There's no worldwide buddhist conspiracy to shun the "bad" parts of meditation, the post author learned from teachers with no qualification.
Uncomfortable, sure. Experiencing the dark night of the soul is not meant to be comfy. It can be rewarding though. Sometimes it is merely insight into our physical and psychological make up though. I don't care what kind of adventures one gets into but if you start getting extreme with them, you're eventually going to experience some really sketchy, uncomfortable, and even life-threatening situations.
I follow the Soto school of Zen Buddhism, my teacher would not allow me to go to Sessin (which is a multi day meditation retreat) until I had been practicing for like two years, and I had a lot of stuff come to the surface at my first one that really disturbed me… however, I had my teacher there, and he knew exactly what to say and do to help me through it as he has been through the same. He would not have permitted me to leave in such a disturbed state.
This guy would not be able to do that for his students, and even for himself he didn’t even know about such things. This is bad, and more stories like this will happen as long as charlatans are taking one aspect of an established practice and ignoring the rest.
As a whole, shikantaza when practiced with a teacher is safe. Things like breath awareness, vipassana and such I think are harmful, but that is due to my training and perhaps I am wrong, but for sure, meditation without the “rest” is largely a money machine these days, and people will be harmed by that.
Edit: I would also add that shikantaza as opposed to other forms of meditation is not about manipulating the brain in any way, but simply observing it. This is why we do not do things with a goal, such as counting of breaths or trying to still the mind. Simply sit, observe, and the stillness comes with no effort. There is no goal, and no enlightenment. There is no separation of practice and experience, the practice is enlightenment.
I can’t make a call either way in the authors mental state, but clearly there was stuff going on unrelated to meditation which he clearly needs some help dealing with.
It was not evident to you that taking some time to be alone with yourself could be uncomfortable? It's almost a polar opposite to how most people live their lives. I am genuinely curious what made you believe otherwise - I cannot imagine it.
Every time I take a walk I'm stuck in my head too.
... Why would that be implausible, at least for non-pedantic values of risk-free?
More and more, modern neuroscience confirms aspects of Buddhist teaching; from the nature of self to the workings of emotion. Buddhist meditation practice has been shown to have real and permanent (and positive) effects. Monks have studied the workings of the mind in altered and unaltered states for lifetimes, over thousands of years. Can you name any practice more effective? Because if you can, I'm certain the monks will be interested.
You seem to be comparing meditation to neurosurgery. I have no idea why you think this comparison is valid. Meditation is voluntary control of attention, which you've been doing all of your life, not neurosurgery. No doubt using this in novel ways will present challenges.
> To claim that a certain group of monks has figured out a foolproof and risk-free formula for exploring altered states of consciousness seems implausible.
Why? Democracy was invented thousands of years ago, and we've been through many other systems of govenment since, and yet now everyone believes that democracy is the best way to organize a highly complex global system of intelligent agents. Does it seem implausible to you that a system of governance that's thousands of years old is still the best we know?
Frankly, I have no doubt that a tradition that's thousands of years old and that has had hundreds of thousands of adherents in that time, could have worked out most or all of the challenges it raises. That's a huge sample set if you were analyzing this scientifically, and these spiritual practices were quite systematically explored.