341–350 of 419 posts
There is no need for a "meditation market", and the term itself is absurd. Can I make a shameless plug for Vipassana here? In the tradition of the Buddha, the Vipassana school offers classes and retreats worldwide, and they do not charge a time; only accepting donations and service in return. dhamma.org
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…
-- Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass
I hope it's transcribed correctly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western Buddhism is based off an aesthetic interpretation of Zen Buddhism. If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority to talk about it, defending western Buddhism, which is based off the customs of a Japanese interpretation (based off a Chinese branch), is a strange turn to take. (hell is mentioned within the context of Theravada as well)
> Western Buddhism is based off There is nothing well-defined as "Western Buddhism". The western buddhism I studied is based on Theraveda, and not Mahayana or Zen. > If Buddhism in East Asia is appropriation and people in East Asia have no authority No, they indeed do not. Western Buddhists or someone who learned from them don't tell these people that they are doing Buddhism wrongly, and should change. So, someone li…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best book I've read on this topic is Chögyam Trungpa's "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" [1]. He's very clear in pointing out how ego tries to get involved in everything. It sounds like you may have had an experience, to some extent, of dwelling in the union of wisdom and emptiness or what some call dharmadhatu [2]. It's not a teaching I encountered until I started practicing Vajrayana, as Theravada teacher…
> ... the union of wisdom and emptiness ... Ah, the extent that some people will go through to avoid acknowledging God. It's like some people take stubborn pleasure in being purposely nihilistic and strenuously denying all that's good about the world. How this can be part of a supposedly spiritual practice, I just can't understand.
That sense of impeding doom is nothing more than those spiritual entities oppressing with overwhelming power them by those gaps.
We are locked out of that world for a reason. The safe means to get unlocked is by getting your soul to borrow the power of God and slowly expose yourself to such world. Other than that, self enlightenment is just wishful thinking of empty vessels.
It's kinda like people who are in reasonably healthy mental shape suddenly decide to run an ultramarathon of the mind. I'm not sure if OP may have the correct expectations.
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 got the message that I should destroy my ego and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.
I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * the «from nowhere» really just might be the unconscious brain* The trouble is that once you start to consider the nature of the unconscious brain, such consideration leads to the same conclusion. If the unconscious brain somehow has “control”, from where does it derive this control? Unless you then accept some kind of metaphysical explanation, it’s centerlessness all the way down.
Well I would say it like this. The ancient part and the modern part of the brain are in a sort of dialogue. The ancient part can place a thought into the modern part of the brain, like a sort of notification. The modern part can then decide to pay attention to this or decide not to. It can reason about it. And finally it can say something back to the ancient part of the brain. It can communicate some plan that the an…
In one of these modes we actively perceive/experience our concept of reality, and the other acts as a black box - not available for direct interrogation, but still possible to reason about via observations in conscious experience.
The issue I'm having with this take is that our definition of reasoning still depends on the black box. The experience of feeling like a being capable of reasoning and then using that ability to consider a problem is all built on a foundation of thoughts, sensations and feelings that just "appear" in conscious experience with very little evidence that the conscious mind had anything to do with putting them there.
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…