Mi'sen

But there are times, and prices to be paid. People who are heavily on the spiritual path in their 20s in India are guided towards renunciation and a monastic life in many cases, because doing work and family life while on that path is horrific for all parties in many cases.

Here, there's this "we can have it all in one life" myth: spiritual and financial and personal life success all at the same time, with no trade offs - a sort of LEAN IN philosophy. Yeah, let me tell you: not if you're going for enlightenment. It'll rip your life off your bones.

Maybe you recover afterwards, maybe you wind up living in a lighthouse staring at the world like the cosmic mystery play it really is. People are assemblages of atoms, garbage bags of negative entropy. They all die really soon. Do you want to see this every waking moment each day

What you have is a folk tradition, mostly Tibetan Buddhist propaganda and marketing in the 1960s when they desperately needed money and political asylum. They told you all this stuff was cool: it's not. It's horrifically hard, dangerous, and of uncertain benefit for most people.

My advice to everybody doing meditation or anything vaguely similar: do *the least you can* and still get some benefits, or (if you want to see it through) be prepared to dedicate 5 to 8 years to it full time, and lose almost everyone in your life and most of your material assets

lost my best friend, all my money (and then some). Shrug. But yes, people break.

In your experience, to what degree do ‘people break’ because of the dissonance they may feel as a result of the losses of stuff/status/friends, and the latent/unseen social-conditioning? Or is it just good old-fashioned psychological breakdown?

Neither one. They reacy badly to discovering that they don't exist, that they never existed, that nothing they cared about ever mattered, and that the whole affair was no realer than children in paper hats pretending to be Robin Hood. It's a shock. But life goes on. Mostly.