https://youtu.be/X7brJ8qrLBo?t=3485 (20-30s) Re the Culadasa stuff, this sort of gestures at the key failure mode, in his own words, the experience of it as described from the inside. This is not just Culadasa, this is every practitioner to some degree and every sex scandal ever, maybe. 1/
Meditation doesn’t have to do this to people, this asymptotic blindness to suboptimal behavior. There is more truth in the fetter/perfection models than is currently sexy. Though, if you combine current pop. meditation methods w/ such models you do get disasters, in practice. 2/
The mind can’t look at terrible things in self & world without preparation. This is partly where the term “equanimity” is pointing, creating an ever-safer space for for bad stuff to come up, so then it does bubble up, fizz up, enter into experience, to be metabolized, roughly. 3/
Popular insight & concentration and combined methods are unprincipled, ad hoc in this sense of equanimity. They do not systematically restructure the ground so that *anything* in the mind can come up. So one raises a contingent subset, extraordinary change, but demons remain. 4/
And it’s actually worse than that. Popular insight & concentration & combined methods do produce limited *compensation* for those remaining demons (abuse, trauma, etc.), which sometimes allows for functional behavior and sometimes causes sex scandals. That’s… somewhat good. 5/
But that compensatory function comes at a cost. It causes a layering, a papering over of the *inroads* to getting at remaining demons, abuse, trauma, childhood confusion and misinterpretations, and so forth. The more compensation, the longer it takes to recover those inroads. 6/
The hiding of those inroads does look like blindspots, rigidity, anger, belligerence, neurosis, etc. So, most meditators DO get saner and crazier at the same time, on short and long cycles. There is nonmonotonicity to even “ideal” practice. 7/
In maybe not the worst case, but still pretty bad, you get a meditator who’s processed so much stuff, is so damn sane in a lot of ways, but then they got this BRILLIANTLY-DECADES-BURIED bad stuff, too, patchily compensated for. 8/
So then you get people who can deliver tremendous value to learners, but then this is combined with, potentially, gaslighting and double-binds that will potentially do tremendous long-term damage. 9/
So, yes, let’s bring in Western psychology, depth psychology, shamanism, bodywork, IFS, Core Transformation, etc., etc., etc.
Use it; use all of it.
But, also, meditation can be fixed. It *is* broken. We are *not* asking more of it than it can do. We *don’t* have to settle. 10/
11/
Apologies for not yet widely publicizing concrete fixes. There is still much to do around self-safety and other-safety. But, there are ways to get involved.
https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/07/27/protocols/
/12
Also, I want to emphasize that I’ve critically benefited from multiple contemporary teachers. And I’ve definitely benefited from Culadasa’s written material, possibly critically.
I personally would have been fucked without the contemporary scene. I still have more to do.
/13
So many meditation communities are iterating on theory and practice. Every serious teacher is a aware of this stuff and cares about it and is doing they best they can. (Culadasa, everyone.) Every student needs to be aware of it, too. It’s alive. Let’s do this.
14/14
I should have said after 10/ that out of all techniques nothing can “get in the cracks” like meditation potentially can. It is potentially the most exhaustive self-transformation method, bar none, all else being equal.
15/14
meditationstuff 