Mindfulness

Just read this article titled Meditation And Mindfulness Have a Dark Side We Rarely Talk About. Here is an excerpt from the article:

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects that had a significant negative impact on their everyday life and lasted for at least one month.

According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression. These are followed by psychotic or delusional symptoms, dissociation or depersonalisation, and fear or terror.

Research also found that adverse effects can happen to people without previous mental health problems, to those who have only had a moderate exposure to meditation and they can lead to long-lasting symptoms.

The western world has also had evidence about these adverse effects for a long time.

In 1976, Arnold Lazarus, a key figure in the cognitive-behavioural science movement, said that meditation, when used indiscriminately, could induce "serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation".

There is evidence that mindfulness can benefit people's well-being. The problem is that mindfulness coaches, videos, apps, and books rarely warn people about the potential adverse effects.

This reminded me of what Meher Baba had to say about the practices like yoga, deep meditation and various forms of asceticism. I used NotebookLM to search 76 sources and summarise Baba's views on such practices.

The Results of Yoga, Deep Meditation, and Ascetic Practices on the Spiritual Path

Introduction

According to Meher Baba, various spiritual disciplines—including the yogas, deep meditation, fasting, and asceticism—have been laid down by ancient sages to help aspirants traverse the spiritual path. While these practices can yield profound inner experiences, deep peace, and advanced spiritual powers, they also contain hidden traps. Without the guidance of a Perfect Master, the results of these practices frequently become severe liabilities, capable of ensnaring the aspirant in heightened illusions, egotism, or even causing a catastrophic spiritual fall.

How These Practices Can Be an Aid

1. Uprooting Past Impressions (Sanskaras)

The true yogas (Karma Yoga, Dnyan Yoga, Raj Yoga, and Bhakti Yoga) serve as prominent signposts on the path to Truth. When followed correctly, they can help uproot the heritage of accumulated impressions (sanskaras) that bind the soul.

• In Karma Yoga, one loses the self in selfless service.
• In Dnyan Yoga, the mind is utilized to contemplation and meditation to check the expression of desires, thereby wiping out sanskaras.
• In Raj Yoga, the aspirant aims to stop the mind from thinking through intense concentration, steadily lessening the grip of sanskaras.

2. Providing Spiritual Rest and Energy

Deep meditation and yogic practices can lead to yoga samadhi (a state of trance). While temporary, this state provides the aspirant with a profound sense of peace. Baba explains that yoga samadhi allows the pilgrim to rest, much like sound sleep, giving the seeker renewed energy to proceed further along the spiritual path.

3. Developing Dispassion and Control

Ascetic practices—such as fasting, solitude, and the denial of physical desires—introduce a "negative assertion" that can help decondition the mind from its habitual attachments to the gross world. When intelligently handled, meditation conserves mental energy, increases the power of concentration, and can occasionally yield inner revelation.

How These Practices Can Become a Liability

Despite their benefits, Meher Baba repeatedly warns that these practices are fraught with profound dangers for the independent seeker.

1. The Trap of Occult Powers (Siddhis)

Intense yogic practices and penance can awaken dormant occult powers, such as the ability to walk on water, read minds, raise the dead, or halt moving trains. However, these powers (siddhis) are considered phenomenal and have nothing to do with true spirituality. They are described as "spectacles of colored glass" that merely alter the appearance of illusion. The fascination with these powers often distracts the aspirant from the true goal of God-realization.

2. The Danger of Misusing Power

The acquisition of these powers becomes a severe liability, particularly on the fourth plane of consciousness, where the aspirant wields infinite energy. If a yogi falls prey to the overpowering temptation to misuse these powers (for either selfish reasons or mere display), it triggers a cataclysmic psychic crash. This disaster completely disintegrates the soul's gained consciousness, throwing the pilgrim all the way back to the rudimentary consciousness of a stone, forcing them to restart the entire evolutionary journey.

