortable, sure. Experiencing the dark night of the soul is not meant to be comfy. It can be rewarding though. Sometimes it is merely insight into our physical and psychological make up though. I don't care what kind of adventures one gets into but if you start getting extreme with them, you're eventually going to experience some really sketchy, uncomfortable, and even life-threatening situations.
Why Zen specifically? There are many different types of Buddhism.
Even if it does have to be Zen, which kind of Zen? Rinzai or Soto, or some mix of the two (which some Zen schools advocate)?
And why Buddhism, anyway? Meditation is practiced in many different religious traditions.
"mindfulness" is itself rooted in the Theraveda -- not Zen -- Buddhist tradition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the "right" way to meditate must be a Buddhist way as opposed to, say, one of the many Hindu forms of meditation.
Of course there are many paths, however I am only aware of the one I’ve been down. So, yeah, I have zen tinted glasses on such subjects and whatever I am saying should be taken with the appropriate sodium chloride.
If you don't have anything positive or constructive to add, why not stay silent? That too is a form of mediation.
I'm really hoping you were going for darkly ironic humour, if not, please reread your sentence I quoted and, I don't know, contemplate on it.
Received transmission? From the Trisolarians perhaps?
Buddhism is largely an oral tradition, in that the teachers who exist today can trace their education back up a tree, this is all I mean by transmission.
1) There's no scientific evidence for chi. Or qi, ki, whatever you're calling it in an Asian language, because it's just, like, deeper.[1]
2) "Energy" is the most wooly thinking word ever in pseudoprofound proclamations. For the love of Jesus. (Who most likely existed, but was very definitely not the son of YHWH)
3) You can believe what you like, and I'll believe what I like. And if I ever develop fantastical beliefs, I promise I won't expect you to treat them as real things deserving of your serious consideration. And I'll hope you do me the decency of reciprocating that implicit respect.
[1]: https://youtu.be/Z78_rAg4Ldg
You may be able to teach yourself meditation from a book, without a teacher. But that can't confer on you the confidence that you're doing it right. Many practices depend critically on confidence. Of course, you have to be confident that your master has really mastered the particular practice; you gain that confidence by knowing that the master received transmission, from someone who received transmission... etc. That line of transmission is referred to as the "lineage" of that practice.
There are no ritual formalities for mindfulness; every monk learns mindfulness, from other monks. The first monks learned it from the Buddha; but if you're going to learn the practice from a layman, you need to start inquiring into your teacher's transmission lineage.
In tantra, there are rituals that accompany the process of mastery: permission to study the text, a reading of the text, a commentary on the text from the master.
But these rituals are not the transmission.
There's usually some kind of "inner" transmission that depends on a personal relationship between the master and the student. But even that doesn't seal the transmission; the student still has to internalise the practice, which might take years.
It's very interesting to look into the process by which tulkus "produce" innovative practices. Often, the teaching is delivered to the tulku by enlightened beings, who learned the practice from some Buddha other than The Sage of the Munis. The tulku must then practice the teaching, usually for many years, until the insight stabilises, before it's safe for him to disseminate it.
Tulkus often have hard lives.
Especially if you unnecessarily revert to jargon when trying to explain your beliefs, you mention "tulku" four times, but define it zero times. This is indicative of in-group signaling.
I avoid articles about pay in the SF area, AI models, Tesla cars, and many other topics. If I read one by accident, I just move on - I don't post a comment whingeing that I'm not interested.
I don't belong to an "in-group" here; I used to be a Buddhist, but I no longer profess any religion. The subject still interests me though; I devoted 40 years of my life to it, and unsurprisingly it has had quite an impact on me.
For what it's worth, a tulku in Tibetan Buddhism is a re-incarnating lama. I realise that I used the wrong word; what I meant was "terton", which is a revealer of hidden teachings. Those hidden/revealed teachings are a specialty of a minority of Tibetan Buddhists - so an "in group", almost by definition. Tertons an interesting subject - if you happen to be interested in such things.
- I had from the beginning espoused a non-religious view of Buddhism. About 20 years in, my teacher stated that Buddhism was definitely religious, and that devotional practices like pujas were non-optional. I didn't like it, but if you take on a teacher, it behoves you to at least try to go along with the teaching - which I did.
- I learned some things about Tibetan history that were the opposite of my earlier, naive beliefs. Pre-communist Tibet was not Shangri-La.
- While I never practiced tantra, the tradition was tantric; I eventually learned some important things about tantra that I found unacceptably obnoxious. I can't go into detail, because I don't want to undermine anyone else's commitment to tantra.
- The group that I had been involved with gradually changed, I became an outsider, and things got difficult. Friends in the group cut me off.
- The behaviour of Buddhist nationalists in places like Myanmar and Srilanka towards non-Buddhist minorities appalled me - this was the tipping point.
- I did my back in through long sitting sessions. The amount of my life that I had spent sitting was beginning to look like heavy expenditure for no obvious gain (I wasn't making much progress).
These are my reasons; they don't apply to anyone else, and I don't deprecate Buddhism or Buddhists. I just gradually came to see that I'm no longer one of them.
