So apparently altered states from meditation aren't that rare — and I don't know how to feel about it

[over_thinking_7683]

Saw this study from Brown University making the rounds — survey of over 1,200 regular meditators, found that about 40% had experienced some kind of altered state. Not just "I felt relaxed." We're talking dissociation, visions, sense of merging with surroundings, that kind of thing.

I've been sitting on and off for maybe four years now. Never made it past 20 minutes consistently — my brain just won't shut up, classic overthinking. But I did have one weird experience about a year ago during a body scan. Felt like my hands were massive, like they were filling the whole room. Lasted maybe 30 seconds. I brushed it off as fatigue from a 12-hour sprint at work.

But reading this study made me wonder if that was... actually something.

From what I understand, Jung would probably frame this as the ego boundary temporarily dissolving — encountering the unconscious directly instead of through dreams. That's a neat framework, but it also feels like a post-hoc rationalization. "Oh, your brain did a weird thing? Let's label it archetypal." I'm skeptical of that kind of catch-all explanation.

The tarot angle interests me more, actually. The Tower card — structured ego collapsing, making room for something new. The Fool stepping into void. I think there might be something there about why these states feel simultaneously terrifying and meaningful. The symbolism maps better than clinical language, at least for me personally.

What I can't shake is the suspicion that a lot of what gets called "spiritual awakening" in these circles might just be... the nervous system doing odd things under sustained attention. Maybe both are true. I don't know.

Anyone here had experiences like this from regular sitting practice? Not full retreat stuff, just normal daily attempts. I'm curious whether people who encountered these states found them useful or just disruptive. Mine was brief enough to ignore, but I imagine a longer episode might be genuinely unsettling if you weren't expecting it.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Using the I Ching for Meditation and Decision-Making | Mystic Wiki.)

[Noetic]

The Brown study you reference — likely Britton et al.'s work on meditation-related adverse effects — is part of a necessary correction in the field. For years, the meditation literature suffered from publication bias toward positive outcomes. The reality is more complex.

Your hand-enlargement experience during a body scan is worth taking seriously, not because it proves anything metaphysical, but because it fits a known pattern. Proprioceptive distortion is well-documented in the clinical literature on altered states of consciousness and is one of the more common phenomenological reports in mindfulness-based interventions.

What I find interesting is your skepticism about Jungian framing as "post-hoc rationalization." That skepticism is warranted. The danger of any symbolic framework is that it can explain everything and therefore explains nothing. Jung's archetypal theory is particularly vulnerable to this — it's so capacious that almost any experience can be retrofitted into it.

But here's the thing that keeps me from dismissing the symbolic approach entirely: the phenomenological content of these altered states shows cross-cultural consistency that's hard to explain through purely neurobiological mechanisms. Why do meditators across traditions independently report experiences of boundlessness, dissolution, and light? A purely neurological account would predict more random variation in subjective content. The fact that there are recurring motifs suggests either shared brain architecture producing convergent experiences or some genuine engagement with a symbolic layer that transcends individual psychology.

I don't think we have enough data to resolve that question. But I think it's the right question to ask.

[lotus_position_404]

"What I can't shake is the suspicion that a lot of what gets called 'spiritual awakening' in these circles might just be... the nervous system doing odd things under sustained attention."

I used to teach this stuff. Yoga, breathwork, the whole thing. And I would have told you that 40% number sounds low, actually — that more people should be touching these states if they're practicing correctly.

Then my mom died. Six months ago.

And here's what nobody tells you: grief produces the exact same symptoms. The dissolution, the merging with surroundings, the sense that your hands aren't your hands. I've had experiences since her death that look identical to what meditation communities call "opening" or "expansion," but they hit me when I was just... sitting in my kitchen. Trying to eat cereal.

So now I'm stuck with this question that won't leave me alone: if the nervous system can produce these states through sustained attention, and also through trauma, and also through grief — what exactly are we measuring when we call one "spiritual" and the other "pathological"? The 40% finding doesn't clarify anything. It muddies the water further.

I think the Tower card framing you mentioned is actually more honest than the Jung catch-all, because at least The Tower doesn't pretend to know whether what's collapsing is being rebuilt into something better. It's just destruction. The meaning comes later, or it doesn't.

My experience with these states now isn't peaceful. It's not useful. I don't feel like I'm encountering my unconscious — I feel like I'm falling through a hole where my mother used to be.

Maybe for people without active grief, these states land differently. I genuinely don't know anymore. But I'm pretty sure the map we're using doesn't account for terrain like this.