Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

All of the real meditation traditions around the world - including the ones inside of Christianity - spend decades training highly skilled teachers to help people

1) avoid problems like this, and

2) clean up problems like this when they do happen.

And even so those traditions never, ever (in my experience) describe themselves as anything other than perilous. "The way is long and narrow." "Like a snake entering a bamboo tube." And so on.

I put together a system for solo practitioners working with absolutely minimal oversight in 2015. People doing it since then, I talk to them roughly once (on average) to check they're doing it right, then don't hear back from them for years until they're getting into the weird "foothills of enlightenment" end stage stuff -- if they make it that far. Most don't, they plateaux. Which is fine, that's a good, safe place to be.

Instructions here. There's a bunch of other stuff in that same directory structure. It's fine.

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/...

Exactly!

The same thing plays out with psychedelics. Many cultures have thousands of years of passed down knowledge with a community of elders to guide people through a trip. In the west we think we can replicate the same thing, sitting at home with a friend who has no clue what they are doing when things go bad.

All long term buddhist retreats will essentially sit you down and try make sure you're mentally healthy enough and prepared to partake. People losing it during long bouts is a regular occurrence.

Absolutely agree. And sometimes it’s probably an efficient method: get people through the tough stuff fast, rip off the band aid. But without the support teams in place the proposition changes dramatically for the worse.

And our paradigm for safety is very different. People are less expendable.

Thanks for sharing, going to check this out later off my work computer. I've been trying to become more disciplined with my meditation practice, I try to do 10 minutes every day.

This is probably not a good fit for you. Ten minutes a day would generally be safe for anybody. This is a different proposition.

Kind of skimmed, but why do you need these enlightened people?

http://myhopeforthe.world is just packed with high impact decision-making issues in future as that work rolls out into the climate (and other) crises.

Sorry for being unclear, I mean what is your motivation?

I want people that I can delegate my responsibilities to if we wind up using the hexayurt and similar parts of my critical infrastructure work in a global humanitarian crisis.

I will be much more confident delegating to people that have done a lot of meditation and are able to hold their heads together under immense pressure.

Makes sense, but doesn't that mean in a way you are afraid of what happens after you die? Or would you call this motivation something different than something similar to fear/worry/anxiety/etc?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com