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Meditation: Curse or Comfort?
In the West, meditation is “in.” In fact, it is so “in” that the
media seldom reports anything negative about this practice but instead showers
praise on its reported benefits. However, one former meditator, writer Mary
Garden, confessed:
· Back in 1979, when I was living in Pune, India,
as a starry-eyed devotee of the infamous guru Bhagwan Rajneesh, something
happened that has disturbed me to this day. A man who had just come down from
Kathmandu after completing a thirty-day Tibetan Buddhist meditation course
killed himself. I had met him the night before, and we'd had coffee together. I
don't remember what we spoke about, but he was friendly and didn't appear
distressed. But the next day he climbed to the top of the multi-storied Blue
Diamond Hotel and leapt off. The Bhagwan, at his first lecture after the man's
suicide, tried to reassure us by saying the man had already reincarnated as a
more enlightened soul. But I was quite upset and remember thinking how strange
it was that someone should kill himself after a meditation course. Isn't
meditation something you do to get--at the very least--peace of mind? I
wondered whether he might have had a mental illness and perhaps shouldn't have
taken the course in the first place. Even if he had, shouldn't the meditation
have helped? It didn't occur to me that the meditation itself might have caused
a mental imbalance that tipped him over the edge--that meditation could be
dangerous for some people. Has such a notion ever appeared in the mainstream
media, let alone the myriad New Age magazines?
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/MaryGarden.html
She adds: “What is interesting is that Buddhist and Hindu
teachers, even the Dalai Lama, have occasionally pointed out the potential
hazards of meditation. Dhammananda warned”:
· The practice of meditation has been abused by
people. They want immediate and quick results, just as they expect quick
returns for everything they do in daily life . . . the mind must be brought
under control in slow degrees and one should not try to reach for the higher
states without proper training. We have heard of over-enthusiastic young men
and women literally going out of their minds because they adopted the wrong
attitudes towards meditation.
· Dr. Lorin Roche, a meditation teacher, says a
major problem arises from the way meditators interpret Buddhist and Hindu
teachings. He points out that meditation techniques that encourage detachment
from the world were intended only for monks and nuns. He has spent thirty years
doing interviews with people who meditate regularly and says many were
depressed.
Are the dangers of meditation simply a product of having the
“wrong attitudes” or “interpretations?” Garden provides some anecdotal evidence
regarding what seems to be dangers inherent to meditation
· On a Goenka Vipassana discussion board called
tribe.net, a participant named Tristan writes: “I wish I could say wonderful
things about my experience but I can't. I stayed the full ten days, many of
them filled with incredible hallucinations, from being inside an egg, to being
a bird-like animal with broken wings, to following tunnels through my brain, to
feeling completely connected to the universe. No problem, I told myself, it's
just sensation. I'm perfectly safe. On the last day of the retreat, listening
to the last lecture, I let out a huge scream and fell down.” [This meditator]
says he became psychotic and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for several
weeks.
· With Goenka's courses there have been a number
of failed suicide attempts in India, including one that resulted in a broken
spine and another in which the survivor suffered a ruptured lung and a
fractured skull. Researchers at Goenka's headquarters at Igatpuri looked at
cases concerning nine persons who'd harmed themselves after a course, and they
found all had either practiced other forms of meditation, used healing
techniques, or used drugs prior to doing a course. They consequently attributed
the serious mental disturbances following the retreat not as side effects of
the meditation technique, but to the practice or use of these other things.
· But a woman who recently contacted me said her
son did a Vipassana course in January in New Zealand, found it to be a very
positive experience that produced many good feelings of love and so forth, but
that within a few days of his return he'd had a "psychotic episode."
He was committed to a mental hospital where he responded well to medication and
is now on antidepressants. Her son had no history of mental instability, nor
was there any such history in the family. He had never tried meditation before nor
had he taken drugs.
· Geoffrey Dawson, a Sydney-based Zen meditation
teacher and psychotherapist, has come across twenty people who had mentally
distressing experiences as a result of attending courses at the Goenka
Vipassana Retreat Center in Blackheath (located in the Blue Mountains of
Australia). Dawson says these meditators became fragmented rather than
integrated and their experiences included panic attacks, depressive episodes,
or both that in most cases persisted months after the retreat ended. There were
also some manic episodes, one of which later became diagnosed and treated as a
bipolar disorder. Dawson was also contacted by a woman whose daughter had been
to a retreat. Her friends and family noticed she became withdrawn and obsessive
afterwards. Her psychological condition deteriorated and some months later she
became psychotic. Within eighteen months she was hospitalized and committed
suicide.
