There are different ways of meditating. If you're hallucinating blue, humming God balls you're certainly not doing what I do. I think what I do would probably be beneficial for most people. I'd hesitate to say all.
I agree. Most "meditation" (mindfulness) as I've seen it portrayed is really a very quiet, self-driven cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn to recognize thoughts, interrogate them to see where they may be false, and retrain to be detached from those cycles.
That's a gentle practice that, in addition to taking 10-20m for yourself in quiet place, is pretty much OK as a general recommendation.
Yeah, I don't think too many people are accidentally going to stumble upon the sort of meditation-induced psychosis talked about in the post using Headspace or Waking Up to try and reclaim some presence in their thoughts.
They just get you to sit there, consciously realize that thoughts come from nowhere, and notice that you can merely discard them. After a year of the Waking Up app, it's just a practical way to reground myself. For example, maybe I realize a bit of anxiety in a large place like a music festival, and I take a moment to try to discard the feeling. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the sort of meditation most people associate with the word.
So the thought of that being psychedelic or dangerous to people, suggested in the post, is just a reminder of how many things fall under the umbrella of "meditation".
I think it's more a question of dose. If you're meditating 20 minutes a day for three years you probably won't see a big effect. If you're meditating 12 hours for a day for 10 years, you're going to encounter a lot of stuff that could get labeled "psychosis" by people who don't know about it. And, it may be permanent. What kind of meditation you're doing will affect what you encounter and how you deal with it, but none of the paths will remain just "a practical way to reground [your]self."
If you eat one cube of sugar in a coffee per day and no sweets you are good. If you eat one kilo of sugar each day you'll probably get diabetes in a few months.
I think the picture is a little more complicated than that. There have been entire monasteries full of people who spend many hours a day meditating for thousands of years. They don't seem to be mentally unhealthy on the whole, though there are some exceptions. So it's evidently not the kind of thing where a continuous overdose will leave your mind or your body disabled; on the contrary, the meditators tend to live longer than average and be happier.
However, the kind of experiences described (seeing visions, losing interest in mundane matters, becoming certain of beliefs that turn out to be false) are a well-known feature of the process. And it's at least widely believed that guidance from experienced meditators is very helpful, if not crucial, to navigating these experiences.
> There have been entire monasteries full of people who spend many hours a day meditating for thousands of years. They don't seem to be mentally unhealthy on the whole,
Not to be snarky (ok maybe a little), but they do believe in unprovable beings on some "higher" plane of existence...
That's true! And it's very likely that meditation is part of that. On the other hand, most people believe in unprovable supernatural beings.
One of the most popular belief systems today posits that incorporeal consciousnesses with names like "California", "Ukraine", and "Google" are the causes of most everyday events, although when you investigate sufficiently you always find that whatever physical doing is attributed to "California" or "Google" is actually done by an ordinary, corporeal human being, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Nevertheless, people adhering to this belief system commonly become very angry when you claim that "Google" exists only in their imaginations.
If they’re practicing Buddhists they recognize that their own self doesn’t exist, so I think they’re winning compared to the average Westerner who believes in free will. Not to mention all those other unprovable beings like “Moses” and “George Washington” who like to hand down written commandments we follow.
It is one of the basic tenets of Buddhism† that humans are constantly deluding themselves and doing self-defeating things. In modern terms, you could say they are all mentally ill. This is asserted of humans in general, not just those who meditate a lot.
It's unnecessarily mean if it's not true or, arguably, if there's nothing they can do about it. But if it's true and there's something they can do about it, then not saying it is being unnecessarily mean.
The Buddhist prescription for how to get better (from common garden-variety self-delusion, not schizophrenia) is called the Noble Eightfold Path, and a large dose of meditation occupies an important place in it. Other important ingredients traditionally include material renunciation, strict nonviolence, celibacy, abstinence from alcohol, honesty, politeness, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path
I have been doing Waking up and meditating 10 minutes a day and really liking it for exactly this reason. It almost feels like I am "training" my mind like I train my body with exercise whereas previously my thoughts and feelings would just run away on me and I would be along for the ride. Whereas now I am getting a bit better at realising I don't just need to be dragged along by whatever pops into my head moment to moment.
Theres actually some evidence (or a least a lot of pubmed papers) that touch on how for certain at risk populations, meditation can increase the probability of an episode of psychosis! (so anyone who has any family history of schizophrenia or other things in the same space, really need to be careful of meditation and friends)
I believe that ' family history of schizophrenia ' is not fully understood.. there is an interrelated system of health, genetics, aging, stress, nutrition and extreme experiences, which can go many ways.. I believe that 'schizophrenia' is real and serious, but that the factors involved in leading to it, and its treatments, are not fully understood..
with that said, I believe there is science evidence that marijuana and meditation, both can be triggering to an ill mental state.. along with other, stronger things of course.. common street methamphetamine can bring on illness rather quickly and is addictive.. serious personal injury like trauma can bring on illness rather quickly.. things like that..
Both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are highly correlated with family history. There is a clear connection something genetic causes them. What that is… we don’t know.
Fortunately, we don’t need exact answers to do science. :)
Psychiatry (and therapy) is far more advanced that it was just a few decades ago. It’s incredible we are where we are today. American culture is starting to accept and talk about mental health.
Wow - thanks for posting. Had seem some brief research about it before but not this much. This really should be a larger part of the cultural conversation around meditation.
The first link is a single male patient who claims meditation provoked his psychosis. Other people suffering from psychosis have blamed, lets see, off the top of my head - wifi signals, chemtrails, their gang stalkers, fluoride, the CIA, aliens, lizard-men, etc. Is there any reason to believe a random psychotic person when they make a claim about meditation, versus when they make the claim about wifi signals?
The case analysis a few results later find a total of 28 people in the literature who have made the claim, with 14 of them having precipitating factors such as "like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use", which almost certainly have a much larger effect on psychosis than...sitting still and thinking a certain way. If I had a heart attack while meditating, I don't think I would jump to the conclusion that meditation is dangerous for people with heart conditions.
These are hardly the only reports. You can train your body too hard and injure yourself. It stands to reason that you can do something similar to your brain.
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 progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
Well, vipassana meditation is just as intense as any other tradition of contemplative prayer.[0] Canonically the Dark Night happens soon after the first stream entry, or loose "hint" of actual awakening/enlightenment, and this should be enough to tell whether you're facing it.
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
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 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).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. 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 jhana. 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.)
Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!
AIUI, it seems that Daniel Ingram has cautiously endorsed the work of well-known Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts as potentially a useful take on stream entry/enlightenment and related things from a theistic, and specifically Christian tradition.
(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)
Fairly extensive sections of the Tipitaka deal with the existence and nature of superhuman beings and attribute Hindu explicitly theist beliefs to encounters with them. I don't think it's true that Buddhism only ever references it very obliquely or that it conflates deities with the Buddha-nature. But my understanding is very limited, so you could be right.
I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.
From personal experience and what I've read, there's a clear dose response relationship. If you meditate enough, especially if do a lot of insight (vipassana) meditation without doing much concentration (samatha) or Metta meditation, you will begin to deconstruct yourself. That's what it does. Often you will find a new, and better way to relate to your conscious experience, but sometimes you break things and they don't get fixed.
> If you meditate enough, especially if do a lot of insight (vipassana) meditation without doing much concentration (samatha) or Metta meditation, you will begin to deconstruct yourself.
I've encountered quite a few people, with personal experience, that insist on similarities between extremely deep meditative states and the effect of LSD and other psychedelics. Which also sometimes cause similar crises of self and relation to reality.
For those with a loose grip on the ego to begin with (or more charitably, the already half-enlightened) further unmooring, particularly suddenly and without reconnection and re-grounding to landmarks (probably similar to what you mean with samatha) likely isn't beneficial.
It's common among people who meditate seriously. A significant fraction of the Tipitaka consists of documentation and interpretation of such experiences.
I think it might be more useful to recommend that they consult a good meditation teacher, because you really need to know both about meditation and about yourself to make the decision—though, as you point out, identifying a good meditation teacher when you aren't one is a difficult problem.
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?
It's just not not having anything to distract you of your mental pain. Like having a flesh wound and instead of using pain killers, you put you finger on the wound and actually focus on the pain. That would be quite stressful, right?
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.
It can feel like that when you resist the painful memory or emotion. But if you stay with it, accepting it, neither rejecting nor holding it, you may notice that it dissolves. It's like the effect of exposure in behavioral therapy, phobias are treated with sustained exposure to the feared stimulus.
Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful.
I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down.
"If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down. "
Yup, that is a good combination. And if you do sports in nature, you might find good spots to calm down in between. Being next to moving water I found helpful, or atop on some mountain with the wind.
Not meditation related, but a lot of people with ADHD have some serious shame issues, and taking meds that treat the ADHD can put them in a state where they can no longer easily distract themselves from the fact that they hate themselves, which is ... not a great feeling.
Are you able to clearly manifest an image of anything in your mind's eye? If not then you might have aphantasia (i.e. "third eye blind").
When I was younger I sat several Vipisana and Zen retreats across multiple traditions. While it changed me in the sense that I became far less impulsive and more grounded, there was never anything mystical about the experiences, just periods of calm and quiet, like the internal world had slowed way down.
But that's unusual, I suspect most who seriously take up meditation do indeed have full blown psychedelic experiences (thus the author's reference to LSD), not long after taking up practice, and certainly within the first week long retreat or two.
expecting "good for me" to be "always fun and easy" is, broadly speaking, going to lead to some weird and probably disappointing mismatches of expectation and outcome.
Meditative practice, prayer, etc. are "good for you", but they are _challenging_, which again, doesn't mean "a thing that is hard to learn but is sunshine and rainbows once i learn it". It means that you will come up against some dark shit sometimes, and that's "good" but it is in no way "fun", and yeah, you need a community of like-minded practitioners to help you.
Relatedly, therapy is "good" but usually not "fun"; and therapists need therapists of their own, too.
Author 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.
I'm bipolar and I meditate - I sit queitly, focus on my breath and try to let my thoughts quiet down. It's a way of relaxing. The end goal is to be at peace in the moment, not some crazy drug-like experience
I don't know. They're Christian but their argument is more nuanced than just thinking meditation is opening up to the dark side. I think it's worth talking about, especially given the experiences shared by other posters in the comments.
The point I'm making is I'm not sure they're viewing it through that lens, but rather GP is dismissing the article because the author is Christian and _some_ of them are known to be against meditation. It does not segue that all Christians are against it. GP seems to be the biased one here with a preconceived opinion.
