There are different ways of meditating. If you're hallucinating blue, humming God balls you're certainly not doing what I do. I think what I do would probably be beneficial for most people. I'd hesitate to say all.
I agree. Most "meditation" (mindfulness) as I've seen it portrayed is really a very quiet, self-driven cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn to recognize thoughts, interrogate them to see where they may be false, and retrain to be detached from those cycles.
That's a gentle practice that, in addition to taking 10-20m for yourself in quiet place, is pretty much OK as a general recommendation.
Yeah, I don't think too many people are accidentally going to stumble upon the sort of meditation-induced psychosis talked about in the post using Headspace or Waking Up to try and reclaim some presence in their thoughts.
They just get you to sit there, consciously realize that thoughts come from nowhere, and notice that you can merely discard them. After a year of the Waking Up app, it's just a practical way to reground myself. For example, maybe I realize a bit of anxiety in a large place like a music festival, and I take a moment to try to discard the feeling. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the sort of meditation most people associate with the word.
So the thought of that being psychedelic or dangerous to people, suggested in the post, is just a reminder of how many things fall under the umbrella of "meditation".
I think it's more a question of dose. If you're meditating 20 minutes a day for three years you probably won't see a big effect. If you're meditating 12 hours for a day for 10 years, you're going to encounter a lot of stuff that could get labeled "psychosis" by people who don't know about it. And, it may be permanent. What kind of meditation you're doing will affect what you encounter and how you deal with it, but none of the paths will remain just "a practical way to reground [your]self."
If you eat one cube of sugar in a coffee per day and no sweets you are good. If you eat one kilo of sugar each day you'll probably get diabetes in a few months.
I think the picture is a little more complicated than that. There have been entire monasteries full of people who spend many hours a day meditating for thousands of years. They don't seem to be mentally unhealthy on the whole, though there are some exceptions. So it's evidently not the kind of thing where a continuous overdose will leave your mind or your body disabled; on the contrary, the meditators tend to live longer than average and be happier.
However, the kind of experiences described (seeing visions, losing interest in mundane matters, becoming certain of beliefs that turn out to be false) are a well-known feature of the process. And it's at least widely believed that guidance from experienced meditators is very helpful, if not crucial, to navigating these experiences.
> There have been entire monasteries full of people who spend many hours a day meditating for thousands of years. They don't seem to be mentally unhealthy on the whole,
Not to be snarky (ok maybe a little), but they do believe in unprovable beings on some "higher" plane of existence...
That's true! And it's very likely that meditation is part of that. On the other hand, most people believe in unprovable supernatural beings.
One of the most popular belief systems today posits that incorporeal consciousnesses with names like "California", "Ukraine", and "Google" are the causes of most everyday events, although when you investigate sufficiently you always find that whatever physical doing is attributed to "California" or "Google" is actually done by an ordinary, corporeal human being, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Nevertheless, people adhering to this belief system commonly become very angry when you claim that "Google" exists only in their imaginations.
If they’re practicing Buddhists they recognize that their own self doesn’t exist, so I think they’re winning compared to the average Westerner who believes in free will. Not to mention all those other unprovable beings like “Moses” and “George Washington” who like to hand down written commandments we follow.
It is one of the basic tenets of Buddhism† that humans are constantly deluding themselves and doing self-defeating things. In modern terms, you could say they are all mentally ill. This is asserted of humans in general, not just those who meditate a lot.
It's unnecessarily mean if it's not true or, arguably, if there's nothing they can do about it. But if it's true and there's something they can do about it, then not saying it is being unnecessarily mean.
The Buddhist prescription for how to get better (from common garden-variety self-delusion, not schizophrenia) is called the Noble Eightfold Path, and a large dose of meditation occupies an important place in it. Other important ingredients traditionally include material renunciation, strict nonviolence, celibacy, abstinence from alcohol, honesty, politeness, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
I have been doing Waking up and meditating 10 minutes a day and really liking it for exactly this reason. It almost feels like I am "training" my mind like I train my body with exercise whereas previously my thoughts and feelings would just run away on me and I would be along for the ride. Whereas now I am getting a bit better at realising I don't just need to be dragged along by whatever pops into my head moment to moment.
Theres actually some evidence (or a least a lot of pubmed papers) that touch on how for certain at risk populations, meditation can increase the probability of an episode of psychosis! (so anyone who has any family history of schizophrenia or other things in the same space, really need to be careful of meditation and friends)
I believe that ' family history of schizophrenia ' is not fully understood.. there is an interrelated system of health, genetics, aging, stress, nutrition and extreme experiences, which can go many ways.. I believe that 'schizophrenia' is real and serious, but that the factors involved in leading to it, and its treatments, are not fully understood..
with that said, I believe there is science evidence that marijuana and meditation, both can be triggering to an ill mental state.. along with other, stronger things of course.. common street methamphetamine can bring on illness rather quickly and is addictive.. serious personal injury like trauma can bring on illness rather quickly.. things like that..
Both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are highly correlated with family history. There is a clear connection something genetic causes them. What that is… we don’t know.
Fortunately, we don’t need exact answers to do science. :)
Psychiatry (and therapy) is far more advanced that it was just a few decades ago. It’s incredible we are where we are today. American culture is starting to accept and talk about mental health.
Wow - thanks for posting. Had seem some brief research about it before but not this much. This really should be a larger part of the cultural conversation around meditation.
The first link is a single male patient who claims meditation provoked his psychosis. Other people suffering from psychosis have blamed, lets see, off the top of my head - wifi signals, chemtrails, their gang stalkers, fluoride, the CIA, aliens, lizard-men, etc. Is there any reason to believe a random psychotic person when they make a claim about meditation, versus when they make the claim about wifi signals?
The case analysis a few results later find a total of 28 people in the literature who have made the claim, with 14 of them having precipitating factors such as "like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use", which almost certainly have a much larger effect on psychosis than...sitting still and thinking a certain way. If I had a heart attack while meditating, I don't think I would jump to the conclusion that meditation is dangerous for people with heart conditions.
These are hardly the only reports. You can train your body too hard and injure yourself. It stands to reason that you can do something similar to your brain.
Or at the very least doesn’t mean what St. John of the Cross means by it.
When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first loose "hint" of stream entry or actual awakening/enlightenment, namely the second vipassana jhana, characterized by seeming effortlessness of insight (Daniel Ingram calls this the "Arising and passing away") and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that vipassana isn’t a serious and intense contemplative discipline. If I did, that certainly wasn’t my intent.
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)
Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!
AIUI, it seems that Daniel Ingram has cautiously endorsed the work of well-known Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts as potentially a useful take on stream entry/enlightenment and related things from a theistic, and specifically Christian tradition.
(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)
Fairly extensive sections of the Tipitaka deal with the existence and nature of superhuman beings and attribute Hindu explicitly theist beliefs to encounters with them. I don't think it's true that Buddhism only ever references it very obliquely or that it conflates deities with the Buddha-nature. But my understanding is very limited, so you could be right.
I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.
From personal experience and what I've read, there's a clear dose response relationship. If you meditate enough, especially if do a lot of insight (vipassana) meditation without doing much concentration (samatha) or Metta meditation, you will begin to deconstruct yourself. That's what it does. Often you will find a new, and better way to relate to your conscious experience, but sometimes you break things and they don't get fixed.
It's common among people who meditate seriously. A significant fraction of the Tipitaka consists of documentation and interpretation of such experiences.
I think it might be more useful to recommend that they consult a good meditation teacher, because you really need to know both about meditation and about yourself to make the decision—though, as you point out, identifying a good meditation teacher when you aren't one is a difficult problem.
Not exactly but I find meditation really "painful".
I am more of the anxious side of things and being super focused on myself is very stressful. Sure I feel calmer afterwards but the process feels like a cold shower in winter.
