Cancer Patients Must Beware of Going Astray into Delusion When Meditating or Practicing Qigong

When sitting in meditation or practicing qigong, one can easily go astray into delusion. In reality, relying on sitting meditation or quiet-sitting qigong to treat cancer is a very unreliable approach, and its harm is often far greater than any benefit obtained from it.

Sitting meditation or quiet-sitting qigong makes it extremely easy to develop hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and auditory hallucinations. Some theistic Buddhists easily take these phenomena for the "divine eye penetration" and "divine ear penetration" often mentioned in Buddhist books, believing they have become psychic people; over time, they will enter a very dangerous state.

Visual and auditory hallucinations are actually a kind of daydream—a highly self-centered, reality-transcending, time-and-space-breaking fantasy activity occurring in the waking state. When objective reality cannot satisfy one's inner wishes and psychological conflict intensifies, people often rely on these fantasy activities to adjust the psychology in which reality and fantasy are out of joint. If daydreams completely replace meaningful action in real life and become a means of escaping reality, they become a sign of psychological pathology.

Some cancer patients, in their plight in life, are easily influenced by certain religious figures, placing hope in a god to save themselves and relying on certain religious cultivation methods to treat their illness. If the teacher they encounter is an upright person who has cultivated well, that is fine; if the teacher they encounter is one who profits from this, it is very dangerous. For those religious figures who profit from this will deliberately, in a mysterious way, lead patients astray into delusion. Buddhist sitting meditation was originally meant to cultivate dhyana, the purpose of which is to quiet the mind and sharpen wisdom; but in the process of sitting meditation, many people develop hallucinations—for example, seeing the Buddha, conversing with immortals, and so on. I now quote the detailed firsthand accounts written by several people who experienced auditory and visual hallucinations, to provide some reference for fellow patients.

The following is the record of a patient who developed auditory hallucinations after sitting meditation and, by adopting various methods, finally gradually moved away from the hallucinations:

First, it should be explained that I myself am also a patient with auditory hallucinations, so I am relatively concerned with information on this topic, and I have finally achieved a little in fighting the hallucinations and gradually reducing them. I have read some fellow patients' experiences and, combining them with my own, have a few thoughts; please have a look. About my experience: I was under thirty, and after graduating from university I passed the civil service examination and entered a state organ. I believe in Daoism; after starting work, I sometimes read and recite some Daoist scriptures in the dorm at night. My qigong experience was on and off for about five years: first it was a certain qigong of reciting mantras to enter the acupoints, and later some quiet-sitting methods. One night in the summer of 2005, after reciting scriptures, I developed auditory hallucinations, hearing sounds of iron chains and whipping. The next day was fine. At the time I did not take it to heart, thinking it a qigong phenomenon or a religious phenomenon. Not long afterward, one night I was staying over at a friend's home and heard a child's crying, lasting all night, and could not sleep; at the time I suspected I had met a ghost. Thereafter, very occasionally, when reading Buddhist or Daoist scriptures or doctrines, there would occasionally arise in the air the sound of recitation or chanting; at the time I thought it a good phenomenon and paid no attention. This phenomenon occurred only two or three times over a few months. In May 2006 I met an old man and learned Maoshan magic from him—mainly drawing talismans and reciting incantations and so on. Thereafter this auditory hallucination gradually intensified. There were sounds of opera, of generals shouting, of ancient mountain-songs, of weeping, and so on. One day in July 2006, because my study of magic had entered a new stage, my mood was rather unsettled; that day human speech appeared, rather vulgar in content, lasting a short time. At night there appeared a male and a female voice; the content seemed encouraging, roughly that from now on they would follow me, that the future would be very good, and so on. The next day there appeared a group voice—old and young, male and female—like the previous day, all in my local dialect. The general content was discussion about my study of magic. In the evening they seemed to introduce a certain deity to me; on the day I did not know how to address him, and after thinking for a long while still did not know; then someone quietly told me to address the deity as Old Ancestor Lord. In a trance there seemed to appear a visual hallucination; I cannot be sure whether it was a scene conjured up by associative thought or a scene actually seen as a visual hallucination. Here it must be explained that scenes conjured up by associative thought are something every one of us has experienced—for example, if we are given the word "ocean," a vague image of the ocean quickly appears in our mind; but a visual hallucination must be a clearly visible scene of some duration. What I associated—or perhaps saw—was that there were two deities: one like an ancient general, the other of indeterminate sex, with a fair face seeming to have feminine qualities, yet rather majestic, the words being a warning not to act rashly. Then, by the end of August, the auditory hallucinations grew daily more severe, mainly discussing the magic, but the hearing was rather unclear, and I could only make out the general direction of their discussion. The study of magic, after trial, had failed. However, in the last few days of studying magic, threats suddenly appeared, saying I was about to die and still doing these things. On the last day of studying magic, they threatened that I would die that very night. One can imagine that, for a theist, the psychological shock produced by such mysterious words was considerable. I did not sleep all night. The next day was fine, and I realized for the first time that the hallucinations were deceptive. Yet the characteristic of auditory hallucinations is that, when you think deeply, they always cater to some hope of yours. I then thought it was a deity's trial; they also commented on my thoughts or answered questions. No vulgar or lewd language appeared; mainly they carried on Q&A between them and me about how to cultivate, how to endure trials, how to face money, beauty, and power, and how to use abilities, and they were responsible for evaluating and scoring this. Some of the Q&A that appeared had considerable depth; their trials seemed endless, and some evaluations were very unexpected. That day I confirmed that they were so-called deities. The trials were mostly conducted through vague images arising from my associative thought: a vague image of a thought was given, then I thought about what it meant and answered. As a result, for three days—including work hours—I basically did not react to anything except thinking; outwardly I looked absent-minded and dazed at work (a colleague later asked me what was going on during that period, and I made up an excuse). During these three days my sleep was zero.

In August I could not bear it any longer and sought help at the hospital. I took perphenazine; the auditory hallucinations decreased, but what replaced them were drowsiness and stiffness of the facial muscles, and I was in a state of extreme fatigue and weariness at work. Then I reduced the dosage, and the therapeutic effect regressed. At this point I thought that perhaps they were not ghosts or gods but possibly a mental illness. Thereafter I also had an EEG and a magnetic resonance examination; no abnormality was found. The doctor's advice was two things: one was drug treatment, the other psychotherapy. For a fairly long period afterward, my thinking about it revolved around whether it was ghosts and gods or an illness. Fellow patients who have had auditory hallucinations should know that the vividness of those voices is just like real people, and at the same time they can know and answer or comment on thoughts in a person's subconscious, so they are very迷惑. Twenty-four hours a day, apart from sleeping and concentrating on doing things, whenever your spirit relaxes and there is a gap in your thinking, this voice exists at all times, and the harm it does to a person's emotions is enormous. During sleep I could hardly fall asleep, because the process of sleep is necessarily a process of gradually lowering consciousness, whereas the auditory hallucinations have the function of keeping a person's thinking going continuously—of course, this is for those who hope to find answers. Even in sleep there accompanied bizarre, metaphor-laden dreams, mostly unpleasant or meaningless dreams of killing or threats. In recent months, seeing that reducing the drug had no effect, I stopped the medication. Because I was keen on online entertainment or reading and so on, I suddenly found that the auditory hallucinations gradually weakened. Today the hallucinations still exist every day, but the great majority of the content is very unclear; I do not know what they are saying, and the voices have gradually grown softer. My sleep has also gone from one or two hours a night to now seven or eight hours. My thoughts: First: Do auditory hallucinations possess logical thinking ability? Through conscious and unconscious experiments, one can basically conclude that they do not. What they say is self-contradictory, and always changes according to a person's conscious judgment. When I suspected they were deities, they could appear impersonating Daoist, Buddhist, or even Christian deities, and do not exist as a coherent, independent thinking entity. Of course, some fellow patients may think they deliberately deceive; but when the voices, for a year or several months, always say the same monotonous things you are already tired of, it proves that they themselves do not know what they are saying. Likewise, they cannot carry out long, coherently expressed verbal descriptions; most are sentences within ten characters. When I was taking medication, they would also fearfully say "the medication has eaten us to death"; in fact, it was my subconscious confidence in drug treatment expressed through them. They also have no sense of shame; I experimentally insulted them and forced them in consciousness to react. Their answers were laughable, such as "stop fucking me" and "you've fucked us to death" and so on.

Second: Are auditory hallucinations a deity's trial or possession by a chuma xian? The former—whether Buddhist, Daoist, or Christian—could not carry on such long, boring hallucinatory harassment, nor is there any minimal doctrinal enlightenment. As for the latter, fellow patients who understand folk metaphysics may know that in this world there exists a certain group with the ability to observe strangers' past affairs and to observe certain minor future matters; some also have some healing ability. This group is called chuma xian, or faguan, or shenpo/shenhan, or tiao dashen, and so on. The popular account, and the group's own understanding, is that spirits possess them and thereby they gain supernatural powers. According to some accounts, before going out as a chuma xian one goes through a period of suffering similar to auditory hallucinations or even worse psychosis. There are also qigong-level accounts that hold it is not spirit possession but that the true and the false mutually attack, and that the person's own intelligence produces this phenomenon. According to my experiments, the subject of the hallucinatory voices does not possess predictive ability: blindfold the book, ask it to recite a certain passage on a certain page, and it cannot do it; nor can it control the probabilistic outcome of a coin. If it were spirit possession, during the hallucinatory stage there should be some small predictive ability, but experiment proves they cannot do it. Therefore one may conclude that most people's auditory hallucinations are not spirit possession, and of course there is no such thing as a deity's trial. Third: Do auditory hallucinations produce the experience of one's thoughts being known by others? Thought broadcasting is one feeling of many fellow patients; in the first one or two months of my illness, the greatest psychological pressure came from this, though it was not severe. Because one can communicate with the voices in one's head, many fellow patients worry that the voices convey some private matters in their thoughts to others—those private matters mostly being lewd thoughts or thoughts of resentment toward someone. If the voices conveyed these thoughts to others, how would those people regard oneself? The pressure this gives is unbearable. Through my observation and experiments, outsiders have no reaction to my purposeful thought-emission, which shows that auditory hallucinations cannot make others know one's thoughts. Fourth: Is there EEG equipment and anti-human organizations persecuting hallucination patients? My answer is no; of course this is my judgment, and some fellow patients may disagree. If there existed EEG equipment (it is said it can already achieve the effect of producing auditory hallucinations, but I am skeptical of this technology), then what would be the purpose against the victim? There are two answers: one is revenge, one is experimentation, one is surveillance. I have not offended any powerful group, nor do I have enemies, so I could not be the object of revenge. Therefore I believe the possibility of revenge does not exist. As for experimentation, why not select death-row prisoners for the research? (Selecting death-row prisoners for research also violates morality.) As for surveillance, there are too many people more powerful than I; there is no reason to monitor me. So that too does not hold. Fifth: What is the source of the hallucinatory speech? Personally, I believe it is the content of the person's long-term thinking, along with the privacy of frustrated and guilty feelings, and self-cognition and so on. In my hallucinations, the early period had a great deal of gods and ghosts, Buddhism and Daoism, China and Japan, Manchus, the cutting of queues, and a relatively smaller number of unpleasant memories or lewd contents. The later period was mostly a great many monotonous sentences of little meaning, such as "tell him" and "stop pestering him" and so on. It is worth mentioning that auditory hallucinations are not all negative; occasionally the hallucinations evaluate a person, for example saying of me, "He is a good person" and "He has a loving heart" and so on. Sixth: Thoughts on certain striking phenomena of auditory hallucinations. Strangely, the hallucinations occasionally speak in languages I am not familiar with. For example, in my hometown there is a term describing a person's hot temper, "fire-burned-hair temper"; the first time (it seems only that once) they said it, I was very shocked, because in my usual vocabulary I had never used such a countrified word. At the same time, when they were impersonating Christianity, I heard the singing of Hallelujah and the very strange sentence, "He is a child of God; you must not violate him," and so on. For a Daoist believer, I had never said such words, and such Christian words did not exist in my consciousness. Also I noticed a fellow patient in Wuhan who seemed to mention that the hallucinations used a Japanese word he had never heard before to describe the purpose of the hallucinations; that Japanese word was maruta, which the patient had never heard before and later learned meant log (raw material). This indeed puzzled me greatly; I can only think that perhaps hallucination patients had previously actually had contact with these words or sentences, only they were forgotten deep in the mind, and now were captured by the hallucinations as they entered and exited the subconscious. Conclusion, conjectures, and suggestions: Auditory hallucinations are a mental illness produced by psychological imbalance (excessive pressure, excessive inferiority, excessive hope, excessive loneliness) and by acquiring too much information (a conjecture; for example, a great deal of thinking and reading makes the brain's associative function overactive), and perhaps also by bodily lesions (I suspect highly myopic people and those with damaged ear function). It can be cured or alleviated through drug treatment (lifelong medication) or psychological regulation (accepting oneself with joy, concentrating on entertainment and relaxation, not thinking about the topics that produce the hallucinations, and keeping one's life busy) and by repairing function (for hallucinations caused by bodily lesions). Blindly believing in the hallucinations leads to the spread of associations, absurd explanations, and aggravation of the illness. The end.

The following is the written account of another patient who developed auditory hallucinations due to sitting meditation:

In high school—let me recall, I started cultivating sitting meditation in high school at the age of eighteen. At that time my body, weakened by long-term masturbation, was deficient and weak with kidney deficiency, and my bones had also changed. I searched online and finally one day entered the "Quit Sex Bar"; I read the quitting experiences of many seniors and the painful experiences of fellow quitters, and began to quit sex, because if one only quits without nourishing, the body recovers slowly. Later I searched everywhere for methods of bodily recovery and learned that sitting meditation could restore the body, so I entered the "Sitting Meditation Bar" and began to cultivate sitting meditation. At first I could not enter quiet, but later, with some experience, I gradually could. Mainly I used thought to guard the dantian. I sat in meditation at school, at my seat, only to let my body recover. Not bad—my original qi indeed recovered fairly well. At that time one sitting would last one to two hours, and I sat about four to five hours a day. I cultivated Daoist qigong, opening the small heavenly circuit, always using thought to observe the lower dantian, reaching a feeling of harmony between heaven and man. Later a fire bird appeared, and I used the fire bird to guard by thought.

At first I had a crush on a girl in my class and secretly loved her, but I had no time to confess and was very timid, with autism; I spent all my time on the practice. Thus I sat for half a year. After half a year, some nervousness appeared: peripheral-vision OCD—I was very sensitive to coughing sounds and also very afraid of being insulted—so in the second half of senior year I stopped. I still had not forgotten my love for that girl and still thought of her. After leaving school, I sat in meditation in a secluded spot at a mountain temple. Around February I stopped sitting, because I had grown up and also had to earn money. So I went away to work; after a month I came home and found a job in my hometown for a little over a month. After coming out, 【hallucinations, visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations】 appeared.

Around June of last year, hallucinations appeared. I was sitting in meditation on the grass; a Buddha appeared in the sky—that is, just an image in the clouds. He said, "Lecherous wolf," then pressed down with his hand, saying something about my affairs in the heavenly court, telling me to do good and that he would give me a happy, warm family. The hallucinations lasted two months; ten thousand characters are omitted here ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.

Now I wonder: was it sitting meditation that gave me the hallucinatory disorder, or did I, because I could not get the girl I secretly loved and was too unwilling, develop schizophrenia? Fellow sitters, may I ask whether I can continue cultivating sitting meditation now, because I really miss those days of sitting meditation in high school.

Both of these patients went astray into delusion through sitting meditation and finally had to seek help from psychotherapists and psychiatrists; they are a warning to us. I reprint them in full to alert fellow cancer patients to remain as wary as possible of such healing methods as religious cultivation. Religious belief, as part of a person's spiritual life, is necessary; but to be overly superstitious of religious belief and to rely on that belief to treat illness can also have very serious consequences.

Author's website: www.zhouzhiyuan.com