I'm not unsympathetic with that stance, as every Christian I've ever met is fast to claim "there are also tolerant ones" - the majority are simply not. That's what a reputation does: It informs someone about what to expect. In this case it colours what is also said, both parties need to acknowledge this.
My interpretation is that the author is Christian (he says this) and he is against meditation for reasons commonly given by many Christians to discourage people from meditating
Again, this is _your_ interpretation. They only said they're Christian, and you've decided this must be the reason they're against, and their opinion is worthless. You're just colouring their opinion with YOUR preconceptions.
Their opinion matches my experience, and other commenters, and I'm not Christian at all. Why are you taking it so personally? It's an intellectually stimulating topic, you're free to disagree without dismissing the person based on their religion.
I'm pretty sure that "destroy your sense of self" is an anti-pattern, even in Buddhist practices. The "dark night" arises out of the very fear and despair that your sense of self could somehow be broken or destroyed, but the goal is to realize that your "senses" are all there, and that "awakening" is about giving yourself the choice of abandoning a flawed understanding of what those weird "senses" are all about.
I respect the fact that most people by far will want to stay the f--- away from the "dark night"; it should only be explored by those who have the prereqs and the ethical maturity and wisdom to get past it smoothly. But the idea that the whole thing must be unreservedly bad or "destructive" is just too limiting.
Also like programming, mainstream tools and procedures sometimes fail in bizarre, frustrating, and utterly undocumented ways when working with unusual hardware.
This is an underappreciated point. I’m an Anglican priest, and I always thought I was just really bad at prayer. (Ironic, I know.) But then I got diagnosed a couple of years ago, and I realized that my brain was working against me.
Some day I have a mind to write a book on spiritual disciplines for those with ADHD and how we talk about prayer and the spiritual life is often not useful for those with the disorder. But, you know, I have ADHD, so I doubt that will ever get written. ;)
This is definitely not the case for everyone with severe ADHD. I think you have to define "severe" and you have to define "meditation." If your ADHD allows you to hold a steady professional-level job, I suspect you can do TM, for example.
I know what you mean. I have tried to pick up meditation at least a dozen times, and I can never get the thoughts to stop even for a minute. Every morning I sit and try observe my thoughts, it just feels like I'm going through the TODO list for the day, with random interrupts of things that bother me or that I should worry about.
So I used to think meditation is impossible for me until I started doing the "morning pages" exercise recommended in the book The Artists's way:
> Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow.
via https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
After doing this 3 pages (on letter paper folded in two 5.5"x8.5") of writing down all my worries, thoughts, plans, and other random thoughts that come to my mind right after I wake up, I have been able to sit for 15 mins and experience moments of "mental silence." I'm not levitating or achieving some deep insights (probably not possible with 15 mins), but definitely a good way to start the day.
Since I had tried to meditate so many times before and failed every time, I found the morning pages helped a lot, and I would recommend to anyone try this out. Then again, my ADHD is more moderate than severe, so the same approach might not work for everyone.
Concentration meditation (samadhi) might help. The whole idea is that you should learn to nonchalantly bring your awareness back to the focus of your meditation whenever you get distracted by some other fleeting thought. Distraction will happen, whether or not you have ADHD - but it should also not matter. You're also not simply relying on willpower or higher executive function, which would of course be very stressful and tiring for those affected; you're learning to focus your attention via an entirely different path.
This is true but the causation is the other way round - meditation is an exercise and if you gain the capability to do that means your ADHD is getting better.
I would like to at least try to meditate but I am not calm person. Not at all. Even coffee and green tea kick my nervous system into overdrive, so 8 don't consume them.
What could possibly make meditation accessible to a person like me?
Maybe guidance from a good teacher, patience with yourself, and persistence (continuing to practice even when you're frustrated with your lack of progress). Meditation isn't for everyone but nothing you have said suggests that it isn't for you.
There's an anecdote in the Tipitaka where the Buddha analogizes would-be followers who never advance in the practice to farm animals that never grow, and explains what the herder does with those animals: he kills them.
This is generally understood as a recommendation to kick hopeless monks out of the monastery, not literally kill them.
You'd have to ask a competent meditation teacher, which I am very much not, how to know. I am pretty sure that the answer involves spending some time trying, with good guidance.
Try starting with very short meditation sessions, even just 1-2 minutes. Even a small first step is still beneficial. Long meditation sessions are not the end goal. Self-awareness is.
I just finished watching two informative series that I recommend: “The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-being” and “Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation”. They’re long (24 30-minutes episodes in each series). You can watch them for free on Kanopy.com with a library card from a participating library.
I personally use an app called Smiling Mind. It has different paths you can go according to what problem you're trying to solve through meditation. It's an amazing app IMO.
There's a lot of authoritative claims about what meditation is in this thread, so there's also a good chance that what I do is considered "not real meditation" but it's what I learned at a meditation center, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you what got me over it when I had a hard time starting:
Just allow yourself to be bad at it and repeatedly apply the rule that when observe that your attention has wandered, you just consciously bring it back to what you're supposed to be focusing on. You haven't "failed at meditation", you're learning it. Don't beat yourself up for your mind wandering, just acknowledge that the repeated application of the redirection is what it takes and it's all part of the practice. At first it's non-stop, and eventually you get better at it. Sometimes it's excruciatingly boring and tedious and sometimes it's immensely relaxing, and occasionally you get weird hallucinatory stuff out of nowhere (although that to me feels like just going into a dream state, which I've always interpreted as "I'm so relaxed I fell asleep and dreamt").
That's really all it is for me. A way to relax and slow down.
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 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 spoke to Buddhist monks in Himalayas, and I lived with Hinduist practitioners in Bali. I went quite far with my exploration of meditation, and perhaps that warrants a blog post of its own. But in terms of keeping up with it, in my case - the chickens came home to roost.
I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
I started working less, started losing interest in certain things. I lost friendships that I later regretted. And I attribute it specifically to meditation because in that "peaceful state of mind" you can't help but laugh at the stupidity of this world. Why should you care if everything around you is designed to work against you. We live in a systematic world yet the system does not provide the means to be genuinely happy human.
Insights like this really dominated my life at the time, and it was very difficult to process it at all. So, at some point, I experienced a "collapse" of sorts and stopped.
At some point, when I catch up with the things I neglected - I would definitely like to return to the habit of daily practice. Meditation is an incredible tool (even if my own report says otherwise) to connect with this world on an entirely different wavelength.
I was never initiated or dedicated myself to a specific practice. I can say today it was a mix of mindfulness and practical Vipassana.
I think one of the things people complain about when it comes to meditation is concentration. I was not one of those people. It came extremely natural to me.
Personally I agree that meditation isn't appropriate for everyone. But a specific issue about Vipassana is that it is marketed as a panacea, though historically it was developed as a practice to make monks out of householders. If it's causing detachment, it's working as intended. Anhedonia is the flip side of the end of suffering.
The same for me - I found mindfulness meditation easy and it’s concerning that it comes with all these “relaxation” “stress reduction” “empty your mind” memes. I don’t need that, I need a technique for the opposite of that.
> 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 version of snake oil.
All this reads as absolute bullshit to me, as has done everything else I've ever read about meditation.
The problem, at it's core, is that the human mind is not a rational thing. Rational frameworks (at least the ones we have currently) do not play well with real-but-irrational things.
This is why early psychoanalysis and Gestalt works focused on symbolism as an abstraction of the human mind. Of course those areas are generally fraught with missteps and bad theory, but progress was still made.
If you want a real no-fluff experimentalist view of the psyche, look into psychonetics, a Soviet toolkit. To quote (from memory) from it's material:
"You may hear the sound of God talking to you. Do not be alarmed, even if you are an atheist. Remain calm and do not respond to the voice."
Snake oil implies you're being sold something, doesn't it?
All I am saying is that meditation brought up a lot of things that I had buried in my past. Anger (being betrayed by people), hatred (being whipped with a leather belt by my step-father when I was a kid) - these are all real emotions that you have to process because in small little ways they do have an influence on your psychological behavior. And, thus, on the behavior of who you "think" you are as a person.
I've observed that sometimes "meditation" is used as a catch phrase for several different practices, especially those which the west adopted from eastern traditions.
I would not rush to dismiss all of it as disingenous just because some interpretation of it does not resonate with you. And it is ok if it doesn't resonate with you, we don't all have to agree on it.
There's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits of mediation. You can ignore all of the noise about higher states of consciousness and suchlike and still receive documented benefits:
I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works.
The paper you've linked to (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589) points out methodological flaws in meditation-related research, ambiguities in the meaning of "mindfulness" etc.; it doesn't set out to prove that meditation doesn't 'work' (in the sense that it causes no effects).
In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything at all, why would anyone experience even adverse effects? Clearly meditation does have effects.
If the definitions of the key terms and concepts in meditation is ambiguous, the body of scientific evidence of meditation doing anything is not particularly convincing.
It seems to be a staple for therapists and psychologists to improve emotional intelligence. It gives you clarity about what you're feeling, why you're feeling it, and what you're going to feel soon. From there it can be used for a whole host of other maladies: addictions, anxiety, depression, etc.
It’s not bad, but if you feel strongly against it, you’re not missing out on much. Overcoming the psychological resistance to meditate is probably not worth it.
> I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another version of snake oil.
I don't know what world you're in, the 'meditation is eastern/new-age woo' seems to me very much the default outside of a certain Ram-Dass/Alan-Watts/Hari-Krishna crowd.
You are very right to be Skeptical and much of what is being talked about when it comes to "Meditation" (both in this thread and elsewhere) should be taken with a "bucket full of grains of salt".
However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.
Unfortunately, for that view at least, brain scans and experiments by notable scientists have shown incredible effects when meditators/meditation are put under the spotlight.
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.
Thanks for reading. You have an interesting perspective - and one filled with more diverse experience than mine, I'd be very interested in reading about it.
> 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, as well as a kind of intellectual knowledge or wisdom that's perhaps best associated today with the Stoic tradition, albeit surely not exclusive to it (even a cursory understanding of the Buddhist literature on vipassana should familiarize you with the same concepts, albeit of course phrased differently).
The idea of meditation as "fighting" with oneself should definitely raise many alarm bells, the practice is surely challenging enough on its own! (The "Dark Night of the Soul" is legitimately scary, especially if you're not told in advance that it might occur and that there's ways past it.)
