Your initial insights may indeed be significant, but as your mind continues to dredge up material, their quality will decline. They may seem profound during meditation, but if you examine them afterward, they often appear trivial. In this way, they are a lot like the “brilliant ideas” that sometimes happen under the influence of recreational drugs.2 Whether they are significant or trivial, the point is the same: discursive brilliance quickly becomes a trap, drawing you away from the practice again and again.
