These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.

I really did not see it coming. For some context, I don't know of any deep seated trauma that I have and I liked to think of myself as someone robust mentally.

I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. This was really nice for about two weeks. I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system). I experienced huge panic attacks like I have never had before, I carried this constant feeling of absolute dread in my soul, like a sense of impending doom. I have heard it described as the dark night of the soul. Some try to push through this, but I held back as i cannot afford to have a complete meltdown as I need to care for a young family and hold down a job.

I spoke with a well respected meditator about this, and they said the some people are wired to have an accelerated experience and are able to obtain deep introspection with limited time on the cushion.

I would say I am almost back to normal now. I had to stop all meditation and instead focused on health food, sleep habits and lots of exercise. My main mediation type thing is now running, it quietens my mind, but the grounding effect of the movement keeps me in a safe play pen to explore my reality.

meditation is incredibly powerful, in the west we have confused it as being a corporate stress ball that you squeeze or like a lavender scented, candle lit bath while listening to Enya. The truth is, it can reveal incredibly deep seated aspects of ourselves that we are in no way prepared to witness, let alone accept.

My mother for instance at one point thought she was Jesus but also thought some of her thoughts or actions were not her own.

   I got the message that I should destroy my ego and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.

   I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”

It sounds like you may have had an experience, to some extent, of dwelling in the union of wisdom and emptiness or what some call dharmadhatu [2]. It's not a teaching I encountered until I started practicing Vajrayana, as Theravada teachers don't often emphasize the teachings on sunyata. It's something you'll encounter in Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings.

[1] https://www.shambhala.com/cutting-through-spiritual-material...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmadhatu

https://untetheredsoul.com/untethered-soul

https://untetheredsoul.com/living-untethered

I also found eckhart Toll's book "A New Earth" are also helpful:

https://eckharttolle.com/books/

I found "A New Earth" better/more details than "Power of Now" probably because it was written later and I read it later.

"Emptiness" of your mind means something like a thin soap bubble around you. This bubble acts as a lens, it can enlarge arbitrary things, it can create stable patterns on its surface, and all that is useful, but it blocks whatever is outside the bubble. In its natural state it would be a perfect invisible sphere, letting you see outside: this union of clarity and emptiness creates wisdom. You are still going to use this bubble as a whiteboard for your thoughts, but you'll also know how to see thru it.

The concept of emptiness applies to material world in general: the western science calls it space-time, the idea that any thing can turn into any other thing, for both are fundamentally just motions of energy that has no natural shape. Buddhism tries to teach this basic idea in different terms.

For some reason that I don't quite understand, the founders of the three religions had fragmented the truth: buddhism teaches wisdom, christianity teaches love and islam teaches action - the three aspects of the spirit. Perhaps they thought that mixing everything into one bag would be too difficult to grasp, or maybe they hope it will make the peoples collaborate to assemble the pieces.

I also would point out that if anything Buddhism is life-affirming and immensely hopeful, not denying what's good in the world. It teaches that there's a way out of suffering right here and right now, and it's available to every being without exclusion. The fourth noble truth is the spiritual practice to make that happen. Every meditation session in Mahayana and Vajrayana lineages have the common preliminaries, which includes love and compassion for all beings.

[1] https://plumvillage.org/books/the-other-shore/

That sense of impeding doom is nothing more than those spiritual entities oppressing with overwhelming power them by those gaps.

We are locked out of that world for a reason. The safe means to get unlocked is by getting your soul to borrow the power of God and slowly expose yourself to such world. Other than that, self enlightenment is just wishful thinking of empty vessels.

Our intentions, understanding, morality, sense of self, sense of direction, is so frail. A man who believes he can manufacture these things for himself (which is, in my opinion, wfundamentally what occultists are doing) is doomed to spiritual sufferring.

These adverse experiences are the ego's last-ditch effort to maintain cohesion. It's the same with psychedelics. If you let go in the face of the terror and accept, the terror becomes utter bliss.

In response to these experiences, ask "Who exactly are they happening to?"

While ego can hijack identity for it's own mad desires, an identity is required for the actuation of relational actions on a basic level. With no "center" from which to make decisions, the functions of your mind tasked with making choices will panic - this is a foundation of brainwashing/psychological manipulation. Very similar things happen to people who have a TBI, where they become stressed when forced to make choices that seem to have zero baring on "their" lives.

