I'm submitting this article because I thought it was somewhat objectively written and an interesting subject to consider. My impression (from far away) of some of the meditation gurus is also that they look like they are kinda addicted to their new "hobby". Also, it's rarely healthy if your income depends on you strongly believing in something (anything, really).
"60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers"
"Britton theorized that the effects of mindfulness might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where at some point therapeutic returns not only diminish but mindfulness could have negative side effects"
I think these things are well known, and the problem is that meditation is being lifted from its original context by people who don't understand it - and who can't navigate these things that are supposed to be navigated with teachers.
And then top it off by corporations promoting mindfulness as a panacea for everything so they don't have to worry about fixing underlying issues and can keep us running for longer, and I'm surprised this isn't more commonly talked about.
It was here on HN couple of years ago on top as well. Sadly, the main reaction here is "he did it wrong" or "not hard enough". Even though he addresses this objection in the article.
I had a hard time with this article. The pool the subjects were pulled from is suspect to me. They also didn’t interview any Rabbis, Priests, Mullahs,….
They study spirituality of a small subset of people pursuing it.
Mindfulness as practiced by the typical western audience (largely secular, young professionals) is well represented.
If you want to take something else away or are looking for alternative discussions about the nature of spirituality itself: go ahead, but that's not the study for that.
Only mindfulness meditation as practiced in western society in the fashionable way.
I disagree. The pool seems to be derived from students and professionals of mindfulness.
I believe mindfulness can be practiced outside of that group. That group also seems like the most confused group of people practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulnesss practiced in a fashionable way seems like the bottom of the barrel of mindfulness.
Maybe I did read the article with the wrong point of view. I thought it was posted to support the notion that Mindfulness is flawed.
Maybe secular young professionals all share some trait that can be associated with sense of superiority? And it’s not really about mindfulness or meditation?
I didn't go back to read check but my memory is that it was around 531 participants. So with that sample size who know how small the control group is.
In any case it certainly is dominating more of my life than I'm comfortable with right now.
How is one to write a story of their personal story in which they are the main, and for the most part the only character, without using the word “I” all the time?
"Rather than retelling it as a subjective narrative, you could retell it as an objective or omniscient narrator. It would sound completely ridiculous if the listener realizes that you're just telling your account from your perspective, particularly if you need to refer to yourself in the third person", said fluoridation as he thought how absurd the idea even is.
It's really frustrating when intensive meditation is sold as always positive. Like you can't get injured, and even if you do you did something wrong.
I have been meditating 20 years, and I have gone trough intensive retreats, so I share.
If you read Buddhist sutras, you find out that Buddha experienced similar and worse while meditating. Going into horrible states of mind at some point is what almost everybody goes trough if they meditate intensively at some point. That's not Buddhism going bad that's what Buddhism has been for 2000 years. If you stay in monasteries long enough, you see monks recovering from bad experience, even some rare cases who are permanently broken somehow. That's rare but it happens.
If your image of intensive meditation is "maintaining constant calm", or that "middle path" means no storms just the calm, you are mistaken. Human's don't naturally pay attention into their inner workings as much as they do in intensive meditation, something will happen. That's why you are doing it.
Living normal hectic life and doing intensive meditation retreats can be a problem. If you live in a monastery or similar place where you meditate 3-4 hours daily, attending intensive retreats is more balanced experience. Taking one year sabbatical and doing nothing but meditation was important step for me.
My most intense mindfulness experience was on a two-week silent retreat, in the woods, isolated from all of humanity. At the beginning, I met only the creatures of the forest and heard only the whispers of the trees.
By the sixth day I was hallucinating gold and purple snakes slithering out of my belly onto the ground around me.
By the eighth day I had visions of a cloud island vista with animals the world had never seen. They were cautious but friendly, and rode with me until the end of my journey that day.
By the twelfth day, I could see nothing but heard the most beautiful music. Melodies and harmonies fluttered and floated across my audible plane, bringing an intense sense of peace and joy.
When I left that place, I was a changed spirit. I may have been alone in physical form, but the universe embraced my inner self and showed me the path to enlightenment.
I am describing my experience. If you make the choice to medicalize my words, that is your own interpretation. But you were not there, you do not know.
You yourself describe it as a hallucinatory state, though. Were you aware that you were hallucinating at the time, or is it only in retrospect that you're able to realize that?
If a person was born who could hear radio waves, would it count as a hallucination, or would we be able to design an experiment to test whether they can actually hear radio waves?
It's only a problem if they experience psychosis in their daily life when they don't want to. Any mental illness is only considered an illness when it causes impairment of function. other than that, probably equivalent to hallucinatory drugs.
Having had two psychotic breaks, I do not recommend the experience. The last one caused something like hardware-level damage that took years for my brain to recover from.
No doubt they are serious. After I made my comment I thought about editing it provide nuance.
My problem is more about language and giving names to things and society adherence to the mean. As children we experience many psychotic breaks as we adjust to the world. It could be that as we mature the frequency is reduced but that doesn't mean the episodes are inherently bad. They could be a normal part of a consciousness's maturation.
These may be original thoughts conceived by an individual. If one needs third party verification for ideas read no further.
I see great similarity in childhood tantrums and psychotic breaks. I believe a more warn/mature consciousness may have a negative reaction to large shifts changes in its perceptual comprehension.
There can be a number of causes for that change which may affect duration.
As for childhood psychotic breaks. I believe they are common. The undeveloped consciousness is so malleable that it is just part of perceiving and comprehending the world. As we mature we experience fewer upheavals but we also gather neuroses.
I'm surprised to have my credentials questioned on an anonymous Internet forum.
Either we have different definitions of psychotic break or you're a pretty high outlier. I don't know anyone from my bipolar support group who had a psychotic break before puberty. Most of them haven't had one.
I had bipolar symptoms at age 5 and severe depression at 9, but didn't have a break until I was 26.
I grew up in a dynamic environment with plenty therapy and hospitalizations. There is definitely something on my mother's side. Suffice to say that I have a lifetime of experience. I think about the human side and the philosophical side.
I'm only speaking from life experience and an effort to frame and understand the issues.
There's a rather big difference between hiking and meditating. Solitary hikers in general hike, they don't spend their time trying to lose their sense of self.
Buddhism is a religion associated with a way of life and a culture. It's not something a businessman does on a "weekend retreat" as "mindfulness practice" to get back in the rat race refreshed.
Even the Thai businessman (and the whole country) has been quite removed from the culture that made Buddhism have a meaning there (as opposed to an empty shell).
Though, even so, he'd still be far closer to it than someone in San Francisco who adopted it as a consumer lifestyle good...
I'm not sure where your experience is from, but Buddhism is an integral part of Thai life and culture and I've seen this play out on a pragmatic level in many ways.
For the most part, western Buddhism is about good vibes bro and meditating and is, for all intents and purposes, irreligious and more of a general life philosophy (like how waking up at 5 am, jogging, and eating organic isn’t a religion either).
Buddhist buddhism involves demons, hell, and more praying or even chanting than meditating for the general population. Most Buddhists probably don’t meditate at all, actually. Some western Buddhists probably have amulets to ward off demons and make fruit offerings to bodhisattvas, but it’s very uncommon. But it’s the norm in Asia.
> Buddhist buddhism involves demons, hell, and more praying or even chanting than meditating for the general population.
You are mentioning Mahayana or later Vajrayana Buddhism.
Buddha never asks you to pray, and he did not teach any concepts of hells or demons.
Please stop appropriating Buddhism. You have no authority.
Just like Christianity practised in the US is not true Christianity, Buddhism practised in East Asia is no truer Buddhism.
And yes, Buddhism and its teachings are watered down in the West. But Western Buddhism, when not watered down, is no less truer than incense burning, praying, hell-believing Eastern Buddhism.
>Just like Christianity practised in the US is not true Christianity, Buddhism practised in East Asia is no truer Buddhism.
That's the "really existing Buddhism" - the kind that matters, and the only kind with roots in a millenia old tradition.
The rest is either spirituallity tourists using it as a lifestyle accessory (the same way they'd adopt pilates or switch to some new age shit), or spirituallity "nerds" getting into an exotic religion (usually in a bizarro version as landed on their shores and according to the spiritual fads of the time it caught on, mid-20th century) to study the scriptures and debate "ways" and versions.
>That's the "really existing Buddhism" - the kind that matters, and the only kind with roots in a millenia old tradition.
