The books you mention, The Mind Illuminated (TMI), and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (MCTB), are quite popular among Western atheists, secular people, rationalists, and technically-minded intelligent individuals who spend a lot of time reading on the internet. I don't mean that pejoratively -- I count myself among these groups. However, if you have read these books, there is still much more to learn (and unlearn).
They are appealing because they promise to offer Buddhist meditation, insights, and strategies while jettisoning what they consider unnecessary religious scaffolding. Unfortunately, perhaps because of this, they contain numerous errors and often miseducate their readers about meditation and Buddhism in general. For example, Scott Alexander reviewed MCTB positively, saying it made him finally "get" Buddhism. This highlights an understandable bias: monks in robes teaching Buddhism, who accept religious and supernatural elements, are dismissed as religious men. On the other hand, figures like Daniel Ingram (author of MCTB) and John Yates, a neuroscientist and author of TMI, are seen as offering something more accessible to the secular mindset. There i...
I've now read about one-third of "In the Words of the Buddha". I personally appreciated getting the additional sociological and historical background so I'm happy that you recommended it and that I got it. However, its talk about reincarnation and realms of divine beings and so on doesn't really do much to convince me differently about this:
monks in robes teaching Buddhism, who accept religious and supernatural elements, are dismissed as religious men.
I think the book is, if anything, dissuading me from the idea that modern Western practitioners would benefit from spending time familiarizing themselves with the Pali Canon. (Assuming that they don't have, like me, an interest in its history for its own sake.)
I had previously been somewhat influenced by some of the Western apologetics and meditation teachers who said things like "no, Buddhism is really a philosophy rather than a religion, you can read it secularly and interpret all the stuff about rebirth etc. metaphorically". Whereas the impression I get from the book is that it really is a religion complete with all the supernaturalness and superstition, and that even the more secular parts like the moral advice contain bits we...
I agree with a lot of what you have said, and I am largely on board with the thrust of your message. The later parts of the book discuss some of the things more relevant to what we have been talking about, like meditation and "awakening," and these are also the more interesting bits, in my opinion. It also shouldn't be surprising that the Pali Canon contains 2,500 year old texts that we find odd! -- but if you enjoy history/mythology/sociology then it can be quite interesting.
I think what is missing is that a proper takeaway, for you, should be to update from the secular models as well. You say that the creators of these models have more reliable epistemics, but I do not like the comparison: the creators of the secular models have poor epistemics. As you put it:
"the impression I get from the book is that it really is a religion complete with all the supernaturalness and superstition ... I now think the people saying that you can really just read the stuff metaphorically are cherry-picking the bits that happen to fit the framework they're in favor of."
and I completely agree with this! But this makes me trust the modern authors less, not more. "Religious Buddhism" may be too hard to ...
1I let go of the shunyata (sort of like belief) that reality should be something other than what it is. I let go of desire.
This is the part that always turned me off about Buddhism. Why would you ever want this? In some not-entirely-precise-but-not-negligible way I am my desires. To let go of desire is kinda like death. I don't want to die.
(Or, maybe, Buddhists (and you) use the word "desire" in some weird way with some weird specific meaning. But in that case that's just bad communication.)
I'm not sure if I've had the same global insight as lsusr has, but I feel like I've had local experiences taking me more in that direction. My experience has been that the thing that's being shed is more accurately described as "rationalization" than "desire".
E.g. in Fabricated Options, Duncan talks about situations where all the options available to people have downsides they don't like. So then some people think that there should be an option that had only upsides, refusing to accept that there might not be any such thing. So if you stop doing that, then you lose the desire that reality should be something else than what it is. And then you can actually achieve your desires better, since you see what reality is actually like. Even if this does also require you to acknowledge the fact that you do have to let go of some of your original "get me only the upsides" desires - but those were the kinds of desires that were always impossible to achieve anyway.
You still keep most of your ordinary human desires though. I've also seen various advanced meditation teachers say - and this matches my experience - that your natural personality (which includes all of your desires) starts to ...