So dissolved identity > Panic attacks when choice-satisfaction plummets > subconscious suggests all kinds of cartoonist extremes for an easy and powerful identity > Conscious mind agrees to play along, uses this character to make decisions about > Choice-satisfaction rises.

I'm sure it's different for most others, but I had the opposite experience. It has introduced a great calm into my life.

From where I am now, I see identity as the central problem we face as a species.

Yeah, except that in practice awareness of no-self is very far from an ethical cure-it-all. There's plenty of supposedly "enlightened" folks in a variety of spiritual traditions who routinely engage in morally sub-standard behavior, despite having reached that awareness themselves and teaching it to others. We know for a fact that many spiritual traditions view correct ethics and behavior as paramount, and as the hardest part of their training.

I remember a clip I'd seen where a veteran with a TBI would break down when shopping, since there's so many choices that are focused at appealing to personality rather than utility, and his notion of his own personality was minimal.

I had struggled with panic disorder in the past, but CBT pretty much fixed it for me. This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. It was so terrifying to think that a simple mental process could potentially trigger a breakdown (and like you, I had a family to take care of).

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I'm moving towards the view that these breakdowns are simple anxiety disorders that just happen to be triggered by meditation, in the same way that a panic attack triggered my anxiety disorder when I was young. I don't think there's anything particularly special or mystical about it - it's just our stupid brains activating the fear response, and it appears that the same methods for dealing with anxiety disorders work here.

I feel like in a way I was the control group for an experiment - can a fear of meditation provoke the same response as meditation itself?

Although this talk about becoming enlightened sounds like people have given up on themselves and realilty entirely to pursue something in their minds. It sounds like a self-induced state of tripping balls.

"Oh, you're enlightened? That's nice. Now, on with what we were doing...."

Just for the conversation: the «from nowhere» really just might be the unconscious brain, as the relationship between conscious and unconscious is ambiguous at best. The conscious insist in being in control, most of the time fooling itself, while the unconscious does most of the work in a really autonomous way.

Maybe the «safety system» was just the unconscious rebelling to prove it does indeed exist and that the conscious should take note, and resume its part in the general guidance of the being :)

The trouble is that once you start to consider the nature of the unconscious brain, such consideration leads to the same conclusion.

If the unconscious brain somehow has “control”, from where does it derive this control? Unless you then accept some kind of metaphysical explanation, it’s centerlessness all the way down.

I say ancient/modern rather than unconsious/conscious, because to a certain extent even the reasoning "just happens", so you might be tempted to say that even the reasoning is unconscious and it's actually all unconscious except some supernatural me that is just passively watching everything without actually taking any action. But we can bypass that (quite interesting) subject, by talking about ancient / modern, because the reasoning part is separate and more modern.

Tldr: The neocortex is the homunculus (in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument).

In one of these modes we actively perceive/experience our concept of reality, and the other acts as a black box - not available for direct interrogation, but still possible to reason about via observations in conscious experience.

The issue I'm having with this take is that our definition of reasoning still depends on the black box. The experience of feeling like a being capable of reasoning and then using that ability to consider a problem is all built on a foundation of thoughts, sensations and feelings that just "appear" in conscious experience with very little evidence that the conscious mind had anything to do with putting them there.

Well I didn't meant anything else actually. I realize that the «unconscious» term is tainted, as it can represent something like a hidden part of personality, especially on Freudian literature and likes.

I didn't meant that, I was thinking of the sum of the autonomous processing and coordination of the numerous intricate and distributed functions of the brain, senses, motor, emotional, etc…

Then again, I really haven't experienced the concept at a fundamental, spiritual level, only intellectually; I don't really meditate. Maybe there's something deep in our wiring (probably in our unconscious mind, which really pulls most of the strings) that has difficulty grappling with the loss of the idea of "self".

And glimpsing centerlessness for yourself sounds disconcerting, but instead seems paradoxically comforting when it happens.

For me personally, it brought with it a deep sense of peace and wonder about my existence and coexistence with a world full of similarly centerless beings.

To your point about wiring, I think absolutely yes. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, many aspects of conscious experience ensure we stay alive and procreate, but are not necessarily pleasant and seem to be increasingly incompatible with modern life.

Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” explores this at length and is a really interesting read. It’s not a book about religious truth, but one that maps a modern understanding of evolutionary psychology onto the insights of Buddhist philosophy and how such philosophy can be incredibly helpful when dealing with the implications of living in a body that did not evolve to survive the conditions to which it is currently subject.

I remember a podcast interview with Adyashanti about this. A lot of people experience unity consciousness first before no self, but some people experience no self first. He mentioned about someone he knows who experienced that, and had it for years, while also having to care for a child.

On reddit, I read someone stating that psychedelic can break someone, and it happened to him. Lots of people responded by saying things, and he was telling them, no, literally, there was something that broke and there’s no coming back from it.

If you were tripping this is called ego death. In some circles, including mine, what you described after:

> I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system).

Can be common. When I experienced ego death I was aware that it would return so I was able to deal with it. I think of it kind of like the trip itself; the more you fight it the harder it fights you.

Not sure this helps as it's entirely my own experience and was drug induced, but I do think occasional ego death is worth it. Just be cognizant of what you're doing. The mind is a powerful place.

Psychedelics are a tool, and the different doses you figure out are ways of using that tool. Ego death requires a fairly heroic dose, something on the order of 3-5 grams of mushrooms for most strains. This, to me, is comparable to the isolation and introspection without breaks to incur ego death in meditation.

Ego death, from my perspective, is also a tool. Done with knowledge of what will happen during and after let's the user experience the absence of ego and helps them live with their ego when it returns. Done without the knowledge of what will happen after, humans often fully embrace that ego as a new life based on wisdom. A false wisdom.

My point here is the medium in which you choose is largely irrelevant. How you use the tools and the knowledge you go into them with are the paramount pieces. It's honestly surprising to me that anyone who meditates would have such judgy and pithy opinions, but it's a big world out there.

I don't think most users of psychedelics view them as a "tool" for serious spiritual practice. They just think tripping is a lot of fun.

Psychedelics can be fun, but in my experience they're fun if your mind is in the right place. They act as a conduit for more deeply connecting with the world around you.

On the other hand, if you have work to do then those things have a chance to appear in your trip. That can be healthy, if you're ready to face something, or it can be incredibly terrifying. I've had both experiences through my own isolation and meditation before. As someone with years of trauma, including a year long stint in a war zone, I can attest that my trips were sometimes fun, almost always challenging, and sometimes terrifying. As time has gone on and I've done work to unpack my trips and connect them with my experiences and understanding when I'm sober my trips have averaged to being "more fun" and "connected". This is something I was not able to achieve with meditation alone.

Yes, and there's no guarantee that your bad trip or encounter with these entities will resolve itself without major effort. That ought to be enough to be seriously concerned about whether it is in any way appropriate to endorse this as some sort of ordinary, routine practice for the uninitiated.

This is needlessly judgmental. I know life-long meditators, 30+ of years disciplined practice who sometimes take psychedelics.

I'm not a fan of various aspects of the psychedelic scene, e.g. the spiritual bypassing and the narcissism that can sometimes come from it, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Usage of psychedelics can be profoundly healing and helpful.

I'm not dismissing spiritual practice, but psychedelics are entirely incidental to it and can be a snare for the unprepared mind. What's "profoundly healing and helpful" is always the spiritual part, not the means used to achieve it.

If you've found a drama-free spiritual community where everyone is deeply chilled and yet also adult and effective without losing a sense of humour, please let me know. That really hasn't been my experience.

In fact I think mindfulness, meditation, and so on confuse a kind of metaphysics of morality with what is probably some fairly basic brain mode switching.

Being "enlightened" for a brief period does not seem to create good people with any consistency or reliability. It doesn't even create consistently happier people. (Sometimes? Yes. More reliably and safely than other activities? Very likely not.)

It does seem to remove certain existential tangles, sometimes. But rather than being about "ego" - boo, hiss - perhaps those are more to do with easy/default vs less accessible modes of emotional cognition.

And actually - that's all.

I see an analogy to using psychedelics as described in this lecture fragment (starts around 12th minute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j72C_lDHTk0 Ram Dass on "When is it right to use psychedealics?"

There he talks about two types of psychedelic usage. Recreational - here we don't need to prepare, we should use little of the substance and can enjoy f.ex. our favorite music sounding a little better. Transformational - here, we have to prepare thoroughly studying spiritual/philosophical books, have a proper fast before the experience and have a proper guide. This way the potential for a difficult experience lessens and the potential for transformative experience grows.