As mentioned in a sibling thread, the real "dark night" is something that happens only after one is deep enough in the development of contemplation - both the Christian and Buddhist tradition are very clear about this. In fact, that's the reason it's so insidious: many inexperienced meditators get as far enough as reaching a stage of insight that subjectively feels a lot like the common folk trope of "sudden enlightenment". But the "dark night" comes right after that stage, and then they don't know that they're supposed to meditate more and look for the way out (through the insight of equanimity). It's a very understandable mistake, which is why it makes sense to warn about it.
I know what you're talking about, and I went through 3(!) major episodes of that kind. Of course, in the end I came out a much better person with a lot of weight lifted off of my shoulders.
Also, I was being very conservative with my comment and it is impossible for me to truly highlight my experiences without writing a book about it. I can say that I met a lot of very interesting people, educated and wise people who helped me a lot.
Actually, if you look at the old texts from Hindu Rishis and Swamis who lived throughout India - most of them talk about teachers appearing if you have the correct discipline.
> I was so caught up with spirituality and meditation that I overlooked anything else in my life.
Respectfully this is not an outcome that you can lay at the feet of meditation. It’s like blaming the catechism for the years you spent cut off from the world in a Benedictine monastery.
Certainly not in the sense of "overlooking anything else in your life". Moral living is a key component of successful dharmic/meditative practice according to Buddhist and other teachings.
Traditional sutric Buddhism was definitely about detachment (or “renunciation”); you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.
The presentation of Buddhism as chill and peaceful and all about meditation is a modernization to keep it alive after the white people found it.
> you’re supposed to never have sex and if you’re eating food you should imagine it’s a rotting corpse so you won’t end up enjoying it.
Possibly as an instrumental practice on the way to full buddhahood (and that would come after even the very advanced stage of arahantship, which basically means guaranteed complete enlightenment after your lifetime!). Surely not as mere penance or mortification of the flesh shorn of any contemplative practice, because that was very clearly criticized by the Buddha as misleading and useless when the Hinduists were doing it.
(Then again, IIRC, the Stoics talk about doing something very similar. The idea itself would not have been unfamiliar in the West.)
Pretty much every "meditation was bad for me" story seems to play out like this. The author basically abused meditation in the way that someone might abuse drugs.
Some people clearly are susceptible to being caught up in this kind of behavior. So I think the point in TFA: "meditation can have risks for some people" is valid. But that "some people" seems to be a fairly specific personality type, and most people could probably benefit from some mind-calming body-centering breathing exercises every day.
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious, did you consider at any point untangling those feelings with a psychotherapist?
Your experience resonates with me, but I came to a different conclusion. Meditation did open the doors to a more conscious awareness. That sounds grandiose but it isn't. It means having a practice of observing thoughts and emotions as they arise. As you describe, this can lead to more clarity into the order or nature of things. But meditation ends there, it is a tool to bring about conscious awareness. It does not "create" those thoughts or emotions.
I ask whether you've worked with a psychotherapist because I found myself in a similar predicament. I realized that my discontent had little or nothing to do with my "spiritual" practice. Simply put, the hustle and bustle of daily life is a sure way to keep many thoughts and emotions at bay. A meditative practice lets the stream pour through. For me meditation became a tool to bring those thoughts to the foreground and getting to know them. Through that process I get to know myself better. If necessary, I'll work with a psychotherapist to go through it.
This is how I feel as well. I think combining meditation with good psychotherapy is almost a must. Meditation allows things from subconscious to rise to the conscious, and psychotherapy allows you to work through them and resolve them.
I would guess that in the past, meditation teachers fulfilled the psychotherapist role. But an actual qualified therapist would be much better - especially now that meditation is a relatively common aspect of psychotherapy.
In fact, it seems like there is a lot of similarity generally between the role that priests of all kinds were supposed to perform in a community, and therapists. I wonder if it would be a good idea for humanity to essentially build a secular replacement to religion like that.
I'm sorry, but this is such an extreme example. You should not overdo anything, be it meditation, gaming, playing, reading, any sport, even drugs. Drugs also give you a state of mind that, when taken to the extreme, can harm your social life and well-being. That is not a problem specifically of meditation.
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.
That's what I did. I mean, my story is quite unique in that I never knew what meditation was (or religion, to be honest) and it just fell into my lap.
I think, looking back I can safely say that it did help me address a lot of emotional trauma. I didn't exactly have a gentle upbringing and I somehow entangled myself into all those memories.
Meditation helped me to clear the air, but as you say - it blindly became a somewhat of an addiction. So I stopped and started focusing on other things. And I still have a long way to go.
From the article, it sounds like the author was spending more than just 40 minutes a day on their spiritual pursuits. They also didn't describe their actual practice.
This thread seems to be full of people trying to debunk meditation as some kind of dangerous dark art.
As a beginner, in zen, for example, it is advised against meditating alone as your practice may just turn to fortifying your own beliefs, views and opinions.
That's why there is a sangha - a group of fellow meditators who will tell you if you start drifting too much away and will advice you.
Don't practice alone. At least not in the beginning.
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
'Walking is not for everyone' and 'Exercise is not for everyone' is technically true since it is going to do more harm than good for a small subsection of society.
It is even more true that some people should not run marathons or ultra marathons, but it would be odd to notice that then write an article based on that evidence that 'walking is not for everyone' rather than 'marathons are not for every one'. And when I have read of serious consequences of meditation it is from doing the equivalent, or more than, an ultra marathon, but then the conclusion is the equivalent of 'walking is not for everyone'.
I'm always amazed at how many people are experiencing meditation for the first time who do this. It must be like suddenly being arrested and stuck in solitary among lifers.
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…
My anecdotal experience is that this is a personality type. "Some is good, more is better" is just not a valid way to approach things, neither in quantity nor in intensity.
To inject another perspective from an outsider, to me it read like meditation actually was a positive experience for you. One of the implicit intentions and outcomes of meditation, at least in Buddhist and Hindu belief systems, is that it's meant to be a technique to _overcome_ wordly illusions and temptations (Maya) and attain enlightened state (Moksha) thus escaping the cycle of birth and rebirth into this world. Seems instead you reverted back to the _samsara_ (world filled with Maya) - although not necessarily for me to judge whether that is good or bad.
It was! Honestly, my comment is pretty raw and it doesn't give the full picture. But you are absolutely right. Meditation changed me and gave me insights about myself and life that I perhaps would have never encountered otherwise.
And you're correct about turning back to a "stale" way of being. This is literally what happened, so kudos to you for noticing. As someone once told me, "You're still young. You have time.".
I would actually point you towards deepening your equanimity, as opposed to trying to renounce the world in this lifetime when you're basically nowhere near ready for that. If it feels like your way of being in the world is "stale", that's the pattern you should be working on. It should be fully possible to engage with the world, even and perhaps especially as an enlightened being.
I always wanted to write a book about what happened to me. The specifics of how spirituality came into to my life, because it was very unusual. And my story could captivate even the most dedicated of skeptics. It was that authentic.
But, for some reason - I was always very afraid to write such a book because it would mean giving away a part of "me". So, in this context, having more time means I can enjoy life without needing to preach a story that perhaps some people are not ready to hear. I don't know...
Funny thing is, I write for a living. Only web dev stuff opposed to digging deep into the psyche of this world.
You are describing slimming down on things that didn't seem important to you within the context of an entirely new way of living. What exactly is the problem here? That you'd make different decisions in a different context? This is true for literally every human being in every significantly changed context, it has nothing to do with what that context is (i.e. meditation or literally anything else).
Yeah it feels like living in a hospital bubble to maximize health. I'd think we need to blend meditative view points (ability to keep some distance, to cool down) with normal daily lives.
>The first odd thing I experienced was the inexplicable feeling that there was someone else in the room during my meditation. Luckily this didn't disturb me too much, one of the books I had read at that time mentioned that this was something that could happen during zazen. I now know that it is called the sensed presence effect. Other sits were more pleasant - I often had a sensation of uncaused joy arise. Sometimes I would see intense and clear images inside my head. During one session I saw a bright blue humming sphere that I knew was God (or some kind of representation of) - I swear I could hear the harmonious hum of it. I had previously abandoned my Christian faith but that experience alone made me reconsider my stance.
I've been trying to meditate on and off for years, including daily 30 minute sessions for months at a time, and never experienced anything remotely as intense as this author. In fact despite all the time I've spent trying, I can't say I feel like I've gotten any better at it. At best I've developed a sensation I would describe as being extremely tall, as though my head were posted thousands of feet above my legs, but psychologically I don't feel like I'm doing any better today than when I started with respect to observing my thoughts or focusing on, say, breath.
I suspect some people are far more predisposed, be it nature or nurture, toward successful and deep meditation than others.
Has anyone here ever tried Waking Up app by Sam Harris? I am working through the intro course now and very much enjoying it and finding it helpful, but I don't have a good base reference to know if he knows his stuff. I am not interested in the spiritual side of meditation so much as the learning to be in my own head a bit more stably and acknowledge and understand my emotions/thought more productively.
Yes he knows one type of meditation really well. I went through his course, for me it was ok but I found the value of the Waking up app being exposed to other teachers from other traditions. It really opened up my eyes.
Meditation is just a word. As an analogy you can say that driving a car can hurt you. Well that depends what kind of car, your driving style, the speed, whether you use the correct side of the road and so on.
My personal experience is with 30 years of Anapana and Vipassana that started under guidance in a Thai monastery. Even with Anapana, which is considered quite low risk in terms of 'side effects', the message was that it is always better to practice with a teacher and don't mix different practices. This cannot be overstated enough.
My own dark night lasted around 10 years, even with the guidance. Sometimes my outlook so dark it was impossible to look in the mirror. Over time there was a slow transformation of perspective that is still ongoing today. Less clinging to ideas of good, bad, and especially self. Things just happen and most of the time I can now see that all emotions and ideas around that what happens are created by the mind and constantly changing. What starts to matter more and more is compassion for the situation of others and their suffering.
Meditation is often a transformative process and without proper support and guidance this process can indeed be risky.
After a decade of practice I basically vividly hallucinate if I let myself when I meditate. Focus is more useful, but the hallucinations are very interesting/calming too.
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.
Can confirm from personal experience. Even a lot of vipassana meditation by itself can send you into psychotic states when you're not ready for all the insight yet. I came very close to psychosis once, experienced ego death, broke down mentally and had to spend 2 months in a depression ward. Cannot recommend.
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 live in peaceful ignorance since then... save 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.
Tread carefully, reality is not as stable as you think.
I had a brief experience with what you're talking about induced by drugs. It's made me decide I have no appetite for either meditation (except for short, surface level sessions to help with anxiety) or mind altering drugs anymore. I had briefly waded into the depths of something I wasn't prepared for, and I don't want to go back.
