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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

But mental illness can have all sorts of causes. I don't think it's crazy to suggest that meditation itself could in rare cases be one of them. Or suppose the person never meditated and lived and died with a latent mental illness that never actually manifested. Could they be said to have a mental illness at all?

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You can suppose till the cows come home, but reality is that this is the first I've ever heard of this. I've certainly never experienced it, and I've had some fairly traumatic things happen far in the past. I found meditation helps relieve dissonance. It's not going to cure it, however. If someone's dissonance is strong, and they attack the wrong side of it, it's possible it could go south.

There are some Tibetan monks who meditate on dissolving chunks of their being slowly as they meditate so that all is left is nothing of them or their consciousness. They merge into nothingness. Other practices focus on merging into the global consciousness. Maybe the article is about someone who wandered off into parts he didn't have any business wandering in?

I don't want to be "that guy", but anecdote is among the least trusted forms of evidence.

Actually anecdote is exactly what is most trustworthy in the context of another's mind. The primary reason is, in order to disprove my hypothesis that meditation is good for me, you must be me. Given you can't be me, disproving my assertion requires disproving what I'm saying about my own thoughts and feelings. While we, as humans, are exceptionally good at speaking for others, it's a horrifically inefficient process to render someone else's feelings. Chances are, you'll be wrong about how I feel, given you aren't me and simply don't have enough time left in this world to accomplish being me. And trust me, you don't want to be me.

Note that my "reality" here is lack of circumstantial evidence for the harmful effects of meditation, which would just help identify there was a problem to begin with. In theory, this could be put to the scientific method to prove or disprove, given you could measure someone's mental state using something other than "he seems unstable today", which you can't, without speaking for someone else.

Anecdote is also often the first sign that a phenomenon exists. It shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, but if all the evidence you have is anecdotal, that's your cue to gather something more robust.

Sometimes, yes. I'm not going to try to play any kind of numbers game here, but I personally think more of the "first signs" have (historically) come from experiments where the experimenter goes "Hm, that's weird." Not some sort of thing where a random stranger comes in off the street and says "Now, here's something weird that happened to me...".

If you want to suggest that and not sound crazy, cite something suggesting the possibility.

The article in question doesn't state that meditation was a cause of their problems, but pretty obviously details that people coming to meditation looking for ways to improve their lifestyle, instead began down a road to a much worse place.

While it might be unsurprising that meditation did not provide direct benefits to mind or body, it also failed to insulate or deflect these people away from new misery.

It's interesting to learn that the people described in the article had uncovered unsettling realities about themselves while meditating.

Knowing what I know about many people, uncompromising introspection is not something everyone would be comfortable with. Some people are jerks. Some people have their head in the clouds.

Grinding one's life to a halt, and taking a hard look in the mirror, is bound to derail an unrealistic world view now and again. But if, on the other side of an unceremonious introduction to cold reality, awaits absolutely no way to fix profound disappointment...

What then?

I'm not convinced that time didn't do the uncovering, and meditation happened to be what they were doing at the time. Correlation != Causation and all of that, you know.

Crazy is making blaming statements at others because they can see beyond the truth of the matter at hand.

Seeing beyond the truth... to what exactly?

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