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My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

danlawton.substack.com

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Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#381

Post by blueprint »

jossclimb wrote: post #127
cutler wrote: post #114

I can't help thinking that most of these examples of negative side effects are related to intensives rather than meditation/mindfulness itself. There's a world of difference between 20 minutes a day and 10 days in a retreat looking inward. Maybe it's just better for you in short bursts, not long marathons. I once experienced negative effects after joining a Buddhist meditation group while at university. Every time I…

I expect there will be higher cases of psychosis happening on intense retreats, but as anecdotal as this, I had it happen to me (albeit not as extreme as OP) after meditating for much shorter periods (approx 10 minutes up to an hour). 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 real…

> that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment

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.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#382

Post by blueprint »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #161
jossclimb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect there will be higher cases of psychosis happening on intense retreats, but as anecdotal as this, I had it happen to me (albeit not as extreme as OP) after meditating for much shorter periods (approx 10 minutes up to an hour). 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 real…

Interestingly you describe the shattering of your delusion as the return of your ego - I think it is the opposite. I think you invited an inflated ego into your life through your meditation : "I should become a guru and help humanity" <-- that is ego speaking. The shattering of this idea is is not ego but humility, to my way of thinking.

dude, ego is a health regulating system. do not try to destroy it in others. what you should destroy are delusional words.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#383

Post by blueprint »

JamesBarney wrote: post #292
DontchaKnowit wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly you describe the shattering of your delusion as the return of your ego - I think it is the opposite. I think you invited an inflated ego into your life through your meditation : "I should become a guru and help humanity" <-- that is ego speaking. The shattering of this idea is is not ego but humility, to my way of thinking.

Meditation and psychology have a specific term for ego, like when referring to ego death. And it doesn't quite mean the same thing as ego in common usage. It usually means a break down of sense of self, this can happen on psychedelics or in schizophrenia. This can also be accompanied with delusions of grandeur, they're not mutually exclusive.

there is such a thing as a true self and false selves. can you tell them apart?

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#384

Post by [deleted] »

yamtaddle wrote: post #332
cutler wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” We need the mundane earthly activities to balance any inward quests.

I've always taken it to (also) mean that one ought not expect rebirth in enlightenment, or some instant transformation of one's condition and even of one's spiritual (if you will) practice. It's not like graduating from school and moving into the workforce, where you stop going to classes and your life shifts radically in a short span. One day you're not enlightened, the next you are, and... that's the whole thing, c…

[deleted]

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#385

Post by BizarroLand »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #326

Contemporary mindfulness practices are a harmful corruption of the original approach. A good book on the subject is Right Mindfulness: Memory & Ardency on the Buddhist Path [1] by Ven. Thanissaro. > 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—s…

I feel like meditation being doled out like a placebo or harmless panacea may need to be curtailed.

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

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#386

Post by blueprint »

according to a master I trained under, the meditation taught today is the opposite of what buddha taught; it leads you to abandon and lose yourself, and to call the souls of the dead to come in and drive your body. they show people things, such as experiences, to trick the living person into allowing the dead soul in. they use aspects of your existing character to make you think the feelings are coming from your own self even though the impulse is environmental. for example some religious people are made to feel as if they are more special or as though they have a special connection with heaven. there are a lot of people who claim enlightenment in the world today. but none of them except for a Tathagata have actually come near to it or attained it in reality. most of them are nearly totally possessed by ghosts.

if this were not true then we would have teaching and advancements in human society from many fully realized beings. they would be able to realize anything in physics or the way and causes to any desired effect in real life. but we obviously dont have this. instead what we have left are platitudes and falsehoods which are designed to confuse the opponent.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#387

Post by astrange »

starkd wrote: post #377
astrange wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words. 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.

Seems like having revulsion for all earthly things can backfire in unpredictable ways. I have a suspicion that the early Buddhist may have been onto something, but something vital was lost a long time ago.

It's good if you're a monk. It's not good if you're a lay person.

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.)

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#389

Post by lend000 »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #333
mettamage wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favorited, I'm on a quest to be egoless as I'm finding the ego to be an issue in my day to day. It's hard to pinpoint the ego, but you did so wonderfully :)

you need some ego. otherwise you won't know where to point your fork to eat.

I haven't quite achieved an ego death yet through meditation, but reading through a fair amount of psychedelic journeys suggests that eliminating the ego, while perhaps useful and enlightening in moderation, sort of defeats the point of living a life in this world. If the world really does exist simply to provide experiential distraction from the existential dread of being an absolute consciousness in the void (which is a big if), why be in such a rush to get back into that base state? Go experience all the wonders of the world, take risks, spread positivity.

Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

#390

Post by lanstin »

Frummy wrote: post #90
fluoridation wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Real" in what way? I would say that something is definitely real if I can agree with other people that it's there, while other things can at best be put in the "maybe" pile. 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 ca…

So not having the tool to measure something makes it not part of reality? Makes me think of how our worldview every now and then expands, from geocentrism to heliocentrism and so on. Surely the earth revolved around the sun before it was understood to be that way. And surely our experiences are real even though our minds are isolated from eachother. In Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the devil told Adrian roughly this:…

Side note: Under general relativity there is a coordinate system in which the earth is at rest. Not a very natural system but mathematically existing.

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

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