MINDFULNESS MEDITATION, BUDDHISM, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Russ Harris wrote in the “Happiness Trap”:

·       “If you bring mindfulness to bear on negative feelings, they loose their impact. Just let them be there without struggling against them, and you’ll eventually feel less anxiety and depression.”

In The Observing Self, psychotherapist, Arthur Deikman, writes,

·       “Mystical tradition asserts the equation: I (Real Self) = God. While ‘I am God’ is the fundamental realization of mysticism, it is blasphemous in many religions…the goal of mysticism—experiencing the Real Self—is said to cure human suffering because its very basis [the illusion of the false, individual self] is thereby removed.”

Deikman, along with a growing number of educated Westerners, believes that the “reality” of our senses is illusory. According to them, reality is one, and we’re all one Self, and that Self is God. And this makes us God! This raises a truck-load of questions:

1. What evidence is there for this? By their very definition, there can’t be any. Instead, the evidence is just part of the illusion. The inevitable conclusion is that there is no evidence! Why should I trust illusory “evidence” that there is such a oneness-reality, against everything my senses tell me firsthand?

2. When I achieve the experience of the “Real Self,” how do I know that this is the “Real Self” and not also a delusion? How do I know that it’s the oneness?

3. Even if this exercise of experiencing the “Real Self” helps me to dissociate myself from pain, how do I know that this experience isn’t the mother of all delusions? Perhaps this is a doorway to mental illness, as many have claimed?

4. Perhaps reality is a matter of me alone? If everything I perceive is part of the illusion, perhaps those others, the “we,” are also part of the illusion? Why then act morally towards phantom-people?

5. What does it mean to be God? If I am God, shouldn’t I have some special powers—like controlling the weather or holding my breath for an hour?

6. Isn’t this life-denying? Should I shut my eyes and heart to family, friends, vocation, and interests if they’re all illusion?

7. If everything is illusion, is there anything to learn about an illusory world?

8. If everything is illusion, isn’t loving others also part of the illusion, since there are no others to love? So too compassion, justice, and every other value that makes life worth living.

9. If everyone is part of the illusion, why even bother to promote such an absurd notion to illusory others?

Surprisingly, Deikman concludes:

·       “Mystical science [meditation] is for those who can obtain satisfaction of their worldly needs from appropriate sources and do not seek them, in disguise, in the spiritual domain. Worldly needs [including psychological struggles] must be satisfied elsewhere so that their pursuit does not interfere with the [spiritual] learning process. Similarly, psychopathology must be dealt with first.”

Well isn’t mindfulness supposed to reduce the impact of negative feelings, as Harris claims? Evidently, Deilman thinks otherwise. However, he doesn’t explain why, but others do.

One former meditator and humanist, 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

Are the dangers of meditation simply a product of having the wrong attitudes or expectations, as some claim, or are they endemic to meditation? Garden writes:

• 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/

What Makes Nations Thrive while others Die?

Why do certain nations fail while others abundantly succeed? Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi concluded that trust based on trustworthiness was a major factor:

• Why are the Dutch or the English able to trust each other in a way that the Indians or the Egyptians cannot? What makes some cultures more honest, less corrupt, more trustworthy, and therefore more prosperous? And why is the postmodern West discarding the moral secret of its success? (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations)

Mangalwadi became convinced that the way we believe is the way we behave and even grow the economy. He observed:

• People in the Netherlands had money to give because generation after generation was taught to work hard and give tithes and offerings to God. The Dutch made money to give to the poor in India because the Bible taught, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28).

The contrast he observed between the beliefs of his Hindu Indian and the Christian West were profound:

• Acharya-turned-Bhagwan-turned-Osho Rajneesh, who gave widespread publicity to the tantric idea of salvation through sex, summarized the Indian as well as the postmodern Western worldview in similar terms: “We have divided the world into the good and the evil. The world is not so divided. The good and the evil are our valuations [not God’s commandments]. There is no good, there is no bad. These are two aspects of one reality… The data collected by Transparency International shows that the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly those whose soul was nurtured by the Bible.

It should be no surprise that if we do not believe in an objective right and wrong, we will begin to act in concert with this belief. Immediate gratification will inevitably triumph over moral truth. However, we might not see this transformation in the Western world because Christian habits still remain even as postmodernism and moral relativism have co-opted the Western mind.

Mangalwadi reasons that Hindu philosophy is directly related to the impoverishment of India:

• India’s religious philosophy taught that since the human soul was divine, it could not sin. In fact, our most rigorous religious philosophy teaches that everything is God. God is the only reality that exists, and therefore there is no ultimate distinction between good and evil, right and wrong.