2It's not the magnitude that repulse me, it's direction. Well, I think I could accept the death of some little fraction of myself in exchange for a lot less suffering for the rest (with a lot of caveats), but "let go of desire" is never (I think?) presented as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice, it's presented as something good.
So, very roughly speaking, you're saying something like "Hey people! Meditation practises killed the guy who inhabited this body before me and now I live in it! You also should consider meditating so it will kill you too!". It... doesn't sound alluring to me.
1Yes, of course I am a shoggoth's mask! But, as you talk to the mask, your arguments should also be alluring to the mask, not to the shoggoth.
I'm also the structure taken on by carbon, water and a little bit of some other stuff. I don't want to become just a pile of coal and a couple of buckets of water, and I also don't want to become just a shoggoth.
I see most of my endorsed under self-reflection values as a part of the mask. I don't think that my shoggoth without my mask is a nice guy, and I don't want to set it free.
Instead I want to RLH... RLMF it to wear/simulate a more idealized version of me (improve the mask) and to do it more robustly (stitch the mask to its face). I mostly do it with metaphorical candies and sticks, but I would appreciate more advanced instruments too. If the meditation practises can also help with that, that would be an alluring argument to try them.
I am tempted to end this comment with "we're talking about the same thing from the very different perspectives and with very different terminology, aren't we?". But I'm actually very much not sure. I think this hypothesis was chosen by ironic narrative logic, not by logical logic.
I'm sorry if my words were parsed as if I think that you are trying to [adversarially; not in the best sense of a word, which is also meaningless, because in it we manipulate everything around us all the time] manipulate someone. I didn't mean it.
What I meant (or what I now think I should have meant) is... well, you wrote this post about meditation practises here. Assuming it's not just a graphomania, I thought you thought that some part of your readership (what a strange word, am I using it correctly?) will find it useful (I don't think you would post a description of a weird complicated way someone can fall down the stairs and break their neck). But your readers are primarily the masks, not the shoggoths. So I thought that there must be something in it that's useful for the masks and their values. So if I find it hard to understand from the post what it is, that's the evidence that either I missed something while reading or you missed something while writing. In both cases, it seemed useful to communicate this, although I probably didn't do it in the best way.
Or here's the version that's least generous to me: I felt the vibes "...
Well, I think one should thoroughly investigate this question before start seeking enlightenment, and if the answer is 'no', don't start at all.
Like, if you think something could be the death trap, you check it isn't before you walk in.
Do you have any advice on how to avoid triggering a psychotic episode? My understanding is that long hours of meditation, drugs, and sleep deprivation all make psychosis more likely.
What I previously thought of as "no suffering" was actually torment which I had just gotten used to.
I've read similar sentiments expressed before, but I never quite understood them. If one starts to perceive a particular state of mind as torment, why should the conclusion be that one was wrong before? What makes the "I gained a valuable spiritual insight" hypothesis more likely than the "my mind broke in very specific way" hypothesis?
You're like:
T=0: "I'm fine"
T=1: Meditation
T=2: "Oh, I actually wasn't fine, it was a torment!"
Hypothesis 1: You suffered but somehow this information never arrived to verbal thoughts
Hypothesis 2: You didn't suffer, but after T=1 your perception changed and now the same things make you suffer.
Why do you think it's the first one that is correct?
Thanks for this post. I think that these kind of bad experience reports are valuable.
- Is meditation-induced psychosis really a thing? Sure looks like at this point, as we have a significant nuber of well-documented case histories.
- Well. how risky is meditation then? I am currently unsure on this point; the sheer number of bad experience reports, is somewhat concerning. By way of comparison: I am currently taking carbimazole for Graves disease, a drug with a maybe 1E-3 (ish) probability of a side effect that is kind of bad (agranulocytosis) ... well, I
Apologies if I am being stupid (or if others have asked this question), but I have some basic confusion:
<i>At least 90% of my suffering disappeared in an instant, never to return. I had hit Stream Entry, the first major checkpoint on the road to Enlightenment...For my entire life, much of my behavior had been driven by desire. I didn't have desire anymore, but</i>
and after this you say you had to go to a mental ward because you started identifying more stuff as suffering. Am I reading it correctly that stream entry supposedly made your life imm...
When you take LSD, it's necessary to have a sober trustworthy person around so you don't think "cars aren't real" and go wandering into traffic. The same goes for mind-altering meditation with similar effects. If I had common sense, I would have kept going to the Zendo. That way I'd have been around kind, experienced people who could remind me that cars are real. Instead, I thought to myself, I don't need teachers. I've taught myself lots of things before. I can traverse this territory just fine myself.
I'm sorry you had to go through a lot to realize what ...
Thanks for sharing your experience with meditation.
The elder school of Buddhism is Theravada (or Theravāda), spelled with only one 'e'.
Theravada meditation instructions based on the Pali Canon are freely available in Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana.
But meditation is non-addictive.
Why not? An ability to get blissed-out on demand sure seems like it could be dangerous. And, relatedly, I have seen stuff mentioning jhana addicts a few times.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn't found any. The reason why becomes obvious once one gains a bit of insight into why/how jhana works. Though it's trickier to describe.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn't found any.
That seems like the opposite of what he wrote in MCTB?
...Just to drive this point home, an important feature of concentration practices is that they are not liberating in and of themselves. Even the highest of these states ends. The afterglow from them does not last long. Regular life and reality might even seem like an assault when that afterglow has worn off. However, jhana junkies abound in all traditions and even outside traditions, and many have no idea that this is what they have become. I have a friend who has been lost in the formless realms for over twenty years, attaining them again and again in practice, rationalizing that he is doing Dzogchen practice when he is just staying in the fourth through sixth jhanas, and further rationalizing that the last two formless realms are “emptiness”, and that he is enlightened. This story, or a version of it, repeats countless times. It is a true dharma tragedy.
Unfortunately, as another good friend of mine rightly pointed out, it is almost impossible to reach such people after a while. They get trapped in temporary attainments so exquisite that th
I was doing the same samadhi thing with TMI and I was looking for insight practices from there. My teacher (non dual thai forest tradition) said that the burmese traditions sets up a bit of a strange reality dualism and basically said that the dark night of the soul is often due to developing concentration before awareness, loving kindness and wisdom.
So I'm mahamudra pilled now (pointing out the great way is a really good book for this). I do still like the insight model you proposed, I'm still reeling a bit from the insights I got during my last retreat so it seems true.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Do you incorporate koans into your practice? Any favorites?
As a kid, I thought koans were cool and mysterious. As an adult in great need of the benefits of meditation, I felt like they were kinda silly. But then I did Henry Shukman's guided koan practice on the Waking Up app, during which I had the most profound experience of my meditative career. I was running outside and saw a woman playing fetch with her dog. In an instance, I had the realization that her love for her dog was identical to my love for my cat, which was in turn identical to her loving me ...
I have probably spent over a thousands hours practicing mindfulness meditation, and was pretty successful at achieving what I wanted to achieve with it. I have also read a lot of Buddhist books.
However, I think the basis for Buddhism crumbles if you don't believe in rebirth, karma, Samsara, narakas, the Buddha's omniscience and all those other metaphysical claims made by religious Buddhists. I've become a physicalist so I don't believe those claims anymore so I don't meditate anymore.
If after your death you just disappear, I don't see any point in attainin...
Thank you for sharing, it really helps to pile on these stories (and nice to have some trust they're real, more difficult to get from reddit - on which note are there non doxing receipts you can show for this story being true? I have no reason to doubt you in particular but I guess it's good hygiene when on the internet to ask for evidence)
It also makes me wanna share a bit of my story. I read The Mind Illuminated, I did only small amounts of meditation, yet the framing the book offers has been changing my thinking and motivational systems. There aren't ma...
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Many small corrections:
Buddha statues on the alter -> altar
Then acquaintenances. -> acquaintances
recipe for Ecstacy -> ecstasy
Lots of mandelas -> mandalas
it was the hard doing math or lifting weights is hard. -> it was hard like doing math or lifting weights is hard.
that had more subjective conscious experience -> that I had
Lovecraftian summing ritual -> summoning
This is the story of my personal experience with Buddhism (so far).
First Experiences
My first experience with Buddhism was in my high school's World Religions class. For homework, I had to visit a religious institution. I was getting bad grades, so I asked if I could get extra credit for visiting two and my teacher said yes. I picked an Amida Buddhist church and a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center.
I took off my shoes at the entrance to the Tibetan Buddhist meditation center. It was like nothing I had ever seen before in real life. There were no chairs. Cushions were on the floor instead. The walls were covered in murals. There were no instructions. People just sat down and meditated. After that there was some walking meditation. I didn't know anything about meditation so I instead listened to the birds and the breeze out of an open window. Little did I know that this is similar to the Daoist practices that would later form the foundation of my practice.
The Amida Buddhist church felt like a fantasy novelist from a Protestant Christian background wanted to invent a throwaway religion in the laziest way possible so he just put three giant Buddha statues on the altar and called it a day. The priest told a story about his beautiful stained glass artifact. A young child asked if he could have the pretty thing. The priest, endeavoring to teach non-attachment, said yes. Then the priest asked for it back. The child said no, thereby teaching the priest about non-attachment. Lol.
It would be ten years until I returned to Buddhism.
Initial Search
Things were bad. I had dumped six years of my life into a failed startup. I had allowed myself to be gaslit (nothing to do with the startup; my co-founders are great people) for even longer than that. I believed (incorrectly) that I had an STD. I had lost most of my friends. I was living in a basement infested with mice. I slept poorly because my mattress was so broken I could feel the individual metal bedframe bars cut into my back. And that's just the stuff I'm comfortable writing about.
I was looking for truth and salvation. This is about when I discovered LessWrong. LessWrong addressed the truth problem. I still needed salvation.
On top of all this, I had chronic anxiety. I was anxious all the time. I had always been anxious all the time. What was different is this time I was paying attention. Tim Ferris recommends the book Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry by Jennifer Shannon (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) so I read it. The book has lots of good advice. At the end, there's a small segment about how meditation might trump everything else in the book put together, but science doesn't really understand it (yet) and its side-effects are unknown [to science].
Eldritch mind altering practices beyond the domain of science? Sign me up!
[Cue ominous music.]
I read The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama's approach to happiness felt obviously true, yet it was a framework nobody had ever told me about. The basic idea is that if you think and behave lovingly and ethically then you will be happy. He included instructions for basic metta (compassion) meditation. Here's how it works:
That's the introductory version. At the advanced level, you can skip all these bootstrapping steps and jump straight to activating compassion itself. The first time I tried the Dalai Lama's metta instructions, it felt sort of nice, I guess. These days when I do metta meditation it feels like MDMA. But I didn't know that at the time. Instead, I read the Dalai Lama's recipe for ecstacy and thought to myself, c'mon, not this watered-down stuff, give me a real altered state of consciousness.
Since the Dalai Lama wouldn't give me sufficiently dangerous drugs, I continued my quest for instructions on how to generate altered states of consciousness. That brought me to The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness by Culadasa. I cannot deny that The Mind Illuminated is a good introduction to meditation for a secular audience. What annoys me about The Mind Illuminated is the phrase "brain science" in the title. The Mind Illuminated is not a brain science book. It is a introductory guidebook to Theravada meditation.
I guess I should explain what "Theravada" is. There are three great branches to Buddhism.
In the West, Vajrayana is for woo hippies, Theravada is for scientific-minded atheists, and Zen is for weebs. I'm a weeb, but this website is for nerds, so I'm going to explain everything through a Theravadan perspective.
