A response to a popular YouTube video on “the thin line between samadhi and psychosis”
A video is going around about a yogi in Rishikesh. He sat down to meditate, and three days later he was found with his eyes open, screaming and weeping. His guru is supposed to have said: “He opened the door without learning to close it.” From there the video argues that samadhi and psychosis look almost the same from outside, and it gives three questions for telling them apart.
Some of it is good advice. Go slowly. Grounding matters more than going deeper. The test of a practice is whether you come back stable. I agree with all of that, and in our book The Inner Laboratory, I build a whole method around it. But the overall frame is wrong in ways that matter. That’s true for the people who are actually in trouble most of all.
1. The opening story is not samadhi in any classical sense
According to the Yoga Sutras, a man screaming and weeping with his eyes open is not in samadhi. Patañjali defines yoga as the stilling of the movements of mind (citta-vṛtti-nirodha, YS 1.2). He describes samadhi as a state where only the object shines forth, “as if empty of its own form” (YS 3.3). Notice the “as if.” The text doesn’t say the self stops existing. It describes how the experience appears, not what it is. Screaming and weeping are vṛttis in full storm, so they are the opposite of nirodha.
The video still tells us that people “weep” and “can’t speak for days” after samadhi. That mixes up yogic absorption with the ecstatic, devotional states of the bhakti world. Those are real phenomena. But they come from a different tradition, with different criteria, and you can’t use them to identify a Patañjali-style samadhi.
So the corridor with “two directions” was built from a mistake. Samadhi and acute psychosis don’t look identical from outside. A still mind and a flooded mind are easy to tell apart. What is hard to judge is a whole middle zone that the video leaves out.
2. The real landscape is not a fork but a field
Serious research on the side effects of meditation doesn’t support a two-way split. The study by Lindahl, Britton and colleagues, The Varieties of Contemplative Experience (2017), documented a broad range of difficult experiences in experienced Buddhist practitioners. These include fear and panic, depersonalization and derealization, insomnia, strong bodily energy phenomena, perceptual changes, and in a minority, episodes that reached psychiatric severity. Most of these are neither samadhi nor psychosis. They belong to the large middle ground of an unstable inner life.
Psychiatry has partly recognized this. Since DSM-IV there has been a separate code for a “religious or spiritual problem.” That was the result of work by Lukoff and others, building on what Stan and Christina Grof called spiritual emergency. Telling someone they are either becoming a saint or a patient leaves them nowhere to stand. Most people who get into difficulty during practice are neither of those. They are practitioners whose instrument is out of tune.
3. Psychosis is not “ego dissolving too fast”
As a physician I have to correct this point directly. The video presents psychosis as one mechanism: the ego breaks down too quickly. Psychosis has many causes. They include genetic vulnerability, sleep deprivation, cannabis and other substances, bipolar mania, severe stress, and physical illness. Intensive retreats can set off an episode in someone who is vulnerable, mostly through lack of sleep, isolation and overload. But the mechanism isn’t a spiritual ego that “breaks.” Turning it into a metaphysical story makes it harder to seek normal medical help, which is sometimes urgently needed.
The most practical warning sign isn’t philosophical. It’s sleep. If someone hardly sleeps for several nights while feeling inspired, chosen or flooded with meaning, that is a reason to see a doctor, not to meditate more. Antipsychotic medication isn’t a betrayal of the path. Sometimes it’s what makes going back to the path possible at all.
4. The three questions can only be answered afterward
The video’s three questions are: do you come back, does the ego get smaller or bigger, and does life become clearer or more chaotic? These are reasonable features to look at. But they can only be answered in hindsight, sometimes months later. They don’t help in the acute moment, and that’s when someone needs help.
The video also undermines its own test. Later it says, correctly, that “you cannot measure a broken ruler with itself.” That’s exactly the point. In psychosis, the capacity for self-assessment is often the first thing to go. A self-test given to someone who has lost insight doesn’t work, and in fact it reassures them wrongly.
