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
> 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
while this is valid, one should take it with a pinch of salt of Not Invented Here Syndrome as meditation is generally a practice of the 'East' and there is a nervousness that it is a gateway drug to the eastern religions for the Christian / rational 'West'.
Well, in my OP that you responded to, I used "eastern mystic bullshit" to explain where I was coming from and why I initially rejected meditation. It was always only something I'd hear brought up from a dread-locked vagabonding white guy with a mandala tattoo on his chest and the desperate need for deodorant.
Sam Harris makes the case that you can save the baby (mindfulness) from the bathwater (superstition, etc.) and that these practices were onto something because we share a common human experience.
Why not listen to his first chapter that I linked? I can almost guarantee that you would agree with him. You are just having a knee-jerk reaction to what you think is going on. Harris covers the exact things you think you're trying to point out.
Also, let's drop the skin-color bullshit. I reject all religion and superstition the same way I reject astrology, which is why I need a rationalist approach to have my mind re-opened to some of these ideas like mindfulness which are almost always couched in superstition. Sam Harris is precisely trying to do this and he starts that chapter making the case for it to people like me who immediately cringe at a loaded word "spirituality".
>Other gurus teach that meditation is “doing nothing”. Okay, but then again there’s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time.
Eastern spirituality sees "nothing" or nothingness as a spiritual place to relax in and be.
Western religions see "nothing" as something that can't exist. That nothing is impossible for Christ.
One function of prayer and meditation is to organize your thoughts and let go of thoughts and aims that are not helpful, sometimes called Sin. You can let them go into nothingness (eastern), into the altar of fire (catholicism) or let them flow away (anglican/methodist). You can also use prayer to aim and think about things that are good for you and you do want.
If you want real detail, John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series [0] does the history of spirituality as a psycho-technology, cog-sci breakdown.
It is very good and leads into discussions with him and Curt Jaimungal [1] on the Theories of Everything channel, which has a slightly more Eastern and hyper-intellectual physics blend to it.
The practice of prayer and meditation has been degraded by practicing psychologists and pop culture. Stay away from that stuff, it eats into the prayer life and meditation from the inside or bottom-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".
Meditation in the context of these bobo articles is just prayer for westerners who hate Christianity. It's a warped solipsistic form of prayer, however. Of course if they knew a damn thing about real Buddhism or Hinduism they'd avoid using terms from those religions, too.
If you're crazy then I am bonkers. I'm having a hard time accepting that this and most of the comments are not some elaborate joke. Meditation is some kind of relaxation or productivity life hack? To observe even briefly the nature of one's own mind requires following some kind of formula or system? Bah, humbug!
When I read this sort of thing I can't help but wonder whether the problem is with the person here rather than with meditation per se. Like I can't imagine a person with a healthy state of mind thinking "Gee, I need to meditate intensely for 8+ hours a day for fourteen days."
It sounds crazy already. No wonder it turned out badly.
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.
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.
This piece reads like some westerner that hasn't practiced meditation in any way before. Which imo, leads to the stupid trap that a lot of westerners like to believe in meditation and make an effort to do it as some sort of "healthy" lifestyle choice (a la Sam Harris; although I do admire his work). Just because you did a retreat for a few weeks by no means opened the stars in your eyes and changed the world. You're not special, we all die. The fact that you came to some profound conclusion on your own is not any more special than someone else going to lunch at McDonalds for the day. Solitude for some reason is championed as some sort of virtuous among westerners, but seen as a weird thing if it's done too much, thus canceling out it's positive aspect. Why? Because you become a self centered asshole that's why.
Jim Carey has a quote on it and I 100% wholly agree with it:"Solitude is dangerous. It’s very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realize how peaceful and calm it is. It’s like you don’t want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy."
I bring this up because I myself have been a borderline schizoid through middle school through college. All it did was made the world flat and filled with pessimism for myself. You begin to really see and understand the world for what it is...except you have no power to influence it to work for you. You get stuck in a rut that makes you go back and hide in your solitude of misery. You realize it's a safe space for any thinking and engagement. But you forget to interact with people.
From 10-21, I said a rosary, various other prayers, and read the bible, and then reflected on that piece of scripture in my life or just let my mind wander while I read it. Every. Single. Day. If I missed for whatever weird reason, I made up for it by doing it twice that next day, which was extremely rare. What you learn in solitude, you ignore in real life. What you don't know in real life, increases your anxieties in solitude. Leading to a viscous cycle of self centered cynicism.
The biggest irony about all these western revelations about solitude are the exact things religions that exist have been preaching for centuries. Praying to god or going "ohm" for 2 hours at the end of the day achieves the same objective in that you pretend like what you're doing is beneficial when in reality it's not and it's just a waste of time.
