Actual marathons aren't great for your body either, especially if it's not something you've diligently trained for properly, so that makes sense.
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.
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.
"Oh, you're enlightened? That's nice. Now, on with what we were doing...."
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 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 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…
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".
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.
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.
Tldr: The neocortex is the homunculus (in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.shambhala.com/cutting-through-spiritual-material...
Ah, the extent that some people will go through to avoid acknowledging God. It's like some people take stubborn pleasure in being purposely nihilistic and strenuously denying all that's good about the world. How this can be part of a supposedly spiritual practice, I just can't understand.
That sense of impeding doom is nothing more than those spiritual entities oppressing with overwhelming power them by those gaps.
We are locked out of that world for a reason. The safe means to get unlocked is by getting your soul to borrow the power of God and slowly expose yourself to such world. Other than that, self enlightenment is just wishful thinking of empty vessels.
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.
"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.
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.
https://untetheredsoul.com/untethered-soul
https://untetheredsoul.com/living-untethered
I also found eckhart Toll's book "A New Earth" are also helpful:
https://eckharttolle.com/books/
I found "A New Earth" better/more details than "Power of Now" probably because it was written later and I read it later.
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.”
Always tough to discuss slippery, ill defined things such as ego, which in a real sense does not actually exist.
My mother for instance at one point thought she was Jesus but also thought some of her thoughts or actions were not her own.
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?"
Wait, is this not common knowledge??
Having a philosophical/intellectual conversation about the nature of mind is very different than your own mind wrapping itself around these concepts directly.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'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.
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.
And actually - that's all.
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.
I don't think most users of psychedelics view them as a "tool" for serious spiritual practice. They just think tripping is a lot of fun.
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.
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.
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 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.
-- Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass
I hope it's transcribed correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is a law of diminishing utility thing and also a basic instinct for people to get used to stuff the more they are exposed
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.
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."