The second question also oversimplifies. Grandiosity, a mission, a sense of being chosen: this does fit mania and some psychoses. But much psychosis is paranoid or depressive, without any inflation. And spiritual inflation happens all the time without psychosis. The history of gurus has plenty of examples. Patañjali names asmitā, the “I-am-ness,” as one of the five afflictions (YS 2.3 and 2.6). He means it as a structural tendency in every mind, not as a diagnostic sign of psychosis. The video uses the term but stretches it to mean something it doesn’t mean in the text.
5. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika warns about something different
The quote that prana, handled wrongly, “kills the practitioner” is correct (HYP 2.15). The text compares prana to a lion, elephant or tiger that has to be tamed gradually. But the next verse lists what improper practice actually causes: hiccups, asthma, coughing, and pain in the head, ears and eyes. That’s a bodily warning about breath practice, not a description of psychosis. Anyone who works with breath, as we do at Breath4Balance, should take that warning seriously. But a pranayama text shouldn’t be turned into a psychiatric theory.
6. “One percent suffering and you are not spiritual”
This is the most harmful sentence in the video, which is why it gets its own section. It says that if there is even 1% of suffering inside you, you’re not spiritual and may be very far from it.
Think of the viewer who most needs this video. That’s someone who is anxious, sleeping badly and confused after intense practice. What they hear is that their suffering proves they’ve failed. That doesn’t ground anyone. It adds shame to a destabilized system. And it contradicts the video’s own story, in which the person who returns from real samadhi may weep and need time to integrate.
No mature tradition uses a lack of suffering as the entry ticket. The Buddha starts with suffering as the first noble truth. It isn’t a sign of failure. It’s what you start from.
7. What the Inner Laboratory proposes instead
The video’s best image is learning to close before you open. In the Inner Laboratory, that isn’t a slogan. It’s the first part of the training.
Build the instrument before you open the door. The path doesn’t start with dissolving the ego. It starts with forming two capacities: the witness, who can observe what is happening without being swept along, and the operator, who can steer attention, hold it, and above all stop it. The operator is the ability to close. Someone who can’t yet put down an experience on purpose has no business deliberately calling up deeper states.
Phenomenological agnosticism. We don’t decide from outside whether something “is” samadhi. We describe what we can actually check. Is the witness still there? Can you stop? Do you sleep? Can you do your shopping, answer an email, and look a loved one in the eye? Those questions don’t depend on metaphysics. You can ask them today, not just six months from now.
Re-anchoring as a standard exercise. Every deep exercise in the book ends with a return: feeling the body, the weight, the breath, the room, your name. You don’t do that only when things go wrong. You do it every time, so the way back is well worn before you ever need it.
An outside eye, but not blind dependence. The video concludes that you should find a guru. It’s true that you need someone outside the experience. But that person doesn’t have to be a guru, and a guru isn’t automatically safe. The history of spiritual abuse is long. What you need is an experienced practitioner who is honest about their limits, and if there are clear warning signs, also a doctor. Those two don’t compete.
In conclusion
The video is right that the path is real and that stability matters more than intensity. It goes wrong by making the problem a dramatic fork, with saint on one side and patient on the other. It romanticizes a crisis as near-samadhi and then hands people a self-test they can’t use when it counts. Its message ends with shame.
The better question isn’t “is this samadhi or psychosis?” It’s “is my witness still there, can my operator stop, and am I sleeping?” If the answer is yes, keep practicing calmly. If the answer is no, stop, ground yourself, and get help, including medical help if you need it. That’s not a failure of the path. It’s part of it.
Jan M. Keppel Hesselink
Keppel Hesselink, J. M. The Inner Laboratory: The Alchemy of Perception and Consciousness, Paperback and Kindle e-book. Amazon: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B0HLHWK44V
Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLoS ONE, 12(5), e0176239.
The Sanskrit terms the video mangles are restored to their proper forms: “vibrahma” is most likely bhrānti-darśana (YS 1.30) and “a smitter” is asmitā.