There is a great deal that I integrated from Buddhism. It remains the basis for my morality, and my world-view is still largely based on Buddhist thought. But I no longer do any kind of formal practice, and I don't identify as a Buddhist.
Soto, as I understand it, is all about just shikantaza. The rest is optional. I don’t shave my head and wear robes, I just sit.
It took me a while, but this shoe fits. I read Dogen and he seems to agree with this for the most part, but of course ymmv.
When I was a kid / teen, I could get into an altered state by repeating a word (any word) in my mind. After a short while, I would "disconnect" (I don't know how to describe it) :)
I would think any moderately well-traveled psychonaut would not be surprise by anything that the author experienced..
Mindfulness is not Buddhism.
Meditation has always been a deeply spiritual practice; Mindfulness attempts to turn it into a psychological, clinical one.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL70fWqztn7OXdbGqWEOvhOVqf...
> "I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA. I was unsettled yet intrigued by Britton’s message. Some of the adverse experiences she had described were similar to challenges I had faced. But, at this point I was a decade into my intensive mindfulness meditation practice. I was too deep to get out. "
There's just so many things that is bad with this new-new age wave.
First of all, doing spiritual practices generally do not go hand-in-hand with taking drugs. Just taking marijuana or hash may bring panic attacks, and even psychotic episodes. If you rely on drugs to keep your emotions in check, you're already dealing with them wrong. Meditation together with drugs won't help that, but may worsen things if done intensively.
Second, there's no such thing as "intensive mindfulness meditation practice". Mindfulness is gentle and short, and more about stillness than meditation.
Third, "intensive meditation" is something everybody should be wary about. Max 20 minutes is recommended per day, and there is no need to do more in order to "get anywhere faster". Most important of all, do it with an experienced teacher you trust. The most important ingredient in meditation is to let go and relax, and is not yet another "work".
In the end, something can always go wrong. Not everyone can deal with meditation, and not sure if there's a way to ensure to filter out people. Often people come to classes because they have some issues, not when everything's alright. So there are already things to deal with. Recommended is that people doing medication like antipsychotics, should be prescreened from joining class.
In the end, meditation is a powerful tool. But not sure the stress of Western life is the right way to channel the clarity and calmess one may get from it. You may come back from long retreats, but need tools to deal with the stresses in modern day life. So just meditation may be too confusing or not enough, to deal with one's life once more.
Agree with everything, although I would say at least in Soto 45 mins seems to be the maximum for one period during sessin, and 15 of that will be kinhin (walking meditation), I tend to do about an hour a day in two sessions, but any longer and there isn’t really any reward.
Drugs are a hard no, I mean do them all you want but don’t combine the two.
As a "beginner" meditator, 20 mins a day is plenty though. As an "experienced" meditator 20 mins is enough too (you may in time meditate anytime/anywhere).
It's when people take on themselves to "do much more", mix several spiritual practices or follow cults that do extreme regimes that things might sometimes get crazy. Most people do OK, but there are people who need medication or have deep-rooted issues that maybe should not be doing meditation, at least not until those issues have been settled.
Another issue is that some deeper practices were basically developed for monks, to be learned after years of initiation and acceptance.
Why not?
An imperfect analogy is taking drugs and then driving fast on a windy mountain road.
Taking drugs, even alchohol, stresses the body and mind, and may distort and cloud the spirit. This work against yoga / equanimity / clarity.
There are traditions that uses drugs ritually, so is part of those traditions. Though, it is often a more perilous and dedicated path. Not everyone needs to live life as a sage or munk.
So doing sadhana (practices) will work over time. It's not a competition.
Meditation will take you down many unknown paths: difficult paths, painful paths, joyful paths...
An intensive meditation sounds more like a doing, like hitting the gym hard on a 30 day diet plan, rather than a state of being meditative and progressively turning inwards. You can't intensively find your inner peace, as an intense thing isn't a peaceful thing.
To my mind, intensive meditation is still going to result in something that feeds the ego, rather than something that feeds the soul. You wouldn't call it intensive if it wasn't ego-driven.
There’s a saying, “if you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha” which effectively addresses the comment that I think you are making.
For some reason, since meditating fairly regularly over the last 5 years, I seem to be quite attune to the troubles drugs and alcohol cause me. It's probably one of the dangers of new practitioners who download applications and get started without any background fall into, they haven't read some of the wise teaching that other may have been exposed too.
I'm not a Buddhist per-se, but I do believe the teachings exist for a reason.
I also remember having a very rough time early in my practice, I think I did too much too early and I was also using Marijuarna which seemd to make some of the issues worse. I backed off that and I recovered and meditate now with no issues.
Interestingly this is covered in the context of psychedelics too (which in my opinion are often touted in a similarly misleading way) by Dr Rick Strassman's fascining DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Making things like this too clinical or for lack of a better word mundane can alter their effects enormously.
- not all are rooted in spirituality
- some are directly related to mindfulness
I find that if I meditate regularly, I'm more likely to catch myself practicing mindfulness by accident in my daily life. In those moments I usually discover something about my surroundings that I didn't know before. Really practical stuff, like an unexplored trail that's a better way to take on my commute home from work.
Intentionally practicing mindfulness is fine, but for me it's the cases of being mindful without explicitly setting the intention that make it worthwhile. They're really pleasant, nothing spiritual about it.
