Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m glad you found a combo that works for you. I don’t know many Christians that demonize meditation, but I’m sure they’re out there.
Out there? I get almost 6 million hits for "meditation demonic" and it really bugs me to having something so helpful to me slurred like this. I suggest you make it clear where you stand on the issue if you're going to write about and sneakily slur it without letting us know you dogmatic positions. edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=meditation+demonic
Not everyone should meditate
191–200 of 335 posts
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#192https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790 Discussion on meditation induced psychosis and some a bit more metadiscussion on how it is perceived by pro-meditation groups - victim blaming (eg. you're doing it wrong, this didn't happen to me, this isn't meditation). Seeing some similar comments in here. Some areas of meditation actually acknowledge some sort of "dark night" that practitioners have to push through whi…
Meditation made a little “high” on life. Careless to the point of physical injuries. Stress via excess is obviously bad but it’s better guide in life than an utopia nirvana.
Like if you look at a colony of beavers. Some are building a dam, others are collecting fruits, kids are playing in the river, some beavers are making love, … . And you have Dave. Dave just stay there 5 hours straight in some sort of yoga position. Just lost in his thoughts. Doesn’t contribute or do anything. Is there any value to be Dave?
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them. This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first. Source: started meditating a few months ago.
If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?
So to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#194I started a casual meditation practice a couple of years ago and was getting benefits from it, when I came across an article (on Hacker News) written by a man who had developed severe disassociation and other disorders from meditation. 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 act…
> had to resolve by accepting the tiny odds
I think that's the right approach. Acceptance works wonders.
FWIW, from what I've read you won't go spontaneously nuts unless you're doing a heavy, heavy practice--hours per day for weeks, at least.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#195Author compares meditation to doing LSD, then states that doing LSD can be helpful but super hurtful to possibly schizophrenic people. Some part of me can't stop thinking that it's nuts to tell people to not sit quietly and try and clear your mind because it might trigger schizophrenia.
It's not nuts, it's Christian. The author states he is a Christian. Some Christian sects think that Yoga and meditation are rituals that open up the dark side. I hear all the time how meditation lets the demons in. 6 Reasons to Reject Eastern Meditation and Yoga https://rosilindjukic.com/eastern-meditation-differs-biblica... I'm bipolar and I meditate - I sit queitly, focus on my breath and try to let my thoughts qui…
Talking snakes and virgin births! Command hallucinations telling you to kill your son!
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, we don't know that this isn't true. Is the past actually gone, or merely inaccessible to us?
That would be quite horrible if that was true, your eternal suffering hypothesis. But fortunately I see no evidence to believe it.
Regardless of whether a person's lived experience is time-boxed or eternal, either we think the good experiences outweigh the bad or we don't. If the good experiences outweigh the bad they still outweigh the bad even if they're eternal.
For me, I believe good experiences do outweigh bad. And summed across the entire population of all humans who have ever lived, I believe they do too, although of course there are some for whom they don't.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, we don't know that this isn't true. Is the past actually gone, or merely inaccessible to us?
That would be quite horrible if that was true, your eternal suffering hypothesis. But fortunately I see no evidence to believe it.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#198This 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…
> It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology This is not something that meditation should ever be about. Meditation is about exploring the inner workings of your experience, in a way that ultimately aims towards equanimity. It requires some deep (and continuing!) experience in practical ethics (turns out if you really learn to care about other sentient beings around you, it's a…
I've always wondered if there'd be less incidents of that if it didn't have such a sexy name.
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#199This 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…
It’s interesting that everyone who has had a bad experience seems to have really tuned their practice up to 11. Silent retreats etc. seem to show up in these stories a lot
On a related note, I've enjoyed my time so much staying at temples that the idea of being stuck in solitary for a long stretch is like a weird ambition! If you see my name in the news for a crime you'll know why…
Re: Not everyone should meditate
#200This 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…
> The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time. I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another versi…
For example, from[1]:
> From studies with thousands of people, Ekman knew that people who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more open to new experience, more interested and more curious about things in general. They are also conscientious—reliable and efficient. “So I had expected that many years of meditative experience”—which requires both openness and conscientiousness—“might make them do better on this ability,” Ekman explains. Thus he had wondered if Oser might be better able to identify these ultra-fast emotions than other people are.
> Then Ekman announced his results: both Oser and another advanced Western meditator Ekman had been able to test were two standard deviations above the norm in recognizing these super-quick facial signals of emotion, albeit the two subjects differed in the emotions they were best at perceiving. They both scored far higher than any of the five thousand other people tested. “They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges—even Secret Service agents,” the group that had previously distinguished itself as most accurate.
That's just one of the many effects noted in the article.