>> Though yoga and meditation were originally intended as ways to calm the ego, many non-Buddhist practitioners do these activities with an eye to self-improvement or calming personal anxieties.
I have noticed meditation being pitched more and more as a self-help/productivity tool/cure all for a range of issues. Is the main difference between 'traditional' (for lack of a better word) and Western meditation just the motive behind it, or is there something else Westerners are missing?
>It's important to bear in mind that meditation is a religious practice specifically aimed at causing ego-death.
This is true for far Eastern styles of meditation, but it's not true for Christian meditation[1]. It aims to fill the mind rather than to empty it. In general Christian meditation is practiced more by the various Eastern Christian Churches, but there are Western traditions as well. I'm by no means an adept at the practice, but it has benefited me pragmatically and spiritually.
Side note on the "mystic flavor" yoga (as oppose to plain "mindfullness meditation" and "yoga for back pains") and other "eastern" spirituality things: I think there's a reason why there are so many initiation ceremonies and tasks that one was/is traditionally put to do before going-off-the-deep-end, and why ancient hindus saw being a yogi as a path for one that was of a certain age and already had a family and proved itself capable of functioning in society - to weed out anyone with preexisting mental health conditions. You even see this pattern in the story of Buddha's life - he was a socially capable young prince born in a loving family and had no frustrations and most material needs fully satisfied. And also for the zen philosophy attitude of "but don't take these things too seriously" - to prevent people from actually "drowning" in these mystical visions and loosing any contact with reality.
Overall I think that a lot of people would benefit from the occasional mystical perspective on life. It's awesome for creative problem solving! And most people have become a bit too secular and boring. But if they go on and apply the "work hard on it and take it seriously" pattern to spirituality they'll just go and OD on it.
The "westernly refined eastern spirituality" seems as close to the original thing as purified cocaine is to chewed coca leaves: very different concentrations, very different use scenarios. How can it not go wrong for the more psychology sensitive individuals among us?
People should go and read/listen some of Allan Watts' book/recordings. You can try starting with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8130_-3d3PA . He had some good ideas on how to use an occasional mystical perspective to enrich one's life, without taking it too seriously and completely loosing it. Mind it, I don't agree with most of his ideas, but they are still better than what others are selling.
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
My intent was to single out a-spiritual meditation. Meditation that occurs as part of an established program of spiritual practice, that goes along with other aspects of religion within a centuries old framework is obviously the opposite of weird. It is normal.
Whether what you call crisis events that are part of the process is == psychotic episodes seems dubious to me. The psychosis I hear reported from more extreme “aspiritual” meditators doesn’t sound productive but disabling and in many cases permanently so. In the context of established religion, such things are “selected against” in the Darwinian sense. Anything that’s part of the process within the context of a long running time tested religious framework, be it Buddhism, Catholicism, Hasidism etc… must be evolutionarily advantageous (in a institutional not biological sense).
I can't speak for the author of that comment, but here's my take:
When you meditate, you're creating in essence an open space in your mind. (A head space, if you will. I will not, because that's pretentious. But feel free.)
That empty space is an invitation to anything out there that wants to fill it. If you're spiritually minded, you might think of it as an invitation to spirits to come and fill your head with new ideas, and wouldn't you know it, evil spirits love that sort of thing.
If you're secular/rational/scientifically minded, just know that if you calm your mind, you WILL get other thoughts replacing the ones you just calmed down. If you sit down feeling guilty, your meditation will likely be dominated by thoughts of guilt. If you're angry, you'll likely obsess about that anger.
The usual advice I've been given is to let it happen. Let those "evil" thoughts come, take note of them, and then let it go. If they come back (and they always come back), note them again, let them go again.
The danger is if we get attached to these ideas. Then they grow and become the basis for depression or anxiety or any number of other ailments.
The opportunity is to be able to see that these thoughts and feelings aren't any more real than anything else; that we don't have to act on them; we don't have to identify with them; we don't have to let them control or even influence how we really feel, think, and act. They're just passing thoughts. We don't have to hop in their car and go for their ride. We can keep walking.
This reminds me very much of the desacralization of meditation, yoga, and even Buddhism as they are often taught in the West.
The former two in particular are often thought of as nothing more than means for improving one's health or destressing, with little if any appreciation of their religious roots.
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.
6 Reasons to Reject Eastern Meditation and Yoga https://rosilindjukic.com/eastern-meditation-differs-biblica...
I'm bipolar and I meditate - I sit queitly, focus on my breath and try to let my thoughts 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
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