And meditation is linked to those moments because, if I'm lucky, it causes them.
It's literally just the skill to not get distracted by the small waves.
So definitely: Mindfulness is not Buddhism.
But would you advise people who are hallucinating to do the same?
The stuff that comes up, including the hallucinations, are brought to the surface through your practice, but they are not caused by it. The only way to deal with them is with an experienced teacher, therapist or with self discipline (the latter i only include as seemingly this is what shakyamuni apparently did).
Everyone is different, I agree, but sitting with inexperienced people and expecting some enlightenment experience is definitely going to go wrong for you.
I think the underlying issue with all these asian-spiritualism-turned-western-nouveau-health is that western people sometimes come in wanting things to be intense, clinical and goal-oriented. But that's literally the opposite of what most of what these disciplines are all about. Asian health upkeep practices (yoga, tai chi, meditation, radio taiso, etc) are mostly about gentle but consistent practice to keep gears oiled for the long run. Most of those aren't even meant to be healing disciplines.
That feels a lot like either victim blaming, or being fed a No True Scotsman truism and accepting it.
One could say the same thing about staying within their skill level for any high-risk adventure sport. "If that advanced ski course is injuring you ...."
Yoga isn't about quantified stretch goals, it's a daily fitness regime. So if you pull a leg muscle by going on a super deep downward dog first thing in the morning without warming up because you're aspiring to reach some guru-like level quickly, instead of seeing yoga as a fitness program to carry your body to old age, then yes, your understanding of the practice is wrong.
That describes me exactly. I spent forever look for a "quantified meditation" course.
I even kept a mediation journal where I could track how many times I lost track of my breath in a 5 minute session. I started out around 50 and was desperately trying to get to 0.
I even used an app that counts taps, that I would rest under my finger, so that I could mark each failure as quickly and easily as possible. Without trying to "remember" the count of failures because it would distract me from the breath.
I felt that if I could get to 0, that I wouldn't be ready for enlightenment, but I would at least achieve ACCESS CONCENTRATION and be able to enter the stream. At that point, it could become a spiritual practice, but I wanted to develop sufficient concentration abilities and conquer my ADHD before thinking too much about what mediation was actually for.
It's been really hard for me to let go of the idea that my meditation needs a score to track my progress.
I think you’re doing yourself a bit wrong with this approach.
Can I suggest a book to you? It’s “Sit down and shut up” by Brad Warner, it may help.
I once read a book by Aleister Crowley, that included a series of meditation practices intended to increase your personal power. The instruction was very similar to the instructions I had received for a type of mindfulness.
I never tried Crowley's practices; but still, for weeks after reading that book, I had a feeling of dread, as if something awful was following me around.
IMHO the biggest dissonance between western idea of "intense" vs eastern is that westerners think of intensity as optimizing for burst amplitude (in martial arts' case, specifically honing combative prowess), whereas easterners think of it as a matter of consistent holistic development (core strength, balance, attention, etc).
Thank you for saying this.
There is an endless, dangerous trend of dismissing monastic traditions like Zen and trying to extract meditation from its context, under the assumption that teachings and formal practice are unnecessary.
It happens in scientific research on meditation as well as on popular McMindfullness.
An age old tale we can't seem to learn.
So maybe people are focusing on the second lesson rather than the first.
In this case, however, the participants may more likely be vulnerable. They are seeking some solution to their problems, and mindfulness is promoted as one. As the author makes the case, it really was a solution to his problems. But it seems he took it too far.
2 major mistakes for me was going too much in either direction (relaxation vs. force).
I had a phase where I wanted to relax too much, or just let it come or let it manifest, either by trying to chill so much as to become sleepy, or by just trying to see with the naked eye. In either case it was a thought loop trap.
And I had a phase were I was too obsessive and used a lot of force. Like I really wanted to concentrate too hard and that also screwed me up a bit.
In either of these cases I could make a statement that meditation screwed me up, but I persisted with it and I can say that after 4 years, the benefits were very well worth the effort.
Also a big mistake was skipping the instructions. I.e. instead of just counting the breath or following the breath, I jumped at the unassisted version. I think if I just sticked to the very simple instructions and tried less of inventing my own way or outsmarting what's in the book, I would not run into these issues.
Note that I'm talking about zazen too, while the article is about mindfulness, it's a bit different although I never tried mindfulness.
The output of meditation is supposed to be a clearer mind from before and it may take a while to reach the desired state of mind. Stoicism should not be misinterpreted as having no zest for life. One psychologist I know told me something that made an impression on me "Just because life is going to end or that many good things come to an end eventually doesn't mean you should not enjoy the present". I am sure different people have different outcomes but I think the purpose of meditation is to learn the joy of life. One could see stoicism as being pessimistic towards life. I personally see meditation as a tool that hopefully helps you derive the joy of living in every moment of your daily existence while not being attached to it so that that if the circumstance changes, you don't lose the joyfulness and adapt to the new things in life knowing that the change won't last either.
