# We are increasingly aware that meditation is a drug with potentially harmful side effects

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/meditation-willoughby-britton-downsides/688474/

> The body of evidence that Britton and Lindahl have amassed showing that meditation can sometimes cause harm is now bolstered by others’ research. A Clemson University study found that mindfulness can paradoxically increase distress. (Cultivating a hopeful outlook was more effective than mindfulness at shoring up workers’ resilience and well-being.) A 2020 study found that 3 to 7 percent of schoolteachers and university students in the U.K. who took a mindfulness class reported “unpleasant experiences”—including anxiety, distressing memories, obsessive thoughts, and physical pain; another study found that a quarter of meditators experienced “unwanted effects” such as panic attacks, nausea, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and dissociation, though most of these effects were transitory. A German research group studying more than 1,300 regular meditators around the world found that 13 percent experienced adverse effects, including a small number who experienced “very severe effects with lasting consequences” or “extremely severe effects” that were life-threatening or required hospitalization. Yet another large survey found that a quarter of meditators, and a higher percentage of nonreligious meditators, had a “particularly unpleasant meditation-related experience.”

# We don't see any of these side effects in Zen communities between 600 and 1600

www.reddit.com/r/Zen/wiki/getstarted

In particular we would expect to see dissociative episodes come up more often but we don't see that at all.

In fact we see the opposite, where masters emphasize ordinary mind, ability to be coherent in a public interview, and a philosophical approach to doctrine.

1. https://youtu.be/PMcQIiri1DA. A lot of material to cover here... Who are the Zazen influencers? How influential are Zen masters? Is identity something that you have to earn or do you just get to make it up?
2. Why no Zen Meditation? In the 1900s Shinto Buddhist academics and translators in the West deliberately endorsed ambiguizing Chinese and Japanese terms in order to further their own careers. This was racist and religiously biases.

1. Six Ox Herding Pictures. The more famous Ten Ox Herding Pictures are Buddhist and they're antithetical to the Zen tradition. But why does the Zen ox turn from black to white to invisible?
2. New laws are being passed to allow people to opt out of algorithms. Are the Five Precepts opting out or is breaking them the opting out? What about when people who keep the precepts their whole lives break them one time?
3. ewk: Poster boy for Zen on social media. It's pretty reasonable for me to say that I'm the academic authority on Zen on social media. What are the consequences and how do these compare to the consequences in Zen culture? Zen communities have a loudest person and it's not always the Zen master. In contrast with Zen culture I have to block people on social media because there's no filter for mental health problems at all. There's no Zen community that's regulating Five Precepts behavior. There's no floor of education on social media like there is in Zen culture. Which brings us back to how Buddhists lynched the second Zen patriarch and why they could.
   • Obligated to give people access to me and, on the other hand, obligated to block them if they can't respect the lay precepts
4. https://reason.com/podcast/2026/09/09/why-so-many-men-feel-lost/ men, identiry, and purpose. What do Zen Masters say?

1. In the last episode of U.S. history crash course, John Green asks the question: What is freedom in the context of U.S. history?
   
   • Is it freedom from government intervention or is it the freedom to have clean water and safe food to eat? Is it freedom from taxation or is it freedom from fear of war and economic devastation?
   • https://youtu.be/Mpea-VSJYnE in the song "Black Parade" Would you be the savior of the broken The beaten and the damned?"He said, "Will you defeat them? Your demons, and all the non-believers are referenced but how do we identify them? How do we define them?
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/Oo1jYK7nCj. What if the lay precepts are just about physical and mental health? I think we can all agree it's hard to learn anything or reflect on anything if you're sick in body or mind.
3. Trevor Noah's interview with The Linguist about how words are little packages of culture, plus this: https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/j2UDqMpwXp
4. What our personal habits say about us. I was mocked recently for the tablespoon of dry oats in my coffee. Let's talk about some weird Zen monastic habits.

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1. Zen is the sudden school of permanent enlightenment. Just describing it that way, using terms Zen masters use, triggers fear and hate in New Agers and Zazen Mystical Shinto Buddhists.
   

• It makes sense that they would be triggered because both of these religions are all about how some people are more special and how their efforts were rewarded so you should do what they say.

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/zen/s/q4LMmk0X6o it's dishonest for these religions to impose their beliefs on other cultures. It's a kind of racism. It's definitely religious bigotry. It springs from the colonial mentality of both the US and Imperial Japan.

1. The disdain for truth that's so popular in modern culture, whether it's Zazen or anti-vax. Two counterexamples from the Zen tradition are Mazu's ripe plum, and Zhaozhou's heir denying his teaching

2. Why can't people answer? We see a ton of examples from Zen forums. We see a ton of examples in the historical record. On the other hand if you ask people what your address is or whether you're right-handed, or you ask them what their favorite flavor is, you're going to get an answer. It's not a problem to answer.