The only times I found meditation enjoyable is in a group setting. Normally I am quite introverted and prefer to do most activities alone but here it is reversed.
"and being super focused on myself is very stressful."
Can you explain, what exactly is stressful to you, by focusing on yourself? Or is it just that you feel you want to move but you also want to be still?
It's just not not having anything to distract you of your mental pain. Like having a flesh wound and instead of using pain killers, you put you finger on the wound and actually focus on the pain. That would be quite stressful, right?
Have you ever had something bad happen and you try to distract yourself by working or watching something? Meditation feels like the reverse of that.
It can feel like that when you resist the painful memory or emotion. But if you stay with it, accepting it, neither rejecting nor holding it, you may notice that it dissolves. It's like the effect of exposure in behavioral therapy, phobias are treated with sustained exposure to the feared stimulus.
Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful.
I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down.
"If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down. "
Yup, that is a good combination. And if you do sports in nature, you might find good spots to calm down in between. Being next to moving water I found helpful, or atop on some mountain with the wind.
Not meditation related, but a lot of people with ADHD have some serious shame issues, and taking meds that treat the ADHD can put them in a state where they can no longer easily distract themselves from the fact that they hate themselves, which is ... not a great feeling.
Are you able to clearly manifest an image of anything in your mind's eye? If not then you might have aphantasia (i.e. "third eye blind").
When I was younger I sat several Vipisana and Zen retreats across multiple traditions. While it changed me in the sense that I became far less impulsive and more grounded, there was never anything mystical about the experiences, just periods of calm and quiet, like the internal world had slowed way down.
But that's unusual, I suspect most who seriously take up meditation do indeed have full blown psychedelic experiences (thus the author's reference to LSD), not long after taking up practice, and certainly within the first week long retreat or two.
expecting "good for me" to be "always fun and easy" is, broadly speaking, going to lead to some weird and probably disappointing mismatches of expectation and outcome.
Meditative practice, prayer, etc. are "good for you", but they are _challenging_, which again, doesn't mean "a thing that is hard to learn but is sunshine and rainbows once i learn it". It means that you will come up against some dark shit sometimes, and that's "good" but it is in no way "fun", and yeah, you need a community of like-minded practitioners to help you.
Relatedly, therapy is "good" but usually not "fun"; and therapists need therapists of their own, too.
Author compares meditation to doing LSD, then states that doing LSD can be helpful but super hurtful to possibly schizophrenic people. Some part of me can't stop thinking that it's nuts to tell people to not sit quietly and try and clear your mind because it might trigger schizophrenia.
It's not nuts, it's Christian. The author states he is a Christian. Some Christian sects think that Yoga and meditation are rituals that open up the dark side. I hear all the time how meditation lets the demons in.
I'm bipolar and I meditate - I sit queitly, focus on my breath and try to let my thoughts quiet down. It's a way of relaxing. The end goal is to be at peace in the moment, not some crazy drug-like experience
I don't know. They're Christian but their argument is more nuanced than just thinking meditation is opening up to the dark side. I think it's worth talking about, especially given the experiences shared by other posters in the comments.
The point I'm making is I'm not sure they're viewing it through that lens, but rather GP is dismissing the article because the author is Christian and _some_ of them are known to be against meditation. It does not segue that all Christians are against it. GP seems to be the biased one here with a preconceived opinion.
I'm not unsympathetic with that stance, as every Christian I've ever met is fast to claim "there are also tolerant ones" - the majority are simply not. That's what a reputation does: It informs someone about what to expect. In this case it colours what is also said, both parties need to acknowledge this.
My interpretation is that the author is Christian (he says this) and he is against meditation for reasons commonly given by many Christians to discourage people from meditating
Again, this is _your_ interpretation. They only said they're Christian, and you've decided this must be the reason they're against, and their opinion is worthless. You're just colouring their opinion with YOUR preconceptions.
Their opinion matches my experience, and other commenters, and I'm not Christian at all. Why are you taking it so personally? It's an intellectually stimulating topic, you're free to disagree without dismissing the person based on their religion.
I'm pretty sure that "destroy your sense of self" is an anti-pattern, even in Buddhist practices. The "dark night" arises out of the very fear and despair that your sense of self could somehow be broken or destroyed, but the goal is to realize that your "senses" are all there, and that "awakening" is about giving yourself the choice of abandoning a flawed understanding of what those weird "senses" are all about.
I respect the fact that most people by far will want to stay the f--- away from the "dark night"; it should only be explored by those who have the prereqs and the ethical maturity and wisdom to get past it smoothly. But the idea that the whole thing must be unreservedly bad or "destructive" is just too limiting.
Also like programming, mainstream tools and procedures sometimes fail in bizarre, frustrating, and utterly undocumented ways when working with unusual hardware.
This is an underappreciated point. I’m an Anglican priest, and I always thought I was just really bad at prayer. (Ironic, I know.) But then I got diagnosed a couple of years ago, and I realized that my brain was working against me.
Some day I have a mind to write a book on spiritual disciplines for those with ADHD and how we talk about prayer and the spiritual life is often not useful for those with the disorder. But, you know, I have ADHD, so I doubt that will ever get written. ;)
This is definitely not the case for everyone with severe ADHD. I think you have to define "severe" and you have to define "meditation." If your ADHD allows you to hold a steady professional-level job, I suspect you can do TM, for example.
I know what you mean. I have tried to pick up meditation at least a dozen times, and I can never get the thoughts to stop even for a minute. Every morning I sit and try observe my thoughts, it just feels like I'm going through the TODO list for the day, with random interrupts of things that bother me or that I should worry about.
So I used to think meditation is impossible for me until I started doing the "morning pages" exercise recommended in the book The Artists's way:
> Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow.
via https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
After doing this 3 pages (on letter paper folded in two 5.5"x8.5") of writing down all my worries, thoughts, plans, and other random thoughts that come to my mind right after I wake up, I have been able to sit for 15 mins and experience moments of "mental silence." I'm not levitating or achieving some deep insights (probably not possible with 15 mins), but definitely a good way to start the day.
Since I had tried to meditate so many times before and failed every time, I found the morning pages helped a lot, and I would recommend to anyone try this out. Then again, my ADHD is more moderate than severe, so the same approach might not work for everyone.
Concentration meditation (samadhi) might help. The whole idea is that you should learn to nonchalantly bring your awareness back to the focus of your meditation whenever you get distracted by some other fleeting thought. Distraction will happen, whether or not you have ADHD - but it should also not matter. You're also not simply relying on willpower or higher executive function, which would of course be very stressful and tiring for those affected; you're learning to focus your attention via an entirely different path.
This is true but the causation is the other way round - meditation is an exercise and if you gain the capability to do that means your ADHD is getting better.
I would like to at least try to meditate but I am not calm person. Not at all. Even coffee and green tea kick my nervous system into overdrive, so 8 don't consume them.
What could possibly make meditation accessible to a person like me?
Maybe guidance from a good teacher, patience with yourself, and persistence (continuing to practice even when you're frustrated with your lack of progress). Meditation isn't for everyone but nothing you have said suggests that it isn't for you.
There's an anecdote in the Tipitaka where the Buddha analogizes would-be followers who never advance in the practice to farm animals that never grow, and explains what the herder does with those animals: he kills them.
This is generally understood as a recommendation to kick hopeless monks out of the monastery, not literally kill them.
You'd have to ask a competent meditation teacher, which I am very much not, how to know. I am pretty sure that the answer involves spending some time trying, with good guidance.
Try starting with very short meditation sessions, even just 1-2 minutes. Even a small first step is still beneficial. Long meditation sessions are not the end goal. Self-awareness is.
I just finished watching two informative series that I recommend: “The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-being” and “Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation”. They’re long (24 30-minutes episodes in each series). You can watch them for free on Kanopy.com with a library card from a participating library.