First, even if this "pseudo-Buddhism" is a lame imitation by Westerners, the fact that it's an imitation means that it shares the same roots with "proper Buddhism". Second, why is proper Buddhism "the only one that matters"? I would say none of it matters, you would say only one of them matters, and there's probably some people who say both of them matter. By what criterion does one opinion take precedence?
Western Buddhism is based off an aesthetic interpretation of Zen Buddhism.
If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority to talk about it, defending western Buddhism, which is based off the customs of a Japanese interpretation (based off a Chinese branch), is a strange turn to take.
(hell is mentioned within the context of Theravada as well)
> hell is mentioned within the context of Theravada as well
As far as I'm aware, Theravada is a body of teaching that developed late - around the same time as Mahayana. It's not some kind of "what the Buddha actually taught".
There is nothing well-defined as "Western Buddhism". The western buddhism I studied is based on Theraveda, and not Mahayana or Zen.
> If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority
No, they indeed do not. Western Buddhists or someone who learned from them don't tell these people that they are doing Buddhism wrongly, and should change. So, someone like you shouldn’t tell Westerners that their practice is wrong and baseless and East Asian is version is the one true one.
Have you even cracked open the Pali Canon upon which Theravada is based? It is rife with references to devas/demons and heavenly/hellish realms, purportedly spoken by the Buddha himself.
Right on, brother. My friend from from Bhutan wants to get into Christianity by reading the Bible like a nerd. I keep reminding her that most Christians where I come from (the Old World, so authentic) mostly only go to church on Sundays and only follow the Ten Commandments to the degree that they don’t kill people.
>I certainly have met Buddhism pratictioners in the West that were deep into the way of life and culture.
They are "big in the way of life and culture" the same way they'd be deep in punk rock or effective altruism.
Not as people living in a culture and tradition that is Buddhist - in an environment that nurtered and fosters its practice, and with all that comes from actual living tradition of a religion. It's more like pilates.
They then switch it off and go be whatever they are everyday.
Rather sweeping statements about an awful lot of people you have never met.
It is actually easier to be superficial with spiritual practice when immersed in its culture. Plenty of “spiritual” practitioners are playing social status games, going through motions in a societally rewarded and expected manner, etc…
Perhaps friend you are projecting your own dissatisfactions with finding an all encompassing one true meaning onto others?
Agreed. In fact a true follower of the Buddha would eventually get the point where they wish to try to integrate back into the business world if that’s where they came from. Lots of karma to resolve there lol.
My distinction is not about doing it well either or going to reach the "real" nirvana or whatever.
I'm seeing it in the anthropological sense, as a particular historical artifact. It's truth is in doing it because you were steeped in a Buddhist tradition/environment, as opposed as doing it as consumer lifestyle choice/hobby.
If your parents tried it as a lifestyle choice, and you yourself grow up with people bowing to statues of Lord Buddha and chanting the Heart Sutra and performing dana rituals for your school grades, then where is the inauthenticity?
It all flows together, reforming excessively strict early Hinduism, meditation in the forest, take these lessons and judge for yourself how they help, going to China with the Dhamma, going back to China for meditation lessons, bringing the practice of just sitting to the US when so few in Japan meditate, every where you look one sees traditions and insights flowing together in this great common effort to heal the suffering around and within us.
I meditate because life become impossible without it. Always now, always here, the authentic past is another category our mind creates and places into the wholeness. One cannot be an authentic first monk in California, but one can sit still with attention and silence and focus. One can be rude to other Buddhists or respectful to them.
As meditation makes it easier to see what is on its own apart from what I expected, the effects will vary depending on what one isn’t seeing clearly. So caution is warranted. Normally retraumatizing oneself isn’t helpful or skillful, but change will happen whether we fear it or long for it. Just make sure to sleep when tired and eat when hungry and pay attention within and without and it will work out.
Even in time of Buddha, there were thousands of Buddhists who were practising Buddhist while remaining in a family.
Buddha, once addressing Ananda, told him that there were hundreds of disciples who attained Nirvana while remaining in a family and with a profession.
I find this kind of opposition to Western Buddhist practices absolitely repulsive and baseless.
Yes, I studied Buddhist scriptures extensively, with guides, and really, you don't need to burn insence sticks and bow k times before a statue to be a Buddhist.
>Even in time of Buddha, there were thousands of Buddhists who were practising Buddhist while remaining in a family.
Which is neither here, nor there.
My distinction is not about following Buddhist as "true to the spirit of Buddha" or not. It's not about "studying" or not, either.
It's about Buddhist as a historical phenomenon, a tradition, emergent and adopted by specific cultures in specific ways of life, and being passed on, versus Buddhism as a consumer lifestyle choice, from some people millions of miles away, in a totally different culture and mindset, who adopted it as one of the "free to chose" religious or lifestyle fads available on their spirituality (or worse, wellness) market.
I fully agree with your comment. But what you and pigsty keep repeating is that: "if it is free to choose, and lifestyle based approach adopted by anyone in West", it is wrong.
So do you say that it is impossible to be a buddhist in the west? Maybe, but as a person that has been practicing a single tradition for a decade, made many life decisions based on that as the fundamental center of my life, helped run centers and actually see my work and family life completely integrated with my spiritual practice (and I chose to do so freely), your comment is comical. Anyway, I never strove to be a "buddhist".
> you don't need to burn insence sticks and bow k times before a statue to be a Buddhist.
That's what would be called "devotional practices". I didn't care for all that - pujas, foundation practices, 100,000 prostrations and so on. I wanted to do the insight practices, and gain insight.
What I later learned is that you have to do devotional practices as well as insight practices. A bird can't fly with just one wing. Devotional practices supposedly give you the confidence to deal with awakening insight.
For sure. Most people would agree that doing something as a fitness regiment is not a religion.
But you say that there is “no Buddhism” in the West. Clearly there are people who practice Buddhism in the West, whether that be “Western Buddhism” or something else. So one can only surmise that your argument is the following:
Only Asians can be Buddhist.
Well, that’s quite essentialist and othering towards Asians. But what other conclusion could there be? Because if you dialogue with such a person, they will continually raise the bar for being “Buddhist”, starting with pure merit and dedication (like: refrains from killing their parents; is nice to people; follows the N8XP) and then devolving into pseudo-anthropology like how Sri Lankans have different lifestyles compared to a Dutch person, or how Thai people might believe (I don’t know?) in jungle/forest spirits.
Eventually you realize that the only way a born-in-the-West person could become a Buddhist, according to this completely wrongheaded interpretation of “lived experience”, is to do the following:
1. Be drafted into the Vietnam War
2. Get amnesia caused by a shrapnel stuck in your skull
3. Get lost in the Vietnamese jungle
4. Eventually find a village and become adopted
5. Learn the local language somehow
6. Become a Buddhist by being immersed in the “way of life and culture”
>Well, that’s quite essentialist and othering towards Asians.
It's rather seeing a religious tradition in its historical context, and recognizing its environment.
It's "western buddhism" that is both orientalism (exoticizing the other) and a form of cultural appropriation and cheapining an original thing.
Note that I don't say that that they are "better Buddhists" or "closer to what Buddha meant" etc, as those are irrelevant. They are authentic even if they are bad at it or indifferent to it.
>Eventually you realize that the only way a born-in-the-West person could become a Buddhist, according to this completely wrongheaded interpretation of “lived experience”, is to do the following
I would just say the feedback loops between awareness got magnified by a lot. I would suggest the author to read the book "Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man". In that book, Gopi Krishna relates how his attention got fractured experienced sensations far intense.
> Often in the silence and darkness of my room at night I found myself looking with dread at
horribly disfigured faces and distorted forms bending and twisting into shapes, appearing and
disappearing rapidly in the shining medium, eddying and swirling in and around me. They left
me trembling with fear, unable to account for their presence. At times, though such
occurrences were rare, I could perceive within the luminous mist a brighter radiance
emanating from a luciferous, ethereal shape, with a hardly distinguishable face and figure, but
nevertheless a presence, emitting a lustre so soft, enchanting, and soothing that on such
occasions my mind overflowed with happiness and an indescribable divine peace filled every
fibre of my being. Strangely enough, on every such occasion the memory of the primary
vision, which occurred on the first day of the awakening, came vividly to me as if to hearten
me in the midst of despondency with a fleeting glimpse of a supercondition towards which I
was being painfully and inexorably drawn.
