IS THE TRUTH REALLY TRUE?
Although it may seem unnecessary, philosophers spend much time discussing what it means when someone says something is true and as everyone who stepped into the mindfulness world quickly realizes, there are a lot of claims about the true nature of things. Meditation is claimed to be the act of dissolving all concepts to see things as they truly are. It is described as a mind science and as someone who sees himself as scientifically minded, I fell for the trap.
In specific, it was the podcaster Sam Harris who lured me into meditation. He claimed that meditation is essentially a first-person science through which one can make the “scientific” observation of no-self which supposedly should lead to happiness. The self, according to Harris and many other Buddhist modernists, is the root of suffering.
After I started meditating and listening to dharma talks, I got mild panic attacks and became more and more dissociated from my own thoughts. I searched the internet for help and was told that the way out is to push through the problems with more meditation. I continued and became depersonalised which feels to me like a state of numbness and centre-lessness. The self was destroyed. At that point, the world became a strange place for me, and my condition nearly cost me my relationship.
“For some, meditation leads to bliss and for others, it leads to enlightenment’s evil twin.”
I am currently spending much time at home, as it provides a safe place for me and am attending the support group of the Cheetah House as part of my recovery. Without Willoughby Britton’s consultation and encouragement that it is possible to overcome depersonalisation I would have been at some darker place.
Coming back to the topic of truth, does my experience or meditation in general really confirm the truth of no-self? Or does it, as Evan Thompson writes in his book Why I Am Not a Buddhist “…change experience, so that experience comes to conform to the no-self norm, by leading us to disidentify with the mind so that it’s no longer experienced as “I” or “me” or “mine”?
“Is bare attention more like a light that reveals things or a mold that shapes them?”
In philosophy, there is the Correspondence Theory of Truth which says that “p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact.” And there is also the Pragmatic Theory of Truth which says that a proposition is true if it is useful to believe. When I am asking if the truth is really true I use the word true as in “The arrow flew true and the warrior dropped to the ground”.
Or as Obi-Wan said:
“Luke, you’re gonna find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
Personally, I don’t think that certain claims of Buddhist modernists are true in a factual way nor are they true in a useful way, at least for me. It is now also clear to me that the claim of the mindfulness community that meditation is like science is also wrong. Going back to Thompson again “…[scientific] instruments are separate from the objects they provide access to, and they don’t change them … Bare attention, however, isn’t an instrument applied to the mind from outside. It’s not separate from the mind; it’s a kind of mental process or cognitive function.”
Before I started to meditate, I was genuinely happy. What got me into meditation was the false promise that everybody would benefit from meditation and also the circumstance that no one told me that there are side-effects. If I would have known how powerful mindfulness can be I would have never started.