I personally use an app called Smiling Mind. It has different paths you can go according to what problem you're trying to solve through meditation. It's an amazing app IMO.
There's a lot of authoritative claims about what meditation is in this thread, so there's also a good chance that what I do is considered "not real meditation" but it's what I learned at a meditation center, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you what got me over it when I had a hard time starting:
Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").
That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.
This is a great perspective. I know what the author means with it, too. I spent 5 years in daily meditation practice (twice a day for 20 minutes) and it completely altered my state of mind. I was a naturally introverted person when I started, though I believe that meditation really stepped it up a notch for me.
The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time.
I spoke to Buddhist monks in Himalayas, and I lived with Hinduist practitioners in Bali. I went quite far with my exploration of meditation, and perhaps that warrants a blog post of its own. But in terms of keeping up with it, in my case - the chickens came home to roost.
I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
I started working less, started losing interest in certain things. I lost friendships that I later regretted. And I attribute it specifically to meditation because in that "peaceful state of mind" you can't help but laugh at the stupidity of this world. Why should you care if everything around you is designed to work against you. We live in a systematic world yet the system does not provide the means to be genuinely happy human.
Insights like this really dominated my life at the time, and it was very difficult to process it at all. So, at some point, I experienced a "collapse" of sorts and stopped.
At some point, when I catch up with the things I neglected - I would definitely like to return to the habit of daily practice. Meditation is an incredible tool (even if my own report says otherwise) to connect with this world on an entirely different wavelength.
I was never initiated or dedicated myself to a specific practice. I can say today it was a mix of mindfulness and practical Vipassana.
I think one of the things people complain about when it comes to meditation is concentration. I was not one of those people. It came extremely natural to me.
Personally I agree that meditation isn't appropriate for everyone. But a specific issue about Vipassana is that it is marketed as a panacea, though historically it was developed as a practice to make monks out of householders. If it's causing detachment, it's working as intended. Anhedonia is the flip side of the end of suffering.
The same for me - I found mindfulness meditation easy and it’s concerning that it comes with all these “relaxation” “stress reduction” “empty your mind” memes. I don’t need that, I need a technique for the opposite of that.
> The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time.
I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.
The problem, at it's core, is that the human mind is not a rational thing. Rational frameworks (at least the ones we have currently) do not play well with real-but-irrational things.
This is why early psychoanalysis and Gestalt works focused on symbolism as an abstraction of the human mind. Of course those areas are generally fraught with missteps and bad theory, but progress was still made.
If you want a real no-fluff experimentalist view of the psyche, look into psychonetics, a Soviet toolkit. To quote (from memory) from it's material:
"You may hear the sound of God talking to you. Do not be alarmed, even if you are an atheist. Remain calm and do not respond to the voice."
Snake oil implies you're being sold something, doesn't it?
All I am saying is that meditation brought up a lot of things that I had buried in my past. Anger (being betrayed by people), hatred (being whipped with a leather belt by my step-father when I was a kid) - these are all real emotions that you have to process because in small little ways they do have an influence on your psychological behavior. And, thus, on the behavior of who you "think" you are as a person.
I've observed that sometimes "meditation" is used as a catch phrase for several different practices, especially those which the west adopted from eastern traditions.
I would not rush to dismiss all of it as disingenous just because some interpretation of it does not resonate with you. And it is ok if it doesn't resonate with you, we don't all have to agree on it.
There's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits of mediation. You can ignore all of the noise about higher states of consciousness and suchlike and still receive documented benefits:
I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.
The paper you've linked to (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589) points out methodological flaws in meditation-related research, ambiguities in the meaning of "mindfulness" etc.; it doesn't set out to prove that meditation doesn't 'work' (in the sense that it causes no effects).
In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything at all, why would anyone experience even adverse effects? Clearly meditation does have effects.
If the definitions of the key terms and concepts in meditation is ambiguous, the body of scientific evidence of meditation doing anything is not particularly convincing.
It seems to be a staple for therapists and psychologists to improve emotional intelligence. It gives you clarity about what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and what you're going to feel soon. From there it can be used for a whole host of other maladies: addictions, anxiety, depression, etc.
It’s not bad, but if you feel strongly against it, you’re not missing out on much. Overcoming the psychological resistance to meditate is probably not worth it.
> I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.
You are very right to be Skeptical and much of what is being talked about when it comes to "Meditation" (both in this thread and elsewhere) should be taken with a "bucket full of grains of salt".
However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.
Unfortunately, for that view at least, brain scans and experiments by notable scientists have shown incredible effects when meditators/meditation are put under the spotlight.
For example, from[1]:
> From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious—reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.
> Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super-quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.
That's just one of the many effects noted in the article.
Thanks for reading. You have an interesting perspective - and one filled with more diverse experience than mine, I'd be very interested in reading about it.
> It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology
This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing!) experience in practical ethics (turns out if you really learn to care about other sentient beings around you, it's a lot easier to care about yourself too!), as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).
The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)
As mentioned in a sibling thread, the real "dark night" is something that happens only after one is deep enough in the development of contemplation - both the Christian and Buddhist tradition are very clear about this. In fact, that's the reason it's so insidious: many inexperienced meditators get as far enough as reaching a stage of insight that subjectively feels a lot like the common folk trope of "sudden enlightenment". But the "dark night" comes right after that stage, and then they don't know that they're supposed to meditate more and look for the way out (through the insight of equanimity). It's a very understandable mistake, which is why it makes sense to warn about it.
I know what you're talking about, and I went through 3(!) major episodes of that kind. Of course, in the end I came out a much better person with a lot of weight lifted off of my shoulders.
Also, I was being very conservative with my comment and it is impossible for me to truly highlight my experiences without writing a book about it. I can say that I met a lot of very interesting people, educated and wise people who helped me a lot.
Actually, if you look at the old texts from Hindu Rishis and Swamis who lived throughout India - most of them talk about teachers appearing if you have the correct discipline.
> I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
Respectfully this is not an outcome that you can lay at the feet of meditation. It’s like blaming the catechism for the years you spent cut off from the world in a Benedictine monastery.
Certainly not in the sense of "overlooking anything else in your life". Moral living is a key component of successful dharmic/meditative practice according to Buddhist and other teachings.
Traditional sutric Buddhism was definitely about detachment (or “renunciation”); you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.
The presentation of Buddhism as chill and peaceful and all about meditation is a modernization to keep it alive after the white people found it.
> you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.
Possibly as an instrumental practice on the way to full buddhahood (and that would come after even the very advanced stage of arahantship, which basically means guaranteed complete enlightenment after your lifetime!). Surely not as mere penance or mortification of the flesh shorn of any contemplative practice, because that was very clearly criticized by the Buddha as misleading and useless when the Hinduists were doing it.
(Then again, IIRC, the Stoics talk about doing something very similar. The idea itself would not have been unfamiliar in the West.)
Pretty much every "meditation was bad for me" story seems to play out like this. The author basically abused meditation in the way that someone might abuse drugs.
Some people clearly are susceptible to being caught up in this kind of behavior. So I think the point in TFA: "meditation can have risks for some people" is valid. But that "some people" seems to be a fairly specific personality type, and most people could probably benefit from some mind-calming body-centering breathing exercises every day.
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious, did you consider at any point untangling those feelings with a psychotherapist?
Your experience resonates with me, but I came to a different conclusion. Meditation did open the doors to a more conscious awareness. That sounds grandiose but it isn't. It means having a practice of observing thoughts and emotions as they arise. As you describe, this can lead to more clarity into the order or nature of things. But meditation ends there, it is a tool to bring about conscious awareness. It does not "create" those thoughts or emotions.
