I can't help thinking that most of these examples of negative side effects are related to intensives rather than meditation/mindfulness itself. There's a world of difference between 20 minutes a day and 10 days in a retreat looking inward. Maybe it's just better for you in short bursts, not long marathons. I once experienced negative effects after joining a Buddhist meditation group while at university. Every time I faced anything which provoked anxiety, such as preparation for my final exams, I would turn to meditation assuming it would help me get things done but it had the opposite effect of avoiding what I needed to face. I ended-up spending longer and longer periods meditating but I felt I was getting weaker both physically and neurologically. Eventually, during the end-of-term holiday break, I consulted a doctor who gave me tranquillisers for a few weeks and I left the Buddhist group when I returned to university but it took a while to get back to normal.
These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.
I expect there will be higher cases of psychosis happening on intense retreats, but as anecdotal as this, I had it happen to me (albeit not as extreme as OP) after meditating for much shorter periods (approx 10 minutes up to an hour).
I really did not see it coming. For some context, I don't know of any deep seated trauma that I have and I liked to think of myself as someone robust mentally.
I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. This was really nice for about two weeks. I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system). I experienced huge panic attacks like I have never had before, I carried this constant feeling of absolute dread in my soul, like a sense of impending doom. I have heard it described as the dark night of the soul. Some try to push through this, but I held back as i cannot afford to have a complete meltdown as I need to care for a young family and hold down a job.
I spoke with a well respected meditator about this, and they said the some people are wired to have an accelerated experience and are able to obtain deep introspection with limited time on the cushion.
I would say I am almost back to normal now. I had to stop all meditation and instead focused on health food, sleep habits and lots of exercise. My main mediation type thing is now running, it quietens my mind, but the grounding effect of the movement keeps me in a safe play pen to explore my reality.
meditation is incredibly powerful, in the west we have confused it as being a corporate stress ball that you squeeze or like a lavender scented, candle lit bath while listening to Enya. The truth is, it can reveal incredibly deep seated aspects of ourselves that we are in no way prepared to witness, let alone accept.
Interestingly you describe the shattering of your delusion as the return of your ego - I think it is the opposite. I think you invited an inflated ego into your life through your meditation : "I should become a guru and help humanity" <-- that is ego speaking. The shattering of this idea is is not ego but humility, to my way of thinking.
Meditation and psychology have a specific term for ego, like when referring to ego death. And it doesn't quite mean the same thing as ego in common usage. It usually means a break down of sense of self, this can happen on psychedelics or in schizophrenia. This can also be accompanied with delusions of grandeur, they're not mutually exclusive.
Delusions of granduer is basically an inflated sense of self - e.g. an inflated ego. Whether using the common parlance or the jungian definition, its the same thing in this context.
Always tough to discuss slippery, ill defined things such as ego, which in a real sense does not actually exist.
Usually inflated sense of self means feeling more important than you are. Though linguistically similar is different from the sense of self that you lose from psychedelics and schizophrenia which is literally losing your self of self. You become disconnected from your thoughts and actions. And many schizophrenics experience both.
My mother for instance at one point thought she was Jesus but also thought some of her thoughts or actions were not her own.
Favorited, I'm on a quest to be egoless as I'm finding the ego to be an issue in my day to day. It's hard to pinpoint the ego, but you did so wonderfully :)
I haven't quite achieved an ego death yet through meditation, but reading through a fair amount of psychedelic journeys suggests that eliminating the ego, while perhaps useful and enlightening in moderation, sort of defeats the point of living a life in this world. If the world really does exist simply to provide experiential distraction from the existential dread of being an absolute consciousness in the void (which is a big if), why be in such a rush to get back into that base state? Go experience all the wonders of the world, take risks, spread positivity.
No-self is not really about eliminating the ego, it's about eliminating the craving for an ego. These two are not the same; in fact, the latter seems to be harder. It's why so many meditators anecdotally get stuck in their "Dark Night". I don't know what psychedelic "ego death" does exactly, but I'm skeptical that it addresses craving.
you reminded me of some John lenon comment on ego death :
I got the message that I should destroy my ego and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.
