As someone who’s done a fair amount of meditation and read a couple dozen books on the topic, I’d just like to flag the fact that this is pretty well examined in the community, and while meditation as a whole is quite pre-paradigmatic, there seems to be an emerging consensus on some of the ways that meditation harm can manifest.
First off, it’s obviously true that if you have a pre-existing tendency towards schizophrenia or any general mental instability, then in a very similar way to psychedelics, meditation can cause a psychotic break or similar episode of mental instability.
Secondly, and to me more interestingly, there’s an emerging consensus that one of the things meditation does is relieve subconscious mental tension accumulated by either large-scale or small-scale traumas in the course of one’s life. It’s very in vogue to use the term karma to refer to this accumulation of mental pathology that one can analogize to stuck priors or misfiring circuits in the synaptic map. This is also, of course, pre-paradigmatic, so it’s not great to take anything on this front super seriously, but it’s a very useful frame.
Now, when it comes to meditation harm, one of the things you see is that going very deep, very fast in meditation without processing this kind of mental tension or trauma can result in the trauma coming up in overwhelming or counterproductive ways. Often, people don’t talk about this in explicit terms, but I personally think it’s very obvious that the fastest and most straightforward ways of “making progress” on the meditative path are the Burmese Mahasi Sayadaw method, which also has by far the highest rate of negative side effects in meditation. To me, this indicates strongly that the Sayadaw method, because it is focused on blowing through to meditative insight without a lot of emotional hippie processing along the way, involves getting hit with all this kind of accumulated tension all at once in a very intensive fashion.
As someone who’s done a fair amount of meditation and read a couple dozen books on the topic, I’d just like to flag the fact that this is pretty well examined in the community, and while meditation as a whole is quite pre-paradigmatic, there seems to be an emerging consensus on some of the ways that meditation harm can manifest.
First off, it’s obviously true that if you have a pre-existing tendency towards schizophrenia or any general mental instability, then in a very similar way to psychedelics, meditation can cause a psychotic break or similar episode of mental instability.
Secondly, and to me more interestingly, there’s an emerging consensus that one of the things meditation does is relieve subconscious mental tension accumulated by either large-scale or small-scale traumas in the course of one’s life. It’s very in vogue to use the term karma to refer to this accumulation of mental pathology that one can analogize to stuck priors or misfiring circuits in the synaptic map. This is also, of course, pre-paradigmatic, so it’s not great to take anything on this front super seriously, but it’s a very useful frame.
Now, when it comes to meditation harm, one of the things you see is that going very deep, very fast in meditation without processing this kind of mental tension or trauma can result in the trauma coming up in overwhelming or counterproductive ways. Often, people don’t talk about this in explicit terms, but I personally think it’s very obvious that the fastest and most straightforward ways of “making progress” on the meditative path are the Burmese Mahasi Sayadaw method, which also has by far the highest rate of negative side effects in meditation. To me, this indicates strongly that the Sayadaw method, because it is focused on blowing through to meditative insight without a lot of emotional hippie processing along the way, involves getting hit with all this kind of accumulated tension all at once in a very intensive fashion.