Since then, I have been practising Vipassana and/or Anapan every day (sometimes twice a day) and I realised that my entire life had been coloured by my anxiety. Now, when my anxiety shoots up, I am much more aware of it than before and can actively self-soothe. Every time I meditate, it feels like someone threw cold water on a hot metal plate. Another way I like to think about it is that I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve “cleared” my mind, so much as “defragmented” it, like a good old spinning hard disk. Usually tears form in my eyes in most sessions.
I continue to practice it every day. I am very grateful to have been through this experience. I experience a little bit more compassion towards myself, and hence, other people. I have a long way to go but this first step has given me much hope for the future.
I would love to hear about your experience too.
You also become comfortable as to who you are vs seeking validation about yourself.
Overall, it was a positive experience for me.
I went with no expectations except wanting to give the technique an honest try. On Day 5 I experienced anxiety and a panic attack. Never had one before - ever. I didn't know what I was feeling. On Day 6 it got worse. On Day 7 I almost quit but after talking to the teacher and course manager decided to persist. On day 7 I cried thru all the meditation sessions. I also felt some incredible highs which many people compare those achieved thru drugs - which I've never used myself. On that day I experienced feelings of extreme compassion and gratitude. On Day 8, my anxiety and panic attack got worse. It culminated in me passing out in the meditation hall. I passed out briefly but at that point I decided I had had enough and asked to leave immediately.
I've spent the last week+ trying to recover and hoping I didn't do any permanent damage to myself. In the past week I have experienced much minor feelings of anxiety but have been able to deal with them. I believe I will be ok but this has been an illuminating experience. Before this, I too never ever thought that meditation and/or mindfulness could have any negative or adverse reactions. So this is all new. I just wanted to pass on my experience objectively.
The one thing I really would say is that I wish these courses did a much better job of screening/counseling folks before they embark on the course and also have a better plan for how to address those people who experience something like I did. In that moment, I wanted to know that I was ok and felt like I wasn't getting the answers I needed. All I was told was to continue to work thru it. I am not sure that is the best thing for everyone. My body clearly was telling me otherwise.
The folks running the course do have a screening by asking you certain questions in the enrollment form and they do ask you to talk to someone if you are confused or concerned about any question. It is not a strong screening but screening nonetheless. How effective it is, I don't know and it also comes down to how forthcoming the student is in clearly stating his/her condition.
Having said the above, people do experience intense emotions like you mentioned as I observed first hand. My take based on what I learnt in the course and afterwards is that throughout life since we are born, we experience life and it builds up certain kind of emotions in ourselves. Depending on who had what experience in life, the build up can be very strong. Vipassana attempts to rid you of the emotional build up that one has accumulated. The act of crying or shouting, or anything else is an act of getting the emotion out of the system and be left with a cleaner state of mind. How long the emotional outburst will continue will depend on how much one has accumulated in life.
I would summarize this as - In order to fill a cup with afresh, you must empty it first. You can't fill an already full cup.
One may also want to read U G Krishnamurthi. One of his quotes that I really like is `When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself.` another way to interpret this is that emotional build happens when you action is in conflict with your inner self and over a period of time, the build up keeps growing resulting in problems (I have had emotional build ups that I have worked very hard to get rid of).
Putting in 10% of what this guy put in would likely give you measurable benefits without the disassociation risks, unless you already have some mental peculiarities.
Before this article, I didn't know meditation could have any adverse effect. Until today, I haven' read a single depiction, a single mention of meditation going wrong. Except in fictions.
So this claim that one does not simply learn about the negative side effects of meditation sounds very plausible to me.
There are certainly risks. A long retreat may exacerbate existing psychopathologies like depression due to the extended isolation.
I'd liken meditation to something like exercise. Exercise is good in general, but you still have to manage and work around injuries. I wouldn't suggest you walk 5 miles with a sprained ankle. And so it is with meditation.
But yes, I also figure this isn't talked about enough - especially in the context of mindfulness as a product.
If it was just that simple, you wouldn't have entire industries (self help seminars, retreats, religious cults of all kinds, pop psychology, and so forth) built on looking for an alternative.
> Willoughby Britton is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and associate professor at Brown University
> The meat of Britton’s talks was the results of a 2017 paper she co-published with her husband, Jared Lindahl, called the Varieties of Contemplative Experience1. In it, they examined distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
I understand it's supposed to be an abstract concept, but this statement still doesn't make sense
Christian religions for example set a certain stage, create an atmosphere that puts people in a shared mental state. Meditative, perhaps. I can see (although never experienced myself) how that, if you let it "in", can lead to a "religious experience" / awakening of sorts.
Worst one was that one time I was in an American evangelical church, the type where there's lots of music and the like. But also weird behaviour; during the sermon, lots of people around me had their hand up and were whispering "jesus", it was eerie as fuck to be honest. That line of churches does a lot with altering brain states though, one article I read mentioned measuring brain waves and seeing them enter an "alpha" state, similar to hypnosis and making people very susceptive to suggestions. Another example is exorcisms, where people go - let themselves go? - into a state of dissociation, speaking in tongues and spasming. I kinda see that as letting their own inhibitions go and letting the impulses take over.
TL;DR not a scientist, just armchair theorizing and waffling.
It's not uncommon to forget one has taken psychedelics when one is having a powerful trip, and just telling yourself that it's chemically induced and will stop in a few hours doesn't necessarily help.
