The dark-night-of-the-soul phenomenon is associated with vipassana meditation. In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible aut

The dark-night-of-the-soul phenomenon is associated with vipassana meditation. In the Platform Sutra dating from perhaps around 700 AD, Huineng (ostensible author) talks about people going insane from ill-advised meditation methods of suppressing body and mind. It seems like these early 'mystical' offshoots around meditation-heavy religion typically don't typically involve or speak well of a lot of meditation, truthfully. Zen Master Bankei didn't want his monks to meditate at all. The problem is that meditation is a cargo-cult. Early in the history of Dzogchen, they had trekcho, "cutting straight through", not a heavy emphasis on meditation. Early in the Zen tradition, they had precious few words to say anything well of meditation at all. Zen Master Foyan wrote, maybe around 1200ish?: > Buddhism is an easily understood, energy-saving teaching; people strain themselves. Seeing them helpless, the ancients told people to try meditating quietly for a moment. These are good words, but later people did not understand the meaning of the ancients; they went off and sat like lumps with knitted brows and closed eyes, suppressing body and mind, waiting for enlightenment. How stupid! How foolish! As someone into this stuff, there is kind of something there--it's the advaita vedanta like realization that this is it, the eye never sees itself. It's hard to describe in a few words, and has nothing at all to do with vipassana or jhanas. Alternatively, I think it has to do with switching to the floodlight perception of the right hemisphere as the default resting state of the mind. The left hemisphere tends to over-dominate because it works on positive-feedback--the more it engages with something, the more it wants to engage. It gets overheated and starts to turn its tunnel vision into a primary aspect of ordinary awareness and places a really heavy overlay on direct experience. The right hemisphere does the more typical negative feedback/diminishing marginal utility thing most of the time. I'm a big fan of direct-path teachings like Loch Kelly gives. I think heavy meditation, especially vipassana, is just a cargo-cult hazing.