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/

LIVING WITH BROKENNESS AND DYSFUNCTIONALITY

I like to boast in my weaknesses, faults, and failures, not simply because it is required but also because it is the truth (2 Cor. 12:7-10; Phil. 3:7-9). I had been entirely broken and dysfunctional. For decades, I had been imprisoned by a mental bondage that had exceeded any form of physical pain. I felt so bad about myself, so inferior, so inadequate, and so damaged that I felt so uncomfortable in the presence of others and couldn’t wait to escape. Sometimes, these feelings were so intense, I couldn’t even talk.

However, over time, my Savior set me free, as He had promised (John 8:31-32). Therefore, He gets all the credit. It has become my joy to give Him all the recognition and thanks. Why? Because He deserves it!

King David also understood this. Upon bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, he danced before the Lord “with all his might” (2 Sam. 6:14). David even shed his kingly garments and danced like a common man. However, his wife, Michal, the daughter of King Saul, despised him when she saw this. However, David answered her:

·       “It was before the LORD, who chose me above your father and above all his house, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the LORD—and I will celebrate before the LORD. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken [with contempt], by them I shall be held in honor.” (2 Samuel 6:21-22; ESV)

Not everyone will understand the surpassing value and beauty of humility and self-abasement before our Savior. However, those who know Him will get it, those who are aware that they are nothing without Him. They understand that they have nothing to boast about apart from their Lord:

·       But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Philippians 3:7-9)

This is what I want to model before the world – that Christ is my hope and my righteousness. In fact, so that I do not forget this all-important lesson, my Savior has left me with enough selfish internal “rubbish” to remind me that it is all about Him.

CIVILIZATION WEARS A DECEPTIVE SMILE

In The Jew Today, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944:

·       I remember the midnight arrival at Birkenau. Shouts, Dogs barking. Families, together for the last time, families about to be torn asunder. A young Jewish boy walks at his father’s side in the convoy of men; they walk and they walk and night walks with them toward a place spewing monstrous fames, flames devouring the sky. Suddenly an inmate crosses the ranks and explains to the men what they are seeing, the truth of the night: the future, the absence of future; the key to the secret, the power of evil. As he speaks, the young boy touches his father’s arm as though to reassure him and whispers, “This is impossible, isn’t it? Don’t listen to what he is telling us, he only wants to frighten us. What he says is impossible, unthinkable, it is all part of another age, the Middle Ages, not the twentieth century, not modern history. The world, Father, the civilized world would not allow such things to happen.”

Yet it still does, and its educated elites even abet the darkness of night, hiding the onslaught of evil. Robert Spencer calls it the “Global Outbreak of Mental Illness”:

·       On Tuesday, a Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” and “Infidel, you must die” stabbed four people, killing one, at a train station near Munich. Nonetheless, Bavarian security officials immediately denied that he “had an Islamic extremist motive.” Then what caused the attack? Bavaria’s state interior minister Joachim Herrmann said that the attacker had “mental disorders.”

·       France: Muslim driver ramming pedestrians while screaming “Allahu akbar” was “absolutely not an act of terrorism”: “‘This is absolutely not an act of terrorism,’ Prosecutor Marie-Christine Tarrare told reporters during a press conference, adding that the man had a ‘long-lasting and severe psychological disorder’ and had been hospitalised over 150 times since 2002.”

·       UK: Imam accused of recruiting for jihad group doesn’t have to wear electronic tag — it breaches his human rights: “A terror suspect last night won a human rights case to have his tag removed – because he thinks MI5 has put a bomb inside it. A judge said the dangerous preacher of hate has mental health problems, and wearing the electronic monitoring device was making him ‘delusional’.”

·       Muslim NYPD cop killer told passers-by to watch: “The gunman who fatally ambushed two New York City police officers in their squad car had a long criminal record, a hatred for police and the government and an apparent history of mental instability that included an attempt to hang himself a year ago, police said Sunday.”

·       France: Muslim who stabbed rabbi gets four years: “Haddouche was deemed unfit to stand trial because of mental issues following a psychiatric evaluation…”

·       Toronto Muslim charged with carrying concealed meat cleaver into Parliament: “RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson told reporters that Ali is known to authorities, but ‘not in the sort of counter-terrorism context.’ In fact, Paulson does not believe that the man’s actions were politically motivated or an act of terror. ‘I understand it is less a concern around so-called national security considerations as it is a mental health issue,’ he said. ‘There is a history of behaviours that are odd.’”

·       Austria: Muslim drives car into crowd, killing 3, then gets out and stabs passersby: “Police are not currently investigating terrorism as a motive and the man is believed to be suffering from mental illness.”

·       Canada: Police shoot Muslim wearing apparent suicide vest and holding triggering device: “In the aftermath of the shooting, police downplayed the incident saying only that the call involved ‘an emotionally disturbed person.’”

·       Muslim bangs on cockpit door, threatens to down plane, “wanted to see Allah”: “After being held back from the cabin door, which could not have been opened anyway, the man, who fellow passengers said appeared to have mental health issues, was then guarded by staff and the sports stars in business class.”

·       Muslima who beheaded toddler recently became religious, started wearing hijab: “One theory is that the woman is mentally ill and that she may have been exploited by a man or men she knew.”

·       Canada: Ottawa shooter’s father waged jihad in Libya in 2011; shooter not a recent convert but a longtime Muslim: “Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the slain 32-year-old suspected killer of a Canadian Forces soldier near Parliament Hill, was a labourer and small-time criminal – a man who had had a religious awakening and seemed to have become mentally unstable.”

