The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness

by Culadasa (John Yates)

These realizations happen if you’re really lucky, but there are two significant caveats. First, if you spend a lot of time doing this practice, you’ll have a spillover into your daily life. You’ll see everything as impermanent, which can really throw you off. Familiar feelings of certainty and purpose disappear, which can produce a sense of hopelessness, even despair. Things lose their usual importance, and life can seem pointless. And it’s all the more disconcerting because these emotions have no logical basis in conscious experience, and seem to come from nowhere. In fact, they are produced by unconscious mental processes trying to assimilate your meditation experiences. In the Theravada tradition, this state is called the “knowledges of suffering” (dukkha ñanas) and is in some ways comparable to the “dark night of the soul” in the Christian mystical tradition. (See the section on Insight Experiences and the Attainment of Insight in the Sixth Interlude.) These insights into impermanence and emptiness can create aversion to practicing, but stopping your practice is probably the worst thing you can do in this situation.