I find this article very interesting, but also very disheartening to me. Meditation is something i really value and this article kind of crushed my dreams of "becoming a better person." (lol kinda). I realize this article is written by someone who has had bad experience with meditation so it is a little biased. I also realize that the article specifically states that (in lack of a better term) "trippy" and "other-wordly" meditation is bad for inexperienced meditators. I agree with this so I only stick to mindfulness/ loving-kindness meditation until I am more experienced.

What really intrigues me about this article, though, is the correlation of meditation to psychedelics. It speaks of how some people get very "psychotic", strange views of the world after practicing meditation wrong. It reminds me of some of my friends (including me) that took psychedelics and got wacky views of the world after. (this was in my younger years, I hope to think I have less "psychotic" views of the world now.) It also reminds me of people who get very trapped and scared inside their own mind (me in my younger years) after taking psychedelics. There are also those people who benefit positively from psychedelics without these "psychotic" views. (Perhaps its because these people don't take the experience too seriously).

I'm sorry if my post is kinda scatterd, I've been in a scattered state of mind the past few weeks. I can't really put what I want to say in words so please don't criticize me. proofreading this post, I already disagree with some things I say, but it would take years for me to convey what I actually want to say. I mainly just wanted to share this article because i thought it was interesting

Anyways, the article is attached in .pdf form

For me, meditation is awareness and being(in the moment), you don't have to sit and close your eyes to meditate... I think the person who wrote this article doesn't really understand the concept of meditation. You never shut stimuli, if anything you become aware of all stimuli but remain still(you don't take your thoughts for a deep ride and just let them pass by like clouds). Awareness is the key and yes once you are fully aware you also can choose to have the perspective of the oneness(Wholeness/holiness) but one must ground oneself because balance is key. Enjoy, explore yourself, and trust yourself and you are in good hands. I am not a fan of these fear based articles... in the end it is just 1 perspective(don't let that perspective create and destroy yours and create preconceptions, make sure yours truly comes from you through experience), take it with a grain of salt.

I'm going to read the article now, but I'm going to preface just based on your comments, that it's more than likely that this guy just has control issues more than anything else.

well put River of thoughts.

It is true meditation comes in many forms.

you can be washing the dishes and you are in a way meditating.

Meditation is relaxing into the you that can't be put into words (in other words, not your story, but your actual presence/awareness). If enjoying quietly being you is bad for you, we're all ****ed.

I'll admit I didn't read the article, but I know there are many practices that people include under the umbrella of "meditation" that have little to do with what I described above. Sensory deprivation type stuff definitely can be disorienting at long intervals, but that's not what meditation is really about. As others have said, it isn't about shutting anything out, it's about relaxing into a deeper, broader awareness.

After reading this article I think the guy may have a couple valid points, though I certainly don't agree with the whole thing. From the research I have done on Vipassana in the past, it seemed clear rather quickly just how extreme a form of meditation those courses are. Novices who take those courses are akin to people who want to take advanced diving classes before they've even learned how to tread water. Using Vipassana as a main argument against meditation is a weak one IMO since most Western meditation practitioners do not and will not ever engage in such extreme forms of meditation.

People seem to become stressed from mental changes from meditation (as many do with psychedelics as well) at times, but I guess I had made the assumption that inherently by meditating in the first place, the practitioner is actively looking for changes. If change, whether it be a change in emotion, or mind state or what have you, is not desired, then why would one meditate in the first place? Indeed meditation is probably not for all, but too many are probably too quick to dismiss it.

He mentions the practitioner's issues with arithmetic and name recall. From what I've read about the neurological underpinnings of meditation, it is essentially aimed at balancing the hemispheres. Without a typically overactive, dominating left hemisphere, I see it as no surprise that arithmetic may come as a bit harder than normal. How well do all of you do with subtraction during immediately following a DMT breakthrough? One might even say that temporarily moving out of that overactive analytical mind state in which one does arithmetic is something of the goal. He may be right to the extent that if you're not looking to have a spiritual experience, then meditation might not be the best route as it is designed as a spiritual practice for attaining spiritual experiences.

