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Meditation takes the regular risks of various sorts of mental unraveling and puts them into a pressure cooker that increases the risks. Weird that many people get into it with the opposite expectation. I'm not even a meditator and I've had to help clean up fallouts a few times.
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Any fault line in your psyche that is likely to quake under stress will do so faster under practices like meditation. If you want to *lower* the risk, you... move away from the earthquake zone and hope for the best (ie adopt a lifestyle where that fault line is not stressed)
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If you are, for eg., the sort of person likely to suffer a megalomaniacal psychotic break in life with a probability of 1%, trying meditation will likely increase the probability to somewhere between 10 and 100% depending on what you try
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I suspect people either tune out, or don't recognize the significance of, everyday incidence of mental unraveling. You can't reach adulthood in most parts of the world without witnessing a few people coming undone, and the comorbidity with meditation type things (incl prayer)
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Think of it as analogous to things like computer crashes, core dumps, etc. To a first approximation, the brain is a computer and can fail catastrophically in analogous ways. And most people aren't running Erlang but something very fragile.
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It's hard to accept advice from non-teachers and non-practitioners who just show up with this opinion. The real work of meditation comes from learning to observe the deep rooted fault lines. Eventually we arrive on the other side. No need to torture ourselves though. Balance.
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people buy into medicalized models of “chemical imbalance” wherein mental health crises are prophesied in your blood and whatever is happening in consciousness can’t possibly reach all the way down there
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We see this amusingly peculiar critique all over. Feels similar to: "Stepping outside your front door considered dangerous. Have you fully contemplated the repercussions of living life?" It is unfortunate that merely sitting and clearing one's mind leads some to madness.
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