Meditation risks, safety, goals, methods

Risks, safety, emergencies
Methods, goals, results
Recommendations

Risks, safety, emergencies

Save this link in case of emergencies (you or someone you know is having trouble with meditation that affects your ability to function normally for more than a little while after stopping meditation): https://www.cheetahhouse.org/get-help-intro 

Being a sciency kinda guy, I'd like quantitative evidence.

Much of the academic and clinical work on negative effects of meditation has been done by Willoughby Britton and her colleagues. See her site for details! https://vivo.brown.edu/display/wbritton#Publications

The science so far isn't as sciency as I'd like, so I won't quote any numbers. However, its general conclusions match what I've seen in decades of meditation practice and informal conversations with thousands of meditators.

Meditation is not entirely safe. In the worst case, it can cause disabling psychiatric breakdowns lasting years. That is very rare.

Mild emotional disturbances, confusion, and odd sensations are common, and not usually a problem. https://www.cheetahhouse.org/symptoms 

Meditation has a "dose-response effect": generally, the more you do, the more intense the results will be, whether positive, negative, or just weird.

If you do 15 min/day, you'll probably have mild positive effects, and are unlikely to be hospitalized (although that can happen).

In a group retreat of 12+ hours meditation per day for months, many to most will experience some negative effects at least briefly, and it's pretty normal for one or two people to have a major mental health crisis.

Usually, if it is producing negative effects, stopping meditating stops the problem. I am not an expert or teacher, so I rarely give advice, but this is my one main recommendation:

Just stop until the problem goes away. Take a break. You can come back to it later.

Meditators may be reluctant to stop even when it has impaired their ability to function: because it feels good, because they think "no pain, no gain," because they mistake dysfunction for incipient "enlightenment," or because their teacher tells them to push through.

It is sometimes true that pushing through what looks like imminent psychosis can produce spiritual breakthroughs. It can also lead to months of psychiatric hospitalization. Do not attempt this without intensive guidance from an expert. (How do you know who is qualified?)

Methods, goals, results

Anecdotally, some meditation methods are safer and/or more effective than others. Afaik, there is no good quantitative data on this. There is lots of vehement religious opinion, though.

As an engineer, I take a first-principles, mechanistic approach to meditation methods.

What is this method supposed to accomplish? What are its prerequisites? How is the method supposed to get you from here to there? Is it plausible that would work? What might go wrong with it?

Western teachers usually say "meditation" is supposed to make your life better, and also possibly someday you will become "enlightened." This is all very nice and super vague, and the lack of precision is harmful. It (deliberately) obscures the actual goal and risks.

Different meditation systems are not different methods for accomplishing the same thing. In their Asian origins, they were each engineered to achieve specific, very different conceptions of enlightenment, taking you in entirely different directions.

Most currently popular meditation methods derive from "Sutrayana," one branch of Buddhism. These methods include secular mindfulness, vipassana, and (with asterisks) Zen. https://vividness.live/sutrayana 

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a message from the MEDITATION EMERGENCY NETWORK

A bunch of twitter replies say "I don't believe meditation has any risks."

Please check the medical studies on this and take their warning seriously. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176239

Bibliography of academic/clinical studies of harmful effects of meditation: https://www.brown.edu/research/labs/britton/sites/britton-lab/files/images/0.%20TOOLBOX%20CONTENTS%202.13.19.docx

To be clear, I meditate sometimes, sometimes intensively. I accept the risks, and believe meditation is usually beneficial.

The point of this thread is not “don’t meditate,” it’s “understand how to decrease the risks and increase benefits.”

I’ll be back after making an omelet.

... aaaaand, we're back.

Sutrayana—mainstream Buddhism—has a precise logic, which you probably already know, and have decided to ignore and forget because you don't like it. https://vividness.live/sutra-vs-tantra 

Existence is unrelentingly awful. There is nothing of any worth in the world . You can't fix that, even the slightest bit, and you can't escape, even in death , because you will just be reborn, probably as an intestinal parasite.

The best thing would be to cease existing. How can you prevent rebirth?

What *causes* rebirth?

(I know you don't believe any of this, and I don't either! I promise it is going to explain how and why mainstream meditation works, and why it's risky, though.)

In life, we can't stop ourselves doing things that cause suffering, because we're compelled by emotions, thoughts, perceptions, involvements, and our sense of selfness.

Same after death: we choose rebirth because of all the emotionally-compelling loose ends left over from life.

If in life we can end our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, involvements, and sense of self, we won't have loose ends after death.

We'll have developed the skill of not making stupid suffering-causing choices (like rebirth), and will retain that after death.

Phew! The way out!

So there's a two-step recipe for ending existence.

Renunciation: withdraw from the physical & social worlds, avoid anything that provokes any emotion, end all activities (ideally up to and including eating).

(That's STEP ONE, before you meditate.) https://vividness.live/renunciation-in-buddhism

Step two: meditation.

Kill any remaining emotions, thoughts, sensations, and your sense of self.

The methods for this are surprisingly effective... and are the historical basis for current secular mindfulness, which is *pretty much the same thing*. https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation

Likely risks of mainstream meditation methods: dissociation, depression, derealization, pathological spaciness, and depersonalization.

Those are precisely the *goals* of the practice, as traditionally understood: the end of involvement, emotions, perception, thought, and self.