I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”
I was more humouring the situation there and adding some color, but for sure, the ego is incredibly powerful and deep seated. I firmly believe what I had initially was profound, and was hijacked by the ego (and this is a very common happening to anyone on a spiritual journey of some sort).
The best book I've read on this topic is Chögyam Trungpa's "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" [1]. He's very clear in pointing out how ego tries to get involved in everything.
It sounds like you may have had an experience, to some extent, of dwelling in the union of wisdom and emptiness or what some call dharmadhatu [2]. It's not a teaching I encountered until I started practicing Vajrayana, as Theravada teachers don't often emphasize the teachings on sunyata. It's something you'll encounter in Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings.
Had this tab open, should have responded several days ago, not sure that this will help anybody now. Michael Singer's Books have been very helpful to me so far. The whole problem seems to be one's ego and how to deal with it.
Ah, the extent that some people will go through to avoid acknowledging God. It's like some people take stubborn pleasure in being purposely nihilistic and strenuously denying all that's good about the world. How this can be part of a supposedly spiritual practice, I just can't understand.
The original term behind "emptiness" is a lot richer than this english word. That's why many books leave those words as is, e.g. rig-pa.
"Emptiness" of your mind means something like a thin soap bubble around you. This bubble acts as a lens, it can enlarge arbitrary things, it can create stable patterns on its surface, and all that is useful, but it blocks whatever is outside the bubble. In its natural state it would be a perfect invisible sphere, letting you see outside: this union of clarity and emptiness creates wisdom. You are still going to use this bubble as a whiteboard for your thoughts, but you'll also know how to see thru it.
The concept of emptiness applies to material world in general: the western science calls it space-time, the idea that any thing can turn into any other thing, for both are fundamentally just motions of energy that has no natural shape. Buddhism tries to teach this basic idea in different terms.
For some reason that I don't quite understand, the founders of the three religions had fragmented the truth: buddhism teaches wisdom, christianity teaches love and islam teaches action - the three aspects of the spirit. Perhaps they thought that mixing everything into one bag would be too difficult to grasp, or maybe they hope it will make the peoples collaborate to assemble the pieces.
It's quite common to first encounter the teachings on emptiness (sunyata) and be confused into thinking it's about nihilism. However, nihilism is considered one of the two extreme views that leads to suffering in Buddhism -- the other being eternalism -- and both are explicitly argued against. Thich Nhat Hanh has a great book that helps clarify the teachings on sunyata [1].
I also would point out that if anything Buddhism is life-affirming and immensely hopeful, not denying what's good in the world. It teaches that there's a way out of suffering right here and right now, and it's available to every being without exclusion. The fourth noble truth is the spiritual practice to make that happen. Every meditation session in Mahayana and Vajrayana lineages have the common preliminaries, which includes love and compassion for all beings.
They think they are on a journey yo self enlightenment when they're actually in a very dangerous road to spiritual weakness, causing damage to their souls and leaving gaps to be used by entities that they'll not feel any pleasure of knowing.
That sense of impeding doom is nothing more than those spiritual entities oppressing with overwhelming power them by those gaps.
We are locked out of that world for a reason. The safe means to get unlocked is by getting your soul to borrow the power of God and slowly expose yourself to such world. Other than that, self enlightenment is just wishful thinking of empty vessels.
Word. The more I explore the the world of occult practices throughout history the more I am convinced that it is always an excercise in self destruction.
Our intentions, understanding, morality, sense of self, sense of direction, is so frail. A man who believes he can manufacture these things for himself (which is, in my opinion, wfundamentally what occultists are doing) is doomed to spiritual sufferring.
These adverse experiences are the ego's last-ditch effort to maintain cohesion. It's the same with psychedelics. If you let go in the face of the terror and accept, the terror becomes utter bliss.
In response to these experiences, ask "Who exactly are they happening to?"
The "help humanity" part is; the "become a guru" part less so. If anything I'd say the bodhisattva vow is "this is impossible, but I'm going to try it anyways".
It's also just a mind that might be desperate for a core identity after having its last one logically dissolved through introspection.