He talks about being one with the universe and the analysis of the brain actions, but cause and effect are not clear. If one were having a spiritual experience with no boundaries, then one would expect to see this correlated in the brain regardless of cause and effect. This doesn't negate that it can be a "two-way street" either. If we think of the famous brain as a television/radio analogy, one would be incorrect to assume that the content being observed on the television set is being generated by the television itself even though one would be able to reliably and repeatedly map certain visual and audio phenomena to electrical activity in its physical circuitry. To continue the analogy, and this is where the "two-way street" comes in, if one were to damage a particular video circuit for example, one would expect to see visual distortions and abnormalities in the television regardless of the fact that the television isn't generating the content. So in this case with the brain and the "no boundaries" phenomenon, it doesn't seem to be a really plausible argument for one way or the other just because we have a correlation. Correlation does not prove causation.

I think meditation, yoga etc in the west have become sort of rediculous and watered down versions of the real thing.

You can see how many people have problems with westerns using the term "shaman"..claiming to be shamans etc.

However, noone seems to mind when they go pay some person to teach them yoga, calling themself a "yogi" based on some class they took at the local Y for anyone with enough money. I have known Moksha yoga teachers who never even heard of the Rig veda.

Alot of people seem to be playing with a shadow of the real thing, not realizing how deep the whole thing goes. People think meditation is just about non-thinking or something, but I dont think so. Read the Tibetan book of the dead..it becomes quite clear there is more going on here..

I remember someone making a post about this on the ayahuasca forums..how it is documented among people who are seriously into trancendental meditation can at times get into some sort of spirial crisis of panic and anxiety and have to be hospitalized..apparently that sort of thing has been documented and it sounds for more like a psychedelic thing than I think some are willing to admit.

That does not mean the whole non-dual experiences or w/e dont play a role..but non-unitive experiences of weird realms, states of being and other strange things all seem to play a role at some point as well.

I get very skeptical of the whole process the way it is displayed in the west at times..I do yoga but I dont concider myself to know enough about the whole process to be a yogi or something..mostly becasue the "teachers" around here take a 3 week class or something and as long as they pay they are then qualified. I know thats not the same as just meditation really but it seems relevant enough.

The west just seem sort of spiritually naive I guess..which is not a surprise or anything.

what?!?
how is that even possible?!?

i can semi-understand not being super knowledgeable about the Rg veda, but to not have heard of it?!?

i wonder how many christian preachers haven't heard of the bible

With our attitudes it definitely is no surprise. What most people consider "normal" is a very flat and dull existence. Devoid of spirituality to a large degree. And when the topic of anything related to spirituality comes up, it's met with derision. Just the word "spiritual" has become a trigger for eye rolls and "oh, here we go"s.

I would never claim some title that I know takes more to earn than a three week course and anyone who is willing to pay for it.

The is only one title I proudly claim for myself and it is "human". Which, sadly, isn't given to us at birth. There are many people I've come across that I wouldn't consider to be human. To be human is to have a conscience and be kind and caring of others. There are plenty of people out there that seem devoid of that.

Anyhow, I digress.

Any sort of altered state can have negative effects on those who are not equipped to handle them. Deep meditation is certainly an altered state of consciousness. I've meditated daily for at least seven years now, and there were some times that I considered taking a break from it. Coupled with some intense psychedelic experiences it can get frightening, but like has been said, I think most of us "meditate" all the time on some level. What we call "day dreaming" is a form of meditation. You don't have to take it to extremes if you're not ready

Jamie, reading your post actually reminded me of how much hell I went through earlier in my meditation career. It's true, part of meditating is allowing all the garbage you avoid or suppress during daily life to bubble up and express itself. And that can be harrowing to say the least. It's like it has to get worse before it can get better.

But, for the vast majority who identify with the quickie mart - commercial yoga stuff, I can't see very many making it through that. Actual changes in consciousness are, in my experience, extremely shocking and disorienting at first (to the point of vomiting sometimes!). Everyone I know who is a serious meditator, myself included, has had to go through a period where the possibility of suicide arises as a real option. Some have called it "the dark night of the soul," but there's probably some debate over what that term actually refers to.

