Harper’s has a new article on meditation which delves into some of these issues. It doesn’t mention PNSE or Martin by name, but some of the mentioned results parallel them, at least:
...Compared with an eight-person control group, the subjects who meditated for more than thirty minutes per day experienced shallower sleep and woke up more often during the night. The more participants reported meditating, the worse their sleep became… A 2014 study from Carnegie Mellon University subjected two groups of participants to an interview with openly hostile evaluators. One group had been coached in meditation for three days beforehand and the other group had not. Participants who had meditated reported feeling less stress immediately after the interview, but their levels of cortisol—the fight-or-flight hormone—were significantly higher than those of the control group. They had become more sensitive, not less, to stressful stimuli, but believing and expecting that meditation reduced stress, they gave self-reports that contradicted the data.
Britton and her team began visiting retreats, talking to the people who ran them, and asking about the difficulties they’d seen. “Every meditation center we went to had at least a dozen horror stories,” she said. Psychotic breaks and cognitive impairments were common; they were often temporary but sometimes lasted years. “Practicing letting go of concepts,” one meditator told Britton, “was sabotaging my mind’s ability to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple things, like what words mean, what colors mean.” Meditators also reported diminished emotions, both negative and positive. “I had two young children,” another meditator said. “I couldn’t feel anything about them. I went through all the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff, but there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead.”
...Britton’s research was bolstered last August when the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica published a systematic review of adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies. Sixty-five percent of the studies included in the review found adverse effects, the most common of which were anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment. “We found that the occurrence of adverse effects during or after meditation is not uncommon,” the authors concluded, “and may occur in individuals with no previous history of mental health problems.” I asked Britton what she hoped people would take away from these findings. “Comprehensive safety training should be part of all meditation teacher trainings,” she said. “If you’re going to go out there and teach this and make money off it, you better take responsibility. I shouldn’t be taking care of your casualties.”
Harper’s has a new article on meditation which delves into some of these issues. It doesn’t mention PNSE or Martin by name, but some of the mentioned results parallel them, at least:
Scott discusses whether enlightenment (or at least, the jhanas that people may be mistaking for enlightenment) can be interpreted as wireheading of free energy minimization: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem