Scott Carney

Time may speed up or slow down, or you may have insights that you've never had before.

And you may think that you're special.

And then when you push those logics and the ideologies that the teacher may tell you are varied,

But one of them might be that you could meditate and become an angel or something called a bodhisattva or you could become enlightened or something like this.

Some people take those physiological signs as an indication that they have achieved a spiritual endpoint and they will declare themselves enlightened.

They may do things that don't make any sense to outside viewers.

I mean, for instance, let me give you an example.

In 2006, I was leaving my PhD program.

I was going into journalism.

I was on that cusp between those two parts of my life.

I was leading in a broad program for American college students in India.

uh and it was called um and the name of the program was like it was india from brahma to buddha right so that brahma is a hindu god and buddha is obviously buddha and we went to all like the holy sites in north india with the highlight being a meeting the dalai lama and going to a seven-day silent meditation retreat in a tibetan tradition and on the seven-day silent meditation retreat my best and my brightest student so i had i think 18 students

uh, under me or, uh, and my best and the brightest student, um, uh, you know, we did the seven days she was meditating in front of me in full Lotus pose.

She really was into it personally.

I hate silent meditation.

Um, uh, but the end of it, she climbed up to the roof of the retreat center and the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment in, in both guy, which is rural area of India.

Uh, and she wrote in her journal, she is a Bodhisattva.

And then she jumped off the roof to her death, believing that all she had to do was leave her body to become enlightened.

And this opened up my eyes to this craziness in the spiritual movements where you can be meditating on this idea of bliss, on empathy, on love, on joy.

the impermanence of life, you know, things that you would think are like good things to think about, but you could end up in this catastrophic outcome.