> I have gained insights I was not supposed to have and I've preferred to mostly live in peaceful ignorance since then
Yes, one of my strongest emotions was "I just want to go back to the ignorance I had before. Being moderately unhappy and distracted all the time was much preferable to this." I'm mostly back there now, two years on. Something that helped me was an Alan Watts talk about those that are "far out" -- AKA, fully engaged in the part they are playing in this life, and not aware of the absurdity of existence. Trying to live life like that has actually helped me cope with that experience, but I do continue to see brief glimpses from time to time.
Hmm, I wonder if these experiences you and GP are describing are at all like my nightmarish Salvia trip--experiencing the collapse of the universe of experience and the certainty that everything I've ever known, been, and desired is an illusion that will all be pulled out from underneath me at any moment. Insanity.
Yet, somehow, I am glad I experienced that insanity--it showed me what direction I was headed in, "woke me up" to the inner world I was creating for myself, and changed my direction.
Still, wouldn't recommend the experience. It would be easier to just have a really open discussion with someone who cares about you and has some life experience, and have them tell you "you need to focus on what really matters--taking care of yourself, and appreciate life while you have it". I had to wrestle that lesson out of that incredibly frightening experience, which psychologically damaged me for almost 2 years.
I had something similar (for years) and I actually found zazen and mindfulness very helpful.
I think diving into ego death when via substances in uncontrolled settings isn't a great idea, because you can get bogged down in delusion and paranoia.
I found it helpful with zazen to realise that any judgement of whatever I was experiencing (whether good or bad / joy or fear / enlightenment or hell), was just as much a delusion in itself as much as anything else. I personally found this made it illogical to be scared by whatever is happening inside your head, because that fear is just line noise.
I'm sorry you've had such difficult experiences. Does the following excerpt resonate with you? If so, I'd be happy to share more.
"This comment is extremely important and should be borne in mind by all who feel tempted to dabble with the psychedelic experience without knowing what they are doing or why. He who enters the fifth state of consciousness without preparation may be spiritually paralyzed by his experience. He has seen too much too soon and, as a result, all games become meaningless. He cannot play the life games that satisfy men in the third state of consciousness. He cannot play the Master Game because he knows nothing about it and has no teacher. So he becomes, like Daumal's "leaf in the wind," an even more helpless plaything of external forces than he was before his rash
experiment."
That resonates on a very deep level, yes. I've worked through most of it already.
I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?
If so, as of the last dark night of the soul I seem to have reached permanent and stable access to sixth circuit now with glimpses of the seventh circuit, but I don't want to go there right now and proceeding further seems like it will take some time now anyway.
I hope to maintain the current state of mind until I have grown older, maybe even until I am able to stop working and focus on this path. I am quite happy with the current, fully integrated metaconsciousness.
>> I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?
No, the fifth state here is an interpretation of the Gurdjieff system and the associated Fourth Way. Loosely the fifth state equivalent to enlightenment (satori). The specific quote is from a book by Robert de Ropp called "The Master Game."
I haven't looked into Leary's eight circuit model in years. Thank you for reminding me of it. By your description of your current state, sounds like you have found utility in that particular framework?
Well, it is a nice concept to contemplate for sure. I've found utility in all of them to various degrees. I'll have to look into the book you mentioned, thank you.
I 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 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.
It's easy to spend your entire life running from one thing to the next. Meditation can just be a 10 minute break where you give yourself permission to take a mental break. Like almost everything, there is an unhealthy extreme. As an analogue, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that fitness is generally good for you, but trying to do ultra ironmans is probably not going to be good for many people, and if you attempt it you have to prepare in a way that's suited to your own body.
The argument here seems to be that LSD can be dangerous, meditation is kind of like LSD, and therefore meditation can be dangerous.
It does seem like a possibility, but you'd think if someone were going to write about it they'd try to present evidence of some sort to support the point.
Meditation can cause severe psychotic episodes in some people [1]. The author may not present the best evidence but meditation is dangerous for some percentage of the population's mental health.
Based on the documented cases of psychotic break and the number of people who meditate, the odds are approximately a million to one in your favor of getting some benefit out of mediation vs. a psychotic break.
From what I've read, psychotic episodes were preceded by exceedingly long meditation sessions. Essentially, don't meditate for more than an hour a day and you should be okay, the psychotic breaks have a higher tendency to happen at meditation 'retreats' where they do like 8 hours a day of meditation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31668156/ is a survey of 19 studies that identified 28 cases. Conclusion: "Of the 28 cases reported, 14 patients had certain precipitating factors like insomnia, lack of food intake, history of mental illness, stress, and psychoactive substance use."
Given the millions who meditate I think risk is less than a range of ordinary daily activities we engage in that can entail a life changing injury: crossing the street, diving into a pool to swim, and eating peanut butter (aflatoxin risk) to name three. The suggestion to consult a mental health professional, in the absence of any prior psychological issues that were significant, seems to me to be a waste of time and money.
I don't think that's the argument exactly. The parallel to LSD was brought up to demonstrate that something that may be good for one person's well being may not be good for another.
Changing your psychological state is something all of us do every day, and some people have problems with just doing that. Experimenting with it substantially has the capacity to damage, and it's reasonable to conclude that for some subset of the population, for whatever reasons, it is not a hood idea. I think that's the point of the article
The author might be more correct than he imagines. I suffer from bipolar disorder, which was “activated” during a heavy meditation period 5 years ago or so.
My therapist now advises me to stay away from it. She says that meditation is a form of “self hypnosis” and that I should stay away from daily practice, which is what I had previously.
Altered states of consciousness are know to trigger psychosis in people who many develop bipolar disorder.
It’s relatively easy for me to deliberately trigger psychosis, despite being on antipsychotics. And it is a very bad idea for me to do that. Losing touch with reality isn’t exactly fun.
Not that I’m aware of. But bipolar disorder is (very) poorly understood. Asking for evidence would imply for instance, that we know what bipolar IS, and from my knowledge, I don’t think we do. In order to have evidence that meditation and bipolar interact we would have to know what bipolar affects in our system that causes it. As far as I know we don’t know what causes it/how it works exactly. We have some inklings of what’s involved.
What we have is some medications that work with relatively extreme side effects (I am now pre diabetic due to daily Seroquel use) and sort of folk tradition of what to do and not to do - ie bipolar people are advised to stay away from religion for instance.
In my experience both the medication and the folk tradition are mostly right actually, as weird as that might sound. It’s not like psychologists are performing huge studies, but they can see patterns in the individual cases when they are studied in bulk - ie religious individuals might have more psychotic episodes etc.
It's been a bit like having access to my computer's terminal for me. I didn't expect the power. I did way more than just turn off the distractions. I fucked some shit up and had to spend some time in the shop. But I also learned how to fix the stuff that was broken and then stay the hell away from the terminal the rest of the time.
My issue was mainly that I couldn't turn the UI back on.
But also I fucked up all the links and the whole system was out of order.
Now I still use it when necessary because I still have bugs, which is really easy because just thinking about it will pop it open. But I mostly use it to signal to me when the UI is starting to fade away; not something I was good at before.
When I had a daily body scan practice, I body scanned so much that I didn't emotionally recognize myself in the mirror. Only rationally did I know that it was me. But it felt like I was looking at a strange man.
I stopped my daily practice after that. Unfortunately, most benefits also went away. Fortunately, a few of them stayed and for that I'm grateful :)
Meditation is a tool. I don't understand how anyone can claim that a tool is powerful enough to alter your mind or body can only have positive effects. Of course, any such tool can also alter your mind or body in a negative way, if used incorrectly or if it is not the right tool for you. Same with Yoga, Ayurveda, weed etc. If you think it has the power to change you, you have to accept that it can also change you in a way you did not anticipate or want. I think we should explore all of these, but also be careful in recommending them as "side-effect-free".
"If you can find a worthy meditation teacher - that may be a valid route too, but the lack of professional qualifications makes it difficult to estimate the authority of such a person."
Vipassana teachers do at least have some guaranteed qualification, and there are schools right around the world. Despite being a 'silent' practice you can speak to the teacher at the middle and end of the day.
How much of this is caused by the dissociative nature of the world in which we live? A similar phenomenon can occur when writing fiction. When I think back on the time in life when my devoted interest in writing became unlimited, I look to the lack of coherent experience offered by the world outside of my work as the primary culprit for my fugue state.
I think meditation is a way of being nice to our right hemisphere. Our left hemisphere is responsible for speech, and our right hemisphere is mute. Be nice to your right hemisphere, it's you too, and it doesn't like listening to your jibber-jabber.
On a semi-related note, I think the movie 'Us' by Jordan Peele is about our split-minds. The protagonists are the left-hemispheres, and the clones are our right hemispheres (they cannot speak). I read a book called "Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology" recently and it just reinforces it. So if you break it down that way theoretically, our right-hemispheres live impoverished lives eating cold, raw rabbit and are experimented on, forced to be 'tethered' to us, listening through us to 'pop' music and the 'government' getting angrier and angrier, fantasizing about using scissors on our own corpus callosum...
Yes, some forms of meditation, in particular "open awareness" is said to give more space to the right hemisphere.
I highly recommend this video if you want to hear about what life is when the right hemisphere is in control, especially for people who have been doing non-dual practices (lots of parallel experiences IMO):
> As a Christian, I use it to hone my focus for prayer and to increase my mindfulness so that I can better sense what God wants for me.
Thanks for letting me know because there is a long campaign against Yoga and meditation by some sects of American Christians, who feel they are demonic and meditation is how you let demons in so they take over. These Christians have bizarre ideas of what Yoga and meditation are, treating them like some kind of ritual that gets you in touch with a hidden world.
That was my first thought when reading the title, so I'm happy the author owned up to his biases. Saying "Not everyone should meditate" is like saying not everyone should sit quietly, pay attention to their breath and see if they can quiet their thoughts.
I am bipolar and meditation along with CBT is how I stay balanced
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.
I grew up around a lot who did. The best way I can describe it is the spiritual practices around meditation where considered to be incompatible with Christianity.
At my Christian high school in the 90s, one of my teachers told the class that the purpose of meditation was to empty the mind to let the devil in. I think this is more typical of fundamentalist types.
That is not without basis. Many cultures with meditation traditions caution against unsupervised meditation. Interestingly enough the Christian bible describes the devil trying to tempt Jesus during his 40 day meditation retreat (which is what people would call it these days). Coincidence? Maybe.
Definitely not saying meditation is a way to connect with the devil. Just saying that it's not as much baloney as you might have thought.