I ask whether you've worked with a psychotherapist because I found myself in a similar predicament. I realized that my discontent had little or nothing to do with my "spiritual" practice. Simply put, the hustle and bustle of daily life is a sure way to keep many thoughts and emotions at bay. A meditative practice lets the stream pour through. For me meditation became a tool to bring those thoughts to the foreground and getting to know them. Through that process I get to know myself better. If necessary, I'll work with a psychotherapist to go through it.
This is how I feel as well. I think combining meditation with good psychotherapy is almost a must. Meditation allows things from subconscious to rise to the conscious, and psychotherapy allows you to work through them and resolve them.
I would guess that in the past, meditation teachers fulfilled the psychotherapist role. But an actual qualified therapist would be much better - especially now that meditation is a relatively common aspect of psychotherapy.
In fact, it seems like there is a lot of similarity generally between the role that priests of all kinds were supposed to perform in a community, and therapists. I wonder if it would be a good idea for humanity to essentially build a secular replacement to religion like that.
I'm sorry, but this is such an extreme example. You should not overdo anything, be it meditation, gaming, playing, reading, any sport, even drugs. Drugs also give you a state of mind that, when taken to the extreme, can harm your social life and well-being. That is not a problem specifically of meditation.
You can safely do anything up to the point that it benefits you. The moment your well-being suffers, or you neglect important parts of life, like friendship, you should stop.
That's what I did. I mean, my story is quite unique in that I never knew what meditation was (or religion, to be honest) and it just fell into my lap.
I think, looking back I can safely say that it did help me address a lot of emotional trauma. I didn't exactly have a gentle upbringing and I somehow entangled myself into all those memories.
Meditation helped me to clear the air, but as you say - it blindly became a somewhat of an addiction. So I stopped and started focusing on other things. And I still have a long way to go.
From the article, it sounds like the author was spending more than just 40 minutes a day on their spiritual pursuits. They also didn't describe their actual practice.
This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.
As a beginner, in zen, for example, it is advised against meditating alone as your practice may just turn to fortifying your own beliefs, views and opinions.
That's why there is a sangha - a group of fellow meditators who will tell you if you start drifting too much away and will advice you.
Don't practice alone. At least not in the beginning.
It’s interesting that everyone who has had a bad experience seems to
have really tuned their practice up to 11. Silent retreats etc. seem to show up in these stories a lot
'Walking is not for everyone' and 'Exercise is not for everyone' is technically true since it is going to do more harm than good for a small subsection of society.
It is even more true that some people should not run marathons or ultra marathons, but it would be odd to notice that then write an article based on that evidence that 'walking is not for everyone' rather than 'marathons are not for every one'. And when I have read of serious consequences of meditation it is from doing the equivalent, or more than, an ultra marathon, but then the conclusion is the equivalent of 'walking is not for everyone'.
I'm always amazed at how many people are experiencing meditation for the first time who do this. It must be like suddenly being arrested and stuck in solitary among lifers.
On a related note, I've enjoyed my time so much staying at temples that the idea of being stuck in solitary for a long stretch is like a weird ambition! If you see my name in the news for a crime you'll know why…
My anecdotal experience is that this is a personality type. "Some is good, more is better" is just not a valid way to approach things, neither in quantity nor in intensity.
To inject another perspective from an outsider, to me it read like meditation actually was a positive experience for you. One of the implicit intentions and outcomes of meditation, at least in Buddhist and Hindu belief systems, is that it's meant to be a technique to _overcome_ wordly illusions and temptations (Maya) and attain enlightened state (Moksha) thus escaping the cycle of birth and rebirth into this world. Seems instead you reverted back to the _samsara_ (world filled with Maya) - although not necessarily for me to judge whether that is good or bad.
It was! Honestly, my comment is pretty raw and it doesn't give the full picture. But you are absolutely right. Meditation changed me and gave me insights about myself and life that I perhaps would have never encountered otherwise.
And you're correct about turning back to a "stale" way of being. This is literally what happened, so kudos to you for noticing. As someone once told me, "You're still young. You have time.".
I would actually point you towards deepening your equanimity, as opposed to trying to renounce the world in this lifetime when you're basically nowhere near ready for that. If it feels like your way of being in the world is "stale", that's the pattern you should be working on. It should be fully possible to engage with the world, even and perhaps especially as an enlightened being.
I always wanted to write a book about what happened to me. The specifics of how spirituality came into to my life, because it was very unusual. And my story could captivate even the most dedicated of skeptics. It was that authentic.
But, for some reason - I was always very afraid to write such a book because it would mean giving away a part of "me". So, in this context, having more time means I can enjoy life without needing to preach a story that perhaps some people are not ready to hear. I don't know...
Funny thing is, I write for a living. Only web dev stuff opposed to digging deep into the psyche of this world.
You are describing slimming down on things that didn't seem important to you within the context of an entirely new way of living. What exactly is the problem here? That you'd make different decisions in a different context? This is true for literally every human being in every significantly changed context, it has nothing to do with what that context is (i.e. meditation or literally anything else).
Yeah it feels like living in a hospital bubble to maximize health. I'd think we need to blend meditative view points (ability to keep some distance, to cool down) with normal daily lives.
>The first odd thing I experienced was the inexplicable feeling that there was someone else in the room during my meditation. Luckily this didn't disturb me too much, one of the books I had read at that time mentioned that this was something that could happen during zazen. I now know that it is called the sensed presence effect. Other sits were more pleasant - I often had a sensation of uncaused joy arise. Sometimes I would see intense and clear images inside my head. During one session I saw a bright blue humming sphere that I knew was God (or some kind of representation of) - I swear I could hear the harmonious hum of it. I had previously abandoned my Christian faith but that experience alone made me reconsider my stance.
I've been trying to meditate on and off for years, including daily 30 minute sessions for months at a time, and never experienced anything remotely as intense as this author. In fact despite all the time I've spent trying, I can't say I feel like I've gotten any better at it. At best I've developed a sensation I would describe as being extremely tall, as though my head were posted thousands of feet above my legs, but psychologically I don't feel like I'm doing any better today than when I started with respect to observing my thoughts or focusing on, say, breath.
I suspect some people are far more predisposed, be it nature or nurture, toward successful and deep meditation than others.
Has anyone here ever tried Waking Up app by Sam Harris? I am working through the intro course now and very much enjoying it and finding it helpful, but I don't have a good base reference to know if he knows his stuff. I am not interested in the spiritual side of meditation so much as the learning to be in my own head a bit more stably and acknowledge and understand my emotions/thought more productively.
Yes he knows one type of meditation really well. I went through his course, for me it was ok but I found the value of the Waking up app being exposed to other teachers from other traditions. It really opened up my eyes.
Meditation is just a word. As an analogy you can say that driving a car can hurt you. Well that depends what kind of car, your driving style, the speed, whether you use the correct side of the road and so on.
My personal experience is with 30 years of Anapana and Vipassana that started under guidance in a Thai monastery. Even with Anapana, which is considered quite low risk in terms of 'side effects', the message was that it is always better to practice with a teacher and don't mix different practices. This cannot be overstated enough.
My own dark night lasted around 10 years, even with the guidance. Sometimes my outlook so dark it was impossible to look in the mirror. Over time there was a slow transformation of perspective that is still ongoing today. Less clinging to ideas of good, bad, and especially self. Things just happen and most of the time I can now see that all emotions and ideas around that what happens are created by the mind and constantly changing. What starts to matter more and more is compassion for the situation of others and their suffering.
Meditation is often a transformative process and without proper support and guidance this process can indeed be risky.
After a decade of practice I basically vividly hallucinate if I let myself when I meditate. Focus is more useful, but the hallucinations are very interesting/calming too.
I'm lucky to have been born naturally resilient to mental damage, but I know from (friends') experience that when you're genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, you're SOL. I've definitely felt my sanity slip at times or delusions take hold, but eventually my brain would reset to the status quo.