Needless to say, that stuff doesn't really sell.

I'm really glad you reminded me of the other side of the coin, Jamie, as it's easy to forget about the very real dangers along the path. Are they worth it? Totally. Risking madness, despair, and suicide are well worth peace of mind. . . it's truly humbling and a intense, if often glossed-over part of the human adventure

The guy makes some good points but definitely seems pretty biased. I don't see why its so surprising really that this sort of thing is possible...I mean look at all the other less mentally demanding activities and professions that occasionally lead to people loosing they're mental marbles. Why would meditation be any different? If anything it'd be more intense...but in the end i think the benefits of carefully getting into it outweigh the risks, by a huge amount

I'm doing a project on meditation now actually, and the research coming out on it right now is pretty mind blowing. An example-just 2 months of it can thicken the neocortex...and also increase the density of the brains gray matter to a noticeable extent (and probably much sooner than 2 months), among other things

Any chance you can link those studies when you get time please.

I recently read through the ones in this thread but some newer studies would be good to read.

Cheers

i've had panic attacks from meditation before , after a while meditating i would only see black and a some point i would feel like i am slipping into the blackness , at this point i would be scared and open my eyes ,or sometimes i've felt an insect running over my body which scares me and i open my eyes , othertimes i've had my routine all jumbled up because of meditation since after meditating i would spend the day differently to how i planned my day

overall i haven't still found it to be dangerous in any way

one of the most interesting meditation experiences i had was over 10 years ago when after meditating for 3 hours or so i felt as if someone dropped a bucket of ice cold water over my head and as i felt the water trickle down all over my body , i opened my eyes thinking that someone has really done so (it felt very real), since my girlfriend at that time was in the other room i thought she might have been having a good laugh doing this, yet i was totally dry and it was an internal experience and she was fast asleep, the bliss i felt was unreal and since then i've never been able to repeat this .......

i really don't meditate atall maybe once a month or so nowdays when i feel like chilling out more than i already am doing at the present , i've given up on mediatating as a serious tool to awaken my awareness and there is so little time anyways that i feel its just not a worthwhile pursuit at this time

i totally agree with this , if you really know how then all activities done with mindfullness and awareness is meditation , yet hardly i live my life this way , yet at times i walk and do other things with a lot of awareness resulting in quite a meditative state , yet it is very hard to be always aware and be doing things not lost in the pyramid of thoughts

Meditation is a powerful practice. Unusual and unpleasant experiences are VERY common, especially in samatha (concentration) practice. Here is a recent podcast from Buddhist Geeks called "The Dark Side of Dharma" detailing neuroscientific studies of difficult meditation experiences:

http://www.buddhistgeeks...the-dark-side-of-dharma/

And this excellent, free meditation manual, "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", begins with a strong warning:

http://static.squarespac...ee9181119/1347785055665/

Meditation can be MORE destabilizing than entheogens. This, of course, is not a criticism.

eH

Got to love meditation! It makes people realize whats actually going on around them, not following the new's or the government's outlook of reality because the government's outlook of reality is just a illusion.

I haven't read the article yet, but I've been a vipassana practitioner for a long time and am intimately familiar with the phenomenology and progression of this form of meditation.

What's being described here, the turbulent and often difficult periods experienced through doing insight meditation properly, are referred to in some models[1] as the dukkha ñanas, which translates from Pali as something like "Knowledge(s) of Suffering", although it's come to be more commonly referred to as "Dark Night"[2]. The dukkha ñanas actually consists of six individual stages: 5th ñana, Knowledge of Dissolution; 6th ñana, Knowledge of Fear; 7th ñana, Knowledge of Misery; 8th ñana, Knowledge of Disgust; 9th ñana, Desire For Deliverance; 10th ñana, Knowledge of Re-Observation.

They serve as a 'map' of the psychological and emotional territory encountered after one crosses "Knowledge of the Arising & Passing Away", which is the typical big spiritual experience some people encounter through practice, or sometimes through hallucinogens. After you cross the A&P, the entire edifice of a self begins to crumble in an often frightening and unexpected way, but it's possible to navigate this skilfully and come out on the other side without going through hell, as is common for those who hit this territory unprepared.