So why is a practice engineered to turn you into a zombie often beneficial in small doses for normal people?

Because we do suffer from insurance paperwork, political outrage, clutter, self-defeating thought-loops, and tedious unresolvable self-esteem issues. (Line those up...)

Stepping back temporarily from busyness, upset, complexity, trying to figure stuff out, and neurotic self-involvement is a great relief. And "mindfulness" (and vipassana and Zen, etc.) can do that.

There's two problems. One is that the dose-response effect is somewhat unpredictable. Rarely, someone does their first 10 minutes of mindfulness & loses their sense of self and contact with reality.

Which was the original goal of the practice! But absolutely not *their* goal!

The other risk is that you meditate intensively and turn into a drooling zombie. You could do that because the world *does* seem unrelentingly awful, and being a zombie seems better.

Probably a bad choice. Great group discussion here; h/t @drossbucket

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmXqHKpgRfg83Nif9/how-to-ignore-your-emotions-while-also-thinking-you-re

You can turn yourself into a zombie by not understanding that different Buddhisms have extremely different ideas of what "enlightenment" means.

For some, it's avoiding rebirth through becoming a zombie; for some others, it's becoming an immortal sky god. https://vividness.live/epistemology-and-enlightenment

If you fantasize about becoming an immortal sky god (and who doesn't?), and pursue that with a method designed to turn you into a zombie, and practice more and more intensively when it doesn't seem to be working yet...

you will definitely turn yourself into a zombie.

Oh, here's some more first-person explanation of why you might choose zombification, and what it may cost you.

If meditation is heading you in this direction, make sure it's what you want, and get help if not.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmXqHKpgRfg83Nif9/how-to-ignore-your-emotions-while-also-thinking-you-re?commentId=P65quDXWpyfkrmZ2v

https://mhollyelmoreblog.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/dissociation/

Recommendations

These apply if you meditate fairly seriously, meaning half an hour or more per day for a year or more. If you meditate casually, the risks are small, and the differences between methods are not that important.

My main recommendation is to get clear about what you want from meditation, what method might lead to that, & what unwanted side-effects it might have.

This will take serious personal inquiry plus external research, due to clouds of motivated vagueness. https://vividness.live/what-do-you-want-buddhism-for

There's been a century-plus of deliberate obfuscation of the functions of meditation. At this point many/most meditation teachers have no idea what the methods they teach are for or how they are supposed to work. (This is bad.) https://vividness.live/the-making-of-buddhist-modernism

Clarifying what you want is also difficult, partly because it depends on what is available.

You'd probably rather become a sky god than a zombie, but as a sciency kinda guy, I don't believe the methods that are supposed to turn you into a sky god are likely to work.

Figuring out what the objectives of different meditation methods are requires—unfortunately—learning some theory and history that is not clearly set out anywhere.

Especially not if you are considering methods deriving from different religions. I can talk only about Buddhism.

I said most modern meditation systems derive from Sutrayana, which aims to escape the world into non-existence or into celestial godhood.

It contrasts with Vajrayana, which is about human functioning in the actual world. https://vividness.live/approaching-vajrayana

The aims and methods of Vajrayana are, on the whole, more compatible with what most people want nowadays, and on the whole seem more realistic. https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview

I wish I could say that Vajrayana also seems safer, but I can't. First, we have no quantitative data on which methods are more dangerous. Second, it's traditionally considered *more* dangerous.

OTOH, the "danger" of Sutrayana is that it works as advertised....

Traditional presentations of the goals of Vajrayana are esoteric, abstract, incomprehensible at first, and often obviously impossible, so clarity about whether you want to practice it takes work.

https://vividness.live/tantra-result 

The risks of Vajrayana are, again, closely related to the goals: narcissism, aggression, sexual acting-out, and delusional psychosis.

(That's what you get if you develop the "form aspects" of Vajrayana and neglect the "emptiness aspects.")

Vajrayana is subdivided into Tantra and what might be called the "essence approaches," which are Mahamudra and Dzogchen.

I've written a lot about Tantra, mostly as a theoretical exercise. It's not a feasible starting point for many people. https://vividness.live/tantra-base 

Within the essence approaches (both Mahamudra and Dzogchen), there is a series of four meditation methods, "the four yogas" or "four naljors." That's mainly what I practice, fwiw.

The overall aim of the four naljors is to relate to pattern and nebulosity as inseparable... which happens to be what all the "books" I write are about. https://metarationality.com/nebulosity 

I would like to say that the four yogas system is risk-free, but we don't know that.

It can be disorienting, but I don't know of anyone having serious negative consequences; & it's hard to think what bad aspects of "recognizing the inseparability of form and emptiness" could be.

My Vividness site used to have a page, from 2014, on teachers of modern Vajrayana. It started by saying there aren't exactly any, but here's some you could look into, with various caveats, and also that I didn't know much about most of them.

I took it down last year after noticing that several teachers had blown up (sex or other scandals) or fizzled (retreated into esoteric bubbles).

This leaves me with little confidence for recommendations, and considerable concern for the future of the religion.

I few months ago my spouse @_awbery_ cofounded a meditation community which teaches primarily the four naljors system. I'm confident they are sane, kind, and competent. (Obviously, I'm biased; investigate for yourself if this sounds attractive!) https://twitter.com/_awbery_/status/1356633410505035783?s=20