Though I’ve had a handful of multi-month streaks of daily meditation, I don’t have much experience with meditation or spirituality in general. I feel fairly receptive to what I’ve seen though.
It seems to me that the two biggest concerns about this area are 1. If it’s “worth” the time to figure out, and 2. If it’s “safe”.
On point 2. I remember a lot of comments along the lines of, “What if I poke around in my brain, trigger a ‘spiritual’ experience, and screw myself up and lose sight of what is real and what is just ‘stuff going on in my brain’?”
To me, this danger is only apparent if you are in a group context where you have people intentionally or unintentionally putting effort into getting you to buy in. I have a hard time seeing why stuff in the meditation realm might be particularly hazardous. If this is just a failure of my imagination, I would love to hear from the people who are worried about this.
Some time ago I described high-level meditation as getting admin privileges into parts of your brain. You can use those privileges to make a lot of changes, which means great potential to improve on things, but also great potential to break stuff.
For example: intellectually, people can accept all kinds of claims about how we’re living in a simulation constructed by our brains and how everything we experience is a result of many layers of processing and transformation. But it’s quite another matter to experience it, by getting access to somewhat earlier processing stages of sensory information. Knowing something on an intellectual level is a very different thing than knowing it on an experiental level: knowing the physical processes of light, is different from actually seeing the color red for the first time. In particular, there are many assumptions of the nature of the self, of the nature of the world, etc. that people take granted because they are fused together with those conceptual structures. Seeing how those structures are constructed, makes them less convincing as absolute truths; they’re more correctly experienced as things that involve certain assumptions, where those assumptions may be wrong.
But those assumptions can be correct, too! And it’s certainly possible for some people to experience this and draw the wrong lessons from it – such as seeing their belief in materialism as just a mental construct, and rejecting it in favor of something they like more. That’s why I suspect that it’s good for people to have a strong intellectual understanding of why things like rationality and materialism are correct, before they start going down this rabbit hole – because this process may remove one’s strong emotional conviction that some particular belief structure is true, at which point they will need to use their intellectual understanding to decide which things they should believe in. If they never had a very strong intellectual argument for why things like materialism and rationality are correct in the first place, and were just believing in that because all of their friends did, then they might go quite crazy. Insight practices can make you question all of your beliefs and unquestioned assumptions more – for good or ill.
To me this sounds like you never had significant spiritual experiences and the resulting issues of having to update your map of the world to integrate them.
Getting visions and believing too much in them can also be a problem. From my perspective good guidance then involves guiding a person not to attach themselves to the vision. Of course having bad guidance in some New Age context where people encourage you to take the vision seriously can be even more problematic.
That said, if there’s somebody in our community who thinks they need help, ask for it. I’m open for talking any rationalist through dealing with strong spiritual experiences.
Read this SSC article which reviews Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: “Some of these people accidentally cross the A&P Event, reach the Dark Night Of The Soul, and – not even knowing that the way out is through meditation – get stuck there for years, having nothing but a vague spiritual yearning and sense that something’s not right. He says that this is his own origin story – he got stuck in the Dark Night after having an A&P Event in a dream at age 15, was low-grade depressed for most of his life, and only recovered once he studied enough Buddhism to realize what had happened to him and how he could meditate his way out”
Though I’ve had a handful of multi-month streaks of daily meditation, I don’t have much experience with meditation or spirituality in general. I feel fairly receptive to what I’ve seen though.
It seems to me that the two biggest concerns about this area are 1. If it’s “worth” the time to figure out, and 2. If it’s “safe”.
On point 2. I remember a lot of comments along the lines of, “What if I poke around in my brain, trigger a ‘spiritual’ experience, and screw myself up and lose sight of what is real and what is just ‘stuff going on in my brain’?”
To me, this danger is only apparent if you are in a group context where you have people intentionally or unintentionally putting effort into getting you to buy in. I have a hard time seeing why stuff in the meditation realm might be particularly hazardous. If this is just a failure of my imagination, I would love to hear from the people who are worried about this.
Some time ago I described high-level meditation as getting admin privileges into parts of your brain. You can use those privileges to make a lot of changes, which means great potential to improve on things, but also great potential to break stuff.
For example: intellectually, people can accept all kinds of claims about how we’re living in a simulation constructed by our brains and how everything we experience is a result of many layers of processing and transformation. But it’s quite another matter to experience it, by getting access to somewhat earlier processing stages of sensory information. Knowing something on an intellectual level is a very different thing than knowing it on an experiental level: knowing the physical processes of light, is different from actually seeing the color red for the first time. In particular, there are many assumptions of the nature of the self, of the nature of the world, etc. that people take granted because they are fused together with those conceptual structures. Seeing how those structures are constructed, makes them less convincing as absolute truths; they’re more correctly experienced as things that involve certain assumptions, where those assumptions may be wrong.
But those assumptions can be correct, too! And it’s certainly possible for some people to experience this and draw the wrong lessons from it – such as seeing their belief in materialism as just a mental construct, and rejecting it in favor of something they like more. That’s why I suspect that it’s good for people to have a strong intellectual understanding of why things like rationality and materialism are correct, before they start going down this rabbit hole – because this process may remove one’s strong emotional conviction that some particular belief structure is true, at which point they will need to use their intellectual understanding to decide which things they should believe in. If they never had a very strong intellectual argument for why things like materialism and rationality are correct in the first place, and were just believing in that because all of their friends did, then they might go quite crazy. Insight practices can make you question all of your beliefs and unquestioned assumptions more – for good or ill.
To me this sounds like you never had significant spiritual experiences and the resulting issues of having to update your map of the world to integrate them.
Getting visions and believing too much in them can also be a problem. From my perspective good guidance then involves guiding a person not to attach themselves to the vision. Of course having bad guidance in some New Age context where people encourage you to take the vision seriously can be even more problematic.
That said, if there’s somebody in our community who thinks they need help, ask for it. I’m open for talking any rationalist through dealing with strong spiritual experiences.
Read this SSC article which reviews Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: “Some of these people accidentally cross the A&P Event, reach the Dark Night Of The Soul, and – not even knowing that the way out is through meditation – get stuck there for years, having nothing but a vague spiritual yearning and sense that something’s not right. He says that this is his own origin story – he got stuck in the Dark Night after having an A&P Event in a dream at age 15, was low-grade depressed for most of his life, and only recovered once he studied enough Buddhism to realize what had happened to him and how he could meditate his way out”