The silver lining is: unless you're willing to devote a large amount of your attention and life to this, you're unlikely to ever experience these kind of effects. I know people who practice for years and experience nothing.
Can confirm from personal experience. Even a lot of vipassana meditation by itself can send you into psychotic states when you're not ready for all the insight yet. I came very close to psychosis once, experienced ego death, broke down mentally and had to spend 2 months in a depression ward. Cannot recommend.
I don't regret the 2-3 months of active ego dissolution phase, life has never been more beautiful and strangely peaceful and jarring at the same time. However, I did lose my job, my apartment and almost permanently lost my sanity as well, but now in hindsight it looks like it was all for the better.
Nevertheless I don't think you should force something like this (like I very much did), the consequences to internal and external reality can be absolutely dramatic, I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then... safe for the short moments of.. remembering. Everything and nothing at once. Becoming the observer. Observing the observer. Being everything...
It's all still there if I really wanted to, and my state of mind has changed permanently in drastic yet mostly unconscious ways. It took years to come to terms with all of this and since I've achieved stream entry back then there is no way back out now. It's either managing to get out of the cycle or repeating it over and over again. Meditation has become mandatory like drinking water. I‘ll soon be confronted with all of this again.
I had a brief experience with what you're talking about induced by drugs. It's made me decide I have no appetite for either meditation (except for short, surface level sessions to help with anxiety) or mind altering drugs anymore. I had briefly waded into the depths of something I wasn't prepared for, and I don't want to go back.
> I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then
Yes, one of my strongest emotions was "I just want to go back to the ignorance I had before. Being moderately unhappy and distracted all the time was much preferable to this." I'm mostly back there now, two years on. Something that helped me was an Alan Watts talk about those that are "far out" -- AKA, fully engaged in the part they are playing in this life, and not aware of the absurdity of existence. Trying to live life like that has actually helped me cope with that experience, but I do continue to see brief glimpses from time to time.
Hmm, I wonder if these experiences you and GP are describing are at all like my nightmarish Salvia trip--experiencing the collapse of the universe of experience and the certainty that everything I've ever known, been, and desired is an illusion that will all be pulled out from underneath me at any moment. Insanity.
Yet, somehow, I am glad I experienced that insanity--it showed me what direction I was headed in, "woke me up" to the inner world I was creating for myself, and changed my direction.
Still, wouldn't recommend the experience. It would be easier to just have a really open discussion with someone who cares about you and has some life experience, and have them tell you "you need to focus on what really matters--taking care of yourself, and appreciate life while you have it". I had to wrestle that lesson out of that incredibly frightening experience, which psychologically damaged me for almost 2 years.
I had something similar (for years) and I actually found zazen and mindfulness very helpful.
I think diving into ego death when via substances in uncontrolled settings isn't a great idea, because you can get bogged down in delusion and paranoia.
I found it helpful with zazen to realise that any judgement of whatever I was experiencing (whether good or bad / joy or fear / enlightenment or hell), was just as much a delusion in itself as much as anything else. I personally found this made it illogical to be scared by whatever is happening inside your head, because that fear is just line noise.
I'm sorry you've had such difficult experiences. Does the following excerpt resonate with you? If so, I'd be happy to share more.
"This comment is extremely important and should be borne in mind by all who feel tempted to dabble with the psychedelic experience without knowing what they are doing or why. He who enters the fifth state of consciousness without preparation may be spiritually paralyzed by his experience. He has seen too much too soon and, as a result, all games become meaningless. He cannot play the life games that satisfy men in the third state of consciousness. He cannot play the Master Game because he knows nothing about it and has no teacher. So he becomes, like Daumal's "leaf in the wind," an even more helpless plaything of external forces than he was before his rash
experiment."
That resonates on a very deep level, yes. I've worked through most of it already.
I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?
If so, as of the last dark night of the soul I seem to have reached permanent and stable access to sixth circuit now with glimpses of the seventh circuit, but I don't want to go there right now and proceeding further seems like it will take some time now anyway.
I hope to maintain the current state of mind until I have grown older, maybe even until I am able to stop working and focus on this path. I am quite happy with the current, fully integrated metaconsciousness.
>> I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?
No, the fifth state here is an interpretation of the Gurdjieff system and the associated Fourth Way. Loosely the fifth state equivalent to enlightenment (satori). The specific quote is from a book by Robert de Ropp called "The Master Game."
I haven't looked into Leary's eight circuit model in years. Thank you for reminding me of it. By your description of your current state, sounds like you have found utility in that particular framework?
Well, it is a nice concept to contemplate for sure. I've found utility in all of them to various degrees. I'll have to look into the book you mentioned, thank you.
I started a casual meditation practice a couple of years ago and was getting benefits from it, when I came across an article (on Hacker News) written by a man who had developed severe disassociation and other disorders from meditation.
The irony is that I started meditating because I struggle with panic disorder. Now I was hearing that my most common panic trigger (the thought that I could think myself crazy) was actually real! This sent me down quite a spiral that I have had to resolve by accepting the tiny odds that I might go spontaneously nuts. That's not an easy one, and I wish there was more reliable research on this issue.
It's easy to spend your entire life running from one thing to the next. Meditation can just be a 10 minute break where you give yourself permission to take a mental break. Like almost everything, there is an unhealthy extreme. As an analogue, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that fitness is generally good for you, but trying to do ultra ironmans is probably not going to be good for many people, and if you attempt it you have to prepare in a way that's suited to your own body.
The argument here seems to be that LSD can be dangerous, meditation is kind of like LSD, and therefore meditation can be dangerous.
It does seem like a possibility, but you'd think if someone were going to write about it they'd try to present evidence of some sort to support the point.
Meditation can cause severe psychotic episodes in some people [1]. The author may not present the best evidence but meditation is dangerous for some percentage of the population's mental health.
Based on the documented cases of psychotic break and the number of people who meditate, the odds are approximately a million to one in your favor of getting some benefit out of mediation vs. a psychotic break.
From what I've read, psychotic episodes were preceded by exceedingly long meditation sessions. Essentially, don't meditate for more than an hour a day and you should be okay, the psychotic breaks have a higher tendency to happen at meditation 'retreats' where they do like 8 hours a day of meditation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31668156/ is a survey of 19 studies that identified 28 cases. Conclusion: "Of the 28 cases reported, 14 patients had certain precipitating factors like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use."
Given the millions who meditate I think risk is less than a range of ordinary daily activities we engage in that can entail a life changing injury: crossing the street, diving into a pool to swim, and eating peanut butter (aflatoxin risk) to name three. The suggestion to consult a mental health professional, in the absence of any prior psychological issues that were significant, seems to me to be a waste of time and money.
I don't think that's the argument exactly. The parallel to LSD was brought up to demonstrate that something that may be good for one person's well being may not be good for another.
Changing your psychological state is something all of us do every day, and some people have problems with just doing that. Experimenting with it substantially has the capacity to damage, and it's reasonable to conclude that for some subset of the population, for whatever reasons, it is not a hood idea. I think that's the point of the article
The author might be more correct than he imagines. I suffer from bipolar disorder, which was “activated” during a heavy meditation period 5 years ago or so.
My therapist now advises me to stay away from it. She says that meditation is a form of “self hypnosis” and that I should stay away from daily practice, which is what I had previously.
Altered states of consciousness are know to trigger psychosis in people who many develop bipolar disorder.
It’s relatively easy for me to deliberately trigger psychosis, despite being on antipsychotics. And it is a very bad idea for me to do that. Losing touch with reality isn’t exactly fun.
Not that I’m aware of. But bipolar disorder is (very) poorly understood. Asking for evidence would imply for instance, that we know what bipolar IS, and from my knowledge, I don’t think we do. In order to have evidence that meditation and bipolar interact we would have to know what bipolar affects in our system that causes it. As far as I know we don’t know what causes it/how it works exactly. We have some inklings of what’s involved.