Interestingly, the lecture excerpt starts with description of ancient/historical use of psychedelics, where they were used in rituals aimed at transformation of the subject. Subject attended the ritual being thoroughly prepared, something completely different than being offered psylocibin mushrooms/acid on a party. I wonder if this advice (going light doesn't require preparation, going heavy requires preparing as much as possible trough fasting and study) could also apply here, to meditation practice.

Sorry if this idea/lecture was posted here already, had only limited time to read and reply in this thread.

A way to frame such an experience (a version of which I've had too) is to say that we realize that the purpose we've been having for our striving is bogus. e.g. There's no special "me" that's important to make look good, that needs respect and fame etc.

But that doesn't mean we lose all striving. We just find a new, more wholesome, purpose for it.

I think Eckhart Tolle talks about this. There are other perspectives, too, that one can garner by reading philosophy. (e.g. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which puts virtue as most worth striving for; there're also much simpler takes on what's worth striving for in an ego-less sense, which are paradoxically harder to intellectually grok while being much more commonly espoused in practice, such as love for home, and family).

you are mistaken as you misunderstood in a subtle but critical way. your sentence is self contradictory. for it to be true it must have some permanent existence. everything that is true does.

in the law of cause and effect there are three kinds of causes. environment is one of them. this is the law buddha told us about after he opened his eye. it reveals the entirety of existence, along with another law or two.

do not cheat yourself by thinking you can see the truth yet. we can check if you doubt this. it would be to your benefit. but few want what is most important for them.

-- Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass

I hope it's transcribed correctly.

Wait, is this not common knowledge??

Having a philosophical/intellectual conversation about the nature of mind is very different than your own mind wrapping itself around these concepts directly.

Most people will reap most of the health benefits that meditation has to offer by sitting for 20 minutes a couple times a day.

You can go much deeper, of course, but that's a philosophical / spiritual quest to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you - it's not a health pursuit. A multi-day meditation retreat is in many ways like running an ultramarathon: it's not really a healthy undertaking, per se, but you might learn something about yourself by doing it, and the way to do it responsibly is by working your way up to it over months and years of practice.

Actual marathons aren't great for your body either, especially if it's not something you've diligently trained for properly, so that makes sense.

At one time I think I would have written a comment similar to yours, because I had not yet experienced the difference between the perspective-altering practice of “looking inward” through mindfulness and the lost-in-thought version, which looks a lot more like rumination and just experiencing the thought loop without perspective, which can be deeply painful.

These practices are full of paradox. This isn’t to say the practice is invalid, but to highlight the fact that such practice is not intuitive or obvious. Evolutionary psychology is helping us unpack the illusions that lead to such apparent paradox.

One such paradox being that looking inward through the practice of mindfulness is the thing that enables someone to look outward and actually see. Most people struggle to describe this in words, but it starts to emerge clearly with practice.

Put another way, the premise is that we are all so lost in thought by default that we don’t even realize we are thinking. To claim that we can see outward in this state is to remain unaware of the possibility space of what is available to see, and to remain controlled by thought. You’ll still “see”, but this seeing is distorted by evolutionary reward systems, and what you think you’re seeing is still suspect.

But seeing the truth about one’s own mind changes how one sees other people in deeply impactful ways.

For me personally, my internal anxiety and self talk was so dominant that it made some outward pursuits feel nearly impossible. Once my relationship with thoughts/feelings started to shift, it didn’t just help with the anxiety in the sense that it subsided, it fundamentally shifted my relationship with the concept of anxiety, and made it possible for me to examine it from a broader perspective instead of just experiencing and being swallowed by it.

You go from knowing that anxiety (etc.) is a feeling to experiencing that anxiety is a feeling, and one that appears alongside everything else in consciousness. The difference between these states is enormous.

Marcus Aurelius—quoted from memory, so probably not quite right, and it's in translation at any rate:

> You can pass your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way and to act the right way.

I personally found the "think the right way" easy to get into, but without the "act the right way" it can indeed lead to apathy, detachment, and avoidance. Whoops.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganana#Technique

Is a law of diminishing utility thing and also a basic instinct for people to get used to stuff the more they are exposed

During the signup process for a 10 day Vipassana retreat, they ask for a lot of details about your psychological health. Even warning against doing the retreat if you’re not in a good mental place. So I’m sure you’re right.

