There’s a neat discussion of “gunk” in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, pp. 80-81).

They observe matter-of-factly: “You never realize how much junk you have in your house until you start to clear out the attic and the cellar. You never realize how much rubbish has accumulated in the subconscious region of your mind until you make the attempt to concentrate [and thus to meditate” (p. 80). This is true.

They go on to argue that one, noticing all this gunk, makes a causal attribution error: It was meditation that screwed me up! “Before I started to practice concentration,” the beginner states, “my mind seemed fairly clean and calm. Now it’s disturbed and full of dirty thoughts. It disgusts me. I’d no idea I was that bad! And surely I’m getting worse, not better” (p. 81)?

Not only did meditation not cause one to be agitated or unsound; but the report that you were calm beforehand is erroneous. Swami Prabhavananda and Isherwood one last time: “The very fact that they have undertaken a mental housecleaning, and stirred up all this mess, means that they have taken a step in the right direction. As for the calmness which they imagined they have hitherto experienced, it was nothing but apathy–the stillness of a pool which is choked with mud. To the casual observer, sloth and serenity–tamas and sattwa–may sometimes look alike. But to pass from the one to the other, we have to go through the violent disturbance of active effort–the phase of rajas” (p. 81).

Here, in brief, is a fine critique of recent arguments that purport to show that meditation can screw you up. To be sure, I don’t think that we should regard secular meditation as something to be commonly “prescribed.” Far better to keep meditation embedded in a living spiritual tradition and to seek it out when you’re ripe for it. Still, one who–say, going to a Goenka meditation retreat–has felt unmoored by meditation is only seeing–albeit unwittingly–all sorts of junk exposed. Was she ready for it? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s for these reasons that a tradition–which involves study of metaphysics, a keen listening to a teacher, and a clear understanding of meditation–is so edifying, indeed needful today.

I’d like to make two points in closing. First, the path of self-knowledge (jnana yoga) is for one who is courageous. Surfacing your suffering–your habitual thoughts and feelings–is often not pretty and can, at times, be downright horrifying. Hence, you must really care, above all, to get the bottom of your ego-self in order to embark on such a path. You must persevere.

Second, place the emphasis on the kali yuga period, which is expressed most clearly in “material civilization” (Rene Guenon), and not on a technique.

For modern culture has shamelessly unleashed meditation techniques on individuals who may not be ready to examine closely all the karma they’ve been carrying inside them over the course of many lifetimes. If there is an indictment to be made, it is on modern culture, not on meditation.