What we have is some medications that work with relatively extreme side effects (I am now pre diabetic due to daily Seroquel use) and sort of folk tradition of what to do and not to do - ie bipolar people are advised to stay away from religion for instance.
In my experience both the medication and the folk tradition are mostly right actually, as weird as that might sound. It’s not like psychologists are performing huge studies, but they can see patterns in the individual cases when they are studied in bulk - ie religious individuals might have more psychotic episodes etc.
It's been a bit like having access to my computer's terminal for me. I didn't expect the power. I did way more than just turn off the distractions. I fucked some shit up and had to spend some time in the shop. But I also learned how to fix the stuff that was broken and then stay the hell away from the terminal the rest of the time.
My issue was mainly that I couldn't turn the UI back on.
But also I fucked up all the links and the whole system was out of order.
Now I still use it when necessary because I still have bugs, which is really easy because just thinking about it will pop it open. But I mostly use it to signal to me when the UI is starting to fade away; not something I was good at before.
When I had a daily body scan practice, I body scanned so much that I didn't emotionally recognize myself in the mirror. Only rationally did I know that it was me. But it felt like I was looking at a strange man.
I stopped my daily practice after that. Unfortunately, most benefits also went away. Fortunately, a few of them stayed and for that I'm grateful :)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadThat's a gentle practice that, in addition to taking 10-20m for yourself in quiet place, is pretty much OK as a general recommendation.
They just get you to sit there, consciously realize that thoughts come from nowhere, and notice that you can merely discard them. After a year of the Waking Up app, it's just a practical way to reground myself. For example, maybe I realize a bit of anxiety in a large place like a music festival, and I take a moment to try to discard the feeling. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the sort of meditation most people associate with the word.
So the thought of that being psychedelic or dangerous to people, suggested in the post, is just a reminder of how many things fall under the umbrella of "meditation".
However, the kind of experiences described (seeing visions, losing interest in mundane matters, becoming certain of beliefs that turn out to be false) are a well-known feature of the process. And it's at least widely believed that guidance from experienced meditators is very helpful, if not crucial, to navigating these experiences.
Not to be snarky (ok maybe a little), but they do believe in unprovable beings on some "higher" plane of existence...
One of the most popular belief systems today posits that incorporeal consciousnesses with names like "California", "Ukraine", and "Google" are the causes of most everyday events, although when you investigate sufficiently you always find that whatever physical doing is attributed to "California" or "Google" is actually done by an ordinary, corporeal human being, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Nevertheless, people adhering to this belief system commonly become very angry when you claim that "Google" exists only in their imaginations.
It's unnecessarily mean if it's not true or, arguably, if there's nothing they can do about it. But if it's true and there's something they can do about it, then not saying it is being unnecessarily mean.
The Buddhist prescription for how to get better (from common garden-variety self-delusion, not schizophrenia) is called the Noble Eightfold Path, and a large dose of meditation occupies an important place in it. Other important ingredients traditionally include material renunciation, strict nonviolence, celibacy, abstinence from alcohol, honesty, politeness, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
______
† And, arguably, Christianity.
see these google scholar results for more info:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=meditation+and+psychosi...
with that said, I believe there is science evidence that marijuana and meditation, both can be triggering to an ill mental state.. along with other, stronger things of course.. common street methamphetamine can bring on illness rather quickly and is addictive.. serious personal injury like trauma can bring on illness rather quickly.. things like that..
Fortunately, we don’t need exact answers to do science. :)
Psychiatry (and therapy) is far more advanced that it was just a few decades ago. It’s incredible we are where we are today. American culture is starting to accept and talk about mental health.
Where will we be in another 30 years? :)
The case analysis a few results later find a total of 28 people in the literature who have made the claim, with 14 of them having precipitating factors such as "like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use", which almost certainly have a much larger effect on psychosis than...sitting still and thinking a certain way. If I had a heart attack while meditating, I don't think I would jump to the conclusion that meditation is dangerous for people with heart conditions.
Is the author’s experience common for other people?
When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)
(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)
I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.
I am more of the anxious side of things and being super focused on myself is very stressful. Sure I feel calmer afterwards but the process feels like a cold shower in winter.
The only times I found meditation enjoyable is in a group setting. Normally I am quite introverted and prefer to do most activities alone but here it is reversed.
Can you explain, what exactly is stressful to you, by focusing on yourself? Or is it just that you feel you want to move but you also want to be still?
Have you ever had something bad happen and you try to distract yourself by working or watching something? Meditation feels like the reverse of that.
Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful.
I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down.
Yup, that is a good combination. And if you do sports in nature, you might find good spots to calm down in between. Being next to moving water I found helpful, or atop on some mountain with the wind.
(but no smartphone to distract me)
Are you able to clearly manifest an image of anything in your mind's eye? If not then you might have aphantasia (i.e. "third eye blind").
When I was younger I sat several Vipisana and Zen retreats across multiple traditions. While it changed me in the sense that I became far less impulsive and more grounded, there was never anything mystical about the experiences, just periods of calm and quiet, like the internal world had slowed way down.
But that's unusual, I suspect most who seriously take up meditation do indeed have full blown psychedelic experiences (thus the author's reference to LSD), not long after taking up practice, and certainly within the first week long retreat or two.
Not at all.
Meditative practice, prayer, etc. are "good for you", but they are _challenging_, which again, doesn't mean "a thing that is hard to learn but is sunshine and rainbows once i learn it". It means that you will come up against some dark shit sometimes, and that's "good" but it is in no way "fun", and yeah, you need a community of like-minded practitioners to help you.
Relatedly, therapy is "good" but usually not "fun"; and therapists need therapists of their own, too.
6 Reasons to Reject Eastern Meditation and Yoga https://rosilindjukic.com/eastern-meditation-differs-biblica...
I'm bipolar and I meditate - I sit queitly, focus on my breath and try to let my thoughts quiet down. It's a way of relaxing. The end goal is to be at peace in the moment, not some crazy drug-like experience
Is it? Viewed through that lens, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of nuance.
Again, this is _your_ interpretation. They only said they're Christian, and you've decided this must be the reason they're against, and their opinion is worthless. You're just colouring their opinion with YOUR preconceptions.
Their opinion matches my experience, and other commenters, and I'm not Christian at all. Why are you taking it so personally? It's an intellectually stimulating topic, you're free to disagree without dismissing the person based on their religion.
Talking snakes and virgin births! Command hallucinations telling you to kill your son!
Maybe that's the problem? People read about "meditation" and don't realize what they're getting into? I don't get it.
I respect the fact that most people by far will want to stay the f--- away from the "dark night"; it should only be explored by those who have the prereqs and the ethical maturity and wisdom to get past it smoothly. But the idea that the whole thing must be unreservedly bad or "destructive" is just too limiting.
Some day I have a mind to write a book on spiritual disciplines for those with ADHD and how we talk about prayer and the spiritual life is often not useful for those with the disorder. But, you know, I have ADHD, so I doubt that will ever get written. ;)
So I used to think meditation is impossible for me until I started doing the "morning pages" exercise recommended in the book The Artists's way:
> Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow. via https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
After doing this 3 pages (on letter paper folded in two 5.5"x8.5") of writing down all my worries, thoughts, plans, and other random thoughts that come to my mind right after I wake up, I have been able to sit for 15 mins and experience moments of "mental silence." I'm not levitating or achieving some deep insights (probably not possible with 15 mins), but definitely a good way to start the day.
Since I had tried to meditate so many times before and failed every time, I found the morning pages helped a lot, and I would recommend to anyone try this out. Then again, my ADHD is more moderate than severe, so the same approach might not work for everyone.