3. Addiction to Trance (Samadhi)

The trance state achieved through yoga or deep meditation (yoga samadhi or haal) is entirely different from the permanent divine state of nirvikalpa samadhi (God-realization). In yoga samadhi, the mind is only temporarily stilled; as soon as the yogi returns to normal consciousness, their ego, intellect, and worldly desires instantly resume functioning. Meher Baba likens this state to a drug addiction or intoxication; the yogi may feel like an emperor while in the trance, but eventually suffers a "headache" of worldly strain upon waking. Consequently, some yogis become so addicted to this bliss that they remain stuck in trance for centuries, completely halting their spiritual progress.

4. Ego Inflation and Hypocrisy

Ascetic practices often breed a dangerous spiritual ego. Meher Baba points out that adopting outward signs of renunciation—such as wearing ochre robes, growing long matted hair, smearing the body with ashes, or sitting naked in the snow—can falsely court respect from the public. This public homage nourishes a superiority complex, turning the aspirant into a hypocrite who outwardly poses as a saint but inwardly remains plagued by worldly desires. Baba emphasized that it is easier to sit naked on a snowbound peak of the Himalayas doing meditation than to live with him and obey him implicitly.

5. The Creation of New Bindings

Independent efforts to annihilate the ego through intense austerities often backfire. Penance, mechanical fasting, and rigid yogic disciplines can actually create new bindings. Trying to escape from actions merely results in the action of inactivity, which strengthens the knots of entanglement. Furthermore, premature or unguided awakening of the kundalini through yogic exercises can lead to self-deception and cannot take the aspirant to the ultimate goal.

Conclusion

Ultimately, while yoga, deep meditation, and asceticism can elevate an aspirant to great heights, they cannot permanently destroy the deep-seated legacy of past sanskaras. The ego cannot annihilate itself simply through its own efforts or mechanical disciplines. To transcend these profound liabilities, Meher Baba asserts that the aspirant must rely on pure love and complete surrender to a Perfect Master, whose grace alone can safely remove the final veils of illusion.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

 

"All we really yearn for is our own absence, after all, we yearn for what happens at death. Ahhh ... I don't have to worry about that anymore."

Nice quote from Jim Carrey in the film "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond" watched on Netflix. We put so much energy into building ourselves, being ourselves, a lifetime of input to build our egos and associated empires. As the Buddha purportedly said according to Vipassana meditation:

In this flow of the world I have taken so many times birth ... birth after birth for so many lives, countless lives. And every time I have taken birth I kept running incessantly. And some wise people in some lives told me that I can get out of this cycle of misery provided I can witness the Creator. Many lives I kept searching for the Creator, the Creator of This House. In search of the Creator of the House, again and again I kept getting birthed full of misery. Oh builder of the house, now I have seen you. You can't build any house for me anymore. Now, I have destroyed everything. I have destroyed all the building materials. You can't make a building for me. My mind is now free of all sankhara [wandering thought-forms] and the craving is rooted out. 

Hollywood is saying of course that Jim Carrey has lost it but what he's saying is no different from what I've been thinking about these past couple of years ... that I'm just a figment of my imagination. Figment meaning "something made up, invented, or fabricated". It's similar to playing the part of a character in a play. However, I have a physical body, This House as the Buddha put it, and it is in that body that the drama is played out.

The High Priestess

For the first time in quite some time, I had a dream last night that I'd call a "big dream". I use this term to describe dreams that are numinous or have psychologically significant content. The setting for the dream was the house where I spent my entire childhood and adolescence, apart from the first two years. It's located at 21 Mayneview Street, Milton, Brisbane and it still stands to this day, although now it's been taken over by a computer company. In my dream world, the house serves as a symbol of my psychological foundations and so any dream containing this symbol is invariably significant.

In last night's dream, I had a close encounter with a very powerful and very old female figure. It began with me at the front of the property on which the house stands. I was on the ground writhing slowly and trying to purge myself of some inner emotional content. It felt a bit like throwing up except that I was trying to rid myself of some psychic content rather than stomach content. This seemed to be a necessary preparation for the encounter with the old woman because in the next scene I am the back of the property where she is seated on a raised throne.

I am still prostrate on the ground and I struggle to get to my feet. Eventually I succeed and I draw closer to her at her behest. As I do, her face comes into focus and I can see that she is very, very old. However, she exudes power and authority. Our faces are almost touching and I know that she is going to say something very important to me and she does. With solemn authority, shes tells me to "lose my anger" and thus delivers a very clear and unequivocal message.

