bruja_gorda

The author is a lost cause. He messed himself up following the teachings of clueless gurus. Then, when he realised he was just damaging his mind, he switched to different gurus. Now he's teaching meditation again, so he is himself taking on the mantle of the clueless guru, spreading around his mental illness to more unknowing victims.

This never stops. These people never face reality. The lure of the supernatural, of enlightenment, of insights, of metaphysical experiences, is too strong and they eventually lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and the crazy teachings of their books and their masters.

Madness is the loss of the ability to discern the boundary between reality and imagination. Meditation is just one of the many ways that supernatural and metaphysical sects have to push the mind beyond that boundary, lock the door behind it and throw away the key.

It's not the meditation that is destabilising. It's the weed:

> I spent my last day in Los Angeles riding on a Segway, buying legal marijuana and staring at some turtles in an on-campus pond at UCLA.

What's left unsaid is that the majority of this "practice" goes hand-in-hand with "recreational" use of weed. Scare quotes because once you start reading revelatory texts under the influence, and probably meditating under the influence, the road to psychosis is just a few turns away.

I've had friends who went mad reading the bible or The Eagle's Gift, or The Tenth Insight, while smoking weed. I can't explain the mechanism, but smoking weed and opening yourself up to all the enlightened bullshit of the New Age, or the Old Religions, can tear a hole in your mental health, big enough for a truck to drive through.

People who believe in the supernatural are already half-mad. The weed comes along and closes the deal.

Without weed, meditation is as woo-woo bullshit for California yuppies as you thought originally.