If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wander and don't let it stick; just experience the ebb and flow. Twenty-minute sessions sound about right for me as well.

this is a path which will cause you to face inordinate difficulties and loneliness. most people are waylaid. "strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto Life and few there be who find it."

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)

1) avoid problems like this, and

2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.

And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.

I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.

Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/...

The same thing plays out with psychedelics. Many cultures have thousands of years of passed down knowledge with a community of elders to guide people through a trip. In the west we think we can replicate the same thing, sitting at home with a friend who has no clue what they are doing when things go bad.

And our paradigm for safety is very different. People are less expendable.

I will be much more confident delegating to people that have done a lot of meditation and are able to hold their heads together under immense pressure.

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.

It's much better to start with a simple meditation practice or go on a shorter retreat (1-3 days), build up a base and periodically dip your feet in deep waters. There are too many people in the west who treat it like an extreme sport and get burned out in the process.

It reminded me of when Tim Ferris decided to go on a 10-day meditation retreat after a multi-day fast and almost had a full mental breakdown.

Formal Buddhist training - such as to be a teacher within the Kadampa tradition - can be done once a week over a course of years. Other traditions training requires full-time reading training over years.

I wouldn’t recommend someone try to master an instrument in 7 - 14 days as learning takes time for integration and people progress at different rates. So I’m skeptical of why anyone would suggest that for attempting to master the mind.

"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.

Therapy _should_ bring up difficult emotions and experiences from the past because they are often the root of dysfunction and frustration in the present.

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.

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.

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.

Here's an example of techniques for CBT: https://positivepsychology.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-ther...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b...

Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.

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.

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.

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

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?

This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.

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.

This was a couple of years before the "meltdown". While meditation surely may have induced mental health issues, the drugs and alcohol probably didn't help.

What stands out is that he had mental health issues and some point that grew worse, sadly. It temporally correlated with meditation but that doesn't mean it was predominantly caused by it.

The meditation may have triggered things, sure, but my guess is he likely would have had a meltdown also if he went all-in on some other activity for 10 years.

After all, with multiple years (4, 6?) between the first dissociative symptoms and the break down, you could also argue that the mediation may even slowed or alleviated the effects of the mental disorder until some threshold was hit.

Most things are fine when done in moderation, most things are bad when taken to the extremes.

"13 days to go" suggest this was some crazy regimen, if you would do that to prisoners I bet it's actually considered torture.

If I read about his past, it sounds to me like he might have some underlying mental health problems that would be good to address. Not by guru's, retreats, or pseudoscience, but psychologists and other professionals.

I think he does come to the right conclusion that the extremes can be very harmful. They are not that far from cults, always some guru or leader, then many people blindly following their weird practices based on absolutely nothing but pseudo science and believe, with a tendency to get more extreme (and more expensive!) the deeper you get into them.

Meditation is fine if done in moderation and as long as you don't expect it to solve all your problems. It can help with certain things, it also won't solve serious mental problems.

Working through mental health problems is no fun and a lot of work with many ups and downs, there is no easy solution, there are no shortcuts. Get professional help, get therapy, get medication if needed, be kind to yourself, and just keep working at it one step at a time.

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".

In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind.

It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all.

The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all.

Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?:

> Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish!

As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time.

I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.

Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shrooms and for the same reasons. There are a lot of these people on hn and in the tech world, overachievers high on the neuroticism scale. A normal person doesn’t meditate more than 30 minutes a day. That alone is a symptom of deeper issues.

Meditating IS weird but, historically, not nearly as weird as a-spirituality, which is the state of the "normal person" in your comment.

And, of course the drive to meditate reflects some difference relative to the general population, but "symptoms of deeper issues" implies buy-in to a kind of the therapeutic/mental-health framework of "if you're unable to exist within the range of 'normal' all the time, you have a disease" and, well, it seems pretty reasonable to be discontent with your life—either your life or your feelings needs to change, and emotional searching is kind of the obvious way to address that.

Whether what you call crisis events that are part of the process is == psychotic episodes seems dubious to me. The psychosis I hear reported from more extreme “aspiritual” meditators doesn’t sound productive but disabling and in many cases permanently so. In the context of established religion, such things are “selected against” in the Darwinian sense. Anything that’s part of the process within the context of a long running time tested religious framework, be it Buddhism, Catholicism, Hasidism etc… must be evolutionarily advantageous (in a institutional not biological sense).

