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> Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention.

I wonder if part of the problem is exposing people to a visceral understanding of that without also teaching them an intellectual understanding. I.e. that if the universe is deterministic, then all their actions were predetermined at the start of the universe, and there's no sense in worrying about the future because there's nothing we can do to change it. And to the extent that the universe is non-deterministic, the added randomness means we have even less (still zero) influence over future outcomes. In this light, the notion of "self" drops away as an arbitrary distinction among cogs in a single machine, and without the self there's no way to think thoughts like "I am sad" or "I am unhappy". Because such thoughts rely on belief in the existence of "I".

I can imagine it causing trauma when someone suddenly feels via meditation that they have no "I", but have no way of understanding/processing this on an intellectual level.




Who knows, maybe there's an I, but it's not what we think it is.

Every proper religion has two sides: public and occult. Buddhism is a very elaborate, but still public and thus simplified teaching. The complexity and level of detail of Buddhism was appropriate at the time it was last updated.

For example, the meaning of word "I" from the occult perspective is interesting. That I is the number 1, the number of abstract spirit - the immutable mathematical principle behind reality. So that "I" exists, but it's unreal and it's shared by all humans.




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