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I’ve experienced something very similar: practicing TMI at home, doing a vipassana retreat, going psychotic and started ‘hearing voices’ – that is to say, experiencing some of my own thoughts as if they were coming from ‘someone else’. Had a breakdown for a few months, did and then came off antipsychotics, the whole drama.
What I eventually discovered, to my immense relief, is that the voice-hearing phenomenon is fueled by my own beliefs. All it really is, is a combination of some of my own thoughts being mislabeled as originating from ‘someone else’ (a misapplication of the self-other illusion, which I personally became vulnerable to after having some dissolution-of-self experiences), and the perfectly mundane mental patterns that normally generate imaginary conversations and internal dialogues – like when you’re continuing a discussion you had with a friend in your head. You think what you’d say to them, and then your mind tries to predict what they’d say in response to that… except now you experience it as if it’s really happening, rather than implicitly knowing that it’s just in your head.
You’ve come some way to discovering this on your own, but it bears repeating. There is no real entities, no voice of god, no mushroom spirit, no dead relatives speaking from beyond the grave, no conscious sub-minds, no meditation masters with psychic powers that can hear and comment on your thoughts. It’s just that your mind has developed the ability to fool itself, so that imagined stories that involve imaginary conversations now feel convincingly like you’re in a conversation with someone else. There’s no substance to it, no deeper truth behind the verbal thoughts – it’s all made up on the spot, depending on your beliefs, emotions, and creativity.
Knowing that, and seeing the evidence for it as it was going on, again and again over time – this solved the problem for me. My voices are 99% gone now, and whenever I have another ‘voice thought’ that seems to come from someone else, I just remind myself that I don’t need to be imagining that because the ‘speaker’ doesn’t really exist. When you think they’re real, your mind thinks that it’s very important to predict ‘what they’ll say next’, and then you experience that prediction as if it really happened, keeping the conversation/story going. When you realize they’re not real, however, your mind gradually realizes that imagining it only causes you needless stress, and gradually kicks the habit.
I’m meditating again, and find that although concentration states can definitely still make imaginary things seem much more real than they are for a short while, constant vigilant skepticism is effective at keeping any such stories from escalating into a vicous cycle of psychotic beliefs again. This is a lesson you need to learn about emptiness, about how what you experience is merely your brain’s best guess, and about how much suffering it can cause you to slack on critical thinking. For me, a year later, I’m glad I learned that lesson.
Anyway, I also recommend loving kindness; it seems to make the stories friendlier over time, which is nice, although it’s not a substitute for knowing that they’re not real. But I’m doing samatha-vipassana again as well, even though at first it made me more sensitive to relapse, just like it does for you. It’s possible to get over this, with constant vigilant skepticism and careful mindfulness. Look at how the thoughts arise, what pattern they come in, the causality of them, while ignoring the stories as best you can. Good luck – I know it can be hell, but you can get past this.
ETA: And I may be the minority in this here, but I’d advice you not to mind the ‘kundalini’ stuff too much. Those ‘energies’ are just sensations, and any complex patterns in them are just constructs of your mind. They can get pretty wild, but I think it’s safest to ignore them, or observe them equanimously without ascribing any deeper meaning to them. The more you believe that something is happening, the more real it will seem, but in the end it’s just perfectly ordinary signals from your body, being remixed into seemingly important patterns by a volatile mind. As with the voices, the more meaning you ascribe to them, and the more you get attached to them being a certain way, the more important your mind will think it is to ‘recognize’ such patterns and the more energy it puts into effectively just making them up.
Hi Eric,
I’m curious what your suggestion was going to be, but the problem I described above has been resolved in another way; I switched objects to the breath at the abdomen, both because it’s further away from the gums and because I’ve read that it’s more relaxing than observing the breath at the nostrils (as I tend to overexcitation more than dullness). In practice, I’m both less overstimulated and much less distracted by my gums now, and I’ve had no trouble picking up at stage 4 with the new object, so I’m pretty happy with this outcome.
(The foods are a good suggestion, I’ve benefited in the past from paying attention to that sort of thing)
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
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This reply was modified 7 years ago by
Raza.
According to Culadasa, there is not; also according to him, this would be because following the eightfold path on a traditional path to insight is highly effective at preventing extended dark night experiences, and thus these experience were much rarer in traditional contexts than they are with western ‘pure meditation’ practices. I just listened to parts 1-5 of his ‘adverse effects of meditation’ lectures (https://dharmatreasure.org/tcmc-29-may-2014-2/), and he mentions this outright. I recommend them if you’re studying the dark night.
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This reply was modified 7 years ago by