Yes, the author should totally study Kundalini. Krishna's story is scary.
It's even mentioned in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and The Mind Illuminated. Some traditions make it a central component (tantric & yogic), while some ignore it (Zen), but it's there in all of them. The core of religions flowed out of these experiences IMO.
There should absolutely be greater awareness that this is where meditation can lead if practiced with sufficient intensity. It's hard to say what the frequency is, but the centrality of these experiences and extrasensory stories (e.g. the Buddha seeing spirits), suggests it's a widely experienced phenomenon along the path. I mean, if the aim of meditation is to awaken to the greater consciousness, then one day you're going to have to experience it to progress.
This is where the West has lost its way. The culture has swung so far in favour of materialism it rejects the idea of universal consciousness, so sells mindfulness as simply brain exercises. That means if someone experiences the bigger reality they have no frame of reference and little support like they would if they followed a tradition where these experiences are more widely experienced.
Agree 100%. Many western meditation practices, especially mindfulness, take the soul and context out of meditation and treat it like an extreme sport or pilates class. Reminds me of when Tim Ferris went on a prolonged fast before doing a mindfulness retreat and almost has a full mental breakdown.
Had anybody else noticed that for many Stoicism has replaced Buddhism as the “cool” and “intellectual” spirituality amongst those in the liberal tech world?
Stoicism is more like Buddhism on easy mode for those in the Western tradition. Even Buddhists themselves are very clear that one should not pursue serious meditation unless they have their sīla (morality, ethical behavior) down pat and are at an appropriate stage of life where they have the time and means for it; Stoicism is all about the practice of sīla. If you skip on that, you end up with stories like OP's, and the people suffering psychotic breaks while on a meditative retreat.
It's probably no coincidence Stoicism (and Cynicism) appeared in the centuries following Alexander's campaign to India, and the bidirectional greco-indian cultural exchange that followed.
(It's also no coincidence that a Indian Buddhist monks ostensibly wear orange togas; not that the Romans conquered India or the Indians went to Rome, but the two seem to have been inspired by the Greek Chiton and Himation)
This cultural exchange is pretty fascinating thing in general. Here are some complementary reading:
I really appreciate your comment. I think I’ll remember the phrase “Buddhism on easy mode” for the rest of my life!
Your observation about preparation, behavior, state of life etc is also very poignant. I am Catholic and something that I’ve found delving into the writings of the saints is that it is often like staring at the sun: it’s too intense and I’m not ready for it. For example, when I was an atheist in college I read St Augustine’s Confessions and found it interesting from a philosophical point of view and an easy read. Now, as a believing and practicing Catholic, I can’t even finish the book. It’s spiritual fruit, of which I was ignorant in my youth, are too intense for me. I come back to it every couple of years and each time make it a little bit further.
That is all to say, it is funny how in mainstream discourse about religion/spirituality there is very little mention of “ability”. “Religious practice” is most certainly a skill that is acquired and refined through hard work (and grace).
The Catholic tradition and Christian tradition in general are deeply informed by Stoicism, especially Stoic ethics. So coming from that kind of tradition, you might find that you're already aware of many of these things, even if you couldn't quite tell where they originally came from.
There's speculation that Jesus might have been a Buddhist or at least well known in Buddhist contemporary circles and interacted with them. If you search online you'll see plenty of sources that mention it as a plausible possibility (there's a BBC documentary even).
as Jung says: the western individual is ready do travel great lengths, go farthest to the east, in the deserts, in the ice, meditate, change what they eat, what they drink, they will do anything, but look inside themselves.
What he experienced is actually expected, deeper states of meditation bring out even harder experiences. Meditation is marketed in the west as some sort of a relaxation pill, designed to cure anxiety and other mental ailments. It's actually not. Meditation is a hardcore exercise for the mind and if your mind is not strong enough then deeper states will break you.
Curious. It sounds like meditation has been misappropriated in the same way as therapy.
Therapy _should_ bring up difficult emotions and experiences from the past because they are often the root of dysfunction and frustration in the present.
I'm genuinely curious as a loved one rejects therapy exactly because she already knows what causes of her depression are and does not see any use in debating them further as they only bring her down.
I don't have experience or knowledge to explain how it would help her.
A good therapist doesn't just talk about root causes, imo. A good therapist talks about healthy coping mechanisms, and ways to get out of negative thought cycles
"because she already knows what causes of her depression are and does not see any use in debating them further as they only bring her down."
Hard to advice without further knowing details, but I could relate in a way, that the global state of the world causes me depression, but I cannot change the root cause. But I can change my attitude towards things. Deal with the problems I can solve and accept the rest. Spot patterns, where I indulge myself into misery and choose a different track (if possible).
And if we are talking about a childhood trauma, this person wants to avoid, then you can compare it to a splinter that is still in the flesh, causing misery and infection - removing the splinter will hurt and it will bleed - but after the splinter is gone, the wound can heal for good.
From my experience the biggest source of depression was people around me. Especially those I felt obligated to, but they didn't seem obligated to me in return. Maybe looking here might help. Indeed, it is not uncommon to criticise the world as a substitute for those in our environment whom we cannot criticise.
Leaving those people was difficult but the depression lifted and I was free to focus on my own life, which has been getting better.
Also getting a good night's sleep is very helpful. There are certainly also intensifying factors in the modern western lifestyle.
Please remember that having a loved one that deals with depression is itself a big challenge and good reason for therapy too. The fact that she might need it "more" is not a reason to avoid seeking help yourself (if you feel that you need it).
Maybe she knows herself, hopefully she isn’t getting pressured to do something she doesn’t want to do. Ask her what, instead of talk therapy, she thinks would be helpful. The answer might be enlightening.
There's additional layer of complexity: both "meditation" and "therapy" exist in various different forms. The above description might fit some methods better and some less.
E.g. some meditation techniques do focus on relaxation; some therapy types focus less on emotions and experiences from the past and look at the present instead; etc.
There is a reason that it is normally recommended that serious/deep meditation practice be done with a teacher. It's isn't so people can scam newbies out of money. When you really practice meditation consistently over a long period of time, you experience a lot of different states of mind. Some of these can make you feel "god like" as if you were enlightened. Teachers bring you down to Earth and remind you that it's just your mind being present while not meditating that makes you feel that way. You can experience strange visions like flashing lights and things. Some people interpret these as a mystical experience or something but it's probably just some random crap your brain is doing in a deep, meditative state. The most common effect, though, is a stripping down of all the lies we tell ourselves. This can be very, very traumatic. The realization that you are mostly making things up as you go and that you might not even have free will can be very heavy and hard to take. You might question who you are and how you have lived until this point.
The real issue, though, is the "I'm enlightened" crowd. They are insufferable and need to brought back down to reality before they go to a dinner party and annoy everyone.
Opening past mental wounds is often like massive invasive surgery, requiring immense skill, plenty of observation afterwards, and a lengthy recovery.
Unfortunately many councillors and psychologists are barbers, butchering people’s minds, or infecting them with hokum.
The worst I have ever heard of was getting a bunch of troubled teenagers together, a session getting them to share their horrific experiences, then sending them home with zero concern for the consequences. I mean, you are already struggling and then you need to process other people’s stories of rape, family violence, and worse. Or you need to face whatever Pandora’s box demons you have shared. Ouch.
Anything as subjective as one's own mindset interpreted by oneself is incompatible with the scientific method in the first place. It's not the right tool for the job because it is impossible to objectively measure the results.
"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile.
Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
As real as the rest of your feelings in that they color, if not drive, your subjective experience of the world. Which applies to pretty much every person on the planet.
So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this: Your brain is sick, yes you are hallucinating me, but that doesn't make me less real.
You're confusing the words "true" and "real". It is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the orbit is also real. That 2+2=4 is true, but it's not real. The electrochemical activity in your brain is real, and the fact that it causes your subjective experience is true. Your subjective experience is true to you (you're experiencing the things you're experiencing), but it's unknown to me. It is also of unknown realness, i.e. of unknown correlation with reality. You can see things that are not real and not see things that are real, or feel things for no reason (e.g. intense fear not because there's something frightening, but because there's a drug in your body).
Thank you for your reply. In most ways I agree, in all ways actually. But my point is that the term "real" doesn't mean strictly material. The picture I'm painting is to bring away "reality" from strictly material and external. I do this to argue with the point above your original reply, saying that the scientific method is incompatible with these things. We're in philosophical territory and I won't pretend to be an expert but I think we will have plenty of tools to bring the scientific method even to our most personal experiences.
