If meditation is producing some negative effect, stopping the meditating usually stops the problem.
The “usually” is really imortant. If the problem you’re dealing with is altered states of consciousness, then yeah, stopping the meditation ought to solve the problem. But if you’re dealing with the fruits of significant insight then too bad; there is no going back.
I have had the experience of having what felt to me like very good conceptual ideas and then just forgetting them and mourning the loss. Assuming they were actually good, why are insights into the self so impossible to forget? Could one not gain access to the part of the brain that associates and do some violence to those parts of yourself that bring particular pathological truths to mind?
Insight doesn’t act on the conceptual level, it acts on the perceptual level. It’s like noticing that you’ve got a rock in your shoe. Doing violence to the part of your brain that notices the rock in your shoe is just going to draw more attention to that area of neural activity.
Maybe another analogy would be something like learning to identify sounds and words in your native language. Once you learn that, everything you hear in your language will be automatically parsed into its components. Sure, there are conditions in which that might get disrupted or in which it doesn’t work perfectly (like mishearing an unfamiliar word), but overall, it’s not going to go away.
“Insight” in this context is a technical jargon referring to what happens when you get direct perception into the process of your mind constructing what seems to be reality, but is actually just conscious simulation of it.
By “significant insight”, I mean enough insight that [1] you’re passed a point of no return and [2] the insight affects your regular day-to-day experience of life in a significant way.
The “usually” is really imortant. If the problem you’re dealing with is altered states of consciousness, then yeah, stopping the meditation ought to solve the problem. But if you’re dealing with the fruits of significant insight then too bad; there is no going back.
I have had the experience of having what felt to me like very good conceptual ideas and then just forgetting them and mourning the loss. Assuming they were actually good, why are insights into the self so impossible to forget? Could one not gain access to the part of the brain that associates and do some violence to those parts of yourself that bring particular pathological truths to mind?
Insight doesn’t act on the conceptual level, it acts on the perceptual level. It’s like noticing that you’ve got a rock in your shoe. Doing violence to the part of your brain that notices the rock in your shoe is just going to draw more attention to that area of neural activity.
Maybe another analogy would be something like learning to identify sounds and words in your native language. Once you learn that, everything you hear in your language will be automatically parsed into its components. Sure, there are conditions in which that might get disrupted or in which it doesn’t work perfectly (like mishearing an unfamiliar word), but overall, it’s not going to go away.
What do you mean by “significant insight”?
“Insight” in this context is a technical jargon referring to what happens when you get direct perception into the process of your mind constructing what seems to be reality, but is actually just conscious simulation of it.
By “significant insight”, I mean enough insight that [1] you’re passed a point of no return and [2] the insight affects your regular day-to-day experience of life in a significant way.