I'd go one further and point you to western esotericism, where you would likely perform various meditations before summoning goetic entities.
Now, you're not supposed to let yourself get possessed by them, but any Christian should clutch their crucifix that anyone would even be trying to communicate with Solomon's demons (except maybe to tell them to go away).
Some similarity there with the story of Mara tempting the Buddha. Taken symbolically it makes sense. Through that lens I probably experienced "demons". There will always be zealots that take things overly literally.
I feel like this actually somewhat overinflates the impact that meditation can have, at least on an acute level. There's a marked difference between taking a psychoactive substance like LSD and meditating. Conflating the two is somewhat disingenuous in my opinion.
This isn't to say that meditation doesn't work, which I highly recommend for improving focus and de-stressing. You probably actually often end up meditating without even realizing it (e.g. anytime you exercise or listen to music).
For me, meditation started a fundamental shift in how I think about free will, and oddly nobody I've mentioned it to in real life has felt this.
I used to feel very in-control of my own mind, but after intentionally sitting and monitoring for thoughts, labeling those thoughts, etc, I became sensitive to how thoughts can really come out of nowhere. You can't predict what you will think next. That strikes a little deeper than a nature/nurture argument where you might say "oh, I just behave a certain way I guess, its in my genes". You start to wonder if you're just being forced to watch the movie that is your own life.
I personally feel like my life is a mostly-good movie, and there's reason to predict it will continue that way, but for many people, they're stuck in a bad movie. Some people may feel imprisoned by that. But not feeling in control can also be liberating, depending how you look at it. So I definitely agree that it's a double edged sword, or that YMMV.
(Overall, I've enjoyed meditation, and I try to do it about once a week, just to remind myself that there's another mode of thinking that's available to me.)
Likewise, I've found my exploration of meditation and similar things has left me feeling less in control (in some ways, at least), less "me", and much less of what I expected from the outset. I suppose I expected the inverse, in a way... To feel more grounded, connected, and in touch with myself. Instead it seems I've only found that myself isn't what I thought it was.
I suppose the most profound aspect is realizing that you aren't who or what you thought you were. Your free will is a facade, and it can feel unsettling.
I try to see the silver linings, like you mentioned. The first time I heard someone nail this on the head after quite a long time of sensing it, but not understanding it, was Sam Harris. I know many others have talked about this phenomenon and perhaps they've done it better, but he helped me understand it and feel better about it quite a lot. It was very unexpected, too – until that point, I'd never really listened to him.
He advocates a lot for forgiving others on account of this lack of free will, which I really like. It's maybe the brightest silver lining. I find it easier than ever in my life to let things be when it comes to external matters. I'm a lot more compassionate towards people I may have only been bothered by in the past. It's easy to get into a headspace in which I see myself in people, and recognize how I never intend to be wrong, or bad, or whatever – and that's likely no different for them.
I sometimes miss living in the facade. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I don't know who or what I am anymore. It was nice not having to consider it before. Sometimes I can't help thinking about the cellular activity and electrical signals in my body, apparently generating whatever this life is, whatever I am. It can interfere with every day life even. It can be sort of disassociating almost. I think a significant challenge going into my 40s will be finding a way to not care about these things and just let them be, and to focus on making the most of things.
This type of experience was exactly what I experienced my first few LSD trips. It's a type of disassociation or ego death, where you really feel deeply the experience of observing yourself, your thoughts, from a seemingly separate viewpoint.
It made me question reality in a way I hadn't before.
Is all of this pre-determined? Is it arbitrary? Is it random? Is there an underlying meaning here we should recognize?
I came to believe that love, connection, existing itself, were all somehow significant. Hard to say if this is real, or just part of the pattern :)
I'm 62 and if I'm understanding you, it's been the same for me the last four or five years. I received a lot of benefit from Sam's work, as well as from Alan Watts, Francis Lucille, Robert Wolfe, and other Advaita Vedanta / non-dual teachers.
This journey has greatly increased my ability to feel compassion for all people, even people that I think are acting unkindly and doing great damage in the world.
Just for grins, here's a YouTube channel that I think you might enjoy:
Yeah, and I think all of this brings us closer to the truth as you say - that ultimately we are responding to cellular/electrical activity. I'm inclined to believe truth-finding is good overall, but we also have to buckle up for some weird stuff then.
Sam Harris, while I never followed his meditation talk much, had one example recently that really drove home the "can't predict thought" concept. Something like "think of a song, any song", and then he challenged you to think about why you picked that song, and not one of the other songs you know. And then, despite whatever explanation you concoct, think about all the songs it didn't even occur to you to choose that fit the same criteria. It's kind of magical.
I do think all this can make us more tolerant towards other people, but it's still a bit circular. If it's all meat and electrons, they're destined to commit the crime, and we're destined to lock them up. (edit: I mean: if they commit the crime, you can't blame them, and if someone jails them, you also can't blame them)
As far as I know, the trend is that older people tend to mellow out - usually! And I think that having a sudden realization that you're not so in-control can be tough. It can catch you off guard if the time isn't right. But after a few years, hopefully people course-correct a bit and start to give themselves more buffer and steer away from activities that exacerbate those anxieties. Or at the very least, one may become more numb to it as the novelty wears off.
I find this interesting because I can barely get my brain to do what I want so I've never felt in control (and am totally fine with it) but I've never felt like I have complete free will or anything. At most I can try to send my thoughts in the right direction and hope the rest of my brain plays along.
As I have got older (I'm in my early 50's) I have gained the ability to step back from situations and think about them from all sides. Sometimes that makes me more mellow about it, not always.
I'm not much into meditation but I have had experiences that viscerally proved to me that I am not in full control of my actions.
In my late teens and early 20's I developed a social anxiety, paruresis, which made it impossible for me to urinate in the presence of strangers. I could stand at a urinal, I could will myself to go as much as I wanted, nothing would happen. It felt very much like being a passenger in my own body. Happily, I was able to use graduated exposure therapy to make this manageable.
With kids I've also seen a lot of storymaking. A child will have an impulse to do something and when you ask them why, they don't know but they make up a story for it. I strongly believe we all do this. We act on impulse and then tell ourselves stories to explain our motivations and maintain a coherent sense of self.
The ethical aspects aside, my intuition is that if you wired up a human being with something similar you could remote control them to go left, right, forward or back. Afterwards you could ask them about their behaviour and they would explain it with a story in terms of their own free choices and decisions.
In my opinion, we both have free will and our thoughts don't always come from us. Some things we see with our eyes are from our own movements, others are from externalities. I believe thoughts are the same but neither contradicts free will.
I believe in individuality; we aren't all one, other people exist, etc.
Understanding oneself is the whole point of one's life so it can't really be defined. Knowledge is more than definitions. The self is more than the body and the mind at least.
The thoughts do come up out of nowhere, unpredictably. But with practice, I can choose whether to inhabit them, or simply note them with quiet amusement and let them pass by. I can also pick something to concentrate on, and stay mostly focused on that, while those extra little thoughts just flutter in the background. This all seems to me like an enhancement of free will.
I do get these feelings of control, so I can't say I feel like a victim of my thoughts - "let them pass by", as you say, is mostly what I feel. But I think for some people, there's a question like:
"I thought I was the originator of many my out-of-the-blue thoughts, and I found out that's not true. Am I actually the originator of the thoughts at the next level up?".
I think some people who have never meditated, while they admit to having thoughts just hit them randomly sometimes, they'll nonetheless feel that many of their truly out-of-the-blue thoughts were conscious choices to switch gears or pull on an interesting thread. A meditator might label the same low-level thought as "random", but a non-meditator would say "I did that". Can a meditator similarly be fooled, on a different level?
You are never entirely without external input. Even if you try to ignore all the stimulation you receive it’ll still have an effect on random thoughts popping into your head.
Properly read, Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic is a response to the question you've articulated. Kant noted as much, and when not resolved with dualism (which flowed from Plato through Descartes to the modern day), this allegory offers powerful insights. I love these topics, have been swimming in them recently, so happy to talk more, just email me (info in profile).
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.
I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name).
He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that.
As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me".
When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me.
What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts".
To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix.
For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time.
Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol.
What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word).
It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.
All that you see is also a representation in your mind formed by your brain. Is everything in your visual field similarly "you"? If not, what makes thoughts different?
> to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me.
Interesting philosophical position! I've rarely seen that position be held in earnest, because the obvious consequence is that you should be held fully responsible for anything possibly criminal you do while sleepwalking, as it was still on your brain's orders, regardless of your state of consciousness.
Our brains often cause us to do things we consider accidents, e.g. fumbling an egg. It's still me that has done it, and I am still responsible to clean up the mess. The fact that I didn't do it 'deliberately' doesn't negate my culpability and responsibility, although it may change its character.
I agree. I think where we might differ though is that I think we can be considered responsible for accidents but I think you were arguing that that was a hard position to take.
I don't meditate, but thoughts do just seem to appear to me without a lot of control or conscious effort. My answer is twofold. Firstly, your executive function is still moderating those thoughts, even if they're appearing from some dingy recess of your brain that decided to think about hunger or inkjet printers. Secondly, there's not really a "self" other than your executive function and the stuff going into it. Any agency is the executive function. It deals with the stream. Maybe it drives some work upstream, like eating before hunger hits.
This is a bit like asking whether a fire is deterministic or random. Sure, at some level there are processes happening that are either deterministic or random. At the level we observe, though, it's just a really complicated semi-predictable process.
I'd say that agency is your executive function's ability to take control of the actions resulting from that process. Someone who binges after starving lacks agency, because their executive function has lost control, while someone who holds themselves under a cold shower is exercising agency by staying there in violation of thermoregulation, pain, cold shock, or whatever else.
I don't think agency can be defined outside the context of the process that is you. Determinism and randomness are inherent in that process, and someone operating predictably still has agency so long as they're exercising control.
The choices and thoughts were set apart in the response. The ability to choose arises from recognising that the thoughts (which definitely just happen) are not necessarily you. That ability is what you get from observing your own thoughts for a long time (e.g. during meditation).
It, too is a creation of the unconscious mind. It tends to stay conscious for a period of a few minutes, then fade for a few seconds while we scan the environment, then it recreates.
You can track this in an MRI scanner with the "default network", or by meditation, or by psychedelic drugs (careful with that last one).
Then realize that the "death/rebirth" of the self occurs multiple times per day, not once per life, and re-think how you understand religion.
And each re-creation of self can be a new entity, a chance to drop an old thought/habit and pick up a new.