That's not to mention that while under the influence of psychedelics a single minute might seem like many lifetimes, or you could feel like you're in an infinite time loop and are never getting out, etc.
Well, meditation and buddhism are supposed to be a way of life, not a stress reliever or a passtime. You can't be living like a modern westerner in the rat race and do buddhism on the side (or merely try to half-follow some general tenets in your everyday totally non-bhudist life).
Or rather you can, and thousands do, and there are fancy retreats and the like, but then you're a tourist to the whole thing, and what you do has little to do with the original spirit and what makes it work - which is all about context (even if there's a plethora of second rate, several times removed from the culture, snakeoil books in the shelves selling this exact approach).
Leonard Cohen spending 5 years on the monastery got it far more right.
>I relayed my experiences that afternoon to the two teachers who were overseeing the retreat of about 40 meditators.
Aka, some random guys who've read some books, perhaps studied under another random guy in the same line of work, opened their own retreat (or work in one), and play the role of buddhist luminaries for lucrative western audiences....
>As an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), I spent four years teaching meditation as a full-time job. A longtime meditator, I have logged roughly 4,000 hours of practice over 10 years, including over 100 days on silent meditation retreats. I’m extremely knowledgeable of both Buddhist and secular frameworks of meditation, have read countless books on the subject, and have taken instruction from numerous renowned Western meditation teachers.
In other words, they've made a mess of different practices, cultures, approaches, etc., mixing and matching, and always separating it from its context, from the culture they live in, from the environment, and from lifestyle commitments (aside from "medidation" itself).
The guy in the article was a teacher himself, not someone just casually dabbling, and mentions that the people studying the negative effects are encountering trainers and teachers more often than casual meditators.
You might find one rooted in the tradition/culture (and living it) practicioner in 1000, if you're lucky, but not in "mindfulness retreats" and corporate seminars.
In which case the article is spot on correct - the western mindfulness/buddhism stuff is mostly potentially dangerous and, as promoted, can lead to all sorts of harmful effects which are often brushed under the carpet.
If you visit the website mbsrtraining.com, the second link on the main menu is "Buy MBSR". Looks like the course materials cost just under $200. You also need to buy videos, attend retreats, co-facilitate retreats, and have supervision, as well as doing a lot of private meditation, if you want to be an accredited teacher. Sounds like a significant investment of time and money.
I can't find out from the website what licence these teaching materials are distributed under; that's a bit shifty, because I bet you're not allowed to reproduce them or distribute them.
Anyway, I wouldn't make that investment, just to sort myself out; I'd expect a return on investment. You get that by gathering paying students.
There is a "householder" tradition in Tibetan Buddhism: you can be an advanced practitioner and teacher, while running a family and a farm. The classic example is Marpa. Marpa was no tourist.
As for Marpa, he is not exactly a good example for a "householder" even of that era, as he was heavily involved, and worked/sacrificed enormously for his practice. So, yes, he was no tourist. But modern dabblers are.
Well, you can, actually. Many people do, and they're not fakes (or "tourists"). It's not easy, and Eastern teachers aren't best-positioned to help Westerners with the difficulties.
There are Western teachers who have been trying to develop ways of teaching Buddhism to Westerners that address the problems. I believe Trungpa was the best of these teachers (he obviously wasn't a Westerner, but he understood Westerners better than any other Tibetan teacher, I think).
I studied under a Western student of Trungpa. I think my teacher was too afraid of letting-go of the ethnic and cultural baggage; all of his teachers were Tibetan masters, and I think perhaps he felt diminished for not being a real Tibetan.
So I don't think the Western teachers have nailed it yet. I'm sure some Western teacher will eventually figure-out a teaching programme that works fairly reliably for Westerners.
But they won't be able to "de-fang" Buddhist practice; it's intrinsically dangerous.
Absolutely. If you meditate so much that it starts to work, it's like any effective medicine or treatment. It has potential for adversarial side effects. Even mentally healthy people get into some crazy states and can experience meltdowns while meditating. I have seen several cases of people having full blown psychosis needing psychiatric care.
Saying that if you get into a bad place you are not meditating right is also wrong. Buddhist tradition knows about these, but they are described in a way that often makes people think it's some kind of philosophical otherworldly metaphor. They can be pleasurable or horrifying or just weird. Japanese zen tradition calls all these just makyō (the realm of demons).
Everyone who has meditated long enough has encountered them. You can read sutras to see Buddha fighting with crazy. Almost every honest autobiography from famous meditation teachers has mentions of them. Zen Master Hakuin had probably the most famous complete meltdown. He called it Zen sickness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness He had to stop and seek help.
Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.
--
Making things worse: Meditation attracts people with mental issues, and many treat them as a substitute to medication or therapy. Meditation is neither. It can be used as part of therapy, but it's not a substitute. Better get your therapy/medication right and then meditate moderately if that feels fine.
What meditation does to the mind is not completely separated from the mental health, but it's not on the same line either. Understanding the nature of your mind heals only minor neuroses, and sometimes with depression.
You can be mentally ill and still have "prajna wisdom" or being "realized" in a very fundamental way. "Prajna wisdom" does not translate directly into normal wisdom or mental health (can help in some cases). The history is full of mentally ill meditation masters, "funny monks" and "crazy wisdom" that is crazy in real way and just not metaphor.
