Have you done any research on the prevalence of meditation-related mental problems in countries where it is a tradition? Like Thailand or Myanmar.
That seems like it should be instructive in disentangling
Meditation is not dangerous at all and its just crazy people going crazy for normal reasons while meditating at around the % baserates would suggest
Meditation is dangerous if done incorrectly, or without the right context and cultural support
Meditation is just always dangerous, at least if you are at high risk for mental problems.
I’ve done a fair bit of sutta-reading, and I can’t remember reading that much about mental problems coming with meditation (or phenomena described in a way where it seems like they’d be describing something we’d refer to as mental problems). But they are obviously a biased source.
Anecdotally, I’ve done a fair bit of serious meditation, and know many others, and haven’t had any experiences with people going crazy. I’ve had crazy experiences and know many people who’ve had crazy experiences, but no-one who permanently lowered their functioning, or even lowered their functioning for more than a day. I’ve had one experience with a guy who meditated a lot and kind of lost motivation to do anything career wise. This seems like it could be quite bad. But he seems super happy. It’s hard to say whether this is actually bad or not. I feel the cases I see/hear of where this happens, often the person in question was pursuing eg their career for dumb reasons. Eg they weren’t doing it for authentic reasons and they didn’t really enjoy it, but they were trying to appease their parents, or they had some complex where they think their life is worthless if they can’t become a multimillionaire, and like they’re currently not a multimillionaire and they feel extreme anguish about it.
Have you done any research on the prevalence of meditation-related mental problems in countries where it is a tradition? Like Thailand or Myanmar.
That seems like it should be instructive in disentangling
Meditation is not dangerous at all and its just crazy people going crazy for normal reasons while meditating at around the % baserates would suggest
Meditation is dangerous if done incorrectly, or without the right context and cultural support
Meditation is just always dangerous, at least if you are at high risk for mental problems.
I’ve done a fair bit of sutta-reading, and I can’t remember reading that much about mental problems coming with meditation (or phenomena described in a way where it seems like they’d be describing something we’d refer to as mental problems). But they are obviously a biased source.
Anecdotally, I’ve done a fair bit of serious meditation, and know many others, and haven’t had any experiences with people going crazy. I’ve had crazy experiences and know many people who’ve had crazy experiences, but no-one who permanently lowered their functioning, or even lowered their functioning for more than a day. I’ve had one experience with a guy who meditated a lot and kind of lost motivation to do anything career wise. This seems like it could be quite bad. But he seems super happy. It’s hard to say whether this is actually bad or not. I feel the cases I see/hear of where this happens, often the person in question was pursuing eg their career for dumb reasons. Eg they weren’t doing it for authentic reasons and they didn’t really enjoy it, but they were trying to appease their parents, or they had some complex where they think their life is worthless if they can’t become a multimillionaire, and like they’re currently not a multimillionaire and they feel extreme anguish about it.