·       Canada: Muslim acting “in the name of Allah” runs down two soldiers, flips car after chase, charges officers with long knife, is shot: “‘We are at the beginning of an investigation. Several hypotheses are being looked at,’ said Sgt. Michel Brunet, adding that investigators would study various angles, including mental illness and terrorism.”Philly cop shooter: “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic State. That is why I did what I did.”: “Archer’s mother has indicated that he is mentally ill and Ross said investigators do not know yet if the suspect was indeed radicalized or tied to terrorism.”

·       Oklahoma: School evacuated after “Middle Eastern” woman says she came there to “take the kids to heaven”: “During the news conference, police also said that the woman had been having mental health concerns recently.”

·       Chattanooga jihad murderer viewed Awlaki material online, spoke of Islamic martyrdom as long ago as 2013: “As the F.B.I. sent more investigators into this city Monday to explore dozens of possible leads, a picture took shape of a deeply troubled young man who struggled with mental illness and drug abuse at the same time he found himself alienated from United States policies in the Arab world, according to the authorities, friends and the family representative.”

·       Colorado Muslim stabs cop, drops Qur’an during struggle: “At about 2 p.m. Saturday, the suspect’s family told law enforcement that they were worried because Clark left his residence in Penrose and said he wasn’t going to return. They also said Clark was mentally disturbed, had been working out a great deal during the last two months and recently had broken up with his girlfriend.”

·       NYC police commissioner: Hatchet attack by convert to Islam was terror: “Authorities also are trying to determine if Thompson had any history of mental illness.”

·       UK Muslim who admitted sharing jihad videos rants about “enemy of Islam court”: “Ahmed, who has a history of mental health problems, pleaded guilty to two counts of dissemination of a terrorist publication.”

·       France: Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” tries to strangle police officer: “Other police officers saw the events on the video surveillance system and rushed to save their colleague, who had been thrown to the ground. His assailant was said to have a history of psychiatric problems.”

·       Spain: Violent Muslim screaming “Allahu Akbar, all you Christians will die!” gets arrested: “Later, he was administered comprehensive tests to ascertain if he was under the influence of drugs or suffered from a mental illness.”

·       UK Muslim gets 20 years for trying to set up jihad training camp in Oregon: “Haroon Aswat, who has been treated for mental illness in the UK, had pleaded guilty to the charges in March after being extradited from Britain to the US last year.”

·       France: Knife-wielding Muslim teen screams “Allahu akbar,” shoots teacher with BB gun: “A psychiatric examination was scheduled for 13 October, with the teenager is likely to be brought before a judge.”

·       Colorado Muslima pleads guilty to conspiring to aid Islamic State: “Moore set sentencing for Jan. 23, saying he wanted time for Conley to undergo more complete psychiatric testing. ‘I desire more information’ on her mental state, he said, asking for both a psychological and personality evaluation.”

Of course, none of this has anything to do with Islam, in the same way that Auschwitz had nothing to do with Nazism. Of course, they were all simply deranged. Evidently, the same mental illness is afflicting Al Qaeda, ISIS, Islamic Jihad, Al Nusra, Boko Haram, and hundreds of other Islamic groups. Besides, the genocide happening in North Africa and the Middle East will have nothing to do with Islamic refugees coming to the West. After all, they are all mentally healthy.

• Even now, children are being led to their death, reassuring their families, “The world, Father, the civilized world would not allow such things to happen.”

A Preoccupation with Sin might be Burdensome, but it is also very Healing and Liberating

Many have taken issue with my essay on universalist Carlton Pearson and his denunciation of Christian “sin consciousness.” According to Pearson:

·       "Sin consciousness, something Jesus never taught or encouraged, both prohibits and prevents self-love, something we must learn and re-learn to do, especially when we're brought up in a kind of "hate yourself" religious climate as many were and continue to be, whether, Christian, Jewish or Islamic."

Oddly, many agreed with Pearson, equating “sin consciousness” – the preoccupation with sin – with mental illness. However, this preoccupation is thoroughly biblical. Jesus stated: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48), proving that He is very preoccupied with sin. Why? Here’s my response:

It seems that we have left behind what Pearson meant by “sin consciousness” and are now pursuing the question of whether scrupulosity regarding sin is a form of OCD or some other mental disturbance. Okay!

Clearly, the Bible never gives us a pass for only doing 99% percent of the law. Perfection is always the standard. Here is an example:

·       But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.” (1 Peter 15-16)

While, to you, this seems obsessive and a prescription for mental problems, it reflects the wisdom of the Bible. Let me try to explain.

Our natural default position is self-righteousness. We love to think that we are worthy, superior and deserving – the very thing that God abhors. Instead, He wants us to be grateful and humble. Therefore, His law not only reflects His own righteousness, it also presents us with a standard of goodness that we cannot obtain on our own – a standard that should humble us and lead us to seek His mercy and be grateful when we receive it.

Interestingly, perfect adherence to goodness is something that we do and should expect from others. When I don’t treat my wife in a loving manner, she has every reason in the world to expect an apology. It just wouldn’t cut it if I responded, “I don’t want to be overly scrupulous about sin. I think you should just chill!”

Likewise, if I lied to you, you would be down my throat. If I responded, “You’re just uptight about sin,” you wouldn’t receive it.

Maturity is a matter of taking full responsibility for our garbage. God expects this from us, and we expect this from others. However, this is where mercy and healing kicks in. When we confess our sins to God, He forgives. There is nothing more healing when my wife and I confess our sins to one another and receive forgiveness from the other. However, all of this depends upon us taking full responsibility for our sins – call it a “sin consciousness” if you want.