The default instructions “focus on your breath and observe your mind, gently letting go of distractions” are based on Vipassana — the same Vipassana that is bound to produce the Dark Night if you do it.
It's based on Vipassana, but as you say yourself at the beginning of the post, it isn't the authentic experience. What makes you think that focusing on your breath and observing your mind is capable of producing the same effect as full Vipassana practice? To me it feels like that would require much more effort and/or experience than just "being mindful" for an hour a day.
Every time I write about meditation, I am somewhat uncomfortable. Then these posts do well (e.g. Do Nothing meditation and Control is a Drug), and I get a bit more uncomfortable.
Meditation isn’t an all-purpose feel-good technique. Originally it was invented by ascetic religious people to reach an unusual mental state — enlightenment. Enlightenment comes with deep perceptual changes, including shifts in the sense of personal identity. People often describe the process of getting there as “the mind deconstructing itself” — reaching deeper and deeper into the finer details of how what you call ”reality” is constructed to you.
These changes do reduce suffering. So it’s tempting to think: doing a bit of meditation is like adding a pinch of exotic South-Eastern spice to your dish. You might not want the fully authentic, ultraspicy version that takes years to prepare. But you can try cooking some playful fusion dishes, and if you don’t like them, you can just stop adding the spice. Right?
This view is not accurate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with stopping meditation if it’s not working for you. But meditation can sometimes induce permanent changes that you might not be able to reverse. There is an ominous saying about enlightenment: “Better not begin, once begun, better to finish”. The idea is that sometimes meditation causes significant problems and the only way out of meditation-related problems is more meditation, over a long period of time.
The Dark Night of the Soul
Different spiritual traditions have various disagreements over the term enlightenment. Zen folks are often like, “Bro, just get enlightened, bro,” and they don’t dwell too much on detailed theory. Theravada Buddhism’s pedagogy is very different from this. It has Vipassana (insight meditation) — a systematic method that attempts to map out the process.
In Vipassana, enlightenment is broken down into four “paths” (broad periods), and each path into sixteen stages (with the last five happening in a split second). The fourth stage, “The knowledge of Arising and Passing Away of Phenomena,” is an important threshold after which there is no going back. This stage is fun, flashy, and sparkly — a kind of hyperthymic (“hypomania-light”) state where spirituality suddenly starts to make profound, visceral sense.
But then come a series of stages with less fun names: “Dissolution,” “Fear,” “Misery,” “Disgust,” “Desire for Deliverance,” and “Re-observation.” Moving through these stages involves suffering in different ways.
If you are interested, read the corresponding chapters in Daniel Ingram’s book “Mastering Core Teachings of the Buddha”.
Daniel Ingram also writes “Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anything from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, such as narcissism and delusions of grandeur”. He quotes Kenneth Folk: “The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” The chart above is quite hand-wavy, but it implies that meditation is inherently somewhat destabilising. For more detail on meditation-related mental health issues, you can check out Cheetah House.
For most people, the Dark Night stages are mild and pass quickly. That was my experience on the first path. For a while meditation was more chaotic in a buzzy “dizzying” way. In my daily life I felt like an automaton — a bundle of automatic subroutines — for about a month, which was uncomfortable. But eventually I started feeling like an automaton who had accepted that the mind lacks a fundamental center, and my meditation got smoother.
Some people experience harsher versions of these stages and cycle through them for a long time. Imagine experiencing a depression-like state of looping through Fear, Misery and Disgust for months or even years. At that point, meditation might not seem like such a good deal: “Better not begin, once begun, better to finish”.
This isn’t a situation like “a kid takes way too many drugs, ignoring the recommended dosage, and ends up with a year-long depression.” This is a meditative path “done right” and in “recommended doses.” And that raises real ethical questions about how meditation should be recommended to people.
The conundrum
The field of psychology largely doesn’t want to grapple with these issues, even as it integrates meditation into mental health programs under the label “mindfulness.” The default instructions “focus on your breath and observe your mind, gently letting go of distractions” are based on Vipassana — the same Vipassana that is bound to produce the Dark Night if you do it. Therapists generally don’t warn clients about this when they recommend meditation.
To be fair, they usually suggest small doses, and a “microdosed” practice of 10–15 minutes a day is highly unlikely to cause problems. Still, what if someone enjoys meditation and ramps up to 45–90 minutes a day?
I am even more bothered by experienced Vipassana teachers running ten-day retreats without warning participants about potential risks. Ten-day retreats are designed to let practice to snowball into breakthroughs. And yet the this important information isn’t conveyed.
Then there is my case, writing about meditation. Obviously, I don’t want to stop — meditation has been transformative in my life. Whatever side effects I’ve experienced have been outweighed by the benefits. But other people’s brains might be different.
So how should I be warning people? Should I plaster tobacco-style warnings all over my blog posts about meditation: “CONTAINS INFOHAZARDS, MIGHT PERMANENTLY ALTER YOUR PERCEPTION”?
So far, I’ve mostly avoided confronting these questions by not explicitly encouraging serious practice, hoping readers will make an informed decision themselves. In “Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment” I talk about my experience and link to books that cover the risks.
Recently, though, I’ve been writing about meditation more directly. In “Do Nothing meditation” I describe a meditation method, in “Control is a Drug” I actively encourage readers to try it for an hour. An hour is almost certainly safe, but if someone starts doing it for an hour every day, crossing important thresholds over the course of months becomes a real possibility. I’m not exactly sure what to do about this. Folding all the nuance from this post into that one would bloat it, and in any case, readers ultimately have authority over their own lives.
Still, while I certainly can’t be responsible for every change in mental state of a person who reads words written by me from the screen of their device, I think that any blog discussing meditation seriously should be doing something to warn about its risks. And today that something is publishing this post.