· Dawson suggests that "if a gradual approach
to meditation retreats is adopted, supportive processes are put in place during
retreats, and follow-up care is provided," while it's not guaranteed
participants won't have adverse experiences, "it can certainly help
prevent and minimize the development of mental disorders."
· Christopher Titmuss, a former Buddhist monk who
now lives in England, holds yearly Vipassana meditation retreats in Bodh Gaya,
India. He reports that occasionally people go through very traumatic
experiences and require round the clock support, the use of strong drugs, or
even hospitalization. "Others may experience a short-lived terror of the
mind utterly out of control, a temporary fear of going mad," he notes.
"Or an alienation from conventional reality that makes it difficult for
consciousness to recover without active intervention." But Titmuss claims
it isn't the meditation that causes such behavior: "The function of
meditation, as the Buddha points out, is to act as a mirror to what is."
Is meditation just “a mirror,” or does it open the meditator to
new dangers? Garden gravitates towards the latter option, citing another former
meditator:
· Those who play the "mental illness"
defense card seem to have a vested interest in Eastern philosophy. Meditation
appears to create mental imbalance by messing with the brain's chemistry.
Garden also backs up her concerns with the relevant research,
pointing to the fact that there are profound costs endemic to meditation:
· Professor Richard Davidson of Wisconsin, a
long-term Buddhist meditator himself, claims that meditation can "change
neural states in circuits that may be important for compassionate behavior and
attentional and emotional regulation."
"Meditation is not going to be good for all
patients with emotional disorders and it may even be bad for certain types of
patients."
· Dr. Solomon Snyder, head of neuroscience at
Johns Hopkins University, warns that during meditation the brain releases
serotonin. This may help those with mild depression but too much serotonin can
cause, in some, a paradoxical relaxation-induced anxiety. Instead of relaxing
during meditation, these people become distressed and may even have panic
attacks. Snyder says that in some cases of schizophrenia, meditation can launch
a person straight into psychosis.
· Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of
Pennsylvania scanned the brains of long-term practitioners of Buddhism while
they were meditating and compared them with images taken when they were not.
Newberg saw that blood flow to the posterior superior parietal lobe decreased
during meditation. This area of the brain determines the boundaries of one's
body in relation to the environment and allows us to navigate a complex
three-dimensional world without bumping into things. "We know that the
posterior superior parietal lobe plays that particular role because there are
patients with damage in this same region who literally cannot move around
without falling," Newberg reports. "They'll miss the chair they
intended to sit on, and generally have a fuzzy understanding of where their
body ends and the rest of the universe begins." He says that when people
have spiritual experiences and feel they become one with the universe and lose
their sense of self, it may be because of what is happening in that area of the
brain. "If you block that area, you lose that boundary between the self
and the rest of the world."
· Dr. Michael Persinger, a professor of
neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Canada, studied 1,018 meditators
in 1993 and found that meditation can bring on symptoms of complex partial
epilepsy such as visual abnormalities, hearing voices, feeling vibrations, or
experiencing automatic behaviors such as narcolepsy. Note that epileptic
patients who suffer from seizures in the temporal lobes have auditory or visual
hallucinations, which they often interpret as mystical experiences. Some are
convinced that they conversed with God.
· Persinger set out to investigate so-called
"mystical" experiences under controlled laboratory conditions. He got
volunteers to wear a helmet fitted with a set of magnets through which he ran a
weak electromagnetic signal. Persinger found that the magnetically induced
seizures in the temporal lobes generate the same sort of hallucinations and
mystical experiences reported by epileptic patients. Four in five people, he
says, report a "mystical experience, the feeling that there is a sentient
being or entity standing behind or near" them. Some weep, some feel God
has touched them, others become frightened and talk of demons and evil spirits.
"That's in the laboratory," Persinger notes, referring to subjects'
knowledge of a controlled environment. "How much more intense might these
experiences be if they happened late at night, or in a pew in a mosque or
synagogue?"
Garden concludes:
· After my Indian odyssey and my return to worldly
life in 1979, I've found being back in the world not such a bad thing after
all. I no longer regard the world as a place from which to escape or detach
myself. My mind is no longer something to conquer or to cleanse of impurities.
In fact, my life is immeasurably richer without meditation.
There are many other pro-meditation sources that admit to the
inherent dangers. Here are just two of them:
http://simonarich.com/meditation-dangers
http://thoughtbrick.com/meditation/dangers-meditation-10-things-look/
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