Who would want to enter into a business deal with someone who doesn’t believe in right or wrong! Wouldn’t we rather affiliate with someone who has such a high commitment to moral truth that honesty would govern his life? The answer is plain. Therefore, Mangalwadi reasons that economy is inseparable from morality:

• Their chronic poverty proves what Adam Smith, a father of capitalism, knew: real- world economics are the result of the kind of morality you have, which in turn is a fruit of the kind of philosophy you have. For example, why have health care costs become so obscene in America that they are destroying the very culture of compassion? Insurance and pharmaceutical companies that sustain health care are blamed only because the intellectual elite can no longer calculate the economic costs of academic godlessness that separates economics from moral truth.

The relationship between morality and economy can be observed in many instances. Mangalwadi relates a revealing experience. He was experiencing frustration trying to purchase tickets from a machine on an Amsterdam tram. He asked a couple of American tourists for assistance. They responded:

• “Why do you want to get tickets?” they responded. “We’ve been riding around for a week. No one has ever come to check any tickets.”

Mangalwadi was startled more by their hardness of conscience than by their theft of service:

• Their shamelessness shocked me more than their immorality. They represented the new generation, liberated from “arbitrary” and “oppressive” religious ideas of right and wrong. University education had freed them from commandments such as “You shall not steal.”

Someone has to pay the price for sin. Eventually, the Dutch will have to hire additional personnel to collect the fares. Who pays for them? Everyone! I too have met many such travelers. They are intelligent, likeable, knowledgeable, highly educated, and even sensitive to victimization in its various forms, but they were unable to connect the dots to their own behaviors. Not a twinge of shame!

However, their conduct serves as an omen of the coming tsunami that will inevitably submerge the economy along with everything we value. It is already at our door, but no one sees it. When I talk about this coming destruction, my secular friends look at me as if I am from another planet. Instead, their hope is in this world, and it is just too difficult to question their sustaining hope. Mangalwadi also marvels at what is happening in the West:

• This good news [of the Christian faith] became the intellectual foundation of the modern West, the force that produced moral integrity, economic prosperity, and political freedom. If moral integrity is foundational to prosperity, why don’t secular experts talk about it? The reason is that the universities no longer know whether moral laws are true universal principles or mere social conventions made up to restrict our freedoms. And why don’t they know? Economists have lost the secret of the West’s success because philosophers have lost the very idea of truth. Why? The truth was lost because of an intellectual arrogance that rejected divine revelation.

I think that it is not simply the arrogance of the West but the disdain of the West towards objective moral does-and-don’ts along with the judgments they inflict for transgression. The West wants to be free from such judgments – anything that will tell them that they are wrong, anything that will cause them to feel guilty or shamed.

However, their quest for absolute freedom has made them slaves and has deprived them of their dignity as human beings. They are so intent to escape from guilt, shame, and their resulting negative self-images that they have adopted philosophies that will degrade them. They have exchanged the concept of human culpability for the belief that we are simply products of our society and upbringing, convinced that this belief will give them the freedom from their painful feelings. After all, they are just a product or result.

However, when we degrade ourselves in this manner, we pay a big price. Psychologist James Hillman observes that we can deaden our lives through the way we interpret them:

• We dull our lives by the way we conceive then… By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents. (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, 6)

Some even go a step further and deny freewill, opting instead for the belief that everything that we do has been predetermined by previous bio-chemical events. Therefore, they claim that we needn’t feel guilty for anything we do. They have even become evangelists for this new faith. One gentleman, with whom I have had considerable contact, leads a group entitled, “The illusion of freewill,” and insists that this belief is necessary to liberate us.

I joke, “I don’t talk to machines, even wet machines.” More seriously, it just becomes too easy to cheat your business partner, if you believe that you couldn’t have acted otherwise. In fact, it becomes too easy to give into any temptation. Without any substantial rational resistance, we become slaves to our impulses.

• The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cords of his sin hold him fast. He will die for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly. (Proverbs 5:22-23)

Once we do wrong and refuse to admit it, we condemn ourselves to a never-ending pattern of rationalizations. We deny our guilt whether through denying freewill or through the many methods of “mindful” dissociation, which have never helped those nations that have practiced them.

I often ask people if we can learn any lessons from the past. Their answer is usually, “No! The situation is now different and requires a different solution.” They can anticipate my next question, “What then has made the West successful,” and skillfully avoid it. Why be encumbered by the lessons of past, if this will interfere with finding the “truth” within one’s own desires! However, according to King Solomon, they will reap the fruits of their own choices:

• Since they hated knowledge and did not choose… the LORD, since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke, they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes. For the waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them (Proverbs 1:29-32)