Thanks to my sustained meditation, I've had relatively few outbursts of anger recently and they have been relatively minor but even so they are unsettling, often occurring when I'm driving. At other times, I'll become impatient when I'm queueing, even though I may not express my irritation. Lately in my meditation, I've become aware of the need to maintain equilibrium between inner and outer. At brief times, I've even felt the two merging and becoming continuous. At such times, "I" fade out and the inner flows into the outer and vice versa. The antithesis of this state is the emotional state of anger, however mild, because it severely disturbs the equilibrium between inside and outside.

Anger is always ego-driven as when I'm driving and somebody does something that I think he or she shouldn't do. I have an inner expectation of how I think people should behave on the roads and if they don't meet those expectations I'm likely to feel aggrieved. It's stupid really but hard to let go of. However, the old lady on her throne is telling me that I have to. She is reminiscent of the High Priestess in the Tarot deck.

Time Out Of Mind

Now that my practice of meditation has become a daily habit, I find myself a little more in sympathy with religious ritual which at least sets aside some time for supposedly "spiritual" activities not directly related to the routine of daily life. The activities themselves, as practised by the majority of individuals, are often mechanical and motivated by the desire for worldly gain but not always, the potential for some sort of spiritual breakthrough is always there. If no time is set aside, then the phenomenal world is liable to absorb our complete attention and we oscillate forever between past and future, never finding the equilibrium of the present moment. Years can go by like that, even entire lifetimes.

The key is to stay alert during the allocated time and not rely on any set routines. Initially, the mind will struggle against the discipline of setting any regular time aside at all for "mind-training" exercises. After all, like a wild horse, the mind (my mind at least) has had a lifetime of freedom, galloping off in any direction that caught its fancy. With persistence the mind will accept the discipline and the temporary reigning in of its freedom but attempt to compartmentalise and indulge the enforced practice. This is made much easier when external rituals and recitation of set prayers are being followed. The ego, the mind's greatest creation, can then bask in the false belief that it is spiritually oriented. Of course, any serious spiritual orientation has the death of the ego as its sole objection and the ego, despite its manifest limitations, is not stupid. It knows its life is on the line and will fight to the last for its survival.

The death of ignorance begins by setting aside some daily time in which there is the opportunity to drop our absorption in the phenomenal world and quiet the feverish activities of our minds. Without that daily allocation of time, there's no hope at all really but with it, there will be some "time out of mind", however momentary, and then seeds can be sown.

Practical Meditation

It was timely that I happened upon Barry Long's book on meditation (as described in my last entry) and started to apply his suggested approach to daily meditation over the past couple of weeks. This was a time of intense pressure for me as I was the sole person responsible for printing out all of the Secondary School reports by the start of the final week of school. The meditation, undertaken for about 15 minutes prior to going to bed, proved consistently effective in allowing me to remain calm under stress. I also came to realise that I have to do what works for me and not follow any suggested methods or techniques too rigidly. For me, sinking deep into the body and feeling its solidity and density, markedly slows the activity of my mind. Thoughts are so quick and light that I find the contrast between them and the heaviness of my body helps me to catch myself before I'm carried off too far into either the past or the future.

The focus on the body leads to an awareness of its energy and rate of vibration, a rate that is so much slower than thought and even the emotions that arise from thought. This creates a real sense of stability, of being rooted in the present. I'm starting to feel less of a helpless spectator caught up in a crazed thought machine and I'm sensing that I might be able to use the machine when I need it and turn it off when I don't. Of course, I've always applauded the "thought" of being able to do this but it's so very different to actually achieve this, even if only for a few moments in meditation. So I'm very much encouraged to continue my daily practice.

Stillness is the Way

I just happened to spy a book on my bookshelf called "Meditation: A Foundation Course" by Barry Long. I'd quite forgotten that I had it and even though I'm a great admirer of this now deceased guy, I'd never sat down and read it through. It's not a long book and its emphasis is wholely practical, just what I need really because lately I've been reading about various techniques for meditation and not deciding on any one in particular. In practical terms, I've been doing nothing and that's why chancing upon this little gem is so serendipitous.