While ego can hijack identity for it's own mad desires, an identity is required for the actuation of relational actions on a basic level. With no "center" from which to make decisions, the functions of your mind tasked with making choices will panic - this is a foundation of brainwashing/psychological manipulation. Very similar things happen to people who have a TBI, where they become stressed when forced to make choices that seem to have zero baring on "their" lives.
So dissolved identity > Panic attacks when choice-satisfaction plummets > subconscious suggests all kinds of cartoonist extremes for an easy and powerful identity > Conscious mind agrees to play along, uses this character to make decisions about > Choice-satisfaction rises.
"So dissolved identity > Panic attacks when choice-satisfaction plummets > subconscious suggests all kinds of cartoonist extremes for an easy and powerful identity > Conscious mind agrees to play along, uses this character to make decisions about > Choice-satisfaction rises. "
I'm sure it's different for most others, but I had the opposite experience. It has introduced a great calm into my life.
From where I am now, I see identity as the central problem we face as a species.
> From where I am now, I see identity as the central problem we face as a species.
Yeah, except that in practice awareness of no-self is very far from an ethical cure-it-all. There's plenty of supposedly "enlightened" folks in a variety of spiritual traditions who routinely engage in morally sub-standard behavior, despite having reached that awareness themselves and teaching it to others. We know for a fact that many spiritual traditions view correct ethics and behavior as paramount, and as the hardest part of their training.
I remember a clip I'd seen where a veteran with a TBI would break down when shopping, since there's so many choices that are focused at appealing to personality rather than utility, and his notion of his own personality was minimal.
A couple of years ago, I started a light meditation practice (10-20 minutes) and did it for about a month with good results. At that point, I read this article (on Hacker News) and spent the next two years terrified this would happen to me.
I had struggled with panic disorder in the past, but CBT pretty much fixed it for me. This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. It was so terrifying to think that a simple mental process could potentially trigger a breakdown (and like you, I had a family to take care of).
Fast-forward a couple of years, and I'm moving towards the view that these breakdowns are simple anxiety disorders that just happen to be triggered by meditation, in the same way that a panic attack triggered my anxiety disorder when I was young. I don't think there's anything particularly special or mystical about it - it's just our stupid brains activating the fear response, and it appears that the same methods for dealing with anxiety disorders work here.
I feel like in a way I was the control group for an experiment - can a fear of meditation provoke the same response as meditation itself?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612475/ is a review of Britton's research discussed in the article. It presents several points of evidence with a coherent argument for why meditation brings benefits while an excessive level of meditation may cause adverse effects.
It's interesting that anyone even had to specify that excessive meditation could cause harm. Isn't the whole point of Buddhism to follow the "middle way"?
The problem with "excessive X causes harm" is that it is tautologically true. The real question is the quantitative level where it starts doing more harm than good. Nobody knows, but it's easy to say after the fact that something is "excessive".
Yea, but I think 10 days in a row of 12 hours a day meditation might fall on the "excessive" side, right? I mean, I live in a place where Buddhists are pretty common, and none that I know do anything like that. They might go to a retreat in the mountains, but they aren't just sitting there for hours trying to feel their body parts mentally, they do other things, like copy religious texts by hand or take nature walks to appreciate life.
> This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety.
Perhaps you should think of your dread and anxiety as a symptom of craving. But if you think your family obligations get in the way, there's nothing wrong with avoiding deep insight practices for now. You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything.
> You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything.
Our fears can dominate our reality, and you are tritely recommending a possibly harmful path without knowing anything about them . . . like recommending eating a peanut to someone who knows they have a dangerous allergic reaction to peanuts. In the context of the article, your advice is especially egregious.
Please tread carefully in the world, effortless advice can cause long term harm.
Sometimes it is good to listen to our fears, sometimes not. Hard to judge others across the vast distance of a few sentences.
Of course. There is a world of difference between understanding something on an intellectual level and engaging in serious insight practice. Unlike insight meditation itself, there isn't really any evidence that the path I suggested is "possibly harmful".