What could possibly make meditation accessible to a person like me?
This is generally understood as a recommendation to kick hopeless monks out of the monastery, not literally kill them.
You'd have to ask a competent meditation teacher, which I am very much not, how to know. I am pretty sure that the answer involves spending some time trying, with good guidance.
I just finished watching two informative series that I recommend: “The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-being” and “Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation”. They’re long (24 30-minutes episodes in each series). You can watch them for free on Kanopy.com with a library card from a participating library.
Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").
That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.
The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time.
I spoke to Buddhist monks in Himalayas, and I lived with Hinduist practitioners in Bali. I went quite far with my exploration of meditation, and perhaps that warrants a blog post of its own. But in terms of keeping up with it, in my case - the chickens came home to roost.
I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
I started working less, started losing interest in certain things. I lost friendships that I later regretted. And I attribute it specifically to meditation because in that "peaceful state of mind" you can't help but laugh at the stupidity of this world. Why should you care if everything around you is designed to work against you. We live in a systematic world yet the system does not provide the means to be genuinely happy human.
Insights like this really dominated my life at the time, and it was very difficult to process it at all. So, at some point, I experienced a "collapse" of sorts and stopped.
At some point, when I catch up with the things I neglected - I would definitely like to return to the habit of daily practice. Meditation is an incredible tool (even if my own report says otherwise) to connect with this world on an entirely different wavelength.
I think one of the things people complain about when it comes to meditation is concentration. I was not one of those people. It came extremely natural to me.
Unfortunately there’s no good secular Tantra.
I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.
The problem, at it's core, is that the human mind is not a rational thing. Rational frameworks (at least the ones we have currently) do not play well with real-but-irrational things.
This is why early psychoanalysis and Gestalt works focused on symbolism as an abstraction of the human mind. Of course those areas are generally fraught with missteps and bad theory, but progress was still made.
If you want a real no-fluff experimentalist view of the psyche, look into psychonetics, a Soviet toolkit. To quote (from memory) from it's material:
"You may hear the sound of God talking to you. Do not be alarmed, even if you are an atheist. Remain calm and do not respond to the voice."
All I am saying is that meditation brought up a lot of things that I had buried in my past. Anger (being betrayed by people), hatred (being whipped with a leather belt by my step-father when I was a kid) - these are all real emotions that you have to process because in small little ways they do have an influence on your psychological behavior. And, thus, on the behavior of who you "think" you are as a person.
I would not rush to dismiss all of it as disingenous just because some interpretation of it does not resonate with you. And it is ok if it doesn't resonate with you, we don't all have to agree on it.
https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-in-depth
I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.
This 2017 publication sums it up nicely: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691617709589
"works" to what end?
In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything at all, why would anyone experience even adverse effects? Clearly meditation does have effects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=mindfulness+meditation
It seems to be a staple for therapists and psychologists to improve emotional intelligence. It gives you clarity about what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and what you're going to feel soon. From there it can be used for a whole host of other maladies: addictions, anxiety, depression, etc.
I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.
However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.
For example, from[1]:
> From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious—reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.
> Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super-quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.
That's just one of the many effects noted in the article.
[1] https://www.lionsroar.com/the-lama-in-the-lab/
If that's the best you've got I'll pass.
This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing!) experience in practical ethics (turns out if you really learn to care about other sentient beings around you, it's a lot easier to care about yourself too!), as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).
The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)
I've always wondered if there'd be less incidents of that if it didn't have such a sexy name.
Also, I was being very conservative with my comment and it is impossible for me to truly highlight my experiences without writing a book about it. I can say that I met a lot of very interesting people, educated and wise people who helped me a lot.
Actually, if you look at the old texts from Hindu Rishis and Swamis who lived throughout India - most of them talk about teachers appearing if you have the correct discipline.
This was my experience.
Respectfully this is not an outcome that you can lay at the feet of meditation. It’s like blaming the catechism for the years you spent cut off from the world in a Benedictine monastery.
Meditation is an input, it is not the program.
The presentation of Buddhism as chill and peaceful and all about meditation is a modernization to keep it alive after the white people found it.
Possibly as an instrumental practice on the way to full buddhahood (and that would come after even the very advanced stage of arahantship, which basically means guaranteed complete enlightenment after your lifetime!). Surely not as mere penance or mortification of the flesh shorn of any contemplative practice, because that was very clearly criticized by the Buddha as misleading and useless when the Hinduists were doing it.
(Then again, IIRC, the Stoics talk about doing something very similar. The idea itself would not have been unfamiliar in the West.)
Some people clearly are susceptible to being caught up in this kind of behavior. So I think the point in TFA: "meditation can have risks for some people" is valid. But that "some people" seems to be a fairly specific personality type, and most people could probably benefit from some mind-calming body-centering breathing exercises every day.
Your experience resonates with me, but I came to a different conclusion. Meditation did open the doors to a more conscious awareness. That sounds grandiose but it isn't. It means having a practice of observing thoughts and emotions as they arise. As you describe, this can lead to more clarity into the order or nature of things. But meditation ends there, it is a tool to bring about conscious awareness. It does not "create" those thoughts or emotions.
I ask whether you've worked with a psychotherapist because I found myself in a similar predicament. I realized that my discontent had little or nothing to do with my "spiritual" practice. Simply put, the hustle and bustle of daily life is a sure way to keep many thoughts and emotions at bay. A meditative practice lets the stream pour through. For me meditation became a tool to bring those thoughts to the foreground and getting to know them. Through that process I get to know myself better. If necessary, I'll work with a psychotherapist to go through it.
I would guess that in the past, meditation teachers fulfilled the psychotherapist role. But an actual qualified therapist would be much better - especially now that meditation is a relatively common aspect of psychotherapy.
In fact, it seems like there is a lot of similarity generally between the role that priests of all kinds were supposed to perform in a community, and therapists. I wonder if it would be a good idea for humanity to essentially build a secular replacement to religion like that.
You can safely do anything up to the point that it benefits you. The moment your well-being suffers, or you neglect important parts of life, like friendship, you should stop.
I think, looking back I can safely say that it did help me address a lot of emotional trauma. I didn't exactly have a gentle upbringing and I somehow entangled myself into all those memories.
Meditation helped me to clear the air, but as you say - it blindly became a somewhat of an addiction. So I stopped and started focusing on other things. And I still have a long way to go.
The real question is how much is considered "overdoing", and then the argument falls back to a common-sense fallacy (until it doesn't work)...
This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.
That's why there is a sangha - a group of fellow meditators who will tell you if you start drifting too much away and will advice you.
Don't practice alone. At least not in the beginning.
'Walking is not for everyone' and 'Exercise is not for everyone' is technically true since it is going to do more harm than good for a small subsection of society.
It is even more true that some people should not run marathons or ultra marathons, but it would be odd to notice that then write an article based on that evidence that 'walking is not for everyone' rather than 'marathons are not for every one'. And when I have read of serious consequences of meditation it is from doing the equivalent, or more than, an ultra marathon, but then the conclusion is the equivalent of 'walking is not for everyone'.
On a related note, I've enjoyed my time so much staying at temples that the idea of being stuck in solitary for a long stretch is like a weird ambition! If you see my name in the news for a crime you'll know why…
And you're correct about turning back to a "stale" way of being. This is literally what happened, so kudos to you for noticing. As someone once told me, "You're still young. You have time.".
And I need that time.
But, for some reason - I was always very afraid to write such a book because it would mean giving away a part of "me". So, in this context, having more time means I can enjoy life without needing to preach a story that perhaps some people are not ready to hear. I don't know...
Funny thing is, I write for a living. Only web dev stuff opposed to digging deep into the psyche of this world.