In religious settings people have tendency to attach attach every good thing to meditation in linear way. Morality, mental and physical health, everything. In reality you get "something completely different" (in the Monty Python way). It can help you in other things but it never solves other problems in your life.
Having psychological flaws doesn't disqualify you from being a realised master and a great teacher.
In many other cases the description of "demons" and other things match what is now called psychotic episodes. There is difference with struggling with practice and being unwell.
That sounds wrong to me, meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not to give anything. Also doing or not doing anything at all is not safe. There is no safety - once we are alive we will die.
Those are all metaphors to describe something "Die before you die so you don't' have to die before you die", "See your true face before you were born", "enlightenment", "entering the stream of holy", "satori", "be one with everything", "be nothing", "emptiness". None of those descriptions will help you understand. You either meditate or not. Then you can describe what happens to you in your own words contradicting everybody else.
This is interesting. As a human, I always have something to be discontent about. It never stops, and it is not supposed to stop - as those are my instincts driving me.
I love my mindfulness moments, and being able to look into my emotions. But I wouldn't want to stay months without discontent.
Overall, several of the author's quotes point to a very extreme practice. He is mixing internal state and reality as if it was one and the same. These two factors are bound to lead to problems.
But I don't see most people doing 30 min per say having these issues.
Meditation is what it says on the tin, a way to uncover real truth. It’s powerful and dangerous. It’s a path for truth seekers, who are willing to pay whatever it takes to see what is truly there. For me its a blessing.
For most these experiences are ones of positive disintegration rather than negative. After the dark night of the soul has passed we find ourselves more fully integrated than before.
For many that’s not something they were after and in this way I agree with the article, meditation is being miss sold.
I stopped meditating as a practice immediately. I toyed with it sometimes during everyday life, watching the trees go passed on the train, trying to be indifferent as strong emotions rocked me. I was mostly too preoccupied with redefining who I was to be bothered by further exploration.
Also note that I was not strongly aware of the connection between the experience I had meditating and the psychological disintegration that followed. I considered it a possibility, but not a strong one. For me it was just an evolution that was in progress. A darkness that had to be faced and an existential horror that I had to make peace with.
It's only after the fact that I can clearly see the connection. Perhaps it is coincidence, but I think it is more likely not.
YYMMV, but I feel the author is having problems they dont want to really accept. That is what the contradiction in the two quotes above indicates.
Aside from that, I couldn't help but think about people having access to too many psychedelics. For a while, tripping can give you the most profound experiences ever. But after a while, it sort of becomes mondane, and this is when the bad trip probability suddenly skyrockets. Or, put another way, even Siddhartha didn't find awakening in the samana practices. They were only the first step (of three) to reach his goal. You can overdo everything, even the very very nice things.
https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/illuminedheart/father_... >The impersonal concept of deity was actually an experience of the non-being from which we have come [already], and that the true understanding of God - the highest, fullest understanding of God is God as person, as I AM - He has revealed Himself as I AM. Archimandrive Sophrony, from His Life is Mine
Small short booklet Fr Seraphim Rose wrote: https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Revelation-Human-Heart-Seraphim/...
In my own journey out of buddhism, taoism, stoicism, psychadelics, Fr Seraphims writings helped clarify why their was still a hole in my soul, and why western Christianity made no sense to me.
In the Orthodox Christian perspective, they are the Church that followed the Council of Jerusalem (the Book of Acts), the earliest writings of the Church (St Ignatius, the Didache, etc.) then all the councils which codified the canon of scripture, the Ecumenical Councils, etc. Every council must affirm previous dogma; believed everywhere, by all (Orthodox Christians), and at all times - so the below article on the Essence and Energy distinction of God, by St Gregory Palamas, affirms the early writings of St Basil and the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church who were fighting heretical notions of what God is - the Church defined what He is not. The Cappadocian Church fathers affirm the Apostles and scriptures, etc. http://orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/florov_palamas.aspx
This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox Christian temples. The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054, and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations, and yet now are splintered into thousands on thousands of beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkmh68urI6A
WHAT IS THE NOUS AND HOW IS IT DISTINCT FROM THE SOUL? https://orthochristian.com/79038.html
The consensus of the fathers includes all of the fathers, if you must cherry pick a subset or an individual to make a point its simply not in the apostolic tradition.
The political/administrative disputes of 1053-1054 that directly produced the Great Schism didn't involve theological change on either side, so this (or the inverse, painting the Orthodox as the moving party, which I’ve also seen) position is simple factional-identity reinforcing revisionism.
> and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations
Quite a few of the things Protestants objected to in the Roman Catholic Church were features it still shared with the Eastern Orthodox Churches (and many of them, both in the shared category and not, were not issues of dogma), so no, that’s not true in much the same way as the preceding claim about 1054 wasn't, even before any debates about which issues of dogma or other doctrine may or may nor have been innovations.
I especially like the one from Florovsky. I'd just like to leave a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm for those who may be wondering what this is all about.