“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” We need the mundane earthly activities to balance any inward quests.
That sounds pragmatic; in the end, you still have to return to the real world and get on with things like survive.
Although this talk about becoming enlightened sounds like people have given up on themselves and realilty entirely to pursue something in their minds. It sounds like a self-induced state of tripping balls.
I've always taken it to (also) mean that one ought not expect rebirth in enlightenment, or some instant transformation of one's condition and even of one's spiritual (if you will) practice. It's not like graduating from school and moving into the workforce, where you stop going to classes and your life shifts radically in a short span. One day you're not enlightened, the next you are, and... that's the whole thing, congrats, you did it, now life goes on surprisingly-similarly to how it did before.
"Oh, you're enlightened? That's nice. Now, on with what we were doing...."
> I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me. This was really nice for about two weeks and then my ego (I expect) just kicked my arse and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system)
Just for the conversation: the «from nowhere» really just might be the unconscious brain, as the relationship between conscious and unconscious is ambiguous at best. The conscious insist in being in control, most of the time fooling itself, while the unconscious does most of the work in a really autonomous way.
Maybe the «safety system» was just the unconscious rebelling to prove it does indeed exist and that the conscious should take note, and resume its part in the general guidance of the being :)
> * the «from nowhere» really just might be the unconscious brain*
The trouble is that once you start to consider the nature of the unconscious brain, such consideration leads to the same conclusion.
If the unconscious brain somehow has “control”, from where does it derive this control? Unless you then accept some kind of metaphysical explanation, it’s centerlessness all the way down.
Well I would say it like this. The ancient part and the modern part of the brain are in a sort of dialogue. The ancient part can place a thought into the modern part of the brain, like a sort of notification. The modern part can then decide to pay attention to this or decide not to. It can reason about it. And finally it can say something back to the ancient part of the brain. It can communicate some plan that the ancient part executes.
I say ancient/modern rather than unconsious/conscious, because to a certain extent even the reasoning "just happens", so you might be tempted to say that even the reasoning is unconscious and it's actually all unconscious except some supernatural me that is just passively watching everything without actually taking any action. But we can bypass that (quite interesting) subject, by talking about ancient / modern, because the reasoning part is separate and more modern.
That is an interesting way to categorize those functions of the brain, but philosophically, doesn't this leave us in the same place? Whether you classify it as ancient/modern, or subconscious/conscious, we're still talking about two modes.
In one of these modes we actively perceive/experience our concept of reality, and the other acts as a black box - not available for direct interrogation, but still possible to reason about via observations in conscious experience.
The issue I'm having with this take is that our definition of reasoning still depends on the black box. The experience of feeling like a being capable of reasoning and then using that ability to consider a problem is all built on a foundation of thoughts, sensations and feelings that just "appear" in conscious experience with very little evidence that the conscious mind had anything to do with putting them there.
Well I didn't meant anything else actually. I realize that the «unconscious» term is tainted, as it can represent something like a hidden part of personality, especially on Freudian literature and likes.
I didn't meant that, I was thinking of the sum of the autonomous processing and coordination of the numerous intricate and distributed functions of the brain, senses, motor, emotional, etc…
That's a good clarification clarification. I misread the quoted part as trying to shift the "well" of consciousness to the unconscious brain, which really just moves the problem down one level.
Then again, I really haven't experienced the concept at a fundamental, spiritual level, only intellectually; I don't really meditate. Maybe there's something deep in our wiring (probably in our unconscious mind, which really pulls most of the strings) that has difficulty grappling with the loss of the idea of "self".
I don’t believe it’s a bad thing at all, it just is.
And glimpsing centerlessness for yourself sounds disconcerting, but instead seems paradoxically comforting when it happens.
For me personally, it brought with it a deep sense of peace and wonder about my existence and coexistence with a world full of similarly centerless beings.
To your point about wiring, I think absolutely yes. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, many aspects of conscious experience ensure we stay alive and procreate, but are not necessarily pleasant and seem to be increasingly incompatible with modern life.
Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” explores this at length and is a really interesting read. It’s not a book about religious truth, but one that maps a modern understanding of evolutionary psychology onto the insights of Buddhist philosophy and how such philosophy can be incredibly helpful when dealing with the implications of living in a body that did not evolve to survive the conditions to which it is currently subject.
That’s the No Self realization. I only had a brief glimpse of it, including the weirdly simultaneous panic. It did not happen during a meditation session, and it was brief.
I remember a podcast interview with Adyashanti about this. A lot of people experience unity consciousness first before no self, but some people experience no self first. He mentioned about someone he knows who experienced that, and had it for years, while also having to care for a child.
On reddit, I read someone stating that psychedelic can break someone, and it happened to him. Lots of people responded by saying things, and he was telling them, no, literally, there was something that broke and there’s no coming back from it.
> I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me.
If you were tripping this is called ego death. In some circles, including mine, what you described after:
> I started to think that I should be looking to help other people and become a guru, perhaps write a book to help humanity, but then my ego (I expect) came back with a vengeance, kicked my ass and brought me back down to earth with a crash (maybe its a safety system).
Can be common. When I experienced ego death I was aware that it would return so I was able to deal with it. I think of it kind of like the trip itself; the more you fight it the harder it fights you.
Not sure this helps as it's entirely my own experience and was drug induced, but I do think occasional ego death is worth it. Just be cognizant of what you're doing. The mind is a powerful place.
And this is exactly why "tripping" is heavily frowned upon by serious meditators and spiritual practitioners. Experiencing "ego death" (i.e. the three marks of existence) without having the previous spiritual grounding for it to help free you from attachment to the ego, is only a recipe for being even more deeply mired in craving and dukkha.
Those probably aren't meditators I would be listening to, it sounds as unhealthy as the person that attaches their identity to their ego return.
Psychedelics are a tool, and the different doses you figure out are ways of using that tool. Ego death requires a fairly heroic dose, something on the order of 3-5 grams of mushrooms for most strains. This, to me, is comparable to the isolation and introspection without breaks to incur ego death in meditation.
Ego death, from my perspective, is also a tool. Done with knowledge of what will happen during and after let's the user experience the absence of ego and helps them live with their ego when it returns. Done without the knowledge of what will happen after, humans often fully embrace that ego as a new life based on wisdom. A false wisdom.
My point here is the medium in which you choose is largely irrelevant. How you use the tools and the knowledge you go into them with are the paramount pieces. It's honestly surprising to me that anyone who meditates would have such judgy and pithy opinions, but it's a big world out there.
That's an incredibly cynical take and possibly bordering on gatekeeping based on "spiritual" boundaries.
Psychedelics can be fun, but in my experience they're fun if your mind is in the right place. They act as a conduit for more deeply connecting with the world around you.
On the other hand, if you have work to do then those things have a chance to appear in your trip. That can be healthy, if you're ready to face something, or it can be incredibly terrifying. I've had both experiences through my own isolation and meditation before. As someone with years of trauma, including a year long stint in a war zone, I can attest that my trips were sometimes fun, almost always challenging, and sometimes terrifying. As time has gone on and I've done work to unpack my trips and connect them with my experiences and understanding when I'm sober my trips have averaged to being "more fun" and "connected". This is something I was not able to achieve with meditation alone.
> That can be healthy, if you're ready to face something, or it can be incredibly terrifying.
Yes, and there's no guarantee that your bad trip or encounter with these entities will resolve itself without major effort. That ought to be enough to be seriously concerned about whether it is in any way appropriate to endorse this as some sort of ordinary, routine practice for the uninitiated.
This can be easily said about spirituality as well. Anecdotally, I've met far more people with higher density narcissistic traits who cover their behavior with beliefs, enlightenment, and morality than I have of those with trippers. Unlike you, I don't think spirituality is a poison pill as a result. Instead I think of it as something that must be constantly measured, dosed, and negotiated with depending on the outcomes for a particular person. This is similar to how I think of psychedelics.
I'm finding it fascinating how much dogmatic religious junk is being thrown around in the comments here - discussing an article where one of the author's central points is that none of the dogmatic religious junk helped him.