Further, meditating is marketed as addressing emotional issues and if it’s not doing that, it’s either a placebo or worse potentially harmful to the people most likely to try it.

Meditation being marketed as a solution to emotional (psychological) issues is precisely the point I’m trying to make.

This is the same problem with detecting the link between antidepressants and suicide. The link between Prozac and suicide was noted in the 80s but written off as correlation. Because correlation is just as plausible an explanation as causation is. It’s difficult to not to conflate the two.

In the case of meditation, I don’t see many people acknowledging the possibility that mental health problems could be correlated with, as opposed to caused by, meditation itself.

Most people I know are psychologically healthy and do not meditate. The people I know who have turned to meditation have done it help with their problems (physical or emotional). I wouldn’t argue that it’s a perfect or even strong correlation, merely that the correlation is there and it may be enough to explain these somewhat rare outcomes from meditation practice.

I remember reading that while training for an ironman and getting a bit spooked. But then I realized that the folks who suffer from OTS are taking it to such an extreme. This article reminded me a lot of that - it sounds like you can take anything too far. At the 99.99th percentile, probably any healthy activity can become an obsessive act that can ruin your life. But anywhere in between the 50th and 99th percentile it's probably still a good thing.

Like maybe 1/20 people will ever do something as intense as a triathlon, in general. So we’re already at 95%. Then maybe 10% of triathletes will do a full Ironman. 99.5%. Of that top level who train for an Ironman, half are not training that hard and just having fun. 99.75%.

So if you’re someone who is training hard for an Ironman, you’re already well beyond the 99th percentile. But still only a small fraction of people who train for an Ironman have any issues with it. But if you’re at that level, you’re already close to the top and it’s not a crazy stretch to think you could get there if you got a bit carried away.

Similar with meditation, I think the analogy works. If you’re consistently meditating for 10min per day for several straight months, that’s more than most people would ever do.

My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790 - July 2021 (568 comments)

I'm also a bit confused from a logical point of view - if there is such and end goal of Zen, of being "completely disassembled" wouldn't Japanese temples where they do a lot of zazen, at some point need to look like asylums for the terminally psychically ill, once a majority has "disassembled themselves"?

Also, I'm a bit suspicious of the quiet references to alcohol and drugs. I'm far from a tee-totaler, but I recognize that one man's casual drinking or smoking (i.e. THC) is another's depression or anxiety-inducing dose.

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

It requires a much slower progression that is usually done with a more experienced mentor, who will guide you through the process and help you when you encounter these issues.

These techniques are powerful and helpful and can definitely help alleviate stress and anxiety, but like in the Nietzsche quote

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”

The way we teach it in the west does not equip us for when the abyss gazes back

> According to Ingram, one must continue to meditate through these awful experiences until reaching a deeper state of awakening. He makes it clear that the consequences of stopping are severe.

Ron Hubbard himself couldn't have stated it any better. He'd be proud.

> 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 sounds crazy already. No wonder it turned out badly.

> For the past several decades, a growing flood of books, articles, and teachings has advanced theories about the practice of mindfulness which are highly questionable and—for anyone hoping to realize the end of suffering—seriously misleading. The main aim of this book is to show that the practice of mindfulness is most fruitful when informed by the Buddha’s own definition of right mindfulness and his explanations of its role on the path.

[1] https://www.dhammatalks.org/ebook_index.html#right_mindfulne...

Humans have a vulnerability to unknown unknowns, and meditation is a possible pathway to experience those.

The stoics, buddhists, and taoists all had a similar idea of moderation of two extremes. The similar idea of having a dark night of the soul because you are imbalanced in some way leading to a crisis of faith. Even Shugendo/Yamabushi practices are a long extended journey where meditation is met with physical exhaustion. Thus it balances itself out.

It’s a lifelong practice and seems the awareness is doing its job of making one aware of the pain to work through. I don’t think Buddhism is the problem here, the over attachment to it seems to have left the author with suffering.

This among other parts make me wonder if the author doesn’t have another side to the story of their life. They mention the drinking and the drugs, but…

I wonder what would have happened had they not gone to this event, not known there was someone out there educating on the bad sides of meditation, etc.

No offense to the guy at all, but I consider the narrator unreliable.