[littlethrowaway]

No, they certainly shouldn't... for various reasons I did a vipassana 10 day silent retreat back in 2010, and, ended up triggering a bipolar episode[0]. No, there was no history of that in my family, it was a complete surprise.

This obviously doesn't happen to everyone doing it, but, while my blog is very much buried now, I still get yearly mails from people saying that the same thing happened to them..

[0]. http://livingvipassana.blogspot.com/2010/02/bipolar-chronicl...

[heyoni]

I quit on day 5. My life started playing itself in my head on repeat and I started to focus on all the pain. I would imagine the universe dying and coming back to life where everything, especially some nasty events would reoccur ad infinitum. I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it.

I had a panic attack, and then another and finally talked to the teacher who agreed that I should leave.

[littlethrowaway]

I'm sorry to hear that - and I hope you're doing fine now. I really didn't have any "bad" experience like that (mania is awesome fun ;)), of course, the downside was depression followed by years of medication. They make such a deal about it being a "bad idea to leave midway through" ... I'm glad your teacher said you should (although even then, they're really ejecting you in what must be a pretty vulnerable situation). Anyway, hope you're doing fine now.

[heyoni]

> mania is awesome fun ;)

That's what I was hoping for! just kidding. But no, for the most part I think I'm totally fine and I don't think vipassana caused anything new, I've always had intrusive thoughts and trouble focusing, but in general I'm fairly successful and lead a pretty normal life. Who knows what would have happened had I stayed, it's quite possible that things would have been much worse. I know I felt emotionally drained for a few weeks afterwards and almost numb.

[argentinian]

> I was convinced that the people who were unlucky in this life were actually suffering for eternity and practically lost it.

Do you have some idea now about why that conviction seemed believable to you at that moment?

[pasiaj]

I had a similar experience that I might be able to explain logically.

I was thinking about death, the exact moment of death, and thought about the last sensation felt by a dying person.

I had a thought that the last affect you experience subjectively never goes away. That if you feel horrible at the moment of your death, subjectively that feeling never goes away.

That idea and feeling shook me and made me think of heaven and hell being abstractions of the last subjective affect that you are ”stuck” with.

I understand that this is nonsense, but it ties well together with abstract consepts about soul and afterlife and logic in a way that allowed my mind to create a model it, and feel all the horrible outcomes of that model.

The model felt plausible enough to trigger strong emotion.

It did not trigger anything long lasting - just a momentary feeling of terror.

[jordwest]

I had a similar feeling of terror as a kid, thinking about death and eternity one night in bed and suddenly experiencing terror. The best way I could describe it was this vast eternal concept of nothingness forever that scared me with the immensity of infinity. In a way I’m kinda grateful for that experience now as it’s led me down a path of learning about meditation and eventually a lot of the things described in this thread.

Here’s something you might like to ponder as an alternative perspective (though I can imagine there’s fear of going back there).

What would be the implication if the passage of time is only an illusion created by memory? What if every moment in our lives is experienced simultaneously, but it only appears to move forwards because we experience each of those moments individually - each containing some memory of moments before. After all it’s not possible to experience any other moment than this one, right now, so we don’t have any subjective evidence that we (as awareness) even experience anything other than a single moment.

In other words, even if awareness persists outside death, when memory dies with the brain how can there be any perception of time - what would it even be that experiences eternity?

[heyoni]

So some of that was definitely going through my head during the meditation. I kept thinking about someone I know who committed suicide and how desperate their last moments must have felt and coupled with the idea that they might live those moments over and over over-amplified everything.

It also made me wonder whether or not there are any efforts to create messages that could potentially persist an event like the universe contracting into another tight ball of energy followed by another big bang. The whole idea being that we could pass messages to future iterations of existence in the hopes that the world wouldn't play itself out exactly as it did before. That's some scifi stuff right there :)

[heyoni]

Honestly, it felt a lot like I was on psychedelics but without the visuals. I tried LSD once and mushrooms twice and there's this loop of thoughts and feelings that bubbles to the surface which felt very familiar during my meditation.

I honestly can't say what it is exactly but I do sometimes have intrusive thoughts which I learned recently is a form of OCD but only comes up in stressful situations, so maybe that was it?

[exolymph]

Frankly, we don't know that this isn't true. Is the past actually gone, or merely inaccessible to us?

[argentinian]

That would be quite horrible if that was true, your eternal suffering hypothesis. But fortunately I see no evidence to believe it.

[jstanley]

I don't think it's horrible even if true.

Regardless of whether a person's lived experience is time-boxed or eternal, either we think the good experiences outweigh the bad or we don't. If the good experiences outweigh the bad they still outweigh the bad even if they're eternal.

For me, I believe good experiences do outweigh bad. And summed across the entire population of all humans who have ever lived, I believe they do too, although of course there are some for whom they don't.

[brigandish]

Buddhism is basically (basically) predicated on the idea, I don't see why it's horrible to acknowledge the possibility, especially if it could be true.

[bambataa]

I wonder if a lot of the original Buddhist cosmology was based on the experiences of meditators having what we now call psychotic episodes, which they would have seen as a glimpse of reality.

[argentinian]

Buddhism says that an end of suffering is possible, so it predicates a different idea.

[nerdponx]

A 10-day silent retreat is really intense though.

A few minutes a day of calming your mind and being still in your body is a lot different.

I suspect the author's 20 minutes a day of meditation was a bit more intense than just that. They describe voraciously reading Zen literature and also describe strong personal Christian beliefs.

And why would you keep meditating intensely every day after you've started experiencing these symptoms? Wouldn't you want to back off a little at that point?

It seems like people "abuse" meditation the same way people abuse hallucinogenic drugs, losing all sense of moderation and going too far with the psychonaut exploration stuff.

Maybe also some people are unusually susceptible to these negative effects, and/or are unusually susceptible to being swept up in the spiritual quest fervor. I think this is the author's thesis, and fine, point taken. Those people in particular need to stay away from intense practice and should probably seek out a guide. But I think the majority of people don't have this problem.