Which is why I originally asked what was meant by "real". From a consensus-realistic perspective, things that are purely subjective and non-material things are definitely less real or at least less-obviously real. From a solipsistic perspective the only real thing is one's subjective experience, and everything else is in doubt. But most people are not capable of consistently maintaining a solipsistic perspective, so I didn't assume that's what was meant.
Even the solipsistic must surely realise that there are simulacrum of external reality that can be dismissed as, say, 'it was just a shiver' rather than being a 'real' part of one's subjective experience.
Reflecting, I guess I'm questioning if the solipsist really believes all that which is put before their minds is really "experience", per se.
Necessarily, that which is experienced is experienced. The belief that one merely thinks is experiencing something but is actually mistaken is untenable. The question is whether the feeling of these keys under what I think are my fingers is caused by something that exists more or less as I perceive it, rather than some contrived hallucination or an illusion. But I'm not able to doubt that I am in fact feeling what I feel. Besides mathematical truths, it's all I can be certain of.
Fun fact: unlike linear motion, rotation is absolute. Accepting that the Earth does not rotate would require us to accept that distant galaxies circle it at tangential speeds many times greater than c. It can be logically consistent, but we would have to come up with an explanation for why the entire universe rotates around a particular object, and for why the speed of light has an exemption for this particular type of motion and none other.
As someone noticed, you are trying to say something similar the private language argument of Wittgenstein.
But notice that this isn’t really private to a person.
How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands.
Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago.
Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time.
For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice).
A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience.
But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
However, I question whether there's actually a shared context when it comes to meditation. Unlike for external phenomena like gravity and QM, there's a lot of ambiguity related to communicating internal processes. For example, basic emotions like happiness and fear are easily communicated because they show up on the face. Two people can agree that the emotion that causes them to make the same face is the same one, and so can agree to call the emotion by a word. But are we sure the same is true for things that don't work like this? If someone says "do this and you'll feel like that" and I do and I don't feel that, what am I to understand? Is it that I did it wrong, that I did it right and my brain just works differently, or that the speaker and I are failing to understand each other? Did the speaker misuse a word? Did I mistakenly think a word meant something other than what was intended? Particularly when it comes to subjective feelings there's going to be a lot of metaphors involved, which never help for unambiguous communication.
Maybe not impossible, but if it was easy or if the gp didn't have a point, wouldn't we have figured out what fibromyalgia is by now? Also maybe we would have given more scrutiny to the widespread marketing and distribution of oxycotin in the U.S., at least enough to prevent the disaster it caused?
Uh, how exactly? What's unfalsifiable about self-reflection leading to painful confrontations, or those confrontations being provocative in ways that can manifest differently depending on the person? To name just one superficial aspect of mindfulness.
Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.
So? That might make it hard for you and me to figure these things out in daily life, but psychology as field of science has been trying to study the mind rigorously for at least a century by now, and it's not exactly naive about this problem.
Not as a lie detector, but to detect whether the underlying mental state is actually present. It seems almost certain that if someone is experiencing or has experienced a state of supreme bliss and is recalling it, that has to pretty visible on fMRI, as compare to someone who has never experienced supreme bliss and is just saying they have.
Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car".
Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to understand. Its a not very wise and not very calming endavour. After all the machine that should reassemble it, is the one that took it apart.
A good response to "that's not falsifiable" is offering a test that could prove the assertion false. This is only more unfalsifiable metaphor.
Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
The rewritting of what has actually percieved and what has happened, after it happened as a inability to act, is for many a enigma. Otherwise you wouldnt regularly get this stammered stories in front of some judge after traffic accidents. The idea, that cause and effect, could be rewritten by your visual system to keep its story straight, even after a failure, is quite the enigma in my eyes.
Anything that happens only inside peoples’ minds is in a pretty tough realm to study. It’s okay to be afraid of it or to assume it doesn’t mean anything, but it would be really stretching “skepticism” to say that people don’t have visions/hallucinations of all kinds in response to meditative practice. You’d just be using “falsifiability” to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
Well danger if done wrong is a good selling point. it suggests that the method must be powerful. I'm sure some gurus exploit this (manipulative technique) to be perceived as more serious or experienced. The problem is now, speaking about the (real or not) dangers of meditation could also induce some kind of nocebo effect in practitioners. And since most people open for this stuff will be more on the irrational spectrum of humanity ... the danger of meditation may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We speak about mindfulness here but there is the same discussion and warnings about kundalini for example.
Obviously focusing (or not) on something and sitting for a long time will alter you state of consciousness to some degree like a trance. But are there real and objective dangers besides the rewiring of your brain?
It's easy to dismiss a whole class of phenomenon just because there isn't an ample understanding of it. And much of mind is unfalsifiable becuase we don't yet understand how to make heads or tails of the largest neural network in our existence: our brains.
And before you look at my username, instead look no further than "Placebos". Why does a sugar pill named "morphine" work? Obviously, handing them a teaspoon of sugar does nothing, but when relabeled, works.
And most of the occult as well is of mind - either my own mind, or that of others. Science even has a semi-explanation with the holographic universe theory, which says that every particle is encoded with the information of everything, just at the simplest resolution. And if mind could be tuned so, could access everything within their own mind. (The old occult principle is 'As above, so below.')
But it's easy to paint things you either don't like or don't understand as "pseudoscience". Flat earth used to be science. Earth-centric orbits used to be science. Wearing masks full of herbs when dealing with plague victims used to be science.
I don’t know what happened to the OP. Maybe he was experiencing psychosis, maybe he was in some stage of enlightenment, maybe he’s the victim of a harmful practice.
But I do know he took mindfulness to an extreme that only a tiny fraction do.
Anything in excess can kill you. Even drinking water. The 10 to 20 minutes per day many mindfulness meditators do doesn’t seem likely to have the same effect as experienced by the OP.
When I read this sort of thing I can't help but wonder whether the problem is with the person here rather than with meditation per se. Like I can't imagine a person with a healthy state of mind thinking "Gee, I need to meditate intensely for 8+ hours a day for fourteen days."
It sounds crazy already. No wonder it turned out badly.
I’m an autistic person and it sounds like in some way this person achieved exactly the point of certain forms of meditation like this which is to open up awareness. And I think as many autistic folks will tell you, being very aware is extremely difficult and is mentally and physically taxing. If you aren’t prepared for it I could indeed see it being extremely disturbing. Being exposed to all your inner workings and thoughts constantly is not for the faint of heart.
That being said, I think mindfulness in western countries skips a lot of Buddhist teachings, which are in large part designed to help deal with this kind of experience. I highly suggest that anyone that is going down this path seek out teachers that have experience and can be of aid. There are pragmatic aspects of it that go beyond meditation and in my opinion are just as important if not more so.
And just to contextualize this, I’m a Buddhist. I live in Thailand and it’s something that is part of my normal life. As such, it’s rare the I’m meditating outside of a temple and I have easy access to a whole host of teachers. I would urge caution around retreats and other intensive practices. Mindset and setting are extremely important and should be considered carefully.
I’ve had a lifetime to learn to live like this and I would not want to see anyone dropped in the deep end without proper preparation.
Was going to post this. There are reasons we have brains with selective attention instead of constant mindfulness, and a whole spectrum of disorders that arises when that sort of a filter breaks down. (I am lucky. I don’t have it bad.) Unfiltered mindfulness of this sort sounds like basically the same thing.
Pretty much. I’m bipolar and every moment I need to have some awareness of where my mood is and do course corrections to head off episodes or emotional overreactions.
I quite literally can’t trust how I feel from minute to minute. Knowing my logical analysis of situations can also be compromised causes me to run deeper mental self-tests several times per day.
I’m used to this but it’s a constant low-grade drain on my attention.
Meditation is dangerous for me as it quickly leads to dangerous psychosis. (Life is a video game and I can’t really die.)
I wouldn't say I'm the most knowledgeable in this regard but as far as I know it's not super common. Buddhism in Thailand is strongly tied to making merit[1] which is more or less doing good deeds. And generally, this is seen as something to be done regularly as a part of daily life as opposed to taking a break out of normal life for it. That being said, I'm sure there are still plenty of folks who do so, but at least in my experience it was primarily non-Thai folks doing so.