A tradition of meditation and spiritual practices with a history encompassing more than two thousand years is the polar opposite from "dogmatic religious junk"; it's filled with observations derived from experience. The Westernized use of psychedelics is barely a few decades old. I think it's reasonably clear what we should choose if we are to remain humble and avoid dogmaticism.
> And this is exactly why "tripping" is heavily frowned upon by serious meditators and spiritual practitioners.
This is needlessly judgmental. I know life-long meditators, 30+ of years disciplined practice who sometimes take psychedelics.
I'm not a fan of various aspects of the psychedelic scene, e.g. the spiritual bypassing and the narcissism that can sometimes come from it, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Usage of psychedelics can be profoundly healing and helpful.
> I know life-long meditators, 30+ of years disciplined practice who sometimes take psychedelics.
I'm not dismissing spiritual practice, but psychedelics are entirely incidental to it and can be a snare for the unprepared mind. What's "profoundly healing and helpful" is always the spiritual part, not the means used to achieve it.
And yet "spiritual" people are at least as prone to narcissism as everyone else. IMO one of the reasons spirituality of all kinds - including both traditional and non-traditional religion - has remained so consistently popular that it provides such excellent cover for more base actions and desires.
If you've found a drama-free spiritual community where everyone is deeply chilled and yet also adult and effective without losing a sense of humour, please let me know. That really hasn't been my experience.
In fact I think mindfulness, meditation, and so on confuse a kind of metaphysics of morality with what is probably some fairly basic brain mode switching.
Being "enlightened" for a brief period does not seem to create good people with any consistency or reliability. It doesn't even create consistently happier people. (Sometimes? Yes. More reliably and safely than other activities? Very likely not.)
It does seem to remove certain existential tangles, sometimes. But rather than being about "ego" - boo, hiss - perhaps those are more to do with easy/default vs less accessible modes of emotional cognition.
So there is this pattern of light spiritual practice (ok, not in your case, here light was the heavy) being safe and chill,
And of heavy spiritual practice having the potential to be dangerous.
I see an analogy to using psychedelics as described in this lecture fragment (starts around 12th minute) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j72C_lDHTk0 Ram Dass on "When is it right to use psychedealics?"
There he talks about two types of psychedelic usage. Recreational - here we don't need to prepare, we should use little of the substance and can enjoy f.ex. our favorite music sounding a little better.
Transformational - here, we have to prepare thoroughly studying spiritual/philosophical books, have a proper fast before the experience and have a proper guide. This way the potential for a difficult experience lessens and the potential for transformative experience grows.
Interestingly, the lecture excerpt starts with description of ancient/historical use of psychedelics, where they were used in rituals aimed at transformation of the subject. Subject attended the ritual being thoroughly prepared, something completely different than being offered psylocibin mushrooms/acid on a party.
I wonder if this advice (going light doesn't require preparation, going heavy requires preparing as much as possible trough fasting and study) could also apply here, to meditation practice.
Sorry if this idea/lecture was posted here already, had only limited time to read and reply in this thread.
> I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment. I understood there was no me.
A way to frame such an experience (a version of which I've had too) is to say that we realize that the purpose we've been having for our striving is bogus. e.g. There's no special "me" that's important to make look good, that needs respect and fame etc.
But that doesn't mean we lose all striving. We just find a new, more wholesome, purpose for it.
I think Eckhart Tolle talks about this. There are other perspectives, too, that one can garner by reading philosophy. (e.g. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which puts virtue as most worth striving for; there're also much simpler takes on what's worth striving for in an ego-less sense, which are paradoxically harder to intellectually grok while being much more commonly espoused in practice, such as love for home, and family).
> that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment
you are mistaken as you misunderstood in a subtle but critical way. your sentence is self contradictory. for it to be true it must have some permanent existence. everything that is true does.
in the law of cause and effect there are three kinds of causes. environment is one of them. this is the law buddha told us about after he opened his eye. it reveals the entirety of existence, along with another law or two.
do not cheat yourself by thinking you can see the truth yet. we can check if you doubt this. it would be to your benefit. but few want what is most important for them.
