Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

(background: I have been doing zen meditation for 20 years. Several hours per day and participated in 50 intensive retreats or so).

Absolutely. If you meditate so much that it starts to work, it's like any effective medicine or treatment. It has potential for adversarial side effects. Even mentally healthy people get into some crazy states and can experience meltdowns while meditating. I have seen several cases of people having full blown psychosis needing psychiatric care.

Saying that if you get into a bad place you are not meditating right is also wrong. Buddhist tradition knows about these, but they are described in a way that often makes people think it's some kind of philosophical otherworldly metaphor. They can be pleasurable or horrifying or just weird. Japanese zen tradition calls all these just makyō (the realm of demons).

Everyone who has meditated long enough has encountered them. You can read sutras to see Buddha fighting with crazy. Almost every honest autobiography from famous meditation teachers has mentions of them. Zen Master Hakuin had probably the most famous complete meltdown. He called it Zen sickness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuin_Ekaku#Zen_sickness He had to stop and seek help.

Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.

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Making things worse: Meditation attracts people with mental issues, and many treat them as a substitute to medication or therapy. Meditation is neither. It can be used as part of therapy, but it's not a substitute. Better get your therapy/medication right and then meditate moderately if that feels fine.

This is key. Meditation is not a substitute for therapy or professional mental health of any sort.

This doesn't match my experience. Professionals can help you only to the extent they understand themselves. Do they understand nature of consciousness, mind, thought? Most likely they do not. Meditation is supposed to bring one to the state where you get control over those things and if it happens there is no question of mental issues for this person anymore.

That's overly idealized and wrong view. Meditation together with mental treatment often works really well but they are not direct substitutes. There are meditation therapies that mix the two.

What meditation does to the mind is not completely separated from the mental health, but it's not on the same line either. Understanding the nature of your mind heals only minor neuroses, and sometimes with depression.

You can be mentally ill and still have "prajna wisdom" or being "realized" in a very fundamental way. "Prajna wisdom" does not translate directly into normal wisdom or mental health (can help in some cases). The history is full of mentally ill meditation masters, "funny monks" and "crazy wisdom" that is crazy in real way and just not metaphor.

In religious settings people have tendency to attach attach every good thing to meditation in linear way. Morality, mental and physical health, everything. In reality you get "something completely different" (in the Monty Python way). It can help you in other things but it never solves other problems in your life.

So how do you know what is mentally healthy? How do you know those meditation masters were mentally ill?

The root teacher of Jamgon Kongtrul The Great was a man called Patrul. Patrul was a notorious drunk, and was known to beat up his students. He was still a kind man, and a legendary teacher.

Having psychological flaws doesn't disqualify you from being a realised master and a great teacher.

In the case of Hakuin he said himself he was very ill.

In many other cases the description of "demons" and other things match what is now called psychotic episodes. There is difference with struggling with practice and being unwell.

>Many things that are worth doing and give meaning to life are not safe.

That sounds wrong to me, meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not to give anything. Also doing or not doing anything at all is not safe. There is no safety - once we are alive we will die.

> meditation is supposed to destroy all meanings of life, not to give anything

Those are all metaphors to describe something "Die before you die so you don't' have to die before you die", "See your true face before you were born", "enlightenment", "entering the stream of holy", "satori", "be one with everything", "be nothing", "emptiness". None of those descriptions will help you understand. You either meditate or not. Then you can describe what happens to you in your own words contradicting everybody else.

  "Well, there is sitting meditation,
   there is walking meditation.   
   Oh, and then, of course, 
   especially in the West, 
   there is talking meditation. 
   No good."

Sure, my point is that losing meanings in the process can be quite crushing experience or liberating depending on one's attitude.

He was born, succeeded in living a meaningless life, and died.

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