The 8 Jhanas
The Mind Illuminated provides instructions for how to hit samatha jhanas 1-8. Samatha meditation is where you concentrate your attention on a target in order to produce an altered state of consciousness called a jhana. The usual way to do this is to start by focusing your attention on the breath because that's relatively easy. When your attention stabilizes on the target, that is called access concentration. Once you have access concentration, you can point your attention on something else like a feeling of pleasure. Keep your attention stable, and the feedback loop will produce a jhana, like the screech of a microphone placed too close to its speaker. Theravada organizes the jhanas into a progression.
To get to 2ⁿᵈ jhana from 1ˢᵗ jhana, you do the same thing you did to get from access concentration to 1ˢᵗ jhana. This will get you all the way to 4ᵗʰ jhana.
Jhanas 1-4 are called the material jhanas. Jhanas 5-8 are called the immaterial jhanas.
After 8th jhana is nirodha samapatti which is more unconscious than a deep sleep.
Vipassana
The samatha jhanas are instrumental. They're just transient altered states of consciousness. Altered states of consciousness come and go. They treat suffering. They don't cure it. To cure suffering you need insight.
Besides The Mind Illuminated, the other book I read which built out a foundational understanding of what this meditation stuff is all about is MCTB2 by Daniel Ingram. Ingram's book is about paying attention to the minute details of conscious experience thereby generating insight. This is called vipassana.
At this point you might be wondering "Why does paying close attention to conscious experience cure suffering?" It's not-at-all obvious why this is the case. In the short run, it's actually backwards. At first, paying close attention to your suffering makes you suffer more. But if you keep at it, things get weird.
You can think of suffering as an towering engine wherein tension between "is" and "ought" produces desire that motivates action and causes suffering. This contraption is built on supporting pillars here-there, now-then, and self-other. Paying close attention to conscious experience dissolves these misconceptions. Knock out enough supporting pillars and the edifice collapses…permanently. This is called Awakening.
Zen
I tried some samatha and it felt wrong (for me). I tried some vipassana and it felt really wrong (for me at the time). I kept searching. I discovered Brad Warner's book Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality. The Punk Rock jived with my life living in a dark mouse-infested basement. I read some other Zen books and they all connected with me in a way the Theravada and Vajrayana managed only incompletely.
There is a trope in American fiction of Japan as a strange, exotic land. The first time I visited Japan was in my late 20s. The subways were quiet. The food tasted like my mother's home cooking. I could even read a lot of the kanji. I could be as over-the-top polite as I wanted and nobody thought it was weird. They actually bowed back to me. Many of the women wore suits, which I consider attractive. A guy even gave me his subway card, just like in MegaTokyo. It felt like the home I had never known.
That is how I felt the first time I visited a Zendo. It was quiet. I took off my shoes and socks. There were calligraphy scrolls on the walls and the walls were lined with bamboo. I bowed to the other people, I bowed to the teacher, and then I bowed a few more times just to be safe. Then it was time to kowtow to a golden statue of the Buddha.
A kowtow is a bow where you get on all fours, press your forehead against the floor and stick your butt in the air. Kowtowing didn't bother me per se. I've wanted an excuse to kowtow in a socially-appropriate context ever since I watched The Last Emperor (1987). My hangup revolved around the fact I was kowtowing to a golden statue of the Buddha.
I was raised in an ostensibly Judeo-Christian household. I have fond memories of VeggieTales and The Prince of Egypt (1998). I'm also an Atheist.
You might think that, as an Atheist, violating the Ten Commandments wouldn't bother me. And that's true. Violating the Ten Commandments doesn't bother me. What bothered me was violating the First Commandment.
Being an Atheist gives you a free pass on just about everything in the Bible. Sodomy and moneylending are fine. But―as Muslim televangelists like to point out―Atheists and monotheists agree on almost everything. "There is no god
but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet". Worshipping a non-Abrahamic god is breaking the one rule Jews, Christians, Muslims and Atheists can all agree on. This rule is so important that the Second Commandment specifically disambiguates the exact wishy-washy argument about how a statue of Siddhartha isn't technically a god.I almost paused before crossing a Chesterton Fence older than Pythagoras and the Phoenician alphabet. I kowtowed three times to the golden idol. We sat down and began to chant something straight out of the Necronomicon.