I've been trying to meditate on and off for years, including daily 30 minute sessions for months at a time, and never experienced anything remotely as intense as this author. In fact despite all the time I've spent trying, I can't say I feel like I've gotten any better at it. At best I've developed a sensation I would describe as being extremely tall, as though my head were posted thousands of feet above my legs, but psychologically I don't feel like I'm doing any better today than when I started with respect to observing my thoughts or focusing on, say, breath.
I suspect some people are far more predisposed, be it nature or nurture, toward successful and deep meditation than others.
Any advice would be appreciated.
My personal experience is with 30 years of Anapana and Vipassana that started under guidance in a Thai monastery. Even with Anapana, which is considered quite low risk in terms of 'side effects', the message was that it is always better to practice with a teacher and don't mix different practices. This cannot be overstated enough.
My own dark night lasted around 10 years, even with the guidance. Sometimes my outlook so dark it was impossible to look in the mirror. Over time there was a slow transformation of perspective that is still ongoing today. Less clinging to ideas of good, bad, and especially self. Things just happen and most of the time I can now see that all emotions and ideas around that what happens are created by the mind and constantly changing. What starts to matter more and more is compassion for the situation of others and their suffering.
Meditation is often a transformative process and without proper support and guidance this process can indeed be risky.
> What starts to matter more and more is compassion for the situation of others and their suffering.
I can't understand this at all. What is good/bad if not defined by compassion for others?
I'm lucky to have been born naturally resilient to mental damage, but I know from (friends') experience that when you're genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, you're SOL. I've definitely felt my sanity slip at times or delusions take hold, but eventually my brain would reset to the status quo.
The silver lining is: unless you're willing to devote a large amount of your attention and life to this, you're unlikely to ever experience these kind of effects. I know people who practice for years and experience nothing.
I don't regret the 2-3 months of active ego dissolution phase, life has never been more beautiful and strangely peaceful and jarring at the same time. However, I did lose my job, my apartment and almost permanently lost my sanity as well, but now in hindsight it looks like it was all for the better.
Nevertheless I don't think you should force something like this (like I very much did), the consequences to internal and external reality can be absolutely dramatic, I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then... safe for the short moments of.. remembering. Everything and nothing at once. Becoming the observer. Observing the observer. Being everything...
It's all still there if I really wanted to, and my state of mind has changed permanently in drastic yet mostly unconscious ways. It took years to come to terms with all of this and since I've achieved stream entry back then there is no way back out now. It's either managing to get out of the cycle or repeating it over and over again. Meditation has become mandatory like drinking water. I‘ll soon be confronted with all of this again.
https://ibb.co/WtBR3FD
Tread carefully, reality is not as stable as you think.
> I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then
Yes, one of my strongest emotions was "I just want to go back to the ignorance I had before. Being moderately unhappy and distracted all the time was much preferable to this." I'm mostly back there now, two years on. Something that helped me was an Alan Watts talk about those that are "far out" -- AKA, fully engaged in the part they are playing in this life, and not aware of the absurdity of existence. Trying to live life like that has actually helped me cope with that experience, but I do continue to see brief glimpses from time to time.
Yet, somehow, I am glad I experienced that insanity--it showed me what direction I was headed in, "woke me up" to the inner world I was creating for myself, and changed my direction.
Still, wouldn't recommend the experience. It would be easier to just have a really open discussion with someone who cares about you and has some life experience, and have them tell you "you need to focus on what really matters--taking care of yourself, and appreciate life while you have it". I had to wrestle that lesson out of that incredibly frightening experience, which psychologically damaged me for almost 2 years.
I think diving into ego death when via substances in uncontrolled settings isn't a great idea, because you can get bogged down in delusion and paranoia.
I found it helpful with zazen to realise that any judgement of whatever I was experiencing (whether good or bad / joy or fear / enlightenment or hell), was just as much a delusion in itself as much as anything else. I personally found this made it illogical to be scared by whatever is happening inside your head, because that fear is just line noise.
"This comment is extremely important and should be borne in mind by all who feel tempted to dabble with the psychedelic experience without knowing what they are doing or why. He who enters the fifth state of consciousness without preparation may be spiritually paralyzed by his experience. He has seen too much too soon and, as a result, all games become meaningless. He cannot play the life games that satisfy men in the third state of consciousness. He cannot play the Master Game because he knows nothing about it and has no teacher. So he becomes, like Daumal's "leaf in the wind," an even more helpless plaything of external forces than he was before his rash experiment."
I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?
If so, as of the last dark night of the soul I seem to have reached permanent and stable access to sixth circuit now with glimpses of the seventh circuit, but I don't want to go there right now and proceeding further seems like it will take some time now anyway.
I hope to maintain the current state of mind until I have grown older, maybe even until I am able to stop working and focus on this path. I am quite happy with the current, fully integrated metaconsciousness.
No, the fifth state here is an interpretation of the Gurdjieff system and the associated Fourth Way. Loosely the fifth state equivalent to enlightenment (satori). The specific quote is from a book by Robert de Ropp called "The Master Game."
I haven't looked into Leary's eight circuit model in years. Thank you for reminding me of it. By your description of your current state, sounds like you have found utility in that particular framework?
The irony is that I started meditating because I struggle with panic disorder. Now I was hearing that my most common panic trigger (the thought that I could think myself crazy) was actually real! This sent me down quite a spiral that I have had to resolve by accepting the tiny odds that I might go spontaneously nuts. That's not an easy one, and I wish there was more reliable research on this issue.
> had to resolve by accepting the tiny odds
I think that's the right approach. Acceptance works wonders.
FWIW, from what I've read you won't go spontaneously nuts unless you're doing a heavy, heavy practice--hours per day for weeks, at least.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31668156/
It does seem like a possibility, but you'd think if someone were going to write about it they'd try to present evidence of some sort to support the point.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17848828/#:~:text=Conclusion....
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31668156/ is a survey of 19 studies that identified 28 cases. Conclusion: "Of the 28 cases reported, 14 patients had certain precipitating factors like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use."
Given the millions who meditate I think risk is less than a range of ordinary daily activities we engage in that can entail a life changing injury: crossing the street, diving into a pool to swim, and eating peanut butter (aflatoxin risk) to name three. The suggestion to consult a mental health professional, in the absence of any prior psychological issues that were significant, seems to me to be a waste of time and money.
Changing your psychological state is something all of us do every day, and some people have problems with just doing that. Experimenting with it substantially has the capacity to damage, and it's reasonable to conclude that for some subset of the population, for whatever reasons, it is not a hood idea. I think that's the point of the article
My therapist now advises me to stay away from it. She says that meditation is a form of “self hypnosis” and that I should stay away from daily practice, which is what I had previously.
It’s relatively easy for me to deliberately trigger psychosis, despite being on antipsychotics. And it is a very bad idea for me to do that. Losing touch with reality isn’t exactly fun.
For those who are interested, I’ve written about the four-month-long psychotic break that ended with me being diagnosed bipolar. https://kayode.co/blog/4106/living-with-psychosis/
What we have is some medications that work with relatively extreme side effects (I am now pre diabetic due to daily Seroquel use) and sort of folk tradition of what to do and not to do - ie bipolar people are advised to stay away from religion for instance.
In my experience both the medication and the folk tradition are mostly right actually, as weird as that might sound. It’s not like psychologists are performing huge studies, but they can see patterns in the individual cases when they are studied in bulk - ie religious individuals might have more psychotic episodes etc.
My issue was mainly that I couldn't turn the UI back on. But also I fucked up all the links and the whole system was out of order.
Now I still use it when necessary because I still have bugs, which is really easy because just thinking about it will pop it open. But I mostly use it to signal to me when the UI is starting to fade away; not something I was good at before.
I stopped my daily practice after that. Unfortunately, most benefits also went away. Fortunately, a few of them stayed and for that I'm grateful :)