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.
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.