There are pretty strong overlaps in certain areas, but that isn't the case though. Autism is caused by physical neurological changes that have to do with brain development before or near birth and while meditation (to my knowledge at least) can alter overall brain structure it won't alter the more fundamental structural changes which are seen in folks with autism.
Anecdotally, my father is probably autistic and doing heart-focused meditation has made him much better able to handle some of the side effects, particularly sensory overload and social frustration. It might be a question of some meditation being more 'cerebral' versus others that are more 'grounding' interacting differently with a tendency for something like autism.
I came here to say the same thing, and you said it much more charitably than I was going to. This is what you get when you try to turn complex religious practice into multi-level marketing, with certifications, and people being paid to instruct.
I suffered from bad anxiety for a while post pandemic.
Mindfulness meditation made me feel better during and for about half an hour afterward, but it wasn't "me again": it was some altered state that not only wasn't addressing the underlying issues (that I've since made great strides on in psychotherapy). I felt periods of great calm, but it was as if I was taking some drug to achieve an altered state.
I read a lot about how to "bring the meditative state into daily life", and that only made the anxiety worse when it broke through, because it sensitized me to focus increasingly on internal physical phenomena. Yeah, I tried not to "judge" them, to neither anticipate their arrival and to just observe their rise and fall, but the observing meant attention, and the attention magnified them.
I finally beat the anxiety mostly for good by acknowledging and facing the problems in my life. I haven't even solved much of them yet, but I'm pretty honest about it both to myself and the people close to me.
Me too, I had always had low level anxiety+depression but at the end of the pandemic it went out of control. Your comment made me think that people like to self medicate. Maybe a 10 day silent retreat is not that different from a heroic dose of psilocybin. Both are certainly high risk (potentially high reward) maneuvers to treat a mental health problem.
Meditation was mildly helpful but it wasn’t really a practical solution for a working parent. You can’t hit pause on your life very often. SSRIs it is for now
Sorry for the loss of your old self. Your life will never be the same as before. Once you peek behind the curtains, you can't un-see what you saw there.
> Once we have crossed the Arising and Passing Away (and if we don’t suddenly die or get severe brain damage due to some unfortunate life circumstances), we shall enter insight stages five through ten regardless of whether we want to. It doesn’t matter if we practice from this point on; once we cross the A&P, we are in the Dark Night to some degree and become what is sometimes called a “Dark Night yogi”, or simply “darknighter”, until we figure out how to get through it. If we do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, we will have to go through it again and again until we do. I mean this in the most absolute terms. It appears to be a hardwired part of human physiology as far as I can tell. I have a very large and growing body of case studies and a wealth of shared experiences among meditation friends and acquaintances to back this up, and I am not alone. Tens of thousands of meditators have noticed these stages in their own practice and countless teachers have noticed them also.
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
It should be noted that Daniel Ingram is following the Mahasi sayadaw method and is a bit from of a fringe Buddhist subculture promoting (if I am not confusing things „dry insight“ meditation).
Maybe the cultivation of the non-dry aspects is actually helpful.
I am a noob, does dry insight mean no concentration practices? The book says a significant amount of concentration practice is necessary before it is possible to make any progress with insight practice, and also recommends continuing concentration practice as a stabilizing and comforting influence against the destabilizing and often unpleasant insight journey.
I assume that's a reference to reaching awareness of the three characteristics by "noting" perceptions and sensations in the mind as if blasting enemies in a video game. That's a very intense vipassana practice and while it apparently makes for quick progress towards full awakening, one could argue that it's not for everyone.
I guess I am also a noob and I am not an expert on the Mahasi method, but in general buddhist meditation has like 3 pillars, metta (loving-kindness meditation, also features self-love), samatha: (tranquility or calm abiding), vipassana (insight). Samatha and vipassana would be preconditions to awakening (bodhi).
samatha contains sati [mindfulness], samadhi [stable attention], piti [joy], passaddhi [tranquility], upekkha [equanimy]).
vipassana is insight (among others) into anicca [impermanence], sunnata [emptyness], dukkha [stress], paticcasamuppada [interdependence of phenomena], anatta [no-observable self],....
The meditative states of jhana (dhyana in sanskrit, chan in chinese, Zen in japanese although the meaning has changed while the term traveled further east) originate from samatha practice.
Overall most Theravāda traditions or traditions that take the pali canon as a source kind of use this metta, samatha/sati, vipassana classification and acknowledge jhanas as meditative states. However, the meditation practice in the theravāda tradition was revived in the 19th/20th century only, so there is in the theravāda tradition no continuous meditation teaching lineage, so people had to make sense of the Pali canon source texts, which aren't exactly a meditation manual as we expect it today and there are concurrent approaches.
I am just a casual meditator (like 2-3 times per week) but overall an avid reader so I have seen quite a few different takes on how metta, mindfulness and insight meditation relate, most aren't dismissing one of these practices entirely, but the order and emphasis on when to practice what differ greatly. "dry-insight" is a I think to be understood as a counterpoint to voices that stated that a buddhist needs to practice concentration first and potentially even reach the jhanas before practicing Vipassana. So concentration / sati is not entirely dismissed. The idea of "dry-insight" is, that fewer meditation hours practicing concentration may be enough to develop insights and it is thus also advertised as a "quicker way" to awakening.
Overall, when reading or listening to meditation teachers, I am cautious about claims to "speed", which makes me a bit reserved about the Mahasi noting method crowd.
What made sense to me was: Laypeople should practice Metta meditation in any case. Practicing Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration) is like taking your brain to the gym & spa, it should also help you a lot in dealing with stressful emotions, if your meditation object are your senses (breath, feet in walking meditation, hands while washing dishes) this seems to be a rather well-grounded activity and not inherently dangerous (unless maybe you have a serious psychological condition).
Proficient enough in Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration), the route could go to practicing samatha and vipassana. Now my assumption would be that if you directly overemphasize vipassana and your skills for concentration, tranquility and equanimity aren't sufficient to contain reactions when 'insight' hits you.
That being said, Vipassana covers a wide range of stuff. Like "Body Scans" as done in Mindfulness based Stress reduction (MBSR) are thought of IIRC as vipassana practices, and IMHO they could just as well be thought of as sati practice.
btw. Daniel Ingram refers to himself as an Aharat/aharant and it is kind of a no-no in buddhism to talk about your own "awakening-status". That's a serious red-flag.
He covers the motivation for this in the book (as well as other departures from traditions of not talking about things he considers important to talk about). Basically there's a tradition of people keeping people in the dark about things that he thinks does more harm than good.
I'm not qualified to comment on the wisdom of either approach, just pointing out that it's covered in the first part of the book, and other parts, e.g. "Mushroom Factor".
I have been told that Trungpa said "they always run".
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!
I think you're conflating the concentration and insight jhanas/meditative practices. What you said about losing the sense of self is true of the insight jhanas, but "mindfulness" as a meditative practice is more reminiscent of concentration. Also, it's not like "losing the sense of self" is always bad for you; it depends how deep your attachment to the self was in the first place. Sīla (moral and ethical practice) and intellectual insights like Stoicism can help you gradually loosen the notion that a personal self must be integral to existence, without abandoning it completely.
There is something very cultish about it. An indication of it being a cult is the tendency to get caught up in definitions of new words. It is easy to think that once you learn the vocabulary (like "vipassana", "sati", or whatever), you are have achieved something, when all you are doing is reciting new words but the thinking is done for you.
Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words.
McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.
Seems like having revulsion for all earthly things can backfire in unpredictable ways. I have a suspicion that the early Buddhist may have been onto something, but something vital was lost a long time ago.
It's good if you're a monk. It's not good if you're a lay person.
Ancient (Pali canon) Buddhism is different from Asian Buddhism, but modernist American Buddhism is pretty different from that too.
(Although, a lot of Asian Buddhism is basically copied from European philosophy; when the Europeans showed up, Asia had to cook up something they'd count as a religion in a hurry so they wouldn't count as savages and get colonized.)
> The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench.
I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.
Realisation of no self (anatta) would be canonically fit into vipssana meditation whereas mindfulness (sati) is something done for concentration practice
I did a lot of mindfulness sitting practice. We were specifically directed not to attempt concentration. There's more than one kind of mindfulness, and more than one kind of vipassana. I was mainly taught vipassana as something that arises naturally from shamatha; but I've been on courses where it was taught as a systematic exploration of the skhandas, to convince yourself that there is no self in the five skhandas.