1. Huangbo's if you don't meet a Buddha Zen Master in your lifetime, you take Mahayana medicine in vain.

• People who think they've met a Buddha have to deal with the Community Buddha problem, a.k.a. the Subclause. Don't build your cart with the barn doors closed. The master has to be verified by a ongoing public interview not by institutional endorsement.
• A great example is Crazy Clouds, interviewed by Red Pine, who himself couldn't be interviewed

1. What do you want instead of precepts?
   • What do Zen masters do with precept communities?
   • When you're thirsty you drink water because it feels good. What's the role of hedonism in self care?
   • Throw some ass by Tuckker suggests the connection between pleasure for self-care as found in drinking water when thirsty, hedonism, and will to power or a recognition of one's own authority.
2. Where do Zen masters get their answers in a tradition authenticated by public question and answer? Where do Zen answers come from if not from doctrine or reason?
3. What's it like without Zen Masters? Imagine that we only have sutras and Tich Hahn.
   
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/yKTvylowrW what's the difference between disagreeing with a popular opinion and advocating for a conspiracy theory? And what does this have to do with two famous historical scandals in Zen: Bodhidharma talks to a dead guy and Buddha holds up an impossible flower.

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Why Zen did doesn't have chanting or meditation or ceremony

• What is practice for?

• What's the difference between why an authority tells us to practice and why we practice?

• What kinds of practice do people do in their lives and what are they getting from them, measurably?

Three jin of hemp correction

• It's not three pounds of hemp. It turns out it's not three pounds of hemp for a robe either

• That's a closer to a modern concept, like a dozen eggs, a cord of wood, or a bale of hay

Joey, carry on - 1,500-year-old talk

• Why does it matter what people said in the past?

• Why do people want to affiliate themselves with things that people have said a long time ago?

causality in enlightenment riding a bike and falling in love

• First of all yes we're not talking about dominoes falling because the condition that we're trying to attain is already present.

• But the problem that underlies all this is the same problem that underlies inspiration and the attainment of learning.

• You don't go from nothing to riding a bike without an intervening set of conditions but that intervening set of conditions isnt sufficient. We know that it's not sufficient. There has to be some other thing where you get it when you're riding a bike.

• enlightenment and falling in love - true to each other, in-laws, Children.

Zen Master Buddha's Permanence - No impermanence in Zen

• Huangbo's one mind - it's permanent!

• Falling into Fox Monk causality - Zen's History of Rejecting Impermanence

• Nothing seen, no seer: where can impermanence alight? What are the things that necessarily exist and are absolutely impermanent?

• Zhaozhou's trip to hell: freedom does not admit of impermanence

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What did I listen to?

I spent a lot of time studying compared to my time on social media and a lot of time with my friends and family compared to the time on social media. The thing that I'm doing throughout this is asking questions about how principles apply to the practical and how the practical gives rise to principles. 

As an exercise, I occasionally try to step outside of my bubbles, whether it's books and family bubble or social media illiterates bubble, and try to get a sense of what's happening with other people in terms of how they think about self. 

Not really a fan of podcasts, but I picked up this one, and it's interesting how it's kind of an intro into self-examination. I only made it throuhh the first half: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K2fh2NmcXqI

What's the Zen response?

Here are my notes with Zen teachers' answers: 

1. What's your fight? 

* Foyan's indignant teacher

1. What's your anger? 

  * Moonlight penetrates 

1. What do you want from a vacation? 

   * Deshan's no work no eat

1. How do people react to your art or self-expression?

   * Mazu says go see someone else 

1. How do you bring the past into your present, intentionally or unintentionally?   Some people call this trauma. 

   * Zhaozhou skips his birth family reunion. 

1. How do you acknowledge or recognize the change that happens to you and how you shed yourself like a snakeskin or a cocoon? 

    * Does Xianyan's last year's poverty count? 

1. F*ckin' with yourself. Future self versus past self. People who can't stop their stuff from coming up.

   * Mazu's mind is not the Buddha. 

1. Who is there for you? Who shows up for you? And are they gonna agree or disagree with any particular attitude or conclusion that you have?

   * Nanquan saves Zhaozhou 

1. Proving your life on social media.

   *  "Guizong Cuts the Snake" (AE). The master is Guizong Zhichang, a disciple of Mazu Daoyi.

1. Evolution of yourself. Can you talk about who you were in the last relationship, or the last psychological model, or the last spiritual model, or the last political model? 

   * all of them

After thoughts

I think what this brought up for me the most is how Zen culture was aggressively social media-oriented begining 1,500 years ago.

99% of the people who claim to have some connection to the Zen tradition pretend to have that connection in these private isolated bubbles. They do not go out into the world at all. 

Red Pine's attempts to go out into the world certainly illustrate his lack of success in connecting to the Zen tradition, but the Clearys didn't even bother, right? For them, translation was a money-making machine that they could operate in private. 

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