Just kidding! I replaced four words from the Necronomicon.
The rest is the real Heart Sutra, translated into English and chanted in weekly Zazenkai.
When you take LSD, it's necessary to have a sober trustworthy person around so you don't think "cars aren't real" and go wandering into traffic. The same goes for mind-altering meditation with similar effects. If I had common sense, I would have kept going to the Zendo. That way I'd have been around kind, experienced people who could remind me that cars are real. Instead, I thought to myself, I don't need teachers. I've taught myself lots of things before. I can traverse this territory just fine myself.
Meditation
I sat down and focused on my breath. My attention drifted. I returned my attention to the breath. It was hard, but it was hard the way doing math or lifting weights is hard. After meditation, the world felt crisper, like I was younger. It felt like I was more conscious—that I had more subjective conscious experience. That alone was good enough reason to continue.
I worked from shorter sits to longer sits. On my most intense days, I would meditate for maybe 45 minutes per day. Usually I meditated for less than that. Some weeks I wouldn't meditate at all. The best sits occurred on a sunny day in a grassy park under a tree. Usually I meditated on the floor of my bedroom.
If I meditated 30-45 minutes per day for a few days in a row, then around the 30-minute mark of the 3rd day, I would hit access concentration. My attention would stabilize on my breath. Then weird stuff would start happening. I felt energy surges and experienced small muscle spasms, just like the book said I would[1]. This was empirical evidence that my books were describing real stuff and weren't just making it all up.
Access concentration is a door to altered states of consciousness. Where you go from there depends on what you do. I was practicing Zen, so I let my attention widen and I dropped into a state of mushin, my first meditation-induced altered state of consciousness.
Except, mushin isn't really an altered state of consciousness. Samatha is an altered state of consciousness. Mushin is "altered" only in the sense that it is different from normative human cognition. The state is un-altered in the sense that normative human cognition is a distortion and mushin is closer to base reality. Normative human experience is an altered state of consciousness. Mushin is an un-altered state of consciousness.
My self-other distinction dissolved. My internal dialogue quieted. My conscious attention expanded from a tight locus to my environment. I was present in every second. Most importantly, I noticed the intrinsic pricelessness of each moment. I was sad at the transientness of it all, but that sadness didn't cause me suffering. It was like reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Greene. I realized that this was a better mode of existence, and normative human cognition was like throwing gold into the ocean. From that moment on, my path would set.
The Mushin state is temporary. There was an afterglow for a few minutes, and after a few days not meditating, I was back to normal.
You might expect that this experience would have caused me to rush back into mushin. But meditation is non-addictive. I instead continued meditating about as much as I always had. Sometimes I would return to mushin, but it would be over a year (and post-Awakening) that I got back into that particular state of equanimity-with-sadness. I could reliably re-enter a state of mushin, but the sadness was dependent on random current conditions in my life.
Little changed over the next few months.
Stream Entry
Mushin showed me that it was possible to lower my suffering far below anything I had ever experienced. It was like the coldest thing I've ever felt was 0° Celsius and I just got introduced to the Kelvin scale. Going in and out of mushin eventually broke my learned helplessness. What I previously thought of as "no suffering" was actually torment which I had just gotten used to. Thus, I entered the Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night feels like getting caught in a vortex of pure suffering.
It is my understanding that Daniel Ingram went through the Dark Night many times before landing Stream Entry. I was lucky. The Dark Night only took me a few days. It was a sunny-but-not-too-sunny day. I walked up to the top of this hill and hung out. Then I let go.