What specifically? You haven't explained what made no sense to you and what finally made sense to you in Eastern Orthodoxy (I would also avoid lumping Protestantism in with Catholicism under the label "Western"). Could it be that you simply did not understand? Here, I would stick to traditional Catholic teaching as the point of reference as the veritable source for orthodox doctrine and tradition, not some Protestant innovation or corruption.
Mind you, the Catholic Church understands God as the Ipsum Esse Subsistens. Thomistic metaphysics uses this term. Thus God is understood as Existence itself, as Being, not a being (you might say that God does not exist, but rather is, or to abuse the terminology, is existence). God is the "to be". This is to be identified with the "I Am" of Exodus 3:14.
> This is a nice comparison video of Tabernacle and Jewish Temple worship, and its continuation in the Orthodox Christian temples.
The Catholic mass is liturgically, etc. the continuation, fulfillment, and perfection of the sacrifices made at the Temple of Jerusalem. The altar is where the perfect, unbloody sacrifice of Christ is offered at each and every mass. This sacrifice is the very purpose of the mass. (Following the destruction of the Temple, the Jews have no priesthood, no temple, and no sacrifices, only synanogues.) So that is no news from a Catholic POV (it may be for poorly catechized and Protestantized Catholics today, but that's a different story).
> The western church in Rome was of the same One Mind of Christ in worship, Creed and sacrament until 1054 and then subsequently the Protestant revolted against their dogmatic innovations, and yet now are splintered into thousands on thousands of beliefs.
I'm not sure you have an entirely accurate view [0].
[0] https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eastern-schism
That's very interesting, and brings it much closer to a kind of pantheistic or even Vedanta-ish conception of god. But it's also simply not true for the how the vast majority of Catholic priests teach the religion.
I'd go a step further and state there is no such thing as a bad trip. There are just situations where loss go of control can result in the surfacing of things that are unresolved... and unpleasant. No one has a bad trip without the latter.
Another reason why psychedelics should come with clear warning labels that describe bad outcomes for specific situations.
Let's not jump to conclusions. I wouldn't propose a ban on anything when a warning label or full disclosure would do just fine. I've edited my comment accordingly
In other words, a bad trip can manifest pathologies where none existed before.
It goes both ways, you can't say the "good" experience is the truth and the "bad" experience is false. They're both the same thing and are just a mirror of your internal state, your job is to analyse them and decide what value you want to put on them. There is no "objectively" good or bad
I think a looot of people are conditioned by what they read on internet about psychedelics, they spend hours watching videos and reading about experiences before trying it for themselves and are already fully trapped in some form of mental cage of what they experience will/should be.
(To be fair, some of my friends still cite that night as a distinctly positive life-altering experience)
It has to be something you want to try (not something your friends semi forced you to join), you have to be aware it can be unpleasant, and you have to do it in a safe place (both mentally and physically), given that not much can go seriously wrong.
My first time was 200ug of lsd in the middle of a desert at night by myself, I had the idea after reading 1/4th of a book from Alan Watts, the way he talked about psychedelics made me curious and I didn't want to be too influenced by his experiences/descriptions which made me decide to stop reading and try it out.
It was my best trip, I gave up and replicating the experience after 4 or 5 times (over 3 or 4 years) and I stopped thinking about psychedelics since then.
Since then I learned two things:
- I'm much prefer tripping alone than with people, especially if the people I trip with aren't very long term/close friends I 200% trust on everything.
- Tripping inside isn't particularly enjoyable, I can't imagine tripping in a basement. I vividly remember feeling claustrophobic during my first trip, and that was in the middle of a desert probably 50km away from any man made structure
Terrors; visions of blood; intense paranoia; and the certainty that the experience is never going to end. That's not the surfacing of unresolved 'stuff'. That's being poisoned.
In my youth, I took a lot of acid, and I loved it. but I never thought it should be legalised; it's dangerous stuff.
Once we can be with it, then we can start to follow it down to its roots. Shining light into the darkness is how we heal.
Unfortunately the author seems to have gone astray down a false path that seems to be very common in western civilization called spiritual bypassing. Basically spiritual bypassing is when you use things like meditation and spirituality to get around your deep seated psychological wounds. Doing this is just a form of avoidance and repression which causes the wound to fester, which can eventually culminate in more severe symptoms like what the author describes.
Sorry, not the most constructive reply ever, but I couldn't resist...
I'm not sure about that. Psychedelics can bring to the surface all sorts of unconscious traumas, repressed memories, and/or issues people have trouble dealing with on a conscious level -- fear of death being a classic source of difficulty during "bad trips", but also other things such as physical or emotional pain, or making you face the way you've been treating others or been treated by others, etc.
Many people just can't handle that... especially if they've been running away from facing those things their whole lives, which many, many people are.
Suddenly - bam - you're face to face with your own death, say, living through it in excruciating detail.. and, yeah, that can be very tough to deal with, and many people react to a "bad" experience by trying to run way even further, but once you're on the psychedelic rollercoaster there's rarely any easy way out until the psychedelic wears off, and most psychedelic therapists these days suggest that instead of running away one should run towards the uncomfortable material, facing it squarely and surrendering to the experience, and this often results in cathartic relief and a "good" trip afterwards.
