Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation • Hacker News Board

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#131

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

mikkom wrote: post #127

bayindirh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the methods try to modify the behavior or emotion without solving or removing the root cause. This practically buries them deeper and adds an emotional deflection layer preventing person him/herself or other people approaching it. This causes the emotion to ferment underneath that layer, and since it's prevented from venting itself, the person sometimes emotionally deforms more and everything becomes harder t…

> Some of the methods try to modify the behavior or emotion without solving or removing the root cause Sounds odd - what exact methods are you talking about?

Any methods involving "programming" and teaching you to mask effects of any bad experiences via self-affirmation.

I don't know the exact names of the methods, but they essentially train to push these bad experiences deeper and pretend that they didn't happen or affect you in the first place.

However, they both happened and affected the person. Pretending not is dangerous akin ignoring a wound with infection.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#132

Post by dartharva » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

As someone from India who was frequently forced to learn and apply meditation by overzealous parents in my childhood, reading this article and the explanations/anecdotes here was positively shocking.

I never really got the hang of meditating, despite receiving training from branches of several international training conglomerates (ISCKON, Art of Living, SRF). But meditation as a practice, in the society I grew in, was hailed as the Godsend ultimate technique of taming your minds, something that will definitely and positively stimulate your brain and make you healthier and more active. I didn't (and don't) understand this stuff so I simply dismissed it as a harmless placebo and went on with it.

But before this I had never even thought of it being potentially harmful, and there were absolutely no warnings circulated about this anywhere - neither by the conglomerates and nor by the indie self-styled "gurus" scattered across India and the world. The fact that this is the first time I'm encountering this notion is quite surprising.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#133

Post by Arun2009 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

> On the first day of the retreat, Megan, a cheerful twenty-five-year-old with blue eyes and shoulder-length hair dyed a cardinal red, woke at four o’clock in the morning to the chiming of a bell. For a cumulative ten hours and forty-five minutes, she sat cross-legged on a rug, her spine erect, and tried to focus on her breath.

This to me sounds like the equivalent of trying to squat with a 200 kg weight on your back on day one when you have never trained with weights before.

In the context of Dharmic spiritual traditions, meditation (of various types) is intentionally aimed at facilitating a deconstruction of your normal sense of self and also induce altered states of consciousness. These should not be taken lightly.

If you are going to pursue it seriously, it's best to gradually ease into the tradition and respect the spiritual context in which these techniques are supposed to work. It's possible that the recommendations that Dharmic spiritual traditions have for ethics and devotional practices allow us to be more prepared for our experiences during mediation sittings and receive them in a more wholesome way.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#134

Post by bambataa » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

haltingproblem wrote: post #58

Long term meditation "enthusiast" who has been around many meditation traditions and also done retreats from 3 days to 3 weeks. Meditation is definitely not relaxation. In the language of Yoga (which meditative traditions share), long meditation sessions move the focus (prana) to certains parts of the body where long sustained focus can create "imbalances" and lead to breaks and other side effects (psychosis or relat…

When you say "good tradition", what did you have in mind? I realise you probably were trying to avoid a flame war, but as a Westerner interested in meditation I find it extremely hard to tell what's good and what's not. Or which teacher is reflecting a school's standard teaching and which is doing their own, idiosyncratic thing.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#135

Post by Arun2009 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

cambaceres wrote: post #115

My theory is that both Christianity and Islam exists because of the fact that deep prolonged mediation causes hallucinations and psychotic experiences. Why? Because God talked to both Jesus and Muhammed while they where meditating in the desert.

> My theory is that both Christianity and Islam exists because of the fact that deep prolonged mediation causes hallucinations and psychotic experiences. Why? Because God talked to both Jesus and Muhammed while they where meditating in the desert.

This has occurred to me as well. But then, this is good news! It means that at least theoretically it might be possible to understand these important historical figures by inducing these hallucinations and psychotic experiences in ourselves in a deliberate and controlled way. This might be the key to understanding religions thoroughly.

I'd even say that a great deal of human progress depends on carrying out this project.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#136

Post by soco » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #96

colordrops wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say these breaks are caused by negative low level physiological states like anxiety, without an obvious root cause to the meditator? Or do they experience something very specific that is outside of their comfort zone which is so unsettling that they are unable to process it? Or both?