The stories we tell ourselves matter. Staring into the mind and seeing nothing is a powerful and frightening story. There may be a more positive reframing, but it's also not a mandatory story to tell yourself.
> I wasn't born Richard Alpert. I was just born as a human being and then I learned this whole business of who I am, whether I'm good or bad, achieving or not - all that's learned along the way. And you see all those learn things separate, so you start to have this dissociative experience, where all that can become is a point of awareness. I remember the first time this happened to me, I got a terrible panic, because indeed I was gonna cease to exist.
> I experienced a deep realisation that our thoughts manifest from nowhere and not from ourselves (words fail me here) and that the construct of 'me' was completely false and was just a reverberation of my environment.
Knowledge is not the same thing as insight, and experiencing what the parent comment describes is something that most people never attempt (or even realize there is something to attempt).
Having a philosophical/intellectual conversation about the nature of mind is very different than your own mind wrapping itself around these concepts directly.
Most people will reap most of the health benefits that meditation has to offer by sitting for 20 minutes a couple times a day.
You can go much deeper, of course, but that's a philosophical / spiritual quest to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you - it's not a health pursuit. A multi-day meditation retreat is in many ways like running an ultramarathon: it's not really a healthy undertaking, per se, but you might learn something about yourself by doing it, and the way to do it responsibly is by working your way up to it over months and years of practice.
Haven’t we all looked inwardly too much already? I’d list that as a top reason for the general malaise I see around me. I’ve never really found looking inward that useful, looking outward and acting outward and thinking about others has to be a 100:1 ratio on returns vs looking inward.
What is too much, and why would such introspection be a bad thing if it consistently leads to improved mental states? But I think more importantly, “looking inward” is not really the primary focus, but a technique to help one realize what is (and is not) already there.
At one time I think I would have written a comment similar to yours, because I had not yet experienced the difference between the perspective-altering practice of “looking inward” through mindfulness and the lost-in-thought version, which looks a lot more like rumination and just experiencing the thought loop without perspective, which can be deeply painful.
These practices are full of paradox. This isn’t to say the practice is invalid, but to highlight the fact that such practice is not intuitive or obvious. Evolutionary psychology is helping us unpack the illusions that lead to such apparent paradox.
One such paradox being that looking inward through the practice of mindfulness is the thing that enables someone to look outward and actually see. Most people struggle to describe this in words, but it starts to emerge clearly with practice.
Put another way, the premise is that we are all so lost in thought by default that we don’t even realize we are thinking. To claim that we can see outward in this state is to remain unaware of the possibility space of what is available to see, and to remain controlled by thought. You’ll still “see”, but this seeing is distorted by evolutionary reward systems, and what you think you’re seeing is still suspect.
But seeing the truth about one’s own mind changes how one sees other people in deeply impactful ways.
For me personally, my internal anxiety and self talk was so dominant that it made some outward pursuits feel nearly impossible. Once my relationship with thoughts/feelings started to shift, it didn’t just help with the anxiety in the sense that it subsided, it fundamentally shifted my relationship with the concept of anxiety, and made it possible for me to examine it from a broader perspective instead of just experiencing and being swallowed by it.
You go from knowing that anxiety (etc.) is a feeling to experiencing that anxiety is a feeling, and one that appears alongside everything else in consciousness. The difference between these states is enormous.
I think stories like this relate to misunderstanding the point of meditation practice, the practice. The time spent may be helpful in of itself but really you're meant to do the practice and learn more about how your mind works and be able to have better control of your emotional states. Not retreat into meditating whenever you fell something other than contentment. Disappointing that you apparently didn't learn this from a Buddhist group and instead focused on the actual act of meditating as the useful thing.
I think the ones that "go deeper" are doing so because they don't know what else to do, what the next step is. But they have achieved some "success", so they keep doing it. It also feeds the rise of new gurus that think they are helping by spreading the message, but they are merely feeding a new ego. There are so many teachers and online gurus hoping to turn it into a vocation.
> I would turn to meditation assuming it would help me get things done but it had the opposite effect of avoiding what I needed to face.
