Cheetah House

 

I´ve linked to this content before, but here we go again. Investigative reporter and cult-buster Scott Carney interviews Willoughby Britton, who I assume is the founder of Cheetah House, an organization devoted to aid victims of destructive meditation practices. 

Summary of the basic points:

Meditation teachers often know about adverse side effects of meditation, but prefer not to talk about them for commercial reasons. One of the few exceptions is Sam Harris, who even discussed the issue with Britton on his podcast! Adverse effects may include insomnia, an inability to carry out daily chores (such as driving), hallucinations, intense fear, and so on. Britton tells a story about two prominent meditators who went literally psychotic. 50% of all Americans have tested meditation, and of these, 10% report strong adverse effects. That´s a lot of people!

"Kundalini" is a wastebasket category which includes everything seemingly inexplicable which is also "spiritual". Groups that are really religious often promote their techniques (including those awakening kundalini) as "secular", and only reveal the religious interpretation of various phenomena after they´ve been experienced by the meditator (who may then feel betrayed).

Experiences are always interpreted. There is nothing in the experience itself which automatically establish it as "spiritual" as opposed to, say, a hallucination. This is a very important point! Also, nothing in the experience itself points to any particular ethic. Once again, ethical consequences (such as more compassion) are superimposed on the experiences "from the outside" and are hence also interpretations. 

Britton says, somewhat sarcastically, that the number of boddhisattvas in the world seems to be vanishingly small given the fact that so many people are practicing meditation. Many American Buddhists send her hate mail due to her criticism of meditation. She doesn´t think Buddhists are in general more compassionate than anyone else. Britton even implies that she bought a cabin in a remote part of Vermont to which she can flee if the threats against her go overboard?! Carney recounts a gruesome story of how one of his students killed herself during a visit to India, her diary indicating that she believed herself to be a boddhisattva after intense meditation practices. 

Psychedelic drugs have the same problems as meditation, but "on steroids". However, literally nobody claims there are *no* potential side effects of such drugs, while this is still common among meditators. Ketamine has become a popular drug. Carney retells a story about how the Buddha himself changed his meditation practices after some of his monks had killed themselves! The story is supposedly found in the Pali Canon. 

Good luck with this one-and-a-half-hour long conversation.