Quote
facet
I’ll return to spiritual circles to locate a teacher, and see everybody here in a year.
Hi Facet, are you sure you're better off getting a teacher? You made a lot of good points in previous discussions about the possible harmful effects of the whole spiritual teacher business.
Personally, I think the best spiritual teacher you can find is yourself, your inner wisdom. It can be snowed under by the superficial self-referential repetitive thoughts we humans tend to engage in, but regularly devoting some time to tune into stillness helps to counteract that.
Sure, sometimes other people can trigger insights that might not have arisen otherwise. So I think it can't harm to listen to other people w.r.t. spirituality once in a while, but to devote yourself to an outer source of insight and value that over your own intuition is unhealthy, IMO.
The cases I see meditation having negative effects usually involve meditating for the wrong reasons: the belief that "there's something wrong with me, and I have to un-wrong myself by meditating." A more healthy attitude IMO is to meditate because you love connecting with the stillness that underlies all experience but usually goes unnoticed. Or curiosity about the nature of awareness, self, and the mind. If meditation isn't done in a loving/fun way, I think it's better not to do it at all.
BTW, pertaining to the title of this thread: on Reddit I stumbled upon what seems to be an instance of meditation-induced psychosis that resulted in attempted murder: [
www.reddit.com]
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/25/2020 08:04PM by zizlz.