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I have stabbed my own heart

To kill my love for you

I have to let it bleed

Until it's dry and blue

I will wrap it in a mourning shroud

And bury it by the old tree

Where our home used to be

#personal #mine

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A thoughtful read from Heliotroph.

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The Overview Effect was described by space theorist and author Frank White in the 1980s. At that time there were enough astronauts who reported similar feelings about being in space and seeing Earth from space to identify an initial pattern.

White observed, “The Overview Effect is the experience of seeing the Earth from a distance, especially from orbit or the Moon, and realizing the inherent unity and oneness of everything on the planet. The Effect represents a shift in perception wherein the viewer moves from identification with parts of the Earth to identification with the whole system.”

Astronaut Russell Schweickart described his experience as if he were part of Earth as a type of sensing instrument: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. And that makes a change.… [I]t comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for man.”

[…]

Anthropologist Deana Weibel analyzes the reports of astronauts’ experiences in space and how they impact their cosmologies or views of the universe. She addresses the Overview Effect but also identifies another state, which she coined the Ultraview Effect. The Ultraview Effect incorporates the more perplexing and disturbing aspects of these new experiences. She explores the ways in which encountering the Earth and other celestial objects in ways never before experienced by human beings has influenced some astronauts’ cosmological understandings.

Weibel recognized that there was considerable overlap between astronauts’ descriptions and those described by scholar Timothy Morton with respect to “hyperobjects.”

Morton wrote that hyperobjects are objects that exist yet are almost unfathomable to comprehend. They include objects found in other dimensions, such as Platonic solids, but also objects that are so large that they are a shock to human comprehension: There exists a reality to certain huge objects or systems that is separate from humanity’s ability to perceive them.

While human beings throughout the ages have had a slow but increasing awareness of large objects (like the globe or the ocean, for example), Morton specifically used hyperobject to refer to “massively distributed entities that can be thought or computered, but not directly touched or seen,” meaning our main awareness of them is achieved through the use of technology.

Weibel credits Morton for recognizing that “human ‘contact’ with these objects is transformative in a very disruptive way.” She notes, “Hyperobjects are normally phased, meaning we only see parts of them at any given time, so they seem to come and go. In this view, the reality of a thing exists apart from our piecemeal impressions of the reality of things, and at this point in time we are starting, slowly, to comprehend them in their entirety.”

The cognition of hyperobjects through technology—both at the micro level enabled by the use of computers, which can model objects in other dimensions, and at the macro level with the use of telescopes and space capsules to view massive objects in space, which are encountered within the seemingly infinite substrate of space—constitutes the historic moment in which we live now. “This is the historical moment at which hyperobjects become visible by humans. This visibility changes everything.”

Morton characterizes the emotions aroused by encountering these objects as pain and disgust. Weibel’s analysis reveals an experience more in line with Otto’s idea of the numinous. She notes, “Our familiar illusions are replaced with a frightening perception of something truly alien.” This new sight, in other words, initiates a shift in worldview. This consciousness of what is truly “alien” reorients those who encounter it. Russell Schweickart described himself as a literal instrument, a “sensing element for man.” Edgar Mitchell felt a “palpable” experience of divinity and connection in space that led to a life-long exploration of the noetic transmission of knowledge.

The new consciousness, powerfully felt and embodied by Schweickart and Mitchell, suggests that the human body and mind, confronted with hyperobjects in space, undergo a process of reception of consciousness that they are compelled to transmit to others. Researchers who study the psychological states of astronauts observe that, just as Otto remarked about the encounter with the numinous, “awe can transform people and reorient their lives, goals, and values. Given the stability of personality and values … awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.”

Among those who experienced these alien mental states, some were struck with a feeling that extraterrestrial life is inevitable. Weibel’s sensitive elaboration of an Apollo astronaut’s experience illustrates this shift in worldview:

Looking at the universe out there from my vantage point, I began to realize that we don’t know crap about anything, we really don’t.… [A]t some points in my orbit around the moon, I was sheltered from both the earth and the sun, so I was in complete darkness. And all of a sudden, the star patterns out there became something that I was not ready for.… So many stars I couldn’t see one. Just a sheet of light. I don’t know whether you’d call it spiritual or not, but when I saw the starfield out there in a way that nobody else has ever seen … I had some pretty profound thoughts.… We are not unique in the universe. When I came back from my flight, we were all totally exhausted.… I’d sit in my living room and all these thoughts would come flowing through, so I began writing them down.… They flowed from my mind through a pen onto a piece of paper. It was like I was being guided by something.