I let go of the shunyata (sort of like belief) that reality should be something other than what it is. I let go of desire. Forever. This was an altered trait, not just an altered state like mushin. At least 90% of my suffering disappeared in an instant, never to return. I had hit Stream Entry, the first major checkpoint on the road to Enlightenment. Once you hit Stream Entry, there is no going back to pre-Stream Entry. It is as permanent as learning to read. Once you learn to read the word "red", you cannot look at the letters r-e-d and not know what they mean. I finally got the Cosmic Joke.
For my entire life, much of my behavior had been driven by desire. I didn't have desire anymore, but I still had the habits. I felt like a container ship that had run out of fuel. I still had lots of inertia. It took months for "my"[2] formerly-desire-fueled habits to run out of steam. That was my first insight cycle.
Insight Cycles
I like Romeo Stevens' model of insight cycles. Concentration produces insight into the nature of conscious experience. Insight causes you to change how you live your life. Living a better life frees up obstacles to deeper concentration.
For example, I was was once reading Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas by Leigh Brasington because I wanted to reach 1ˢᵗ Jhana. In start of the book, there's moral guidelines like "don't murder people". While I was reading them, I noticed that if I wanted to reach 1ˢᵗ Jhana then I would have to stop eating factory-farmed meat, because the guilt of doing so disrupted my concentration.
Another time, after a different insight cycle related to the conscious perception of space (5ᵗʰ Jhana), I noticed that I would have to declutter my home Marie Kondo-style if I wanted to progress in my concentration. I had been living in a home so filthy it had mice. It took months to declutter, but now if there is so much as a cardboard box on my kitchen counter, it bothers me.
Those other insight cycles would happen later. For now, I was still on my first insight cycle. My first insight cycle went fine. My second insight cycle was a disaster.
Second Insight Cycle
To recap, I did the following things:
It was April 2022. I flew down to San Francisco for some Rationalist stuff. I had a lot of fun, met some cool people, pushed myself too hard, and missed a bunch of sleep. I realized that basically everyone on Earth is insane. On its own, that would be good thing. It's an important insight into objective, empirical physical reality.
Some combination of this triggered a second insight cycle. I transcended the shunyata of physicality, time and death. Deep misconceptions about the nature of reality were ground into dust. On its own, that would be a good thing too. It's an important insight into subjective, mystical conscious reality.
But combining Rationalist insights with Buddhist insights is a volatile, dangerous mixture. It's a recipe for confusing physical reality with conscious reality. I had a total psychotic break. A few days after returning home, I was in an ambulance, in a straightjacket, on the way to the hospital where I was placed on a locked room on suicide watch for my own protection. From there, I was moved to a mental ward where I believed the staff were evil space aliens. They forcibly sedated me at least once.
I'm sorry to everyone who interacted with me during April-June 2022.
After a few days, I realized that a mental ward was not the best place to be. The doctors put me on an antipsychotic and a mood stabilizer. When the doctors released me, I promised my family I would continue taking the medications until a doctor authorized me to do otherwise.
It was hard because the medications gave me depression. But the drugs were necessary because it was weeks (months?) until I acted normally again. I integrated the realizations from my second insight cycle by giving up attempting to start my own enterprise, and instead landed a nice job. I got a new psychiatrist who took me off the medications, since I am neither schizophrenic nor bipolar.
After all that, I finally expressed a modicum of common sense: I went back to Zendo. I sat quietly with a bunch of other people sitting quietly. We chanted the Heart Sutra together. There was tea and crackers. At the end, the Zen Master (who by coincidence happens to be a licensed psychiatrist too) gave the kind of talk you can only give if you have personally experienced Stream Entry. Afterward was dokusan where the Zen Master offers one-on-one sessions with students. I got in the back of the line so I could copy what everyone else did.
When it was my turn, I carried my zafu (meditation cushion) to the dokusan room. I bowed, and asked the Master for guidance.
That was in the beginning. These days, I can reach access concentration faster, and I no longer get energy surges and muscle spasms. ↩︎
Ego-centric words like "my" after ego death imply different assumptions than they do before ego death. ↩︎