You should have some attachment to earlier "yous", love is real and powerful and you should love yourself, but those prior selfs are not the totality of you and you can also love without attachment, mark some of that prior self as past and gone never to return.
My wife threw out some cut tulips this morning. They still had their petals, but they were cut a week ago and she thought they were fading. She really loves tulips.
There have been experiments on split brain patients (where there Corpus Callosum has been severed, so their two hemispheres no longer communicate), that seem to imply that the self is more of a way of monitoring and understanding what's going on and tying it all together.
For example, asking the subject, whispered in one ear, so only one hemisphere receives the request - "can you get me a can of Coke from the vending machine please, I'm really thirsty". Then when the subject returns, asking the other ear (and hence the other hemisphere) "why did you get that can?" - to which the subject replied "I thought I would need a drink on my way home" - in effect filling in an explanation for the "black box" behaviour their body was expressing.
Think of how you can make a verbal conscious decision to learn how to ride a bike. Then you get on a bike, and you make a verbal conscious decision to keep your arms stable. Even though you made the choice, your arms won't obey you the first time. Because stabilizing limbs rides the line between a conscious and subconscious activity. But you keep making that choice, and eventually your arms obey you. With more practice, your arms obey a choice you haven't made verbally or consciously. You're riding a bike so of course you want your arms to be stable.
The meaning of choice is not just the single incident of a conscious verbal decision. There's a meta choice, where a choice is made many times over many attempts, until the associated action becomes subconscious. That's the only way we can choose to drive, read, speak, ride a bike, swim, and so on.
This extends to emotions. You only know you're angry after you've become angry. It feels like anger comes from somewhere outside of your control. Yet you can still choose to not be angry, even though you already failed. The more you choose not to be angry the less angry you would be.
It also extends to thoughts. Harmless intrusive thoughts, or distracting useless thoughts, or painful thoughts, all of these pop in without choice. You can still practice exerting choice over a subconscious process you can't control. Even though thoughts come from no where, people who meditate often (pretty quickly too in my own case) exert control over that subconscious area and stop thoughts from even happening.
> with practice, I can choose whether to inhabit them, or simply note them with quiet amusement and let them pass by. I can also pick something to concentrate on, and stay mostly focused on that, while those extra little thoughts just flutter in the background.
The next level is when you realize that these choices of how to respond, too, arise and resolve themselves spontaneously.
We don't exhibit complete control over our thoughts, that is provably impossible and anecdotally obvious when reflecting on errant thoughts we have experienced.
Free will is about behavior, not thoughts. Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.
Ha, it's like Hume said. If your actions and thoughts depend on past events and biological and environmental stimulus, they are not free, they are conditioned, they are a reaction to past experience. And the alternative would be random actions, and random is not free, it's random.
That makes a good distinction. Is he taking one side or the other though? Seems to me like deterministic != free, and random also != free. So maybe nothing is free?
Depends on definitions. If we consider "free" someone completely self determined, independent of anything outside itself, unconditioned, yes, then there is nothing that is free.
Color, the scent of a flower, music, a delicious meal, beauty, struggle, love, meaning, free will. These things only exist in your mind. If objective reality exists at all, it is of vanishingly small importance.
Well, does someone who can't control their thoughts really control their own behavior? Is there any basis for thought/behavior that science knows of, that is not physiological? Scientists have never put out a press release saying "we've discovered that there are non-physiological processes called 'will' that actually make you even more in control than previously suspected". It's always the other way around - they find that things we used to assign to "will", are in fact caused by something else.
> Our free will is demonstrated by our ability to consciously choose whether and how to act when presented with thoughts and emotions.
This is nonsensical, because choice is a thought before it is an action, and we accept that we do not control the comings and goings of our own thoughts.
Anyone who has had a panic attack or suffered from a social anxiety will tell you that you cannot always choose behaviour. Sometimes you simply cannot get your body to do what you will it to.
Imo, recognizing that there are some uncontrollable thoughts is part of the general trend of acknowledging the close connection of mental health to physical health. The existence of "lizard" characteristics to the brain doesn't invalidate free will, but they're so rarely pointed out that it's useful to notice them.
There is no distinction between "lizard" and non-lizard thoughts. Every that that arises in your brain originates with processes far below the level of consciousness, you don't have control over the upstream causes that are in motion long before you are aware of any conscious thought.
Even accepting that deterministic framework, I think there's still a distinction in that the lizard-thoughts are missing some metadata that comes with the thoughts we recognize as conscious.
(Note: I'm not sure if you're suggesting there is a "you" or not.) While I'm of course a mass of stuff that feels and thinks, I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs. I feel like that about half the time. The other half, I forget, and live "normally". I also don't feel like I'm part of some interconnected world organism or anything like that.
To the ~5 people I've described that to, they mostly show some kind of alarm, like they didn't realize I held such dangerous views. I guess in some people the same worldview might manifest as a sociopath personality that excuses reckless behavior, or a person with no drive that wastes their days away. In my case, I'm hypersensitive about harming people, I'm fairly risk averse, and I'm borderline obsessed with keeping high "productivity".
I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that. So I do find the narrative shifts from "I accomplished X because I decided to" and becomes "I spent time on X, and I'm glad that happened, it was fun, and I'm glad I find that fun".
I hope I'm not getting too off topic given the original article. Self/consciousness/free-will debates can go on forever, so my ideal outcome is somebody says "yeah, that is pretty weird, pretty magical, oh well!". But more often it's met with "ah, don't be so negative, you can control yourself, if you try!".
> I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs.
I was curious about this. You mean it feels as if you are a little person sitting inside your skull, watching the "you" movie? Or you meant something different?
Yep, that's what I mean. And movie maybe implies too much action/drama/plot... Maybe it's more like a surveillance camera! I'd say it's just a general dampening of predictions, emotions, and explanations.
Instead of saying "I want my next job to be X", it's "I wonder what my next job will be". Instead of saying "I'm taking a walk to place Y", it's "I wonder where I'm walking to". Of course I can tell myself a destination, but statistically, I know it's far from certain. Looking backwards, instead of saying "You should have said hi to your neighbor", it's more like "I wonder why I acted that way". And it's not always in the direction of being helpless. Sometimes it's "I wonder why I'm exercising so much today".
At one point today, walking, I thought "I'm moving my left foot, I'm moving my right foot, my foot is touching the ground, it's weird that I don't usually think about this". That's meditation-ish, like watching the breath as a swinging gate, appreciating a normally automatic process for a bit. In my opinion, this goes beyond just breathing and walking, and extends into processes like writing and talking - words just kind of come. You can revise them and slow them down, but if you can step back, you might feel words just coming out of nowhere. Sam Harris, mentioned by others in this thread, has also described speech as being surreal in this way.
What do you think about the idea of meditation being about temporarily stop reacting to the movie? As if the watcher is often very involved with what happens in the movie, but during meditation he lets go of the the involvement?
That seems pretty valid. Not to make it overly analytical, but perhaps it's like meditation is a lab/training environment where you can press pause on the movie, look around in a 360 degree view, rewind a tad, press play again. But there's no urgent situation forcing you to be "very involved" as you say, and any goal-oriented processes can be paused. Kind of a mini-sabbatical - you know nobody is getting "paid" for the next 20 minutes, so it's not a big deal what happens.
Sounds a vaguely like depersonalisation, although I'm against this trend of pathologising every little thing that might be unusual about the human experience.
> I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that.
There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that you live in an environment that plays to your strengths, and that it’s somewhat arbitrary.
I have an aptitude for academic study and have always simply enjoyed it. Happily, I live in a society that rewards that. I’m also short, left handed and wear glasses. I would have fared less well in pre-industrial times. I’m extremely fortunate to have been born when and where I was.
Where would they come from in some alternate reality? What would the difference in your perception be if you weren't just watching a movie of your own life but where actually in charge of your thoughts? It's hard for me to imagine it being any different.
(It sounds like you're saying you largely also view life as happening to you, but maybe I'm wrong). There's maybe no point in even making a distinction between life-as-movie and life-as-commander, especially if people aren't choosing the camp they fall in!
I would posit there are correlations like "people who view life as something that happens to them tend to enjoy it more, when their economic and political circumstances are good, and enjoy it less when their circumstances are bad". And "people who view themselves as controlling their life enjoy life in a wider variety of conditions". I think some call this internal/external locus of control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control)
You could probably extend those correlations to things like "societies with an overall internal locus of control tend to support the death penalty more", or "societies with an external locus of control tend to believe in magic more". Whether or not these are useful correlations, I don't know ;)
From my own practice and what I've read / been taught, it's wrong to be labeling the thoughts, your either simply paying attention to raw experience or you're not. Once you start telling yourself it's good (or bad), you're not longer just an observer you're a participant.
By wrong I don't mean to say you're doing anything wrong, but it's not in the spirit of objective mindful meditation.
From my own practice, it's help me to accept the good and bad times, or what I'd usually think of good and bad, as more of a movie and put the bad times in a little more perspective.
It's something like what burrows is saying. I don't know if I'm implementing it as intended, but I first heard of "labeling" when reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It seemed silly/trivial at first, but I later started just trying to categorize my thoughts. I found that there were actually surprisingly few buckets that my idle thoughts fell into.
I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:
- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life)
- B: chores I need to do and social debts
- C: money, and whether I have enough
- D: what will the future be like?
- E: food, sex, safety
- F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"
I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.
I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.
- We have an executive center in our prefrontal cortex which we use to create thoughts and compel the actions we want, it maps pretty closely to most people's ideas of consciousness, free will etc.
- We also have other parts of our brain which have their own agendas and are constantly creating thoughts of varying intensity
- Our executive center can mediate or override those impulses with some level of success, less than 100%. We can increase or decrease that success rate over time, but how to do so is only partially understood. Unfortunately, factors like psychiatric disorders can decrease this success rate dramatically.
- Meditation can influence the success rate too. Mostly for the better but it can go both ways. That's not always its purpose and it's perhaps less effective than more modern techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy.
I think this is probably a bit oversimplified but not too far from where the science is.
My experience might be similar in a way, in that when I started meditating I became aware in a more direct way of how self-referential my mind was. It does things, but then it also does things that can observe it doing things. That is both interesting and liberating, in that there are processes I can't control (which I think aligns with your feeling of lack of free will), but also processes which I can can control. It is quite comforting to feel like I'm not trapped on a single level of thought, which is sometimes uncontrollable.
I think you’d enjoy reading Selfie by William Storr. It talks a lot about the left brain observer and various experiments that have observed what you’re talking about.
There's the idea that the world is a simulation. I believe it is, but not in the "Matrix" kind of way - more that everything you perceive and experience is a "model" of the outside world that your brain has constructed from the various input signals.