I've also been to McMindfulness groups, where they blended shamatha-type mindfulness with guided vipassana meditation. It makes no sense to me, to teach vipassana divorced from the no-self doctrine, and all the abhidharma ideas about the skhandas and the different kinds of consciousness.
Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
> There's more than one kind of mindfulness, and more than one kind of vipassana
Definitely true, by itself sati/smrti is a hard-to-translate term.
> Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I am mostly focussing on some breathing mindfulness meditation and some metta, not much, but enough that I feel a calming effect, and I overall am trying to foster some 'buddhist values' in my life.
> I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
I heard of meditating on your 'own decaying body' definitely from a theravada context, but was overall warned that meditation objects from the imagination are more risky overall for psychological emergencies.
No idea what Bhante Vimalaramsi is. I used the term as a synonym for sravakayana; I think I probably used it incorrectly, it should probably include a lot of mahayana practice (because mahayana sutras). Maybe it just means "practices that don't depend on revealed teachings". At any rate, "not tantrayana".
Ah, Bhante Vimalaramsi is an american monk originally from the theravada tradition who IIRC uses Sutrayana for his take on what the Pali canon says, as he deviates from the theravada interpretation of the text.
Great write-up. Where I'm based, there are not a lot of meditation retreats at all. It's often something that's not really talked about but even then I wasn't aware at all that these side effects were out there. The most I went through as a short mindfulness class in college, and I absolutely thought it would be beneficial to go deeper into it eventually. I could never find the time or (mostly) patience to follow up with it afterwards.
Having had almost life ruining psychosis for pandemic related reasons in between then and now, reading this makes me glad I didn't and keen to learn more on this side of the issue.
A cultural addiction to dualism meeting a practice that opens one up to what lies beyond the innate denial of dualism will typically result in fear or pain. Setting expectations about what one will or won't uncover when one digs into the unknown subconscious is a recipe for all this.
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[ 35.9 ms ] story [ 6529 ms ] thread"60% of the participants reporting distressing experiences were meditation teachers"
"Britton theorized that the effects of mindfulness might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, where at some point therapeutic returns not only diminish but mindfulness could have negative side effects"
And then top it off by corporations promoting mindfulness as a panacea for everything so they don't have to worry about fixing underlying issues and can keep us running for longer, and I'm surprised this isn't more commonly talked about.
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790 - July 2021 (568 comments)
They've never meditated properly even once. Teacher my ass, these people do way more damage than help anyone.
https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/study-links-mindfulness-medit...
If you want to take something else away or are looking for alternative discussions about the nature of spirituality itself: go ahead, but that's not the study for that.
Only mindfulness meditation as practiced in western society in the fashionable way.
Mindfulnesss practiced in a fashionable way seems like the bottom of the barrel of mindfulness.
Maybe I did read the article with the wrong point of view. I thought it was posted to support the notion that Mindfulness is flawed.
Thats the crux of what is spelled out at length, could the study be improved? Maybe.
But I see no evidence here of anything else, so until it is replicated or failed to replicate it will be my opinion.
I have been meditating 20 years, and I have gone trough intensive retreats, so I share.
If you read Buddhist sutras, you find out that Buddha experienced similar and worse while meditating. Going into horrible states of mind at some point is what almost everybody goes trough if they meditate intensively at some point. That's not Buddhism going bad that's what Buddhism has been for 2000 years. If you stay in monasteries long enough, you see monks recovering from bad experience, even some rare cases who are permanently broken somehow. That's rare but it happens.
If your image of intensive meditation is "maintaining constant calm", or that "middle path" means no storms just the calm, you are mistaken. Human's don't naturally pay attention into their inner workings as much as they do in intensive meditation, something will happen. That's why you are doing it.
Living normal hectic life and doing intensive meditation retreats can be a problem. If you live in a monastery or similar place where you meditate 3-4 hours daily, attending intensive retreats is more balanced experience. Taking one year sabbatical and doing nothing but meditation was important step for me.
By the sixth day I was hallucinating gold and purple snakes slithering out of my belly onto the ground around me.
By the eighth day I had visions of a cloud island vista with animals the world had never seen. They were cautious but friendly, and rode with me until the end of my journey that day.
By the twelfth day, I could see nothing but heard the most beautiful music. Melodies and harmonies fluttered and floated across my audible plane, bringing an intense sense of peace and joy.
When I left that place, I was a changed spirit. I may have been alone in physical form, but the universe embraced my inner self and showed me the path to enlightenment.
My problem is more about language and giving names to things and society adherence to the mean. As children we experience many psychotic breaks as we adjust to the world. It could be that as we mature the frequency is reduced but that doesn't mean the episodes are inherently bad. They could be a normal part of a consciousness's maturation.
Neat, I didn’t know this. Where could I read about it? :)
Most of the google results I’m getting talk about childhood schizophrenia. (Which is a thing and quite serious.)
I see great similarity in childhood tantrums and psychotic breaks. I believe a more warn/mature consciousness may have a negative reaction to large shifts changes in its perceptual comprehension. There can be a number of causes for that change which may affect duration.
As for childhood psychotic breaks. I believe they are common. The undeveloped consciousness is so malleable that it is just part of perceiving and comprehending the world. As we mature we experience fewer upheavals but we also gather neuroses.
I'm surprised to have my credentials questioned on an anonymous Internet forum.
I had bipolar symptoms at age 5 and severe depression at 9, but didn't have a break until I was 26.
It's no surprise these experiences are often misinterpreted as psychosis by people without an awareness of where deep meditative states can lead.
Buddhism is a religion associated with a way of life and a culture. It's not something a businessman does on a "weekend retreat" as "mindfulness practice" to get back in the rat race refreshed.
Though, even so, he'd still be far closer to it than someone in San Francisco who adopted it as a consumer lifestyle good...
I for one applaud the Taliban for blowing up statues of the Buddha. They aren't posers like we are.
I certainly have met Buddhism pratictioners in the West that were deep into the way of life and culture.
Buddhist buddhism involves demons, hell, and more praying or even chanting than meditating for the general population. Most Buddhists probably don’t meditate at all, actually. Some western Buddhists probably have amulets to ward off demons and make fruit offerings to bodhisattvas, but it’s very uncommon. But it’s the norm in Asia.
It’s like saying Christians pray and worship god. That’s not a generalization. That’s Christianity.
You are mentioning Mahayana or later Vajrayana Buddhism.
Buddha never asks you to pray, and he did not teach any concepts of hells or demons.
Please stop appropriating Buddhism. You have no authority.
Just like Christianity practised in the US is not true Christianity, Buddhism practised in East Asia is no truer Buddhism.
And yes, Buddhism and its teachings are watered down in the West. But Western Buddhism, when not watered down, is no less truer than incense burning, praying, hell-believing Eastern Buddhism.
That's the "really existing Buddhism" - the kind that matters, and the only kind with roots in a millenia old tradition.
The rest is either spirituallity tourists using it as a lifestyle accessory (the same way they'd adopt pilates or switch to some new age shit), or spirituallity "nerds" getting into an exotic religion (usually in a bizarro version as landed on their shores and according to the spiritual fads of the time it caught on, mid-20th century) to study the scriptures and debate "ways" and versions.
First, even if this "pseudo-Buddhism" is a lame imitation by Westerners, the fact that it's an imitation means that it shares the same roots with "proper Buddhism". Second, why is proper Buddhism "the only one that matters"? I would say none of it matters, you would say only one of them matters, and there's probably some people who say both of them matter. By what criterion does one opinion take precedence?
If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority to talk about it, defending western Buddhism, which is based off the customs of a Japanese interpretation (based off a Chinese branch), is a strange turn to take.
(hell is mentioned within the context of Theravada as well)
As far as I'm aware, Theravada is a body of teaching that developed late - around the same time as Mahayana. It's not some kind of "what the Buddha actually taught".
There is nothing well-defined as "Western Buddhism". The western buddhism I studied is based on Theraveda, and not Mahayana or Zen.
> If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority
No, they indeed do not. Western Buddhists or someone who learned from them don't tell these people that they are doing Buddhism wrongly, and should change. So, someone like you shouldn’t tell Westerners that their practice is wrong and baseless and East Asian is version is the one true one.
They are "big in the way of life and culture" the same way they'd be deep in punk rock or effective altruism.
