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.
That's very similar to the boddhisatva vow many Buddhists are required to take.
The "help humanity" part is; the "become a guru" part less so. If anything I'd say the bodhisattva vow is "this is impossible, but I'm going to try it anyways".
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…
Not entirely sure if any study demonstrating the benefits of meditation or mindfulness considers counting 9 to 1 repeatedly an act of either. That aligns much more closely with the advice given to those with panic disorders in how to ride out their panic attacks or prevent them when they feel coming on.
Counting the breaths (usually up, not down) is the standard starting practice in zazen, Zen meditation. When you lose track you bring your mind back to counting again at 1, so it's more like "1.. 2.. shit. 1.. ugh. 1.. 2.. 3.." than anything actually involving 10.
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
Fun fact: unlike linear motion, rotation is absolute. Accepting that the Earth does not rotate would require us to accept that distant galaxies circle it at tangential speeds many times greater than c. It can be logically consistent, but we would have to come up with an explanation for why the entire universe rotates around a particular object, and for why the speed of light has an exemption for this particular type of motion and none other.
You yourself describe it as a hallucinatory state, though. Were you aware that you were hallucinating at the time, or is it only in retrospect that you're able to realize that?
In a country of deaf men, would hearing sounds count as hallucinations?
If a person was born who could hear radio waves, would it count as a hallucination, or would we be able to design an experiment to test whether they can actually hear radio waves?
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.
Delusions of granduer is basically an inflated sense of self - e.g. an inflated ego. Whether using the common parlance or the jungian definition, its the same thing in this context. Always tough to discuss slippery, ill defined things such as ego, which in a real sense does not actually exist.
Usually inflated sense of self means feeling more important than you are. Though linguistically similar is different from the sense of self that you lose from psychedelics and schizophrenia which is literally losing your self of self. You become disconnected from your thoughts and actions. And many schizophrenics experience both.
My mother for instance at one point thought she was Jesus but also thought some of her thoughts or actions were not her own.
Innocent question by a non meditator. Every couple months when it takes an hour or two to fall asleep, I get this otherworldly feeling; like a specific part of my body is growing unbelievably heavy, large and uncontrollable. It feels like this body part will end up crushing me, suffocating me, imploding, etc. It feels like it's happening to me, but I am not in my body. I start to feel emotions start to wash by me, it…
Seems to me like you're just in a state where you're conscious while you're body is getting ready to sleep. You're also in a state of sleep paralysis.
You should check out a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. He has sections on sleep paralysis and nightmares. First few chapters tell you about the stages of sleep
Haven’t we all looked inwardly too much already? I’d list that as a top reason for the general malaise I see around me. I’ve never really found looking inward that useful, looking outward and acting outward and thinking about others has to be a 100:1 ratio on returns vs looking inward.
What is too much, and why would such introspection be a bad thing if it consistently leads to improved mental states? But I think more importantly, “looking inward” is not really the primary focus, but a technique to help one realize what is (and is not) already there. At one time I think I would have written a comment similar to yours, because I had not yet experienced the difference between the perspective-altering…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612475/ is a review of Britton's research discussed in the article. It presents several points of evidence with a coherent argument for why meditation brings benefits while an excessive level of meditation may cause adverse effects.
It's interesting that anyone even had to specify that excessive meditation could cause harm. Isn't the whole point of Buddhism to follow the "middle way"?
The problem with "excessive X causes harm" is that it is tautologically true. The real question is the quantitative level where it starts doing more harm than good. Nobody knows, but it's easy to say after the fact that something is "excessive".
All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people 1) avoid problems like this, and 2) clean up problems like this when they do happen. And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamb…
Kind of skimmed, but why do you need these enlightened people?
All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people 1) avoid problems like this, and 2) clean up problems like this when they do happen. And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamb…