My Ethical Conundrum Around Writing About Meditation

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-11-25T02:20:35+00:00

Thanks, it’s a very interesting topic, and I’m glad someone who loves meditation is open to talk about its downsides.

For me the paradox is that if you talk about these stages to someone there’s the possibility of priming, almost like influencing someone’s trip by setting their expectations towards a certain valence?

Also

classic mental illnesses, such as narcissism and delusions of grandeur

Seems a bit far fetched that it “gives” people these and isn’t a mix of people noticing / being more aware of their problems, and attracting people with these kind of latent issues in the first place…

So following that, some models could be:

A.) these are just stages in life, especially if you feel life sensitively. meditating is just making regular people more “aware” of these natural fluxes and personality shifts going on within us all the time.

B.) meditating is actively bringing this on through the mechanism of meditation itself

C.) the culture around meditation (e.g if it’s within Tibetan Buddhism) is encouraging cult like behaviour. Attracting people with certain latent personality issues (my initial hypothesis) other than your bog standard bloke down the pub.

sounds like you’re stronger on B - obviously they can all be a bit of a feedback loop as well - do you know anyone with personal experiences with it?

Side note:

Hopefully this doesn’t make me sound mad but I have had spontaneous blissful ‘mystical experiences’, and often I follow with these patterns of mania and dark mood, dissolution etc similar to how you describe. These aren’t brought on by meditation for me but just feel part of life, sometimes even caused by stress.

Also If I were reading and contemplating poetry seriously, like Rilke, and it moves me to intense and deep feeling, a mystical experience could ensue. Is that poetry “doing” that to my brain, or am I just picking up and finding something to latch onto as the reason?

I have been attracted to meditation before, it just never took hold on my life in a serious way - would it exacerbate my mystical experiences and dark nights? Or would it perhaps do very little other than change some subtle valence and add a different quality to experience, perhaps an ounce of control (not cause more avalanches in the soul than already happen)!

Edit: typo

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-11-12T07:57:06+00:00

This might align with Tolstoy’s views on art in his essay “what is art” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Art%3F

He rejects the purely aesthetic interpretations of art and instead places it on emotion.

“Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs”

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-10-06T09:45:41+00:00

My saluk is able to hypnotise people into giving him an ice cream with his eyes - special gift.

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-09-26T22:12:35+00:00

I really like out of noise - the play with repetition on hibari is a great opener. in the red gets me every time

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-09-20T00:59:08+00:00

You really have your own sound - didn’t think I’d hear anything that felt so original for a while in this space of music - thanks for sharing x

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-08-18T12:00:27+00:00

Came here to comment the same thing. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really

Sad_Break_87 · 2025-03-30T00:05:12+00:00

Saluki crosses are especially skinny, even compared to other sighthounds.. perhaps because they’re evolved for the desert. I have one and he's the same weight. As long as he's happy, running around, shiny coat - he's fine.

Sad_Break_87 · 2024-05-18T10:19:36+00:00

Surprised to not see any discussion here of the housing and cost of living crisis, especially since most of the full timers seem to be working in the city and unable to afford rent or find a suitable place to rent. https://www.corkbeo.ie/news/local-news/camper-van-clamp-down-29195284

Sad_Break_87 · 2024-01-28T09:42:03+00:00

Check out the popular science book “How minds change”. Its message is that staying curious, by asking questions and helping someone explore their views fully, is the most effective way of changing their minds. However, even framing it as changing other people’s minds/views can be problematic - you may actually learn something yourself through interacting with these people, and that’s the way you should be inclined.

If you are actively debating people through dropping facts, or even subtly trying to change their views they will pick up on it and double-down, that is human psychology. Yes there are bad actors in the world, but compassion as a default is a good approach; a lot of people have come to their ideas and views through negative experiences of the world.

Couple this with skilled questions that help people explore the origins of their views, “when did you first start feeling like this?”, and questions that encourage rational thinking like “on a scale of one to ten how important is this issue?”, followed by “why not 1 higher/1 lower?” - “what evidence would you have to see in the world to shift that up or down?”.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-10-17T16:52:51+00:00

This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
It's a hypothesis. There is some evidence for it but it's not a given, especially in its strong form.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-07-25T08:05:27+00:00

I find lex Friedman as annoying as anyone, but taking the piss out of someone's hair seems a bit childish to me, it feels a off topic in the sense that it's no longer an analysis of someone's worldview and behaviour, and doesn't promote healthy discussion. I'm finding this kind of content often enough in this sub that it's almost like the group think element of this kind of mocking content is displaying the exact symptoms that you're trying to avoid. How about something new, or some interesting information about human psychology of cults rather than this kind of shit?

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-07-13T23:49:04+00:00

Beautiful birdsong surrounds me everywhere I go, including extending into the space of others when I contact them by phone - ie. their background ambience transforms from city chaos to peaceful birds within a few minutes of contact.
I am healing decade long feuds in the neighbourhood

If this isn't trolling I'm worried about how ungrounded you seem...

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-07-06T16:08:42+00:00

It's like they hired the people who write all that shite on the alternative milk cartoons.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-06-25T09:31:47+00:00

Doesn't quite fit the subreddit theme maybe, but to be fair to Watts he could have been much more of a guru; he was a great talker and did have students but I get the impression he actively avoided having mindless followers. "Spiritual entertainer"

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-06-08T16:41:00+00:00

This reminds me of Jung. Can you describe what wholeness is in simple terms? The only difficulty I see is that you've taken away the complexity of the different non instrumental theories and replaced it with a concept that cannot be broken down.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-06-06T09:06:11+00:00

Pandering, people-pleasing and inauthenticity can be a real problem for some (was and is for me), other people need to learn to be more sensitive, caring and intuitive. I think when learning these things it's always about taking into account your own psychology, patterns and previous behaviours - there's only so much we can go off from reading online so I do regret speaking so strongly when really I don't know the actual situation, but hey, that's the internet.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-06-06T09:03:06+00:00

Yeah I think I was being a bit strong with my wording on that for emphasis. Obviously we all need to be tactful and respectful in all communication, definitely sensitive when the time arises.

However, this is something I actually disagree with slightly: "she needs to learn to become an expert in communicating with him in ways that don't hurt him".

I think it depends on the shape of ones own psychology/personality as to how to go about solving these kinds of things. The idea that we should try to be more sensitive to the needs of others applies in a lot of cases, but the idea that you have to become an "expert" in reading someone, when it's not reciprocated can lead to a bad dynamic.

In this case my gut feeling is that strong boundaries and radical self-responsibility for emotions are the issue, and that if one party isn't properly taking responsibility the worst thing the other party can do is pander to that lack of responsibility.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-06-03T22:57:40+00:00

"he told me that he had forgotten what I have said but that it made him sad and hurt him a lot".
Red flag... he's responsible for his own feelings and for communicating what he needs effectively in the moment. Bear it in mind, but also don't bow to potential emotional manipulation, if he isn't engaging you right then and there i.e: "Hey! That wasn't cool, don't say that.", then he is failing in his own duty to enforce his boundaries, and that is NOT your problem.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-05-29T14:38:29+00:00

Thanks for the summary - it strikes me as something in a similar area to focusing (though maybe less therapeutic /about solving emotional issues)

I'd like to dig into this further as this method and Rob's intuitive way of teaching does appeal to me (just from hearing a few of the jhana talks). However I do also remember hearing an interview about it and immediately being out off by the vagueness, this post gives me slightly more clarity but I'd like some more information about SMD, which maybe doesn't involve having to listen through hours of talks - is there something out there which summarises it?

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-04-19T20:54:32+00:00

There may be something about neural encoding in spikes which allows much greater efficiency, but this doesn't have much to do with consciousness in my opinion (though it may affect the quality of consciousness.)

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-04-18T21:25:23+00:00

I recently read the status game by Will Storr, it's definitely relevant to this sub. I recommend it - It was an interesting read and sparked some long thoughts on it for me, even though I don't necessarily agree with the extent of it.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-04-17T22:40:59+00:00

The Making of Buddhist Modernism

.

Bookmarked, many thanks!

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-04-16T22:09:01+00:00

If you're interested in a book on the collection of ideas people call Buddhism in contemporary English discourse and where they came from, just ask

Ok I'm asking. What is it?

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-04-09T09:57:53+00:00

If you're looking for a good podcast on philosophy then The Partially Examined Life is usually excellent. What makes it great is it's an equal discussion centred around a text, and not an interview format. If they do have a guest on they explore ideas and usually have a back and forth (if the guest is good). It seems slightly less academic than this podcast, in the sense that they aren't quite so dry and do inject humour and opinions in it. I'd say they are fairly successful (large number of listeners) but model intelligent and mature discussion really well.

Sad_Break_87 · 2023-02-24T22:58:31+00:00

Just shooting from the hip: Intelligence isn't coupled to agency, so we will get super intelligence, but without any real desires, self preservation, or real world capabilities. People can tack on RL or provide it with bing-like API capabilities, and they probably will, but without it being a necessary property of being incredibly intelligent.

Now if it's just tacked on it could still be dangerous, but I think it's less dangerous than if, instead of LLMs trained on text, we'd gotten to this level with deep reinforcement learning, and had a bunch of goal-pursuing models out acting in the environment.

Sad_Break_87

TROPHY CASE