Barry has a no-nonsense style about him. For example on page 3, he writes: "A great deal of mumbo-jumbo has been written and talked about meditation" and he goes on to say that "some meditation techniques introduce emotional excitation or arousal - through visualisation, chanting, imaginative exercises, trance and so forth - but these will not get you real results, only more confusion."

He divides the book into ten lessons to be followed sequentially over a period of days. Lesson 1 is titled "Posture, Breathing and the Still Mind" and in this Barry briefly outlines the ideas behind the practical lessons that follow, the first of which (Lesson 2) is titled "Meditating on the Body". The approach outlined there is more or less the same as the Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N.Goenka that I'm familiar with from the 90s and so I have no conflicts or reservations in following his directions. I'll practise what he says in the second lesson for a few days and then move on to the next. At last I'll be actually meditating.

In setting up the hyperlinks for this post, I notice that the people behind Barry Long's website are still marketing his videos, audio tapes and books even though he died on December 6th 2003. This is regrettable as their focus should now be on freely disseminating the material via the Internet. To this end they should follow the example of the Meher Baba Trust and digitise all of Barry Long's books and make the ebooks downloadable at no cost. Similarly all his audio and video recordings should be freely downloadable. However, I doubt that will happen.

I also noticed that there is a Vipasanna Meditation Centre at Bogor (near Jakarta) that is offering 10 day courses in May and July but the times aren't convenient for me. In any case, I don't know if I could endure a full ten day session again. I managed a couple when I was in my mid-40s but I don't think I'd have the stamina for it now. The problem with these sessions was that they were so exhausting that I always stopped meditating after leaving the centre just out of sheer relief. I think I'll stick with a little bit of meditation every day if I can manage it. As Barry says: "Stillness is the Way".

I am NOT THAT

I'm still making my way through Osho's "Book of Wisdom" and what he says about meditation is relevant to my last post about keeping physically fit. He describes meditation as anything that brings body, mind and spirit into harmony. To that end, jogging could be a form of meditation. So could swimming. He says it is important to choose a form of meditation that suits you. Sitting quietly observing the rhythm of your breathing may suit some but not others. You have to find techniques that work for you. He says that whenever a person is creative, absorbed in creativity, he or she is meditating.

As Brian Eno says, "If you study the heuristics and logistics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line". He goes on to say, "So it's

much more realistic to abandon such statistics and resign to be trapped like a leaf on the vine". It's easy to be trapped of course. We are trapped by identification. According to Osho (so this may be apocryphal), George Gurdieff said, "If I could summarise my teachings into one word, it would be 'disidentification'". I like that. Don't get trapped. Don't identify.

You can start by not accepting labels. I used to proclaim, with my ego nodding agreeably, that "I am a vegetarian". Oops, label. Of course once you allow yourself to be categorised, there are sub-categories to consider. People would ask "Do you eat eggs?" I would smilingly say "I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian, which means I eat eggs (non-fertilised of course) and milk products". Inevitably someone asks, "Do you eat fish?" and I would be compelled to say, somewhat sternly, that I don't eat fish because if I did then I wouldn't qualify as a vegetarian. Categorisation feeds the ego. It's far simpler to say that I don't eat meat. If someone asks whether I eat fish, I can calmly say that I don't. It throws the onus back on the questioner to decide on a categorisation for my eating habits if he or she feels that it's needed.

The same goes for nationality. If someone were to ask me now, "Are you an Australian?", I'd have to say that I have an Australian passport. If the person then wants to classify me as an Australian then that's their decision. It's easy to get cute about this and use this "via negativa" as an ego trip but it's also important to free oneself of categories and this is a step in the right direction. If I say I am a vegetarian, then that implies there are non-vegetarians and immediately a divide is created. If I say on the other hand that I don't eat meat, it's rather different. It's more like saying I don't eat chocolate (not quite the same, but similar).

It's very common to describe oneself in terms of one's profession. I might say "I'm a teacher" but what I really mean is that "I'm qualified to work as a teacher in a Secondary school". It's not quite the same thing. I guess it come down to trying to remember that "I am NOT THAT". You can only find yourself by forgetting what you're not and reinforcing your false sense of identity through "I am THIS" is sensibly to be avoided.