He thinks it is almost funny how I get pushed back into meditating every time I stop because I seem to need it. In my case the meditation helps me cope with anomalous experiences, but it also makes them more common. Because they are more common, I really need the meditation more as I go along. A weird sort of feedback loop.

My experiences are common enough that I’ve even managed to get some evidence of them on video. I spent my last counseling session discussing a video of me making my pk pinwheel spin. What my counselor noticed was how relaxed I was when doing that sort of pk (as opposed to light bulbs popping when I’m upset). That’s what the mediation seems to be doing for me… making it possible for me to relax when unexplainable things are happening in my life. I think as long as those sorts of things keep on happening, I’m probably going to need to meditate. (I haven’t given up on a cure though. I may find one yet.)

The process of patching up emotional injuries is messy and “not to the taste” even of 97% of all psychotherapists I have met and known. Psychiatry? forget it. Those folks are trained to institutionalize mental emotional illness at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. They are trained to give drugs. Period. … and other parts of treatment do not address emotions which in almost all cases are the driver of behavioral problems of those confined in hospitals and also the masses of us walking around “normal”. I’ve seen people go off the edge and become crazier by what they were subjected to in a psychiatric hospital while the well meaning staff was way way overwhelmed and not trained to do anything significant except prescribe very expensive drugs and other expensive drugs to combat side effects of of the first drug.

ONe of my close friends’ father wrote three of the chapters in the standard pharmacology text used in USA medical schools, including the chapter of drugs for psychiatry. He put one of his kids on Haldol starting when the kid was age nine …. at a time the kid was acting out during a divorce that included violent behavior by the father. This guy was one of seven research fellows the federal government called on when they want advice from a psychiatrist about drugs for the mind. The feds thru the VA system published a book he wrote about how psychedelics make you psychotic.

Culturally we are cut off from the potentials the Tibetans and other pre industrial cultures have developed to heal the mind of emotional issues by the fact our emotional issues tend to be so “high amplitude” we cannot even relax. stabilize and focus the mind for a few minutes.

I think my counselor had previously looked at meditation as just being a good way to relax. Now he is asking questions about what else it may be doing. There is still the problem with meditation tending to increase the likelihood of having anomalous experiences. Sometimes I stop meditating because I don’t like that part, but the benefits generally outweigh the problems so I keep going back to meditation.

Talking to a counselor has made coping with the anomalous experiences easier to handle. I don’t automatically interpret such experiences as being bad anymore. I’m learning to see the good in them. Meditation seems to be giving me at least a bit of control over the experiences. Somehow they seem to make more sense than they used to. So both counseling and meditation are helping me. It sure is a lot for me, and my counselor, to figure out though.

Others, and I think this is common, psychologist friends have commented on it ….. go for meditation training and get nothing at all out of it. I was one. I strongly suspect emotional “skeletons in the closet” that hijack consciousness making the necessary unperturbable stability, focus and relaxation impossible. It’s very hard work to become transparent to that emotional stuff. My experience is you have to return to the vulnerability of the child in a stable therapeutic container (psychedelics CAN speed it up like crazy too) to the time you sustained the original injury and then it transforms to tranparent immediately. Also most meditation instruction in the west leaves an essential step out, development of a degree of Samadhi first. Again emotional skeltons make the requisite degree of focus and relaxation almost impossible.

“Yep. It’s not as if there’s any one behavior or internal strategy that is the optimal thing for all situations.”

Perhaps one could say one must become transparent to the emotional reactions, thus no longer controlled (limited) by them. Then Samadhi becomes accessible …. insight or Vipassana is one secondary or knock on result of the presence of Samadhi. That has been my experience. It was not in the least subtle.

“Now the mindfulness traditions would claim that the practice of mindfulness is all you need. No, no, I shouldn’t say all. It’s the main thing you need to eventually recognize those sources and change them. That eventually you’ll have insights into your personality that will let you change some of the more maladaptive psychological things, but eventually you’ll have the more important insights as to who you really are, which will make the big change.”

Mindfulness may be all you need but emotional issues are a big obstacle to mindfulness. The Dalai Lama at a meeting of Neuroscience and Buddhists at Stanford in Oct 2005 flatly stated (paraphrasing) “mastery of the emotions” is what Buddhism has to bring to that table. We westerners have “special needs,” so to speak, before we have access to the wisdom of the Tibetans.

Maybe I need to start meditating again…

The largest mental hospital in the world is the LA County mens jail. They spend $150K a week on drugs to “treat” inmates and have nothing but escalating problems. Psychiatrists are trained solely to give drugs or to talk sense to people whose emotions have hijacked their behavior, even for issues that are psycho social in nature and are not organic. The emotions come from a more primitive part of our brain and trump intellect. The pharm industry loves it and has vastly too much influence on the way physicians are trained and the paradigm of medicine generally at the expense of other types of solutions. We need to legitimize introspection, self observation to master our emotions as no white coat “expert” can ever truly observe and influence another persons mind directly. The Tibetans have a lot to teach us, they have been at it for a long time.

The human mind heals itself spontaneously just as the body does and the process of skilled observation of our minds initiates and drives that process. One of my favorite scientists of all time, Willis Harman, said (I’m paraphrasing) one of the big obstacles is the willingness of scientists themselves personally to be transformed by their experiences instead of stuffing their heads full of facts out of books then declare that makes them the authority.