Zen practitioner and trainer here. Proper meditation is a very powerful journey inside and has the power to uncover a lot of trauma or bad experiences masked or buried by other coping mechanisms. It can be said that purification is the process of uncovering these traumas and/or problems and solving them definitively, removing all secondary effects in the process, hence making person more free. As OP said, the mechani…

It's both not understood by modern science and very underrated by "woo woo" people.

My guess is, it's not understood by modern science exactly because it's underrated by "woo woo" people :( But I notice in later years an increased focus on mental studies so maybe modern science will get to this as well. That is, if it's not too busy explaining the earth is round... (*edited to reformat)

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#137

Post by samus » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

dartharva wrote: post #132

As someone from India who was frequently forced to learn and apply meditation by overzealous parents in my childhood, reading this article and the explanations/anecdotes here was positively shocking. I never really got the hang of meditating, despite receiving training from branches of several international training conglomerates ( ISCKON , Art of Living , SRF ). But meditation as a practice, in the society I grew in…

Maybe the strong cultural roots of the practice makes explicitly stating the dangers unnecessary. Most people never go deep, or practice light techniques that are quite safe. And if you advance, society pushes you to seek out a guru.

Edit: Until quite recently (< 150 ago), most people were deeply integrated into family life, both in the West and elsewhere. There was simply way less opportunity for people to isolate themselves and mess around with random techniques from the internet.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#138

Post by JulianRaphael » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:11 AM UTC

majjgepolja wrote: post #93

kumarvvr wrote: post #6

The west (and the east too) has commercialized meditation and yogic practices and reduced them to some pseudo medical amalgam that will solve all your health and mental issues. Per Hindu practices, Meditation is the first, foremost step towards self realization. For attaining liberation and knowing god. It is a tool to calm the mind and prepare it for deeper states of realization (samadhi, nirvikalpa samadhi, etc). I…

> Per Hindu practices, Meditation is the first, foremost step towards self realization. Isn't it 7th stage or something? In yogic philosophies. Admittedly don't know lot about these stuff.

You are correct (see the Wikipedia article). Meditation was - and is - not a practice that beginners on the spiritual path would engage with in traditional Yoga or Buddhist practices. The problem is that these practices were taken out of their context (stationary secluded environments like ashrams or secretive groups of wandering mendicants) and commercialized by the West in general and by snake-oil vending gurus in the East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_(eight_limbs_of_yoga)

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#139

Post by Priem19 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

I stopped meditating when I wasn't able to laugh any more. I was at a friend's house, sitting comfortably on a couch. I passed my phone and showed my friend and his girlfriend a funny video. They were laughing out loud and so was I, until I became conscious that I was laughing. Similar as to how meditation requires you to be conscious of your breathing. I immediately stopped laughing, and became super serious. Fortunately they didn't look at me and were glued to the screen. It felt remarkably uncomfortable. I tried to laugh again but couldn't, hoping they wouldn't notice. Fortunately I could remain composure and go along but I was desperate to get out of there. At that moment I decided to stop meditating and replace it with going for a walk in nature.

Re: Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

#140

Post by froh » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

hudon wrote: post #126

cambaceres wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bible was written 300 years after Jesus lived, so some of these things might have been confused...

1. “The Bible” is not one text and is actually a collection of books each written by different people at different times over the course of centuries. Most of these books were written before Jesus was even born. 2. The books probably relevant to this discussion—the Gospels—are generally believed to have been written before the turn of the first century. Some argue that Mark and Luke were written as early as the 50s,…

the path from oral tradition in some languages (Aramaic, hebrew, then also greek and latin) to writeups in various languages (greek, latin, then some hebrew) to what we happen to hold in our hands today is a bumpy ride, which in and by itself makes clear that "the bible" is a temporary and local consensus which has changed in the past and will evolve in the future.

the books we see today are translations of heavily copyedited and consolidated writeups of oral traditions.

scholars like Bart Ehrmann have been very helpful to see that whatever the word of god was, it's deeply hidden behind the words we hold in our hands, and the.words are by no means a historically accurate, literal "truth", but a consensus on what the author's and editors over centuries hold dear as spirtual and religious "true" foundation.