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People who suffer from severe ADHD, meditation is nearly impossible.
Like programming, meditation is nearly impossible for everyone. At first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not exactly but I find meditation really "painful". I am more of the anxious side of things and being super focused on myself is very stressful. Sure I feel calmer afterwards but the process feels like a cold shower in winter. The only times I found meditation enjoyable is in a group setting. Normally I am quite introverted and prefer to do most activities alone but here it is reversed.
"and being super focused on myself is very stressful." Can you explain, what exactly is stressful to you, by focusing on yourself? Or is it just that you feel you want to move but you also want to be still?
Have you ever had something bad happen and you try to distract yourself by working or watching something? Meditation feels like the reverse of that.
I'm lucky to have been born naturally resilient to mental damage, but I know from (friends') experience that when you're genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, you're SOL. I've definitely felt my sanity slip at times or delusions take hold, but eventually my brain would reset to the status quo.
The silver lining is: unless you're willing to devote a large amount of your attention and life to this, you're unlikely to ever experience these kind of effects. I know people who practice for years and experience nothing.
I don't regret the 2-3 months of active ego dissolution phase, life has never been more beautiful and strangely peaceful and jarring at the same time. However, I did lose my job, my apartment and almost permanently lost my sanity as well, but now in hindsight it looks like it was all for the better.
Nevertheless I don't think you should force something like this (like I very much did), the consequences to internal and external reality can be absolutely dramatic, I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then... safe for the short moments of.. remembering. Everything and nothing at once. Becoming the observer. Observing the observer. Being everything...
It's all still there if I really wanted to, and my state of mind has changed permanently in drastic yet mostly unconscious ways. It took years to come to terms with all of this and since I've achieved stream entry back then there is no way back out now. It's either managing to get out of the cycle or repeating it over and over again. Meditation has become mandatory like drinking water. I‘ll soon be confronted with all of this again.
Tread carefully, reality is not as stable as you think.
This is a great perspective. I know what the author means with it, too. I spent 5 years in daily meditation practice (twice a day for 20 minutes) and it completely altered my state of mind. I was a naturally introverted person when I started, though I believe that meditation really stepped it up a notch for me. The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends y…
You can safely do anything up to the point that it benefits you. The moment your well-being suffers, or you neglect important parts of life, like friendship, you should stop.
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Or at the very least doesn’t mean what St. John of the Cross means by it. When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual p…
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first loose "hint" of stream entry or actual awakening/enlightenment, namely the second vipassana jhana, characterized by seeming effortlessness of insight (Daniel Ingram calls this the "Arising and passing away") and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.…
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
The irony is that I started meditating because I struggle with panic disorder. Now I was hearing that my most common panic trigger (the thought that I could think myself crazy) was actually real! This sent me down quite a spiral that I have had to resolve by accepting the tiny odds that I might go spontaneously nuts. That's not an easy one, and I wish there was more reliable research on this issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first loose "hint" of stream entry or actual awakening/enlightenment, namely the second vipassana jhana, characterized by seeming effortlessness of insight (Daniel Ingram calls this the "Arising and passing away") and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.…
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that vipassana isn’t a serious and intense contemplative discipline. If I did, that certainly wasn’t my intent. At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the t…
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)