Not as people living in a culture and tradition that is Buddhist - in an environment that nurtered and fosters its practice, and with all that comes from actual living tradition of a religion. It's more like pilates.
They then switch it off and go be whatever they are everyday.
It is actually easier to be superficial with spiritual practice when immersed in its culture. Plenty of “spiritual” practitioners are playing social status games, going through motions in a societally rewarded and expected manner, etc…
Perhaps friend you are projecting your own dissatisfactions with finding an all encompassing one true meaning onto others?
Your "No True Buddhist" argument is sweeping and fallacious.
My distinction is not about doing it well either or going to reach the "real" nirvana or whatever.
I'm seeing it in the anthropological sense, as a particular historical artifact. It's truth is in doing it because you were steeped in a Buddhist tradition/environment, as opposed as doing it as consumer lifestyle choice/hobby.
It all flows together, reforming excessively strict early Hinduism, meditation in the forest, take these lessons and judge for yourself how they help, going to China with the Dhamma, going back to China for meditation lessons, bringing the practice of just sitting to the US when so few in Japan meditate, every where you look one sees traditions and insights flowing together in this great common effort to heal the suffering around and within us.
I meditate because life become impossible without it. Always now, always here, the authentic past is another category our mind creates and places into the wholeness. One cannot be an authentic first monk in California, but one can sit still with attention and silence and focus. One can be rude to other Buddhists or respectful to them.
As meditation makes it easier to see what is on its own apart from what I expected, the effects will vary depending on what one isn’t seeing clearly. So caution is warranted. Normally retraumatizing oneself isn’t helpful or skillful, but change will happen whether we fear it or long for it. Just make sure to sleep when tired and eat when hungry and pay attention within and without and it will work out.
Even in time of Buddha, there were thousands of Buddhists who were practising Buddhist while remaining in a family.
Buddha, once addressing Ananda, told him that there were hundreds of disciples who attained Nirvana while remaining in a family and with a profession.
I find this kind of opposition to Western Buddhist practices absolitely repulsive and baseless.
Yes, I studied Buddhist scriptures extensively, with guides, and really, you don't need to burn insence sticks and bow k times before a statue to be a Buddhist.
Which is neither here, nor there.
My distinction is not about following Buddhist as "true to the spirit of Buddha" or not. It's not about "studying" or not, either.
It's about Buddhist as a historical phenomenon, a tradition, emergent and adopted by specific cultures in specific ways of life, and being passed on, versus Buddhism as a consumer lifestyle choice, from some people millions of miles away, in a totally different culture and mindset, who adopted it as one of the "free to chose" religious or lifestyle fads available on their spirituality (or worse, wellness) market.
I don't agree with this.
That's what would be called "devotional practices". I didn't care for all that - pujas, foundation practices, 100,000 prostrations and so on. I wanted to do the insight practices, and gain insight.
What I later learned is that you have to do devotional practices as well as insight practices. A bird can't fly with just one wing. Devotional practices supposedly give you the confidence to deal with awakening insight.
/me no longer a practitioner or a Buddhist.
But you say that there is “no Buddhism” in the West. Clearly there are people who practice Buddhism in the West, whether that be “Western Buddhism” or something else. So one can only surmise that your argument is the following:
Only Asians can be Buddhist.
Well, that’s quite essentialist and othering towards Asians. But what other conclusion could there be? Because if you dialogue with such a person, they will continually raise the bar for being “Buddhist”, starting with pure merit and dedication (like: refrains from killing their parents; is nice to people; follows the N8XP) and then devolving into pseudo-anthropology like how Sri Lankans have different lifestyles compared to a Dutch person, or how Thai people might believe (I don’t know?) in jungle/forest spirits.
Eventually you realize that the only way a born-in-the-West person could become a Buddhist, according to this completely wrongheaded interpretation of “lived experience”, is to do the following:
1. Be drafted into the Vietnam War
2. Get amnesia caused by a shrapnel stuck in your skull
3. Get lost in the Vietnamese jungle
4. Eventually find a village and become adopted
5. Learn the local language somehow
6. Become a Buddhist by being immersed in the “way of life and culture”
It's rather seeing a religious tradition in its historical context, and recognizing its environment.
It's "western buddhism" that is both orientalism (exoticizing the other) and a form of cultural appropriation and cheapining an original thing.
Note that I don't say that that they are "better Buddhists" or "closer to what Buddha meant" etc, as those are irrelevant. They are authentic even if they are bad at it or indifferent to it.
>Eventually you realize that the only way a born-in-the-West person could become a Buddhist, according to this completely wrongheaded interpretation of “lived experience”, is to do the following
That would be a good way, yes.
At least they wouldn't be a tourist at it.
> Often in the silence and darkness of my room at night I found myself looking with dread at horribly disfigured faces and distorted forms bending and twisting into shapes, appearing and disappearing rapidly in the shining medium, eddying and swirling in and around me. They left me trembling with fear, unable to account for their presence. At times, though such occurrences were rare, I could perceive within the luminous mist a brighter radiance emanating from a luciferous, ethereal shape, with a hardly distinguishable face and figure, but nevertheless a presence, emitting a lustre so soft, enchanting, and soothing that on such occasions my mind overflowed with happiness and an indescribable divine peace filled every fibre of my being. Strangely enough, on every such occasion the memory of the primary vision, which occurred on the first day of the awakening, came vividly to me as if to hearten me in the midst of despondency with a fleeting glimpse of a supercondition towards which I was being painfully and inexorably drawn.
It's even mentioned in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and The Mind Illuminated. Some traditions make it a central component (tantric & yogic), while some ignore it (Zen), but it's there in all of them. The core of religions flowed out of these experiences IMO.
There should absolutely be greater awareness that this is where meditation can lead if practiced with sufficient intensity. It's hard to say what the frequency is, but the centrality of these experiences and extrasensory stories (e.g. the Buddha seeing spirits), suggests it's a widely experienced phenomenon along the path. I mean, if the aim of meditation is to awaken to the greater consciousness, then one day you're going to have to experience it to progress.
This is where the West has lost its way. The culture has swung so far in favour of materialism it rejects the idea of universal consciousness, so sells mindfulness as simply brain exercises. That means if someone experiences the bigger reality they have no frame of reference and little support like they would if they followed a tradition where these experiences are more widely experienced.
Yeah, I'm sure that has nothing to do with psychotic breakdowns.
(It's also no coincidence that a Indian Buddhist monks ostensibly wear orange togas; not that the Romans conquered India or the Indians went to Rome, but the two seem to have been inspired by the Greek Chiton and Himation)
This cultural exchange is pretty fascinating thing in general. Here are some complementary reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Greece
Your observation about preparation, behavior, state of life etc is also very poignant. I am Catholic and something that I’ve found delving into the writings of the saints is that it is often like staring at the sun: it’s too intense and I’m not ready for it. For example, when I was an atheist in college I read St Augustine’s Confessions and found it interesting from a philosophical point of view and an easy read. Now, as a believing and practicing Catholic, I can’t even finish the book. It’s spiritual fruit, of which I was ignorant in my youth, are too intense for me. I come back to it every couple of years and each time make it a little bit further.
That is all to say, it is funny how in mainstream discourse about religion/spirituality there is very little mention of “ability”. “Religious practice” is most certainly a skill that is acquired and refined through hard work (and grace).
Therapy _should_ bring up difficult emotions and experiences from the past because they are often the root of dysfunction and frustration in the present.
I'm genuinely curious as a loved one rejects therapy exactly because she already knows what causes of her depression are and does not see any use in debating them further as they only bring her down.
I don't have experience or knowledge to explain how it would help her.
Hard to advice without further knowing details, but I could relate in a way, that the global state of the world causes me depression, but I cannot change the root cause. But I can change my attitude towards things. Deal with the problems I can solve and accept the rest. Spot patterns, where I indulge myself into misery and choose a different track (if possible).
And if we are talking about a childhood trauma, this person wants to avoid, then you can compare it to a splinter that is still in the flesh, causing misery and infection - removing the splinter will hurt and it will bleed - but after the splinter is gone, the wound can heal for good.
Leaving those people was difficult but the depression lifted and I was free to focus on my own life, which has been getting better.
Also getting a good night's sleep is very helpful. There are certainly also intensifying factors in the modern western lifestyle.
Here's an example of techniques for CBT: https://positivepsychology.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-ther...