This is incorrect, unpleasant experiences occur through vipassana when one crosses 4th ñana and and enters the dukkha ñanas, not through samatha. Samatha leads to jhanas which are some of the most profoundly pleasurable states one can access through any meditative practice.

"Unusual and unpleasant experiences" are only common if someone is actively observing their bare sensate experience in real-time. i.e. watching the sensation from which your experience of reality is constructed, and seeing their emptiness, their transience and their inherent unsatisfactoriness. If you simply concentrate on the breath, you'll be fine but it's possible to inadvertently begin to examine your experience at this level and it's not entirely uncommon. In fact, this is pretty much how the whole adventure kicked off for me...

As for "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", the author is a friend of mine and I'm currently working with him, and a couple of other yogis from the Dharma Overground forum[3], to produce an updated version of the book. I highly recommend anyone serious about meditation and ending suffering for all sentient beings to check the book and the website out as there's a major focus on technique over theory. Daniel has made the book available for free online but I'd need to look out the links, he used to have a personal site called "Interactive Buddha" but he's in the process of renaming and reorganizing it.

Much as I don't like to suggest that I know more than anyone else about anything, meditation, specifically vipassana and samatha, is an area where I have considerable experience and have studied it, and continue to do so, intensively. I've also spent considerable time working directly with the whole "Dark Night" issue in my own practice, as well as having gotten heavily into examining the phenomenology insight meditators typically encounter. I know a lot about the ins and out of "Dark Night" and how to practice effectively to get through it, maximizing insight while minimizing the potential difficulties and unpleasantness common to these stages, so I'd be happy to offer any advice or help I can.

[1] Specifically, the "Progress of Insight" model developed by Mahasi Sayadaw, which also forms the foundation of Daniel Ingrams model presented in "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" and the model used by another recommended pragmatic dharma teacher, Kenneth Folk.

[2] The term "Dark Night" is a reference to the model developed by St. John of the Cross which contained a period of what he described as "spiritual dryness" wherein God is felt to have abandoned the Christian mystic. This was referred to as "The Dark Night of the Soul" and is a good metaphor for this period of difficulty and change as spiritual insights deepen, dismantling the "I" further until finally its illusory nature is realized. This same process of dissolution and breakdown appears in countless other mystical traditions, from Sufism to Christian Science, and is expressed wonderfully in the alchemical axiom: Solve et Coagula (Dissolve and coagulate).

[3] I don't mean to seem like I'm plugging another website on here, I'm actually one of the moderators on the DhO and am an active member of the site so I'm recommending it based on the fact that I know how useful and effective it is, and how much valuable information is available there.

Something else I forgot to mention is that I know several yogis, including Daniel Ingram, who were involved with Prof. Judson Brewer, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale, and his project to examine how meditation changes the brain. I'll need to dig out the links to the papers he published, but the potentially difficult periods common to insight and mindfulness practitioners are being studied quite a lot in the last year or so.

Professor Willoughby Britton is also involved in this field and has done some amazing research on the subject of "Dark Night", I'm fairly sure she's worked with Judd on stuff involving neuroplasticity too.

Another good source of information on this who comes from a psychological point-of-view is another friend of mine, Ron Crouch, who's a psychotherapist and meditation teacher practicing in Hawaii. He has a good blog on these things too and is another highly skilled insight practitioner with intimate knowledge of the ins and out of this thing. He's currently working with Willoughby on meditation-related studies but I'm not sure what they're actually working on right now as I haven't spoken to them in a while.

Universecannon, those are some excellent and interesting links! Thanks for posting them.

I noticed you mentioned you were currently involved in studies on meditation, would you mind saying more about that as I'd be very, very interested to hear about it.

It's incredible what a broad range of participants this site has, and with so many different and often remarkable skill sets that demonstrate how safely, responsibly and positively entheogens and hallucinogens can be used. I take my hat off to you all, it's an honour to be a part of this community.