Self-Destruction in Nihilism vs. Self-Destruction in Meditation
This is going to be a terminology clarification video. On my first video that was titled “Channel Introduction: What is probabilistic utilitarianism?” I mentioned self-destructive nihilistic culture, and I also mentioned that meditation can be self-destructive. I want to make it clear that I was actually talking about two different forms of self-destruction here.
Self-destruction from conceptual nihilism is something more clear-cut in being generally destructive if we look at the people who are the most conceptually nihilistic from an anecdotal and intuitive sense as appearing to generally be the most self-destructive people. One example would be a homeless drug addict who has a lot of nihilistic beliefs and maybe more nihilistic thoughts that emerge at least partially because of those beliefs, and this particular person is caught in a vicious self-destructive cycle with a variety of possible factors, like environment, diet, medical issues, ect., and one of these factors for this particular person includes extreme conceptual nihilism.
I won't talk about extreme felt and non-linguistic nihilism because that could correlate with something wrong in the diet, lack of sleep, or a medical issue, all arguably being forms of biological pointers that are pointing towards something being wrong which I would argue have some inherent meaning in attempting to point towards health; and felt nihilism could also correlate with the mystic idea of “the dark night of the soul”, which might not be entirely bad if it comes in the context that it pushes one deeper into meditation that is more constructive than destructive, or more good than bad-- and also, from reading about The Change Triangle in AEDP therapy I'm also hesitant to completely demonize emotions even if they are negative or perceived as negative since doing such a thing seems to be less healthy based on AEDP, where curiosity and compassion is argued to go further in being a healthy orientation towards such emotions.
So whether or not you agree with my view on the general destructiveness of extreme conceptual nihilism, I'm going to talk about how meditation can potentially be self-destructive in this video, and I also want to add that I make no claim on a complete answer.
I see self-destruction from meditation as more murky in being destructive. Since relationships to living and non-living forms appear to contain the entirety of human identity apart from our sense of separateness, I believe that meditation in general, not necessarily being mystic or having to do with altered states of consciousness, can be destructive to relationships with other living things or socially destructive-- and what is socially destructive can be self-destructive in the sense that apart from our sense of separateness, our identities appear to be made out of relationships, and while not all social interactions are healthy for us, loneliness has also been shown to not be healthy for us.
This social destruction from meditation happens in the sense that any good meditation tends to pull one towards speechlessness in my view. And when meditation is mystic, it can pull your awareness away from seeing the world, or even your body, if you have intense enough phosphenes or inner visual experiences-- which I believe are necessary practices on a serious meditative path that includes love-bliss or ananda, which comes with its own risks with scientifically viable symptoms in kundalini syndrome.
Meditation can also come attached to pseudoscientific, improbable ideas that turn out to be self-destructive. Many spiritual cults that include meditation have engaged in human rights abuses. And I believe that samadhi or altered states of consciousness from meditation have been connected to pseudoscientific, improbable ideas, which have manipulated people into being abused or abusing others due to lack of the understanding that critical-thinking consists of increasingly doing the following: gathering evidence, correcting for fallacies, and looking for probability which includes awareness-changing techniques.
I personally have called this probabilistic thinking or probability deduction, because gathering evidence, correcting for fallacies, and the awareness-changing techniques that are also called critical-thinking techniques, all ultimately serve the pursuit of the most probable truth. Outsourcing what we know as true based on the opinions of other people we trust inevitably happens because of our limited time, attention, and energy, and we can call this cognitive outsourcing. This is why the pursuit of virtuous decentralized collective intelligence is so important, because we raise the degree of probability that we are correct on any given subject the better our collective intelligence is, in the sense of the capacity to see probable truth.
To also talk about the cons of speech, attachment to concepts or thoughts can cause incredible suffering. So you have The Harvard Grant Study suggesting people need warm, deep relationships with others to live the best possible lives, which tends to go with language and concepts to achieve such relationships in human complexity, and you have the suffering imposed by attachment to language and concepts that inevitably seems to come with relationships with others and your relationship to yourself-- and this creates a murky question around how much self-destructiveness might be in meditation, and in what way, including taking it to its most extreme ends-- and it is a question I want to bring into awareness here more rather than perfectly answer.
When the Buddha, for instance, left his family behind for a time, and his family likely suffered from his absence, was this not destructive to his family in that it likely caused them emotional pain? And was this not destructive to him in a likely similar manner?
Between social destructiveness, symptoms of deeper meditation gone wrong which I personally believe are all connected to whatever kundalini syndrome is, and destructive improbable claims attached to meditation, it seems observable that we simply cannot claim that meditation is all good, even if it is arguably more good than bad, and more good than conceptual nihilism. With that said, I don't demonize kundalini but I think it should be respected as a physiologically radical mystery with unwanted potential symptoms that has to be pursued in the right mindset to mitigate unwanted symptoms and to handle the overall experience.
To keep this video from being too long I won't go more into what the best mindset for approaching kundalini might objectively look like, and I don't claim to have any permanent kundalini awakening which I see as synonymous with Sahaja Samadhi, but because I think it may be ethical to do so, I will say that I currently think there has to be extreme trust in the benevolence of kundalini experiences to handle the physiological changes that can come with them and this doesn't necessarily preclude all danger due to the mystery of the phenomena combined with the biological complexity and differences of human beings.
So this is how I intuitively and anecdotally view self-destruction in meditation versus self-destruction in nihilism.
Video: https://rumble.com/v18v2im-self-destruction-in-nihilism-vs.-self-destruction-in-meditation.html
Picture source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-map-pieces-2859169/