You only see a partial reconstruction, a projection of the outside world, literally Plato's cave (the cave being the skull). Sometimes things come in from outside (what you see etc) but most activity is internal.
Your thoughts are nothing more than the emerging patterns of neuronal activity formed by semi-stochastic responses of your constantly shifting brain connectivity. In many ways, they are random.
I mean, in a sense you are locked into what you are going to do anyway. Even if you think you have a choice, there’s always only one action you will actually take.
That kind of makes me sad, because I’d branch down a lot of paths if I could, but it doesn’t exactly disturb me.
What waits at the end of that path, now that disturbs me.
I'm not meditating and had the same thought/expiernce/revelation.
My direct thought (me) what I feel is me, is trying to influence the rest of me and it just not always work.
One theory is, that you are reading/expierincing what already happened (like subseconds ago) and you can only try to influence the upcoming behavior of your whole system.
No, they certainly shouldn't... for various reasons I did a vipassana 10 day silent retreat back in 2010, and, ended up triggering a bipolar episode[0]. No, there was no history of that in my family, it was a complete surprise.
This obviously doesn't happen to everyone doing it, but, while my blog is very much buried now, I still get yearly mails from people saying that the same thing happened to them..
I quit on day 5. My life started playing itself in my head on repeat and I started to focus on all the pain. I would imagine the universe dying and coming back to life where everything, especially some nasty events would reoccur ad infinitum. I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it.
I had a panic attack, and then another and finally talked to the teacher who agreed that I should leave.
I'm sorry to hear that - and I hope you're doing fine now. I really didn't have any "bad" experience like that (mania is awesome fun ;)), of course, the downside was depression followed by years of medication. They make such a deal about it being a "bad idea to leave midway through" ... I'm glad your teacher said you should (although even then, they're really ejecting you in what must be a pretty vulnerable situation). Anyway, hope you're doing fine now.
That's what I was hoping for! just kidding. But no, for the most part I think I'm totally fine and I don't think vipassana caused anything new, I've always had intrusive thoughts and trouble focusing, but in general I'm fairly successful and lead a pretty normal life. Who knows what would have happened had I stayed, it's quite possible that things would have been much worse. I know I felt emotionally drained for a few weeks afterwards and almost numb.
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.
Buddhism is basically (basically) predicated on the idea, I don't see why it's horrible to acknowledge the possibility, especially if it could be true.
I wonder if a lot of the original Buddhist cosmology was based on the experiences of meditators having what we now call psychotic episodes, which they would have seen as a glimpse of reality.
Buddhism also says that an end to suffering in this lifetime is incredibly rare, something that qualifies you not just as an arahant but as a full Buddha. The claim that full Buddhahood is possible is obviously interesting - it implies that meaningful developments in enlightenment are very possible even after the conventional four stages of awakening - but obviously it's something that can only be explored by arahants who have completed these four stages. (And there's enough controversy about even the mere existence of modern arahatship, so the claim that it might at some time become common enough to make further progress feasible is even more speculative!)
I had a similar experience that I might be able to explain logically.
I was thinking about death, the exact moment of death, and thought about the last sensation felt by a dying person.
I had a thought that the last affect you experience subjectively never goes away. That if you feel horrible at the moment of your death, subjectively that feeling never goes away.
That idea and feeling shook me and made me think of heaven and hell being abstractions of the last subjective affect that you are ”stuck” with.
I understand that this is nonsense, but it ties well together with abstract consepts about soul and afterlife and logic in a way that allowed my mind to create a model it, and feel all the horrible outcomes of that model.
The model felt plausible enough to trigger strong emotion.
It did not trigger anything long lasting - just a momentary feeling of terror.
I had a similar feeling of terror as a kid, thinking about death and eternity one night in bed and suddenly experiencing terror. The best way I could describe it was this vast eternal concept of nothingness forever that scared me with the immensity of infinity. In a way I’m kinda grateful for that experience now as it’s led me down a path of learning about meditation and eventually a lot of the things described in this thread.
Here’s something you might like to ponder as an alternative perspective (though I can imagine there’s fear of going back there).
What would be the implication if the passage of time is only an illusion created by memory? What if every moment in our lives is experienced simultaneously, but it only appears to move forwards because we experience each of those moments individually - each containing some memory of moments before. After all it’s not possible to experience any other moment than this one, right now, so we don’t have any subjective evidence that we (as awareness) even experience anything other than a single moment.
In other words, even if awareness persists outside death, when memory dies with the brain how can there be any perception of time - what would it even be that experiences eternity?
So some of that was definitely going through my head during the meditation. I kept thinking about someone I know who committed suicide and how desperate their last moments must have felt and coupled with the idea that they might live those moments over and over over-amplified everything.
It also made me wonder whether or not there are any efforts to create messages that could potentially persist an event like the universe contracting into another tight ball of energy followed by another big bang. The whole idea being that we could pass messages to future iterations of existence in the hopes that the world wouldn't play itself out exactly as it did before. That's some scifi stuff right there :)
Honestly, it felt a lot like I was on psychedelics but without the visuals. I tried LSD once and mushrooms twice and there's this loop of thoughts and feelings that bubbles to the surface which felt very familiar during my meditation.
I honestly can't say what it is exactly but I do sometimes have intrusive thoughts which I learned recently is a form of OCD but only comes up in stressful situations, so maybe that was it?
A few minutes a day of calming your mind and being still in your body is a lot different.
I suspect the author's 20 minutes a day of meditation was a bit more intense than just that. They describe voraciously reading Zen literature and also describe strong personal Christian beliefs.
And why would you keep meditating intensely every day after you've started experiencing these symptoms? Wouldn't you want to back off a little at that point?
It seems like people "abuse" meditation the same way people abuse hallucinogenic drugs, losing all sense of moderation and going too far with the psychonaut exploration stuff.
Maybe also some people are unusually susceptible to these negative effects, and/or are unusually susceptible to being swept up in the spiritual quest fervor. I think this is the author's thesis, and fine, point taken. Those people in particular need to stay away from intense practice and should probably seek out a guide. But I think the majority of people don't have this problem.
I mediated an average of 10-15 hours/week for about 10 years, and... it didn't do much for me.
What instead did a lot for me was Zen Practice:
- going to the temple
- going to retreat
- Zen reading
- Dharma talks
- Interview with the Zen Masters
- Working at the Temple
And then, meeting the inflated ego of some - but not all - the Zen characters in low-level leadership.
I still practice Zen, but I do it as a Free-Agent LOL
Recently I realized something, not so much achieving Nirvana, more like a DUH-moment: mediation is practice for mindfulness, and at any point in time, no matter where I am, no matter what I do, I can practice mindfulness. Here, I am doing it right now...
And don't get me started in all the pseudo-meditation practices and "applications".
Good insight. Seems to me people who doubt the usefulness of mindfulness are looking too close. It's obvious, the hard part is staying in that DUH moment, we are built to over-think :)
Coincidentally Mingyur Rinpoche just posted a talk about this as well [1]. I think the most important thing is to find a lineage to practice under, with texts that can support that practice. As much as people want to divorce it from it's historical context, meditation is part of a spiritual practice and communities of people have ways of teaching it in particular ways for a reason. No one should just go sit with zero context and no support.
>No one should just go sit with zero context and no support.
C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense.
Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretically be, necessarily have anything all that critical to add to the subjective experience of simply sitting quietly. Just like the practices and teachings that accompany many organized religions, a lot of meditative lingo and theories about meditative "progress" is, IMHO, horseshit peddled by people who have decided to make a living selling said horseshit or have defined themselves by their unquestioning acceptance of said horseshit.
edit: I should add that I can recognize that, as others discuss in this thread, deep meditation over long periods may trigger various psychological issues for some people. However, it's also true that, for example, eating food can be extremely problematic for some people who have serious eating disorders. That doesn't mean that the mere act of eating, which most people manage to do just fine, somehow needs to be guided by some deep tradition, and I don't believe that sitting in meditation needs such guidance in general either. For most people, meditation is a very gentle, mildly restorative practice that aids mood and focus, not some metaphysically shattering cataclysm.
It's like programming. You don't need anyone's support or help to pick it up and start building things. If you don't seek out resources, though, you are liable to fall into bad habits and constantly reinventing the wheel.
Meditation sometimes leads to weird or difficult experiences. That's just like any other effortful activity we engage in. There's many who have encountered similar problems before us and their guidance could mean the difference between astagnant practice and reaching what one aspires to.
Strongly disagree. There's more to meditation than just sitting quietly. I'd say it's more analogous to breaking out of a sandboxed VM and gaining read/write access to the underlying OS and kernel.
My personal anecdote - I developed a difficult-to-control, anxiety-inducing thought* while dabbling in meditation a couple of years ago. I experienced a week or two worth of extreme anxiety, and had a panic attack. To this day, the obsessive thought is still with me and causes occasional distress. I can't say with certainty that the meditation practice was the cause, but the timing coincides, and I've never experienced anything like this prior to the meditation practice.
* not exactly a thought, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It's more of an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception toward sensations which I perceive as uncomfortable and disturbing.
It sounds like intrusive thoughts. Some (a lot of?) people have thoughts that pop up in certain contexts where they are incredibly unwanted and they can be disturbing to experience.
This is a difficult topic for me to articulate, so the below explanation is merely my best effort to express the experience in words.
The perception of my own heartbeat is something that I've always been squeamish about, but for most of my life it was never a problem. It made me a bit uncomfortable during high intensity exercise, but it was easy enough to just ignore.
During meditation, I began to perceive my heartbeat more intensely than ever before, and it became a "center of gravity" that my attention would often "fall into". My attention would gravitate toward intense perception of my heartbeat not only while meditating, but also at other times (while trying to fall asleep, while trying to focus on work, while driving), and paired with my pre-existing squeamishness, this became very uncomfortable. I might go through most of my day normally, but as soon as my mind becomes idle for a bit, or if something triggers me to start thinking about my heart, my mind will uncontrollably gravitate toward perceiving my heartbeat, and I'll struggle to ignore my heartbeat and to focus on other things.
My strategy at the time was to attempt to become more comfortable with my heartbeat through continued meditation. I thought that by deliberately focusing on my heart during meditation rather than trying to ignore it, I could "fight the monster face-to-face", kill off the squeamish feeling, and learn to perceive my heartbeat as a benign sensation.
