Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Meditation Is Scary Sometimes
The Varieties of Trippy Brain Experiences
Yesterday I had a weird-ass meditation experience. I've tried a lot of mindfulness meditation during my mental health quests, and my previous experiences have fallen into three groups:
One is the experience of having scattered thoughts about, say, laundry, and having to constantly bring myself back to the object of focus.
The second is meditation or mindfulness bringing up intense emotions, especially sadness, with a cathartic feeling.
And the third is the nice one everyone likes: entering a flow state of absorption, usually when I do something sensory, like body scans or paying attention to noises or sitting outside.
Up until yesterday, I thought that, when people said things like, "Meditation is hard sometimes," or, "It can feel like you're getting worse when you're getting better," they were talking about that first experience: not being quite there, feeling scattered, off your game. I knew to accept that that's just how it goes sometimes, and I knew that feeling was normal, mindfulness is a muscle you train, etc etc etc.
But yesterday I experienced something weird. It was different and disconcerting but mostly just painful, and it lasted for hours. I tried to capture the experience for a novel, so here it is, weird fiction voice intact:
I think I've had a spiritual awakening, and it was the most horrible thing I've ever experienced. I was at my meditation class. We broke out into little groups of two in order to do a listening meditation. We would each take time to listen to the other person talk for several minutes. We were supposed to listen fully, without trying to respond to the other. After that, we’d switch roles.
As I listened, I started by being conscious of my thoughts and sensations as I normally would. But at a certain point, the self-consciousness started to intensify in a particular way that brought up more and more disgust. First, I became very aware that every time they said anything, I had an impulse to act out some vapid response. I would half-smile, half-nod, cringe in fake sympathy; but suddenly, I felt disgusted by how uncaring all of these impulses were. It was like I was watching myself on a stage pretend to be kind to someone, and I was a terrible actor–disconnected, barely present, uninterested.
The next thing I noticed was how extremely little I took in of what they said. Even now I only remember tiny scraps. A single word here and there: park bench, evening, that's all. Nor did I care what they had to say. No wonder I remember so little of my life. If I pay attention even half a second of every day, I would be amazed. Instead, I looked at their face, noticed the smiles, the eye movements, and how affected they were.
The third thing I noticed more and more was the judgmental thoughts, and this was the most painful experience. First I noticed all my disapproving feelings as they came up, both of their words and also my reactions: that's fake, that was forced, there they understand a concept, what they just said is totally idiotic, etc. Then I noticed more and more my own judgments of my judgments: "How dare I say that," "is that fair," “don’t be mean,” "why am I so judgmental," and it was like pouring oil on fire. It became more and more intense and painful, like I was being stung as each thought landed like a hailstone, and swung from emotion to bigger emotion: disgusted, ashamed, then laughing hysterically. I felt like I was suddenly swallowing the whole picture of my mental reality and it hurt.
Afterwards, I tried to explain what had happened to the group, and it seemed like no one (except my group partner) had had a similar experience. They laughed, they told me to listen better next time (I felt fury and resentment, had the thought, "They all did it wrong.") I sat, silent and frozen, for the rest of the class, unable to speak and angrier and angrier.
After the class was over, I started to feel electrocuted by intense energy and the feeling of meaningfulness and insight: this was what it meant to be truly aware! And it sucked shit! I decided I was having a profound and special experience, that clearly I had become much more aware of my mind than before. I felt complete contempt for everyone in my class and for everyone who had ever told me that meditation was a therapeutic tool to alleviate depression and anxiety. Fuck you, Jon Kabat-Zinn! You are a worm, and you know nothing!
So, anyway. After that, I started to get tired of the experience, and wanted it to be over, because I kept noticing every fucking thought, especially the judgmental ones, and it was impossible to focus on anything else. I started to FREAK OUT in that “OMFG I’m going to be high forever?!!” type of way. It sounds silly to say that it was like doing drugs, but it really felt that intense, and had some of the same feelings: a sudden terror that everyone around you is noticing you and knows what's happening in your head; sounds being too loud, sights being too sharp; and sudden, overwhelming emotions. An existential panic attack happening in slow-motion.
My at-this-point gigantic library of behavioral therapy skills, particularly DBT ones, helped finally, forcibly end it. I dunked my head into ice water eighteen times, after which point it's hard to not feel somewhat calmer, if only because your nervous system just has to refocus all its efforts on making sure you aren't drowning. Then I lay in bed watching TikToks until I fell asleep, distracting myself as hard as possible from my awareness of my thoughts. I fell asleep for ten hours and then woke up back to normal.
Today I researched people's negative meditation and mindfulness experiences. I vaguely knew about those types of things, and that it’s normal among religious meditation practitioners to talk about them, though less normal among secular medical advocates of “mental-health mindfulness.” There's some interesting scientific research too about people's bad meditation experiences that result in psychosis. But not that much research. It got some press a couple years ago, then faded out again.
So yeah! I’m not sure if I’m describing just how much of a trip that was. But I’m feeling relieved today to be once again screening out 99% of reality, to be checked out, numb, and distracted. Tl;dr: third eye briefly opened, not fun.
I think one of the things that was most interesting, and made me most uncomfortable during the whole thing, was this feeling of a switch from one part of me to another. A distinct feeling of being a completely different self. It's this feeling like: "Welcome to the Real Reality. When this is over, that other self is going to tell you this is insanity, but I want you to know that they're the fake one." And a single-minded drive to take the experience further and to not do any of the things that might ground you or bring yourself out of it: "Don't tell your psychiatrist or therapist about this, they won't understand," "This is a profound SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE and anyone who dismisses it DOESN'T GET IT and HASN'T EXPERIENCED IT," "DO DRUGS!!" in short, a weird kind of grandiosity + paranoia that does not sound like what mindfulness is supposed to induce, like, aren't you supposed to be letting go of the ego? But maybe, as you're letting go of the ego, you start to notice it more? I know there’s not actually any “supposed to.”
It also involved this sudden switch in my worldview that I could attempt to describe as going from being mostly a Tolstoy person to suddenly being a Dostoevsky person. Tolstoy person: focused on mundane shit like strawberry jam. Describes big experiences like war in terms of, like, soldiers spending their days off doing sick dance solos. People going around having spiritual epiphanies/manic episodes where they're like "I'M DESTINED TO KILL NAPOLEON" and then the next week being like, wtf was that. People making big decisions and then immediately forgetting about them. An expansive and philosophical view of life, built on a lot of little mundane moments.
Dostoevsky person: lit up with an intense, single-minded passion for some idea: sex, gambling, becoming the Ubermensch, God, or being really, really pissed at your coworkers. When people have spiritual epiphanies/manic episodes that is the Truth. They face death, or see reality by sudden flashes of lightning, and then they collapse out of it, both depressed and relieved that they can't maintain that sense of radical comprehension 24/7. Even though their epiphanies often amount to something like "OMFG WHAT IF THE CHURCH…WAS THE STATE."
To put it another way: life considered from the point of view of each day; life considered from the point of view of death. The radical particularity of everything, the radical unity of everything, empirical truth vs mystical truth, Robert Pirsig's analytical worldview vs romantic worldview, some Apollo/Dionysus shit probably, there's definitely some half-baked theory about the bicameral mind that I could slide in here: Europeans have talked this topic to death.
This is all reductive. I'm trying to make a point. What I'm really trying to say is that yesterday, I experienced those two famously opposed ways of knowing and perceiving because of meditation, and it made me think how disconcerting it is to switch from one to the other and back again.
Partly why this disturbed me so much is because I'd also experienced this feeling in the fall of 2022, when I maybe/probably had a hypomanic episode, and that still unsettles me. All of the sudden, that fall, the world felt really weird. Full of meaning and significance. Dostoevskian. Stars were aligning! Plans were manifesting! Creative projects were about to change the world! Special people had crossed my path for Divine Reasons and I really wanted to hook up with them! I was on a mission from God. And my random intuitions and thoughts all meant something. They were the Truth, and all the things my therapist was saying were lame, so I stopped telling her what was really going on with me. I felt driven to protect my experience at any cost.
A crash followed. Maybe depression is the inside-out version of that spiritual/manic way of knowing, or maybe it's its own type of consciousness. The unaware, flattening, hopeless view of life. Depressive consciousness often follows the glow of the ecstatic, and that's a big reason to avoid ecstasy. When you crash, you crash hard.
Maybe you can manage those feelings if you have a better framework for accepting the ecstatic ones. This seems like a good argument for religiosity: human beings just have these types of weird experiences sometimes, and religion gives people a cultural context that leads them through them. It says, you aren't crazy, this is okay, and you'll ultimately get something positive out of it. Accepting the experience makes you freak out about it less and helps you let it go. And there is something about religious and spiritual frameworks that just feels a lot more right/emotionally salient when you're in that ecstatic/manic/spiritual mood. You really feel like the experience should mean something, and religion and spirituality tell you it does.
I tend to think of the mundane view of life as "sane" because it seems more grounded and also nicer: you remember people's birthdays. On the other hand I often derisively think of that spiritual/ecstatic way of perceiving as insane, but that's not fair to it. There are tons of arguments about sanity and insanity being socially constructed, etc, and yes and no, I agree with parts of that (we could change society to accommodate neurodivergence more tomorrow if we let the work week be more flexible), but I think there is real truth in the fact that it's hard to build anything much at all when you're in Dostoevsky mode. Maybe you can dash off the first draft of a poem if you're lucky, or have a prophetic dream that you base a painting on. But like, building a house, raising a family, writing a long novel? Probably not. Maintaining effort over years requires attention to how long your commute is, making sure you wake up at 8:30 AM every day. I doubt even Dostoevsky wrote his novels in flashes of insight; the way I imagine it, he had his religious seizures and stuff and then started books that he would have abandoned if his long-suffering secretary/wife hadn't forced him to finish them, day after day after day.
But on the other hand, I do think there was something valuable in that hypomanic episode that wouldn't have happened to me otherwise (though also, there was destruction that I wish hadn't happened). It's when I got the idea to apply to film school, a thing I'd long imagined doing but felt like I couldn't do because I thought other people would think it sounded stupid. And I do think, from the outside, it seemed out-of-left-field to some people who know me. Of course, I did not just apply and then start going to school overnight; after I got in, I interviewed people at the school, I thought about the decision for months, I got a scholarship, and I was sliding from theater/playwriting to film/screenwriting which isn't like leaping from playwriting to discrete mathematics (something I'd also once considered during an Up mood). Nevertheless, it was something I wouldn't have done without my brain giving me a little Spicy Energy, and I'm glad I did it; I'm happy, more happy than I've been in a while.
Anyway. I felt off balance when I meditated yesterday and then I freaked out and had anxiety and some dissociation. I made the classic blunder that always leads to a bad trip: I resisted the experience instead of riding it out.
Edit: I feel like I left something important out in this at first. Why should sane and insane, judging and accepting, religion and empirical knowledge, be divided at all? Is there an inherent divide in the brain between these modes of knowing, or do I just make there be for some reason? Doesn’t the fact that two male white writers from an imperialist culture represent these categories to me at all demonstrate something suspicious about them? Can you live in a whole made of both? Is that the actual path to mental health? More soon.