Harvard Study Unveils What Meditation Literally Does To The Brain!

Believe it or not, that’s what the dark night is all about: transformation. Your ego, your limited sense of self, your inadequate complex of ideas about who you are had to be dissolved. Your ego was, you begin to see, eclipsing higher consciousness and your true nature. Your old sense of self was inadequate to your new hopes and proper state. Your suffering intensified because of a major misapprehension.

Your ego sense is so powerful — you invest it with so much of your thought and feeling — that your attitudes of life become based on an egocentric perspective. The ego gains a progressively greater foothold on your entire life because your basic attitudes about your existence and essential nature are strongly linked with ego.

Then, your ego sense, due to your suffering or your limitations in life, wants to have more power over circumstances and a more pleasant life. The ego sense often becomes motivated to seek higher consciousness and, thus, greater ability to dominate in life. Not always, but often, it is the ego sense which most eagerly pursues higher consciousness. It wants to be in charge; it wants to manipulate events and make life come out more to its satisfaction. But, as long as your ego dominates, it is on a collision course with your true nature and your higher consciousness. There’s going to be a showdown. There has to be a confrontation sometime if your higher consciousness is ever to emerge, if you are ever to know truly who you are and what your human capabilities are.
[link to www.themystic.org]

[link to news.harvard.edu]

That's the link to Harvard, not some b.s. tin foil hat.

Oh, and this is 3 years old news.

Buddhist Meditation and the Dark Night

Stories of disturbing experiences and psychological damage from meditation are coming to light. Borrowing a phrase from the Christian mystic Saint John of the Cross, these experiences are being called "a dark night of the soul."

Although meditation has been marketed in the West as a kind of relaxation technique, that is actually not what it is in a spiritual context. Buddhists meditate to wake up.
As a spiritual practice meditation is sometimes anything but relaxing. The traditional practices have a way of reaching deep into the psyche and bringing dark and painful things about ourselves into awareness. For a person seeking enlightenment this is considered necessary; for someone just trying to de-stress, maybe not.

You can find many articles on the Web about the Dark Night Project, run by a psychology professor named Dr. Willoughby Britton (see, for example, an article on The Atlantic website by Tomas Rocha, "The Dark Knight of the Soul"). Britton runs a kind of refuge for people recovering from bad meditation experiences and is also working to "document, analyze, and publicize accounts of the adverse effects of contemplative practices," the article says.
Indeed, many of the experiences described are common ones Zen teachers explicitly warn about and which in a monastic setting would be recognized and worked through. But through a combination of improper preparation and incompetent or no guidance, people's lives actually were wrecked.

My first Zen teacher used to refer to meditative bliss as "the cave of hell," for example, because people want to stay there forever and feel let down when the bliss fades. All passing mental states, including bliss, are dukkha.

At the same time, mystics of many religious traditions have described the not-at-all blissful "dark night of the soul" experience and recognized it was a necessary phase of their particular spiritual journey, not something to be avoided.

But sometimes painful meditation experiences are harmful. A lot of damage can be done when people are pushed into deep states of meditative absorption before they are ready for example. In a proper monastic setting students get one-on-one time with a teacher who knows them and their particular spiritual challenges personally. Meditation practices may be prescribed for the student, like medicine, that are appropriate for his or her stage of development.

Unfortunately, in a lot of western retreat experiences everyone gets the same instruction with little or no individual guidance.

The "pit of emptiness" is something Zen students fall into occasionally. This is hard to explain, but it is usually described as a one-sided experience of sunyata in which there is just nothing, and the student remains stuck there. Such an experience is considered to be a serious spiritual sickness that must be worked through with great care. This is not something likely to happen to a casual mediator or a beginner student.

A nana is a mental phenomenon. It is also used to mean something like "insight knowledge." The early Pali scriptures describe many "nanas" or insights, pleasant and unpleasant, one passes through on the way to enlightenment. The several "dukkha nanas" are insights into misery, but we can't stop being miserable until we thoroughly understand misery. Passing through a dukkha nana stage is a kind of dark night of the soul.

Particularly if you are recovering from a recent severe trauma or a deep clinical depression, for example, meditation may feel too raw and intense, like rubbing sandpaper on a wound. If that's the case, stop, and take it up again when you're feeling better. Don't push it just because someone else says it's good for you.
[link to buddhism.about.com]

I remember an earlier study that showed the scans of the brain during meditation and prayer side by side. Cool thing was they were identical. They both showed the same area of the brain activated and this part of the brain usually does not show any activity.

Meditation Dangers: Things You Should Know and Prepare For

If you’re not aware of meditation dangers, they can unexpectedly come and cause many troubles in your life, such as frightening visions, non-physical contacts or even insanity.

I remember during a Vipassana meditation course I was meditating and saw a vision of me meditating alone in a vast desert. I told the teacher about this amazing experience and she just said: ignore it and keep meditating. It was like a slap on my face, but now I understand why she responded this way.

Let’s be honest – most people start meditating for selfish reasons. It could be for getting rid of stress, raising awareness, knowing God or oneself, feeling the unity or God’s energy and so on. Rarely does anyone start meditating for the enlightenment of humans, infusing more positivity and wisdom to the world or for the world peace.

Some meditators come face to face with an even more dangerous phenomenon. It’s called “The Dark Night of The Soul”.
The dark night of the soul is the inner state when your awareness of God disappears. Some meditators completely get used to the feeling that God is always with them an that their intuitive powers never let them down. And suddenly they are left completely alone.
Some even start believing that God doesn’t exist and so join the “rational people” circle.
The dark night of the soul visits those meditators who are very near the enlightenment. I would dare to say that this is the last step to enlightenment. It teaches you that all the external gods you knew of, were born in your mind or in the minds of other projections of… the one awareness. It’s only You that exists. You Are the reality.

When you can accept this, you start seeing the reflection of yourself in every living and non-living being and event. Then you no longer feel alone and without the connection to God.
[link to simonarich.com]

yes

and prayer concerning Christs wished is the best.

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When Jesus taught his boys to pray he said, "Thy kingdom come, THY WILL BE DONE" and yet all the christiantards always pray for this...for that...help me God...gimmee gimmee...

Real praying IS meditation. Silence the mind...shut up and let HIS will be done.
Most christiantards find a preacher they "like" and repeat what he or she says and how THEY THINK is should be understood. All the while trying to force feed their ideas and sick projections on to everyone else.

From the link
"Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different."

It does not say prayer is better.

Nice thread OP. 5*'s


Simple steps to meditation. ;
Poster:
[link to www.pixhost.org]

Thread;
Thread: Meditation Made Easy!

Last Edited by abhie on 12/18/2014 07:48 PM

If you can't find instrumental music to help (I am a musician and frequently my brain starts analyzing the music if I listen to it), then you might look up the Monroe Institute. They have a lot of awesome cds which can really kick start things for you. One of my friends has let her doctor convince her she's ADHD, she's never been able to focus (or not - haha) to meditate. I lent her one of my favorite chill out discs and now she uses it regularly to help her meditate.

And great thread OP!

I've meditated for years.

It brings me such peace that I can't imagine my life without it.

OP, thanks for sharing this info.

.

Very true!

I find myself in the same situation, I start analyzing the music and it doesn't help to silence the mind... The best sounds are ambient ones like ocean waves, wind, nature, etc...

Bump!

Bumped, this thread has been.

yoda

Prayer is the Same Thing. You go to the Same Place. Love this Thread and Loved that article. Thank you OP.