421–430 of 600 posts
Major selection bias here. From a 10,000 foot view it looks like: "Flaky dude attracted to Buddhist retreats who uses words like jhana had a freak out. Say it ain't so ..."
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
> I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA.
What's left unsaid is that the majority of this "practice" goes hand-in-hand with "recreational" use of weed. Scare quotes because once you start reading revelatory texts under the influence, and probably meditating under the influence, the road to psychosis is just a few turns away.
I've had friends who went mad reading the bible or The Eagle's Gift, or The Tenth Insight, while smoking weed. I can't explain the mechanism, but smoking weed and opening yourself up to all the enlightened bullshit of the New Age, or the Old Religions, can tear a hole in your mental health, big enough for a truck to drive through.
People who believe in the supernatural are already half-mad. The weed comes along and closes the deal.
Without weed, meditation is as woo-woo bullshit for California yuppies as you thought originally.
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, keep in mind this is a practice that as far as we know people have been practicing for at least 2600 years, I think doing things like a 5-10 day Vipassana retreat is not a risk free thing, but you really shouldn’t be doing those unless you are ready. I follow the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, my teacher would not allow me to go to Sessin (which is a multi day meditation retreat) until I had been practicing for l…
He mentions sharing his experiences with teachers who seem to be clueless, not his fault, is it?
This never stops. These people never face reality. The lure of the supernatural, of enlightenment, of insights, of metaphysical experiences, is too strong and they eventually lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and the crazy teachings of their books and their masters.
Madness is the loss of the ability to discern the boundary between reality and imagination. Meditation is just one of the many ways that supernatural and metaphysical sects have to push the mind beyond that boundary, lock the door behind it and throw away the key.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "Dark Night" is typically attributed to St. John of the Cross, although I'd be willing to believe that the term has been used in other traditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul Ah, note the last paragraph in this article: 'In modern mindfulness practice, many authors have named a similar phenomenon in meditation as the dark night of the soul after the poem. It is often described as a length…
I would be very careful in comparing what St. John means and what is meant in the Buddhist sense. See [0] for those interested in a brief comparison. Selected quotes: "The ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God, while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or a state of nothingness)." "For Buddhists, salvation is a privation of individual consciousness; for Catholics salvation is an eternally…
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
The cautious conclusion is that meditation is on par with being a cab driver in a large city (which also shows up on brain scans).
I definitely feel bad for the guy, and I hope he got/gets the full help he needs. That having been said, I think there's something about meditation traditions that come from and are part of monastic traditions vs. meditation techniques that have been removed from their monastic roots. Basically, he was meditating at monk-like levels, and if he were actually in a monastery, he would probably have gotten help at some p…
This is spot on. It seems to me like the author took meditation and removed it from it's cultural, historical and spiritual context. In Buddhism, the community of other practicioners is extremely important, as well as the teacher, and it seemed like the author didn't have those. Meditating for 10 minutes a day on your own is fine, but meditating for hours a day and going on week long retreats without a proper teacher or community does seem like opening up the door for things to go wrong or get too intense or for one to become confused or lost. The red flags should have been when the author began convulsing or disassociating or feeling bad. I think the warning is not about the ill effects of meditation, but rather the ill effects of practicing meditation deeply without the proper grounding in tradition, spirituality and community.
To be fair, it's not really the author's fault that he removed meditation from it's proper context. All of the workshops he was going to did that as well. You go, do 1-2 weeks of really intense meditation, and then leave. You might never see those teachers again, or at least not for a while. It's on you to integrate your experience, which can be very difficult.
I hate to invalidate this author's experience, but I really think it was that the author was not doing it right. It's okay to say this. If you start deadlifting every day for 30 days, and then blow your back out, and then try to say there are negative effects of deadlifting, the proper response would be "you're not doing it right." Because that would be the truth. Again, it's not totally his fault for not doing it right, as all these retreats seemed to enable not doing it right. I think he should spread the word about what happened, but it shouldn't be "meditation has some bad side effects" but rather "meditation can have some bad side effects when not done correctly. This is how to do it correctly." The article doesn't really present much of any framework for understanding how and when the bad side effects occur, and a solution for avoiding them. Which is why it's getting a lot of pushback I think.
The article also has a really bad title: "When Buddhism Goes Bad". The article hardly talks about Buddhism. Things like the four noble truths, the eightfold path and other important Buddhist concepts are not mentioned at all. Meditation is not the same as Buddhism. In fact, it seems like his mediation practice was actually missing true Buddhism, and that might be how this whole thing occurred. Regardless, the only thing that went wrong here was meditation practice, not Buddhism.
Props to the author for sharing, and I hope everything goes well for him, but I have to push back on the way he's trying to communicate this warning.
This thread is blowing my mind, although not for the obvious reason. I’m just astounded by all the anecdotes people are mentioning here that suggest meditation, mindfulness, etc. actually work , even the secularized, distorted, popularized versions we get here in the West. Previously I just assumed this was all a bunch of wackadoo woo-woo bullshit designed to separate dissatisfied California yuppies from their money.…
This article might as well have said “The Shenrikki school of telekinesis is popular, but if you’re not careful while practicing you might accidentally crack the foundation of your house or give your spouse a concussion, and no one will warn you about this. ” and then a bunch of people jumped into the thread to say “Yes yes, this happened to me, and my home insurance didn’t cover it!” My reaction is: wait, what, real…