-- D. W. Pasulka, Encounters

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I often think we are deceiving ourselves by imagining we are involved in spiritual pursuits; and spiritual activities are very fashionable these days. It is easy to join meditation retreats of one kind or another believing we are undertaking something meaningful. but in fact we may merely be indulging in a kind of spiritual recreation.

First of all, it is necessary to be free of any preconceived ideas about meditation, and also of any kind of habitual thinking, to starve the mind of ideas and thoughts. Zazen is not a way of gaining great knowledge; it is a way of humility there being nothing to acquire, nothing to keep; it is the transcendence of all that is habitual in us. It is this vast unknown original field of reality which no one has ever explored. Each moment is new, virgin soil.

Our whole lives should be penetrated by zazen; whatever we do should be none other than zazen; there is no spare time to indulge in anything, even zazen itself. And no preparation is needed for this, because meditation is our original way of life; it is the deep peace of the mindfulness we experience when our whole being is absorbed and opened by what we are doing now, be it sitting, or going about our daily activities.

Our own individual being is like a man in a small boat; and the boat is floating at the mercy of the waves on the sea. So long as we remain like that man in a boat we shall be easily influenced and disturbed by daily events, clinging to conventional beliefs and old habits in the hope that they will provide us with some kind of security; our entire lives may pass like that of a dreamer, or a drunkard.

Zazen is the recognition of the universal life, as it is, within us. Everyone is seeking eternal life and peace, but it is, miraculously here within this moment. Deep peace does not always come from inspiration, special knowledge, or practice; it is present in each and everyone's exhalation, in the deep silence of no-mind.

Zazen is a primordial practice, essentially the trinity of body breath, and mind; and true zazen will not be opened in us until our sitting posture, breathing, and mind are correctly adjusted. Daily practice, awakened determination and teachings bring about this trinity of zazen. We must sit with the back straight and breathe calmly leaving thoughts as they are to come and go like clouds in the sky. Our eyes will naturally be cast to the ground in front of us, not looking at anything; everything around us naturally being reflected, as it is. When we have no focus inside or outside of us, we have 'ten direction eyes', and are free from everything.

Breathing is the rhythm of the universe; it will awaken us to the truth that there is nothing but the breath of the cosmos, coming from an immaculate origin.

To sit in zazen is to experience transparency and nothingness, as well as endless abundance. To sit in zazen is to discover the one within who is born anew every moment of this timeless reality. When one acts with intention, however, there is a split between God and man. To sit and sit without one's 'self' is real sitting.

Do not have satisfaction, or dissatisfaction — Just sit and sit and sit. Once sitting is truly settled, the mind is free from wandering, and one is peace itself. To sit firmly and unconditionally is to realize one's original simplicity and to understand clearly that very little is needed in ordinary life. Seeing this, one is purified.

Zazen is the cessation of the everyday business of thinking! It is, in fact too simple to want to continue — doing nothing, expecting nothing, getting nothing! But we should not be sitting-machines. If our everyday lives are unsound, it is impossible to practise the real way of zazen. If zazen is not the son of daily life, it is a lie. But the opposite is also true — daily life is the son and zazen the mother.

We do not need a particular time to be at 'the gateless gate of dharma', it is enough if we sit in calmness for a while each day Being busy is not the same as having the empty sky in our hearts. If we sit we find that we can sit however busy we may be. Time will be found for eating and sleeping. So, if we say we have no time for meditation, what we are really saying is we have other priorities.

We are all beginners. This is not only true, but necessary — even for someone who has been practising for more than one hundred years. This is not trite sentiment. We need the beginner's mind in everything, whatever we do, whoever we are.

Expert practitioners are naturally able to discern and rectify their attitudes and actions the moment the need arises. They are always able to abandon their own selves. They are always beginners.

This is the meditation of infinite awakening; this sitting does not remain as our own.