E.g. some meditation techniques do focus on relaxation; some therapy types focus less on emotions and experiences from the past and look at the present instead; etc.
The real issue, though, is the "I'm enlightened" crowd. They are insufferable and need to brought back down to reality before they go to a dinner party and annoy everyone.
Unfortunately many councillors and psychologists are barbers, butchering people’s minds, or infecting them with hokum.
The worst I have ever heard of was getting a bunch of troubled teenagers together, a session getting them to share their horrific experiences, then sending them home with zero concern for the consequences. I mean, you are already struggling and then you need to process other people’s stories of rape, family violence, and worse. Or you need to face whatever Pandora’s box demons you have shared. Ouch.
That does not make those results any less real.
Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
Reflecting, I guess I'm questioning if the solipsist really believes all that which is put before their minds is really "experience", per se.
As sure as anything, Pyrrhonism is where it's at!
And part of a meditation practice is seeing how the reality of your experiences is more like the reality of a co strict and less like the reality ofm
But notice that this isn’t really private to a person.
How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands.
Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago.
Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time.
For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice).
A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience.
But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.
Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car".
Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to understand. Its a not very wise and not very calming endavour. After all the machine that should reassemble it, is the one that took it apart.
Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
We speak about mindfulness here but there is the same discussion and warnings about kundalini for example.
Obviously focusing (or not) on something and sitting for a long time will alter you state of consciousness to some degree like a trance. But are there real and objective dangers besides the rewiring of your brain?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b...
Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.
And before you look at my username, instead look no further than "Placebos". Why does a sugar pill named "morphine" work? Obviously, handing them a teaspoon of sugar does nothing, but when relabeled, works.
And most of the occult as well is of mind - either my own mind, or that of others. Science even has a semi-explanation with the holographic universe theory, which says that every particle is encoded with the information of everything, just at the simplest resolution. And if mind could be tuned so, could access everything within their own mind. (The old occult principle is 'As above, so below.')
But it's easy to paint things you either don't like or don't understand as "pseudoscience". Flat earth used to be science. Earth-centric orbits used to be science. Wearing masks full of herbs when dealing with plague victims used to be science.
This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jennifer-stranges-family-awarde...
I don’t know what happened to the OP. Maybe he was experiencing psychosis, maybe he was in some stage of enlightenment, maybe he’s the victim of a harmful practice.
But I do know he took mindfulness to an extreme that only a tiny fraction do.
Anything in excess can kill you. Even drinking water. The 10 to 20 minutes per day many mindfulness meditators do doesn’t seem likely to have the same effect as experienced by the OP.
It sounds crazy already. No wonder it turned out badly.
That being said, I think mindfulness in western countries skips a lot of Buddhist teachings, which are in large part designed to help deal with this kind of experience. I highly suggest that anyone that is going down this path seek out teachers that have experience and can be of aid. There are pragmatic aspects of it that go beyond meditation and in my opinion are just as important if not more so.
And just to contextualize this, I’m a Buddhist. I live in Thailand and it’s something that is part of my normal life. As such, it’s rare the I’m meditating outside of a temple and I have easy access to a whole host of teachers. I would urge caution around retreats and other intensive practices. Mindset and setting are extremely important and should be considered carefully.
I’ve had a lifetime to learn to live like this and I would not want to see anyone dropped in the deep end without proper preparation.
I quite literally can’t trust how I feel from minute to minute. Knowing my logical analysis of situations can also be compromised causes me to run deeper mental self-tests several times per day.
I’m used to this but it’s a constant low-grade drain on my attention.
Meditation is dangerous for me as it quickly leads to dangerous psychosis. (Life is a video game and I can’t really die.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_(Buddhism)
Mindfulness meditation made me feel better during and for about half an hour afterward, but it wasn't "me again": it was some altered state that not only wasn't addressing the underlying issues (that I've since made great strides on in psychotherapy). I felt periods of great calm, but it was as if I was taking some drug to achieve an altered state.
I read a lot about how to "bring the meditative state into daily life", and that only made the anxiety worse when it broke through, because it sensitized me to focus increasingly on internal physical phenomena. Yeah, I tried not to "judge" them, to neither anticipate their arrival and to just observe their rise and fall, but the observing meant attention, and the attention magnified them.
I finally beat the anxiety mostly for good by acknowledging and facing the problems in my life. I haven't even solved much of them yet, but I'm pretty honest about it both to myself and the people close to me.
Meditation was mildly helpful but it wasn’t really a practical solution for a working parent. You can’t hit pause on your life very often. SSRIs it is for now
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...
Maybe the cultivation of the non-dry aspects is actually helpful.
samatha contains sati [mindfulness], samadhi [stable attention], piti [joy], passaddhi [tranquility], upekkha [equanimy]).
vipassana is insight (among others) into anicca [impermanence], sunnata [emptyness], dukkha [stress], paticcasamuppada [interdependence of phenomena], anatta [no-observable self],....
The meditative states of jhana (dhyana in sanskrit, chan in chinese, Zen in japanese although the meaning has changed while the term traveled further east) originate from samatha practice.
Overall most Theravāda traditions or traditions that take the pali canon as a source kind of use this metta, samatha/sati, vipassana classification and acknowledge jhanas as meditative states. However, the meditation practice in the theravāda tradition was revived in the 19th/20th century only, so there is in the theravāda tradition no continuous meditation teaching lineage, so people had to make sense of the Pali canon source texts, which aren't exactly a meditation manual as we expect it today and there are concurrent approaches.
I am just a casual meditator (like 2-3 times per week) but overall an avid reader so I have seen quite a few different takes on how metta, mindfulness and insight meditation relate, most aren't dismissing one of these practices entirely, but the order and emphasis on when to practice what differ greatly. "dry-insight" is a I think to be understood as a counterpoint to voices that stated that a buddhist needs to practice concentration first and potentially even reach the jhanas before practicing Vipassana. So concentration / sati is not entirely dismissed. The idea of "dry-insight" is, that fewer meditation hours practicing concentration may be enough to develop insights and it is thus also advertised as a "quicker way" to awakening.
Overall, when reading or listening to meditation teachers, I am cautious about claims to "speed", which makes me a bit reserved about the Mahasi noting method crowd.
What made sense to me was: Laypeople should practice Metta meditation in any case. Practicing Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration) is like taking your brain to the gym & spa, it should also help you a lot in dealing with stressful emotions, if your meditation object are your senses (breath, feet in walking meditation, hands while washing dishes) this seems to be a rather well-grounded activity and not inherently dangerous (unless maybe you have a serious psychological condition).
Proficient enough in Sati (mindfulness) and Samādhi (concentration), the route could go to practicing samatha and vipassana. Now my assumption would be that if you directly overemphasize vipassana and your skills for concentration, tranquility and equanimity aren't sufficient to contain reactions when 'insight' hits you.
That being said, Vipassana covers a wide range of stuff. Like "Body Scans" as done in Mindfulness based Stress reduction (MBSR) are thought of IIRC as vipassana practices, and IMHO they could just as well be thought of as sati practice.
I'm not qualified to comment on the wisdom of either approach, just pointing out that it's covered in the first part of the book, and other parts, e.g. "Mushroom Factor".
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!
McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.
Ancient (Pali canon) Buddhism is different from Asian Buddhism, but modernist American Buddhism is pretty different from that too.
(Although, a lot of Asian Buddhism is basically copied from European philosophy; when the Europeans showed up, Asia had to cook up something they'd count as a religion in a hurry so they wouldn't count as savages and get colonized.)
I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.
I've also been to McMindfulness groups, where they blended shamatha-type mindfulness with guided vipassana meditation. It makes no sense to me, to teach vipassana divorced from the no-self doctrine, and all the abhidharma ideas about the skhandas and the different kinds of consciousness.
Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
Definitely true, by itself sati/smrti is a hard-to-translate term.
> Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I am mostly focussing on some breathing mindfulness meditation and some metta, not much, but enough that I feel a calming effect, and I overall am trying to foster some 'buddhist values' in my life.
> I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
I heard of meditating on your 'own decaying body' definitely from a theravada context, but was overall warned that meditation objects from the imagination are more risky overall for psychological emergencies.
> sutrayana
That sounds like Bhante Vimalaramsi?
I never really looked into Tibetan buddhism tbh.
Having had almost life ruining psychosis for pandemic related reasons in between then and now, reading this makes me glad I didn't and keen to learn more on this side of the issue.