Marcus Aurelius—quoted from memory, so probably not quite right, and it's in translation at any rate:
> You can pass your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way and to act the right way.
I personally found the "think the right way" easy to get into, but without the "act the right way" it can indeed lead to apathy, detachment, and avoidance. Whoops.
One of the findings from researchers in the book Altered Traits is that largest (positive) cerebral changes were associated with time spent at intensive retreats. This is also very much a part of Zen practice (etc) so presumably practitioners have found some additional value in intensives over the years.
Not entirely sure if any study demonstrating the benefits of meditation or mindfulness considers counting 9 to 1 repeatedly an act of either. That aligns much more closely with the advice given to those with panic disorders in how to ride out their panic attacks or prevent them when they feel coming on.
Counting the breaths (usually up, not down) is the standard starting practice in zazen, Zen meditation. When you lose track you bring your mind back to counting again at 1, so it's more like "1.. 2.. shit. 1.. ugh. 1.. 2.. 3.." than anything actually involving 10.
Maybe the brain is smart, once you know meditation works, it then anticipates it to work. The expectation of it working interferes with the actual mindfulness and you take longer and longer.
Is a law of diminishing utility thing and also a basic instinct for people to get used to stuff the more they are exposed
There are often first-hand comments about the dangers of mindfulness practice here on HN. But when the commenters describe their practices they are so extreme that it was almost inevitable that they had negative effects.
There’s quite a spectrum between a 10-20min almost daily habit and trying to actually reach “enlightenment”. These 10 day silent retreats are a lot closer to the Bodhidharma sitting in a cave end of the spectrum. Probably not the first people to go a little crazy attempting that in Buddhist history. Given the context I would imagine it’s mostly overachievers but that is not really a healthy approach to religion or mental health (going hard as a mf)
> Probably not the first people to go a little crazy attempting that in Buddhist history
During the signup process for a 10 day Vipassana retreat, they ask for a lot of details about your psychological health. Even warning against doing the retreat if you’re not in a good mental place. So I’m sure you’re right.
> These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly.
If it works for you that's great. However, I would say approaching meditation from a "mind control" exercise such as "counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly" goes counter to its purpose and will hinder its full potential. If you're willing to experiment with other methods, try letting your mind wander and don't let it stick; just experience the ebb and flow. Twenty-minute sessions sound about right for me as well.
I have a theory that meditation/mindfulness is essentially just an excercise in self-erasure. This can be beneficial to some degree in that we all need to erase those negative associations and question our assumptions. However, carried to an extreme, it can erase some of the associations we need to make in order to live and create extreme hyper-selfawareness. Or in other words, you open up your mind too much, your brains start to fall out.
buddha was not enlightened through meditation. that is a dangerous falsehood that has been added by monks. he was enlightened through his accumulation of virtue through his specific practices of educating others while he was in the mountains. this placed him in turmoil. he left the mountains, and sat down under a tree to collect himself. it was only after he became calm that he realized that he had already attained the supreme enlightenment. you cannot attain it through any other means than teaching after entering a samadhi. but to enter samadhi means you have to stop your karma. even then, it can be reborn, just like anything else. the final enlightenment - that of a buddha - is to burn down all your karma. the greatest way to do this is the practice of true love.
this is a path which will cause you to face inordinate difficulties and loneliness. most people are waylaid. "strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto Life and few there be who find it."
I'm no expert, but this still seems like avoidance more than mindfulness. Obviously, meditating for six hours as a means to escape and avoid uncomfortable thoughts is healthier than blacking out or doing opioids, but it's still escaping versus being present, processing, and facing uncomfortable feelings and emotions.
These days I do 20 minutes a day of mind control which involves nothing more than counting down from 9 to 1 repeatedly. No quest for Enlightenment. Just a sense of calm I can depend on balanced by facing stress and, most important, some kind of short-burst physical activity such as 3 sets of full squats to bring me right back into my body in no uncertain terms. Works wonders. It's all about balance. 10-day mindfulness retreats full of 2-hour sessions, in my view, are for zealots.