Unfortunately, I developed a delusion that I might gain the ability to consciously control my heartbeat (analogously to how we can consciously control our breathing when we think about it), and that I'd injure or kill myself because I'm not at all qualified to exercise that kind of control. I convinced myself that this is impossible because the heart uses its own pacemaker, unlike the lungs which are controlled by the nervous system. But this didn't kill the delusion - it just transformed it into a more vague anxiety, centered around the notion that I might be inadvertently abusing whatever regulatory connections exist between my heart and my brain. I think this delusion is really just a transformation of the visceral squeamishness that I originally felt when I began perceiving my heartbeat, into a more cerebral form of "squeamishness". I made the decision to stop meditating a couple years ago, but the delusion still lurks in my subconscious and comes back from time to time.
So to summarize, when it first began, the uncontrollable heartbeat perception paired with the squeamishness/delusion caused a lot of agony for about two weeks. I've gotten significantly better at ignoring my heartbeat and not being so troubled by it, but it's a problem that I haven't been able to completely get over.
I've heard about a similar thing happening to someone on a Goenka Vipassana retreat. The sound from their heartbeat became too overwhelming for them and they had to stop.
Maybe taking refuge in the impermanence of that feeling could help? That the squeamishness is just a state of mind and like all things arises from emptiness (sunyata) and returns to it? But yeah, putting away the practice sounds completely reasonable in this case.
In a Thai tradition I practiced a bit from they'd tell you to not focus your attention and awareness on anything above the heart center at the beginning, to really just keep it at the naval, as these sorts of difficulties with the body aren't uncommon.
I think maybe we're talking about different things, and it certainly doesn't help that we're trying to translate concepts from sanskrit, pali, apabhra?sa, abahatta, etc. that don't necessarily have great translations into an English speaking society without much of a tradition in these things.
I absolutely agree that anyone can (and should!) sit quietly in a room and breath. That could probably fall under a category of beginner pranayama or pratyahara. Physical yoga or qi gong practice is also a great thing to undertake as it begins to develop awareness of breath and sensation at this stage.
But I think what a lot of others here are discussing is a meditation practice that has a goal of uncovering deeper layers of consciousness and realizing the nature of mind. Without support that can be quite overwhelming. If it isn't for you, that's wonderful! It definitely was for me.
OP: "I'm not an expert, having only a superficial understanding of this ancient and nuanced practice, but let me write a clickbaity hot take on it with all the confidence of a master/expert."
Meditation is not just one thing, there are many traditions and many forms, some can lead to strange side effects, in fact, some document those side effects on their map towards their goal.
Every culture has forms of meditation, for example some prayers that christian monks do are mindfulness meditation. See David Fontana's "The Meditator's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Eastern and Western Meditation Techniques" for a overview of many forms of meditations across cultures.
One thing that is not emphasized enough about meditation is to explore why you want to meditate, what you expect out of it. Different answers to that questions will lead to different practices. My understanding though is that if done in an intensive manner, all forms of meditation converge and have side effects.
Finding a good teacher is important, the issue is to how... There is no easy answer, but there is a lot of information online, do your homework about particular practices and what to expect, their risks, etc... and trust your gut instincts. Don't take red flags lightly, talk to friend and family, see a professional if in doubt.
I have been meditating for the last 28 years and I meditate 2-3 hours a day, every day, without fail. Still don’t consider myself an expert and I am not a teacher although when pushed, I will sit with someone sincere and meditate with them. If they ask.
The question is not whether everyone should meditate or not. The question is whether “I should meditate?” And if the answer to that is yes, try and find someone who knows what they are doing. If they charge you something, that’s fine, they need to make a living. If they charge you so much they make you weak—-run. If they in any way try to come between you and your friends or family—-run.
I cannot say if meditation is for everyone because I am not everyone. I am me, and meditation has had a mind-blowing effect on my life. And with it (because of it) I can work (I’m an engineer) and know I am not working, I can do, and know I am not doing, and perhaps best of all, be, without blaming anyone.
Grew up in a continent of many legendary arahant monks (in Thailand), I would say legit lessons have been lost a lot in the past century, to the point that, as of today I don't think I can trust any living monk as a teacher, it's also very hard to find direct descendants of passed away arahant monk. We call this trustworthy monk "Forest monk" who you barely saw/see them, they were/are mostly in deep jungle.
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.
Just because I've done LSD multiple times without psychosis, doesn't mean that LSD can't cause psychosis in some people. I believe it is the same with meditation. As much as some think meditation is beneficial, the effective sample size is 1.
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?
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
One of the points about meditation is about being present, fully experiencing the present moment. By fully experiencing every present moment, you fully experience your life. The opposite would be living perpetually in the future or in the past; not living your life, but continuously preparing to start living it some day.
In your example, the beavers being present and building a dam/collecting fruits are in fact the equivalent of skilled meditators. Dave 'lost in his thoughts' is a person unskilled in meditation, the default situation for a lot of people a lot of the time. Consider how many hours a week people tend to spend distracting themselves, 'lost in their thoughts' - time better spent just sitting and doing nothing, getting bored, and then getting an urge to be creative - like when you were a child.
> Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
My understanding is that this actually highlights the "meaninglessness" of enlightenment -- but you don't know what you missed if you never went through that phase.
And, my personal interpretation is that, given that one already went through all that trouble to attain it, it must have some profound meaning by definition. (To the "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" vibe.)
> And, my personal interpretation is that, given that one already went through all that trouble to attain it, it must have some profound meaning by definition.
Wouldn't this depend on what "profound" means? The "lean" model of enlightenment favored by Daniel Ingram and other modern practitioners is that it's really about progressively dispensing with the psychological "need" or "craving" for some sort of personal identity (in the philosophical sense). It's one thing to reveal that personal identity is an illusion (that's comparatively easy in many ways), another thing entirely to restructure your underlying thinking process so as to fully engage with the world without needing to constantly refer back to that basic worldview. There's plenty of room for disagreement as to whether that's 'profound' enough!
Yeah, but is there any hard data supporting the idea that enlightened people (or people who meditate, or whatever) are more creative or do more interesting things with their time?
My vague understanding was that, given any objective measurement of psychological "success", enlightened people are statistically indistinguishable from un-enlightened people.
If they aren't, it certainly seems non-obvious to me. The world hasn't been taken over by a wave of super-mindful people who use their awareness of their own emotions to make the best decisions about everything.
This sort of thing comes up now and again, and all I can really say is: don't harm yourself by doing this incorrectly or without the proper support. If you're meditating intensively like a sesshin or a retreat, you really need some kind of experienced teacher or access to a proper community to help you deal with this kind of stuff.
I am a practicing buddhist of the Zen variety, and I certainly couldn't do a 10 day vipassana retreat, even after actual years of practicing staring at a wall. People who expect to be able to do this kind of stuff, with a 'teacher' that got his/her credentials by sending off 500 dollars to deepak chopra without such things happening are misguided at best and being taken advantage of (read: suckers).
There are no shortcuts, look after your health, don't overdo it. Don't pay charlatans.
A helpful concept from Thomas Keating is "the evacuation of the unconscious". The idea is that it is normal to have painful thoughts arise into our consciousness when we enter into meditation. It is common in ordinary life to get into the habit of filling one's life with noise and distraction, in order to keep sources of anxiety or other negative emotions at bay. Meditation lessens the noise and distraction, which has the natural effect of making room for the suppressed thoughts and emotions to pop up. In meditation practice one learns to gently refrain from engaging with emotionally charged material, noticing it with objectivity and detachment, letting it pass by, and returning to a state of calm wordless awareness. In the natural course of events, suppressed fears and anxieties are much less powerful when looked at consciously and rationally. One ends up taking them less seriously, and consequently they tend to lessen in terms of their ability to cause unhappiness. Circling back to the point of the OP, if an attempt at meditation practice starts causing psychotic episodes or anything of that nature, don't do it. That's just common sense.
This is my experience as well. You gain self awareness and it helps your focus. I haven't experienced ghosts or orbs myself. The author should question his own sanity instead of being concerned with others.
Your positive experience doesn't discount others' unpleasant one. Through meditation you can reach deep into the unconscious.
The safe approach is to start with practices that get you more in touch with the body, that get you to become more aware of the body. If you are grounded in the body, it's a lot easier to face whatever unpleasant emotions or sensations might come up.
Such a claim can't be disproven. But the author doesn't have any really good argument why somebody shouldn't try meditation.
In my opinion, if you can "think" yourself into something like a dangerous psychosis, then that is not a problem of sitting down too much, it is a problem that should be addressed through other channels like proper medical help.
Yes, there are sharlatans, sects, whatever, but that's not what I mean by "meditation".
Every major school or lineage originating from Sanathana Dharma insists on the importance of a guru's guidance and/or initiation. Yet people decide to ignore it and think Apps can/should replace a guru.
Going it alone comes with its risks, there are many who have done it having taken extreme plunges, some throwing away their last piece of clothing (or their kingdoms) to erase themselves of the memory & attachment to their past.
Bringing it into our narrow world view trivialises this seeking, yes it is not the same, few people have true seeking to understand/experience reality.
This post reminds me of the book : Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness, by David A. Treleaven. It explains how incompetent meditation can awaken and reinforce trauma, while a competently handled meditation can be part of the toolbox to heal it.
People with OCD [0] should consider doing less meditation, IMO.
I find that meditation can lead me into rumination traps where I make no progress.
I sometimes have to set myself deadlines or checkpoints to make sure that I do not ruminate my way out of available time.
What I tend to need instead is breathing techniques to stay and cope within the moment, which I accept is like task-focussed micro-meditation in a way. But deliberate, long quiet meditation rarely helps me and it can make things worse.
[0] by which I mean the debilitating condition, not the pop-culture joke about pointing out pictures aren't straight or kerning on some signage is wrong
Having a life-long love affair with Japanese Zen, and a ten year zazen practice, the most useful insight for me comes from Claire Gesshin Greenwood's book, Bow First, Ask Questions Later. <quote> Most teachers of Zen, in Japan at least, will tell you that Zen is "not about thinking," and that practice is something you do primarily with your body. </quote> Soto Zen's practice of Shinkantaza, 'Just Sitting' fits well this. It's the posture, stupid.
A few more snippets from Gesshin's book: In the Zen tradition especially, there is a lot of emphasis placed on "not thinking." In "Universal Instructions for Zazen", Dogen Zenji wrote, "Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking. Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen."
So generally (in Japanese Zen) the advice given is to just practice without trying to understand what is happening, because the only way to actually learn something is to engage with the thing itself without adding your own idea. If you add your own idea, then you are just engaging with your idea, not the thing you are trying to learn. I should add that this is all advice that I have personally received.
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