Generations of peoples, primarily in Asia, have maintained that the historical Buddha, Gautama, invented zazen, and so was an Absolute God in zazen. The truth is, of course, zazen was not born of, nor created by the historical Buddha; Buddha was born of the unfathomable depths of zazen. We too may be born from the same place, as countless buddhas have in the past. We are all absolute perfection in zazen, infinite perfection — the transcendence of ourselves; the transcendence of the practice; the transcendence of all things. Zazen is and was the mother of Buddha. We should confirm this with our own direct experience — otherwise we shall be carried away by man-made stories and the euphoria of dogma; and this is not our true practice.

-- Hôgen Yamahata, Zazen: Sitting Meditation

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Sitting is a part of our daily lives. We take a rest by sitting. We sit to eat, draw, write, and talk with friends. When we share good things, we sit. You don’t really have a good chat with someone when you are standing up or walking. When you want to talk heart-to-heart, you sit. Sitting brings people closer together.

Sitting is a foundation. It’s part of our development, both as individuals and as a species. The child must learn to sit before he can stand up. We distinguish ourselves from animals because we stand upright. Animals crawl. Sitting is the transition between animals and humans.

With sitting, we are able to concentrate for long periods. It is our creative posture, our posture of concentration and absorption in the work of the mind and dexterous tasks. It is said we evolved as humans when we were able to stand upright and use our hands. But think of how much we owe to the person who sits, absorbed in his or her task!

When we are sad, we keep to ourselves. But we also sit. Sitting is a way to recover, to gradually let what is inside us resolve. It creates stability. There is a sense of grounding when we sit. Sitting is a way to give ourselves comfort.

-- Guo Jun, Essential Chan Buddhism

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My head was shaved by Master Song Nian at Singapore’s Mahabodhi Monastery on Easter day in 1997. I did sutra studies at Taiwan’s Buddhist Institute. After that, I wanted to experience different forms of Chan practice and I wanted to test myself. So in 1999 and 2000 I went on three-month intensive summer and winter retreats at Korean Son monasteries in Seoul and Gwangju.

Son, the Korean form of Chan or Zen, had a reputation for being very rigorous. That was what I wanted, and I was not disappointed.The daily schedule was brutal. We woke at 3:00 AM and finished at 11:00 PM. We had only fifteen minutes each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Toilet breaks were five minutes, but the toilet was far from the meditation hall. We had no time, so we just went outside to shoot. For ninety days we did not take a shower. We had a basin of water that was filled from a bamboo pipe that ran down from the mountain and used a towel to scrub ourselves clean.

No break time, no time to relax, no nap after lunch. Sleeping after 11:00. Waking at 3:00. Most of us did not even have a room. We sat in the meditation hall on a folded-up cushions, which were also our beds. Each sitting was at least an hour, and we had to sit in full lotus. No movement was tolerated. If the monitors, who were senior monks, saw us move an inch, they’d hit us with the incense stick. In the morning, after waking, we had to do 108 prostrations in only ten minutes. Up and down, up and down. It looked like we were doing jumping jacks.

The Korean terminology for this kind of intensive retreat is Kyol Che, which means “very tight dharma.” You have to be very fast, very precise, always in the moment. There is no time to think, wander off, and daydream. If you fall behind, you get hit. There is nothing symbolic about these blows. Thwack! You dare not whimper or cringe. They punch and kick you, and you have to bow and gently say, “thank you.” In Korean. And then there is pain, so much pain.

Tears roll down from your eyes the moment you move your legs as you come out of the full lotus. There is so much pain that you don’t know where the pain is coming from. You try to massage your muscles, but it’s not the muscles. The pain goes into the bone. At the end of the day you are so tired you cannot move or stand up. You crawl to bed.

And then the food. Kimchi all the time, kimchi and white rice. The kimchi smelled like rotten eggs. It was repulsive, almost unbearable. It made me gag, and I had to force down every bite. It was the only food, so you either ate it or starved! A piece of tofu was an extravagance. We ate tofu three or four times in ninety days. The rest of the time it was kimchi with black beans and a few sprouts.

For seven days and nights in the middle of the retreat we were subjected to what is called in Chinese yong men jin jing, which translates as “great courageous diligence.” This was an even more intensive practice than your run-of-the-mill Kyol Che. For seven days and nights we were not allowed to lie down. Twenty-four hours of continuous sitting practice for seven straight days. We learned how to sleep while sitting, but when you were caught dozing, you were hit. You learned to sleep without moving.

[...]

Before going into the Son retreat they warned us that it was called the demon training camp. We called it the cave of the tiger. Once you enter the cave of the tiger you can only come out in two ways. One, you die. If it’s summer, they will carry your corpse out of the Son Bang, the Chan Hall. But if you die in the winter, they put you under the table. It is so cold in the unheated hall that your body will not rot. Then they take you out for burial after the retreat is over.

The second way to leave Son Bang is to be verified that you are enlightened. Then you can walk away before the retreat ends. Those are the two acceptable ways to leave the retreat. But sometimes, in the ninety days, the person next to you would disappear. They had escaped. In the middle of night, they had climbed over the monastery’s wall and run away. When that happened their name was published and the whole of Korea knew they had run. For the next three years, that person was blacklisted—banned from the Chan Hall and Chan monasteries in all of Korea.

-- Guo Jun, Essential Chan Buddhism

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I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had…

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

-- Michael Crichton

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Shakyamuni Buddha transmitted the teaching of thusness. He said the following:

Please train yourselves thus: In the seen, there will be just the seen. In the heard, there will be just the heard. In the sensed, there will be just the sensed. In the cognized, there will be just the cognized. When for you, in the seen there is just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the sensed just the sensed, in the cognized just the cognized, then you will not identify with the seen, and so on. And if you do not identify with them, you will not be located in them; if you are not located in them, there will be no here, no there, or in-between. And this will be the end  of suffering.

This is themeless meditation. It is seamless meditation. There is no seam between you and the heard: there is just the heard. No seam: only the heard and the seen and the imagined. This is having no object of thought.

-- John Daido Loori, The Art of Just Sitting

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By totally just sitting, we put our whole being on the ground of interdependent origination. We do nothing but “just sitting” with whole body and mind. Dogen Zenji’s zazen (shikantaza) is a unique practice even within different kinds of meditation practices in the various forms of Buddhism.

We don’t meditate. Meditation is done by our mind. But in zazen, we don’t do anything with our mind. We don’t count breath. We don’t watch breath. We don’t chant mantra. We don’t contemplate anything. We don’t try to concentrate our mind on any particular object. We have no techniques.

We really just sit with both body and mind. We sit in an upright posture, breathe through the nose quietly, deeply, and smoothly from our abdomen. We keep our eyes open. Even when we sit in this posture, our mind is functioning. Our heart is beating; our stomach is digesting food. Each and every organ in our body continues to function.

There is no reason that our brain stops working in our zazen. The function of our brain is to secrete thoughts. Thoughts well up in our mind moment by moment. But we refrain from doing anything with our thoughts. We just let everything come up freely and go away freely. We don’t grasp anything. We don’t try to control anything. We just sit.

-- John Daido Loori, The Art of Just Sitting

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There is story about a layman named So Toba, a very famous Chinese essayist. He lived during the Sung Dynasty, when there was a great sparking of dharma activity. It must have been an extraordinary time to live. Layman Toba is said to have had “a profound understanding of the vast ocean of Buddhism” and to have been “a dragon in the sea of letters.” He was able to use words to illuminate clarity, to give a sense of the basis and scope of movement and possibility. Hearing the sound of a stream in a mountain valley,  he wrote:

The sound of the valley stream is his great tongue, The colors of the mountains are his pure body. In the night, I have heard eighty-four thousand hymns, But how to tell it to people the next day?

-- John Daido Loori, The Art of Just Sitting

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Many of us imagine the human self to be a discrete entity, solid, formed and known. But this could be an illusion of our making, albeit a useful illusion, that allows us to act efficiently in the world. Researchers of the unconscious have found that the self has no definite boundaries, and that at its inner depths it trails off into mystery and the unknown. To borrow the metaphor from physics, what we had previously thought of as a solid entity may turn out to be a wave of infinite extension. Quantum physics discovered that the smallest elements of matter behave in one moment as particles and in another as waves. As particles, they are discrete and separate, and can be ‘split’ to release energy. As waves, they behave less like bits of matter and more like bands of light or energy, reaching out to eternity. They cannot be confined or boxed in but participate in an ocean of being, as it were.

This suggests a certain paradoxical instability at the heart of matter. Matter looks stable to the eye but, from the perspective of microphysics, the world is fluid, and uncertain, even bizarrely so. Einstein argued that all particles have a wave nature, and vice versa. Heisenberg, Max Planck and others refined and changed the theory. Needless to say, this discovery shattered the prevailing views of Newtonian physics, and its ramifications are still being felt today. As Brian Greene put it in The Elegant Universe, ‘Matter has been dematerialized.’

What has happened in physics has occurred in the parallel movement of Jung’s analytical psychology. This is more than coincidence, because while he was a Swiss citizen and based in Zurich, Einstein befriended Jung and they had discussions about the nature of reality. Einstein was discovering relativity in physics and Jung was discovering it in psychology.

Like matter, the self is only relatively stable. At its depths, it too can lose its solid formation and appear as a wave or as a fluid process. The notion of applying the wave-particle duality to psychology is mine and not Jung’s, but I think the metaphor holds if we think in terms of the healing experience of the numinous. As with the concept of matter in physics, I think we live simultaneously as waves and particles as psychological beings.

As particles, we are distinct beings, physical and discrete, each with our unique personality and makeup. As waves, we are not so individual. We are similar to each other, and participate in the cosmos in predetermined ways. As waves, we are spiritual beings, fluid, open-ended and connected to other waves. We are especially receptive to archetypal currents that course through us, which Jung identified as universal and collective. In his terms, the particle is the ego or conscious self, and the wave is the infinite expanse of the unconscious.

‘The suprapersonal or collective unconscious,’ writes Jung, ‘is like an all-pervasive, omnipresent, omniscient spirit.’ It represents ‘an extension of man beyond himself; it means death for his personal being and rebirth in a new dimension as literally enacted in certain of the ancient mysteries’. Rituals such as those of ancient Greece, in which rebirth in a new dimension was enacted, seek to lead us away from the particle to the wave, and such experiences are referred to theologically as grace, unconditional love or transcendence. The wave-like connection is precisely what we today call spirituality, namely, the capacity to feel connected to the cosmos and the entirety of life.

[...]

My contention is that as soon as we experience ourselves as waves, this has a healing effect on consciousness. When this connection is restored, we overcome ego-bound existence and anxiety, and feel ourselves to be part of a larger whole. The ego’s petty concerns and worries are dropped and we feel renewed. It is burdensome to be confined to the ego and to its tiny world. As Freud correctly observed, the ego is the ‘seat of anxiety’, and when we move outside the ego our anxiety – which can produce disease and neurosis – falls away.

We are not designed to dwell all our lives in the ego, in its confining world. This has long been a part of human knowledge, which is why ritual and liturgy played such a huge role in people’s lives in the past. Today we are more likely to seek out this experience of transcendence in a variety of secular ways, including music, drugs, sexuality, relationships, contact with nature and awe and wonder.

[...]

It is possible to see the relation between particle and wave in the experiences of the devotees of Dionysus. In many ways, Dionysus is the god who invites us to return to the source and immerse ourselves in the ocean of being. As Zurich analyst Verena Kast writes of the Dionysian festivals of ancient Greece:

Those seized by Dionysus broke out of the conventional order to become part of a cosmic order; human beings became one with nature, social rank was obliterated, rivalries ceased. Torn out of their isolation, individuals experienced prophecy and a momentary connection with the transpersonal Self.

In the ancient festivals, the ego personality was momentarily eclipsed by a different order of being or, as Kast puts it, ‘the devotees of the god experienced the Self through momentary forgetfulness of self’. The Dionysian spirit is ecstatic and it brings release from the isolation of our individual selfhood. Dionysus lures us out of our shells into ecstatic communion with others and with nature. However, the enchantment that Dionysus offers can lead to intoxication, loss of control, excess and obliteration.

This is why the god Dionysus was feared as well as revered. He personifies a primal wave that can engulf and obliterate the particle. The human element can be destroyed in a frenzy of elation and mania. He invites us to move out of our confined state, but the chaos of the primordial is the danger we face, which in the cult of Dionysus is symbolised by his companions, the maenads, whose name derives from mania and means possession or frenzy.

[...]

Walter Otto and Karl Kerenyi provide memorable descriptions of the ancient festivals of this god. Dionysus was invoked by singing the dithyramb or ritual song. The wearing of the ritual masks of the god would invite Dionysus to enter the festivities and insinuate himself in the human throng. Women would gather in a circle, clap their hands, and sing and dance to the sound of drums and flutes. The dithyrambic choir would enter an altered state of consciousness, in which members lost their identities and acted as one. Describing this process of fusion with nature and life, Nietzsche wrote:

So stirred by Dionysus, the individual forgets himself completely. In the Dionysiac rite, nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The mystical jubilation of Dionysus breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being.

[...]

Some of us can be transformed by our contact with ecstasy but some of us can be destroyed. As Verena Kast notes: ‘Ecstasy carries us beyond our limits, killing our normal personality. It can fragment us so that we do not know how, or if, we are going to return.’

-- David Tacey, Gods and Diseases

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The fact is that we cannot tolerate our orderly, rational lives all the time. There are times when we must break out, and release through alcohol and drugs has become a kind of ceremonial release for many of us who are caught in rationality during the week. We are not just searching for alcohol and the poisoning that it inflicts on the body and nervous system. We are searching for altered mental states, and for what James calls ‘potential forms of consciousness entirely different from our own’.

In a secular culture we do not know how to transcend the normal state of consciousness, except through eating, drinking and various kinds of substance abuse. This is where the loss of religious awareness takes its toll, because we stand dumb and mute before the innate human need to transcend our profane state and achieve the condition of homo religiosus, to use Mircea Eliade’s phrase for the true nature of humanity as ‘religious man’.

[...]

Adopting the language of Greek mythology to explain our modern dilemma, analyst Robert Johnson claims that our secular culture has a poor relation to Dionysus, the god who teaches us how to transcend the rational. By day and during the week, we carefully erect an Apollonic structure around ourselves that by night and on weekends we feel compelled to tear down. But we are so far removed from Dionysus, his rituals, ceremonies and arts, that we do not know how to conduct this transcendence in a positive way. Instead we turn to the lesser rituals of the drunken Bacchus, or to what Johnson calls ‘low-grade Dionysus’, and attempt to drink or consume our way to a breakthrough.

[...]

The spirit must have transcendence, either positively in spiritual forms, or negatively in substance abuse and self-destruction. The negative ‘spirit’ of alcohol destroys the ego rather than ‘transcends’ it, and it can destroy the body and its organs as well as society itself.

-- David Tacey, Gods and Diseases

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This is a book about music, but a special kind of music we’ll call transcendental. In what sense I use this term will get clearer as we proceed. Two notable experiences led me to write about the extraordinary Indian musician, Nada Brahmananda, whom I first met in 1976. One was an apparent precognitive dream about Nada before I ever heard of him. The other took place five years before I met the Swami, perhaps the strangest experience I’ve ever had that centered around a piece of music I’d call transcendental. So I should begin with an account of this experience, written down soon after it happened:

I live on the top floor of 14 Bedford Street in the West Village of New York City with my partner, Jane. We are listening to a jazz composition by John Coltrane,�� The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. It is about 11:30 p.m. Jane is sprawled out on the sofa. I step to the window and gaze vacantly into the clear evening sky. I’m in a mild reverie from Coltrane’s hypnotic beat, softly thumping my foot, swaying to the rhythms of the music.Suddenly, a cluster of dazzling white lights appears out of nowhere. The lights are larger and more brilliant than any stars. They are attached to nothing I can see. They perform zigzag aerial acrobatics, in tune, it seems, with Coltrane’s music. Their appearance in the sky is so sudden and so silent, I just keep staring, somewhat surprised, listening to the music, watching the dance of lights. After about twenty seconds I realize that what I’m seeing is very strange indeed, and it starts to sink in. Something outside my window a few hundred or so feet in the sky seems to be communing with me and the music of John Coltrane. My attention fixed on the dancing lying light-cluster, I yell to Jane to come to the window. She gives a start, and joins me. Apparently I’m not just “seeing” things. Jane puts on her glasses and raises the window. It’s no reflection. Something is really out there, brighter, more dazzling, than any star. The light-entity suddenly stops its aerial capers and slowly glides downward, in a straight line, toward the dome of Our Lady of Pompei, the oldest church in Greenwich Village—built more than a century ago to serve migrants and refugees, located to the right at the corner of Carmine and Bleecker Streets. The lights hover there, pulsing above the dome of the church. An unusual sensation comes over me; it feels like I’m flying far out in space, surrounded by stars. Among the stars, I see the dome of Our Lady of Pompei and the lights still pulsing. Then I realize I am back in my room. The church is just blocks away! But now something else. Over the lights I see—but this more inwardly than outwardly—two large heads and massive shoulders. The figures I see look excited! They’re watching us! I recall one of the heads. It was human. I get an impression of curiosity, a kind of playful agitation, and a strong feeling that I—and Jane, who was half- dressed—are the objects of voyeuristic curiosity. Suddenly, the impression of the two heads fades. My attention is again riveted on the church dome. The light entity, above the cross, still pulsing, suddenly shoots back to where we first saw it, a few hundred feet above our rooftop. Again it makes zany and impossible aerial maneuvers. Then, without warning, it stops and hop-flies across the skyline, going uptown. We observe its trajectory, scramble to the other window, and watch it take one last curving leap over the top of the Empire State Building where it  vanishes. Jane and I were electrified after this highly strange encounter with what nowadays is called a UAP, an unidentified aerial phenomenon. Our apartment was on the top floor and we both had the impulse to walk a flight up and step onto the roof, which we promptly did. There we met with an equally astonished person, a young drummer who lived in the same apartment building, and whom I had recently turned on to the music of John Coltrane. His name was Louie and he said, “Did you see that?” So we had a third witness to confirm that what we saw was “real.” Louie noted the silence of our visitor and saw the lights in the form of a pyramid. Neither Jane nor I had had any impression of a pyramid.

-- Michael Grosso, Yoga of Sound: the Life and Teachings of the Celestial Songman, Swami Nada Brahmananda

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-- Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy

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The social critic Christopher Lasch once observed that therapy "simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist." And I couldn’t help thinking of Becca’s predicament when I read this from Lasch: "As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority."

-- Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy

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The Treatment-Prevalence Paradox

More widely available treatment ought to abate the rate (and severity) of disease.

Take breast cancer, pitiless killer of over forty thousand American women each year. As early detection and treatment for breast cancer improved since 1989, rates of death from breast cancer plummeted. Or maternal mortality: as antibiotics became more readily available, rates of maternal death in childbirth collapsed. Better and more widely available dental care has meant fewer toothless Americans. And as we developed immunizations and cures for childhood illness, child mortality rates nose-dived.

And yet as treatments for anxiety and depression have become more sophisticated and more readily available, adolescent anxiety and depression have ballooned.

I’m not the only one to have found something fishy in the fact that more treatment has not resulted in less depression. A group of academic researchers recently noticed the same. They published a peer-reviewed paper titled “More Treatment but No Less Depression: The Treatment-Prevalence Paradox.” The authors note that treatment for major depression has become much more widely available (and, in their view, improved) since the 1980s worldwide. And yet in not a single Western country has this treatment made a dent in the incidence of major depressive disorder. Many countries saw an increase.

“The increased availability of effective treatments should shorten depressive episodes, reduce relapses, and curtail recurrences. Combined, these treatment advances unequivocally should result in lower point-prevalence estimates of depression,” they write. “Have these reductions occurred? The empirical answer clearly is NO.”

I checked with several of the paper’s authors. Two confirmed that the same might be said for anxiety. As treatment has become more widely available and dispersed, point-prevalence rates should go down. They have not. And while the authors admit that there was likely more depression in the past than we realized, they argue that there is at least as much, and probably more, depression now.

After generations of increased intervention, that shouldn’t be the case. More access to antibiotics should spell fewer deaths from infection. And more generally available therapy should spell less depression.

Instead, adolescent mental health has been in steady decline since the 1950s. Between 1990 and 2007 (before any teens had smartphones), the number of mentally ill children rose thirty-five-fold. And while overdiagnosis or the expansion of definitions of mental illness may partially account for this rapid change, it is hard to dismiss or contextualize away the startling rise in teen suicide: “Between 1950 and 1988, the proportion of adolescents aged between fifteen and nineteen who killed themselves quadrupled,” The New Yorker reported. Mental illness became the leading cause of disability in children.

Yes, the coincidence of these two trends—deteriorating mental health in an era of vastly expanded awareness, detection, diagnosis, and treatment of psychological disorders—may be just that: coincidence. It does not unveil a causal arrow. But it is peculiar. At the very least, it may provide a clue that many of the treatments and many of the helpers aren’t actually helping.

-- Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy

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For decades, the standard therapy proffered to victims of disaster—terrorist attack, combat, severe burn injury—was the “psychological debriefing.” A therapist would invite victims of a tragedy into a group session in which participants were encouraged to “process” their negative emotions, learned to recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and discouraged from discontinuing therapy. Study after study has shown that this bare-bones process is sufficient to make PTSD symptoms worse.

Well-meaning therapists often act as though talking through your problems with a professional is good for everyone. That isn’t so. Nor is it the case that as long as the therapist is following protocols, and has good intentions, the patient is bound to get better.

Any intervention potent enough to cure is also powerful enough to hurt. Therapy is no benign folk remedy. It can provide relief. It can also deliver unintended harm and does so in up to 20 percent of patients.

Therapy can lead a client to understand herself as sick and rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis. Therapy can encourage family estrangement—coming to realize that it’s all Mom’s fault and you never want to see her again. Therapy can exacerbate marital stress, compromise a patient’s resilience, render a patient more traumatized, more depressed, and undermine her self-efficacy so she’s less able to turn her life around. Therapy may lead a patient by degrees—sunk into a leather sofa, well-placed tissue box close at hand—to become overly dependent on her therapist.

This is true even for adults, who in general are much less easily led by other adults. These iatrogenic effects pose at least as great a risk, and likely much more, to children.

Police officers who responded to a plane crash and then underwent debriefing sessions exhibited more disaster-related hyperarousal symptoms eighteen months later than those who did not receive the treatment. Burn victims exhibited more anxiety after therapy than those left untreated. Breast cancer patients have left peer support groups feeling worse about their condition than those who opted out. And counseling sessions for normal bereavement often make it harder, not easier, for mourners to recover from loss. Some people who say they “just don’t want to talk about it” know better than the experts what will help them: spending time with family; exercising; putting one foot in front of the other; gradually adjusting to the loss.

When it comes to our psyches, we’re a lot more bespoke than mental health professionals often acknowledge or allow. And Tuesdays at four p.m. may not be when we’re ready to confront our woes with a hired expert. Reminiscing with a friend, cracking a joke with your spouse you wouldn’t dare make with anyone else, helping your cousin box up her apartment—without talking about your problems—often aids recovery far more than sitting around in a room full of sad people. Therapy can hijack our normal processes of resilience, interrupting our psyche’s ability to heal itself, in its own way, at its own time.

Think of it this way: group therapy for those who experienced loss or disaster forces the coping to hang out with the sad. This may make the relatively resilient sadder and prompt the sad to stew. The most dejected steer the ship to Planet Misery, with everyone else trapped inside.

Individual therapy can intensify bad feelings, too. Psychiatrist Samantha Boardman wrote candidly about a patient who quit therapy after a few weeks of treatment. “All we do is talk about the bad stuff in my life,” the patient told Boardman. “I sit in your office and complain for 45 minutes straight. Even if I am having a good day, coming here makes me think about all the negative things.” Reading that, I remembered saving up emotional injuries to report to my therapist so that we would have something to talk about at our session—injuries I might have just let go.

Interestingly, even when patients’ symptoms are made objectively worse by therapy, they tend to assume the therapy has helped. We rely largely on how “purged” we feel when we leave a therapist’s office to justify our sense that the therapy is working. We rarely track objective markers, for example, the state of our career or relationships, before reaching a conclusion. Sometimes when our lives do improve, it’s not because the therapy worked but because the motivation that led us to start therapy also led us to make other positive changes: spend more time with friends and family, reconnect with people we haven’t heard from in a while, volunteer, eat better, exercise.

An embarrassing number of psychological interventions have little proven efficacy. They have nonetheless been applied with great élan to children and adolescents.

-- Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy

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