Of course doing this with a trained therapist who can help you before, during, and after the psychedelic session is better than trying to deal with it alone, which many people just aren't prepared to do.
I mean they could also reduce the pressure to perform and to be on top of everything a bit. I get that enthusiasm is contagious and FOMO is a real problem in tech, but the company should have done more to slow people right the fuck down.
I'm doing guided meditation(with Headspace) for 20 min each day and right now on 10 day streak and feeling good so far.
Yeah, right.
> in 2009 I started a fist fight in a French Quarter bar … I broke a window with my fist, misplaced my shirt, and guzzled about 16 bottles of Miller High Life … > That … represented a constant battle I had waged over the prior decade with anger and other negative emotions. I drank too much. I occasionally smashed printers that jammed. I had volatile relationships …
Would put my money on unacknowledged childhood trauma.
It's extremely easy to dismiss people like this, but, have a care, there are real people on the other end of your dismissive comments.
What I'm curious about: Are you suggesting that it is childhood trauma that will trigger a bipolar episode (rather than the 10 days of silent meditation 10 days in a row!)
If "everyone" has childhood trauma, why don't we see a higher incidence of bipolar disorder in the population?
unacknowledged childhood trauma is a real thing, it's not uncommon and does not constitute "dismissive comments" in any way.
Ironically, you are being very dismissive of eurasiantiger.
I wonder if this is a symptom of going far too much in a direction people don't normally do, similar to how people can and do die from water intoxication but almost never under regular conditions. The naive guidance of the meditation teachers saying "more of a good thing is always a good thing" with regards to meditation having the same role as organisers of a water drinking contest.
My ex is a very experienced and well-trained child psychotherapist. She insists that all adult psychological problems are caused by childhood trauma.
She seems to rely heavily on R.D.Laing for that (she trained at the Tavistock); I thought Laing had been discredited, but it seems that nowadays he's back in favour.
[Edit] I don't agree with my ex. I think she must have fallen down an antipsychiatry rabbit-hole.
People are going to keep poking around in their minds and finding things that disturb them. There is a lot to be said for learning to stay with the difficult things, if you can not yet afford yourself faith.
I honestly think it's _insane_ that they (vipassana) will take regular people who haven't done meditation and allow them to do a 10 day silent retreat. I honestly think it's like taking a regular person and allowing them to go down a grade 4 or 5 river. They might make it, but they might get seriously hurt too.
I actually raised this point with the local (New Zealand) health and disability ombudsman. I said that vipassana ought to have a psychologist to assess people as they left, or at least _something_ like that. Nothing changed as far as I am aware.
I hope the author continues to get better. It was a long journey for me.
[0]. http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com/2010/02/bipolar-chronicl...
The main reason I went on it was because doing a meditation retreat was suggested at a leadership seminar I went to! I was keeping a blog and I thought it would be "interesting" to go on the course. I was right about that ;)
What retreat did you go on, and did they ask about bi-polar experience pre-retreat?
Reiki is a problem, I speculate, because it puts you in the habit of imagining sensation beyond your body, and this may lead to some problems. There may also be a spiritual aspect to it. One counter-point is that there is one meditation practice that goes beyond the body: metta. So maybe its a specific issue with Reiki (like how you'll never see a teacher wearing black and/or red at a retreat).
And there is a form of milder bipolar disorder called cyclothymia that is rarely diagnosed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia
People don't seem to accept either that 1. You're tired and have been willing to try a lot, 2. Even the mystical panacea doesn't help.
Maybe when I retire! Thanks for the advice!
I did a Vipassana 12 day retreat (years ago) but I didn't find it to be that wild.
The hardest part for me was actually sitting down 15? hours a day. Had I known what I was going to do I would have prepared by doing exercises to strengthen my back.
One must wonder, why this is not common knowledge? Also, are there causation links, or not?
My personal conclusion is that the sample is biased -- that is, some people seeking meditation are looking to self-medicate (subconsciously or not) on personal issues they wish to overcome.
It would seem that perhaps a non-trivial portion of meditation practitioners are ending up with worse outcomes than they started out.
One is left to wonder whether meditation practice should come with warning labels ( just like medication does for adverse effects)...
You'll only ever read about the happy path or the success story, with some lip-service paid to how difficult it is to actually do in practice. You'll rarely get the raw detail of it, or a fully authentic account.
I'm not talking about quality literature here, but the short 250-pager you'd pick up in an airport bookshop that makes you feel good by the time you finish.
As with everything else in life: don't overdo it.
Relating this to meditation: On the rare occasion that I try meditating, it doesn't trigger anything negative, but I have found that I can induce such negative dissociative experiences on purpose (at least to some degree) by inducing a certain meditative-like thought pattern. It's hard to describe, but it has to do with time. It's like the mind is usually thinking at least a fraction of a second ahead, it's focused at least just a little into the future. If you break that, then meaningfulness seems to collapse and... it's not good, and you have to snap out of it.
I wonder if meditating is triggering something like that for the author.
Instead of meditating, mindfulness, thinking about your own thinking and purposefully trying to dissociate from yourself by conscious force, it may be more helpful just to find something that helps you relax. The point is to clear away stressful thoughts and thought patterns by letting the mind focus on something else rather than nothing (or itself).