I’ve meditated on and off for a few decades and have only ever experienced a sense of calm and clarity.
Is the author’s experience common for other people?
Is the author’s experience common for other people?
When I took ascetical theology in seminary, my professor told us that if someone comes to you and says they’re undergoing the Dark Night, they probably aren’t. (Unless you for some reason happen to be the spiritual director of a contemplative order, but even then.) He wasn’t being flippant; it was just a recognition of the degree of spiritual progress needed even to arrive at that point.
It can be easy to confuse aridity or even unaddressed psychological issues for something like the Dark Night, but it does have a precise technical meaning in the mystical literature. It isn’t just “prayer is difficult for me right now.”
[0] And yes, in case you didn't know, prayer is definitely a legitimate part of meditation, even going by Buddhist teachings - the typical metta/loving-kindness meditation is indistinguishable from a kind of prayer.
Arguably, a very legitimate role can even be recovered/reconstructed for outright theistic contemplative worship directed at the "Ultimate Self", essentially the Brahman of Hinduism - although this would of course reflect a very imperfect understanding of the Brahman, one way too error-prone for those who would seriously aim at enlightenment and unity with the Ultimate Self in this very lifetime. But nonetheless plenty enough to look forward to what's effectively an afterlife in the Pure Abodes realm as an anagami or "non-returner"! Hinduists in the "dualist" tradition, for all its imperfection, have of course always been aware of this as a possible path.
At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the term is used in the vipassana tradition (making the necessary accommodations for the translation needed to take a Christian mystical concept and import it into that tradition).
Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very fact that it is understood as a transition stage between different degrees of insight.) Daniel Ingram's book on Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha does a very nice job of "decoding" the Buddhist tradition in very modern and understandable terms, and I'm not aware of people involved in the actual tradition who have raised any deep, substantive objections to the understanding he conveys.
(Note that "Dark Night" as applied to vipassana meditation is a modern term, but one that does reflect traditional understanding of the relevant jhanas-- the Buddhist traditional name is apparently "dukkha ñana", or "Knowledge of Suffering", and in the Vimuttimagga it is known, rather descriptively, as the stage of "fear and disadvantage and disenchantment", followed by "delight in deliverance and equanimity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81-%C3%B1%C4%81%E1... It was not the result of forcefully "importing" something that came from outside, but rather of carefully drawing empirically-sensible parallels between the two traditions.)
(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)
I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.
I am more of the anxious side of things and being super focused on myself is very stressful. Sure I feel calmer afterwards but the process feels like a cold shower in winter.
The only times I found meditation enjoyable is in a group setting. Normally I am quite introverted and prefer to do most activities alone but here it is reversed.
Can you explain, what exactly is stressful to you, by focusing on yourself? Or is it just that you feel you want to move but you also want to be still?
Have you ever had something bad happen and you try to distract yourself by working or watching something? Meditation feels like the reverse of that.
Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful.
I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I meditate then after physical exercise when my body is full of happiness hormones giving me a nice cool-down.
Yup, that is a good combination. And if you do sports in nature, you might find good spots to calm down in between. Being next to moving water I found helpful, or atop on some mountain with the wind.
(but no smartphone to distract me)
Are you able to clearly manifest an image of anything in your mind's eye? If not then you might have aphantasia (i.e. "third eye blind").
When I was younger I sat several Vipisana and Zen retreats across multiple traditions. While it changed me in the sense that I became far less impulsive and more grounded, there was never anything mystical about the experiences, just periods of calm and quiet, like the internal world had slowed way down.
But that's unusual, I suspect most who seriously take up meditation do indeed have full blown psychedelic experiences (thus the author's reference to LSD), not long after taking up practice, and certainly within the first week long retreat or two.
Not at all.