I know it’s been a while since you left this, but I was wondering; do you pass through the stages of depression, boredom, and insanity that he mentioned just by consistently meditating for a few months? No one else who talks about Vipassana seems to mention them.
Also, do all the weird things that happen occur just during meditation, or are they constant?
It took me couple of years to get to the point where depression started to dominate so I guess a lot of the groundwork was already done. It did really only take me only a couple of months of regular practice to get the fruits of DavidM’s method.
The heaviest bouts of depression, boredom and insanity occur during meditation but some of that “leaks” to the daily life as well. The really weird stuff I had like a visualisation of a creature that chops of your body parts and dances around with them laughing only occur in meditation. There are no hallucinations outside of meditation and even in meditation you mostly have control of the visualisations and know that they are not real or important. It’s more about letting go and the mind sometimes does crazy stuff before settling down.
I would be surprised if meditators in general didn’t have crazy episodes from time to time. Talking about them is taboo in most traditions. It does make sense because the mind wanders around and picks up stuff associated with meditation. If you hear or read a lot about strange stuff that can appear in meditation your mind will start playing around with the ideas and then you have sort of imagined visualisations that are doubly irrelevant. My issue here is that when people start to practice meditation alone all of the insane stuff can be quite frightening if you don’t have a teacher or peers who can guide one through them. So for the lone meditators it’s good to know a little about the weird stuff so they don’t give them too much attention or freak out.
I know it’s been a while since you left this, but I was wondering; do you pass through the stages of depression, boredom, and insanity that he mentioned just by consistently meditating for a few months? No one else who talks about Vipassana seems to mention them. Also, do all the weird things that happen occur just during meditation, or are they constant?
It took me couple of years to get to the point where depression started to dominate so I guess a lot of the groundwork was already done. It did really only take me only a couple of months of regular practice to get the fruits of DavidM’s method. The heaviest bouts of depression, boredom and insanity occur during meditation but some of that “leaks” to the daily life as well. The really weird stuff I had like a visualisation of a creature that chops of your body parts and dances around with them laughing only occur in meditation. There are no hallucinations outside of meditation and even in meditation you mostly have control of the visualisations and know that they are not real or important. It’s more about letting go and the mind sometimes does crazy stuff before settling down. I would be surprised if meditators in general didn’t have crazy episodes from time to time. Talking about them is taboo in most traditions. It does make sense because the mind wanders around and picks up stuff associated with meditation. If you hear or read a lot about strange stuff that can appear in meditation your mind will start playing around with the ideas and then you have sort of imagined visualisations that are doubly irrelevant. My issue here is that when people start to practice meditation alone all of the insane stuff can be quite frightening if you don’t have a teacher or peers who can guide one through them. So for the lone meditators it’s good to know a little about the weird stuff so they don’t give them too much attention or freak out.