For instance, pleasant and unusual experiences can become addictive and extremely seductive, causing us to give them more attention and focus than they deserve or than would be beneficial to deeper practice. They can also lead to people becoming way “out-there” and ungrounded, very much the way hallucinogens can. They can cause the “real world” to seem harsh by comparison, causing us to be tempted to reject the world, withdraw, or dissociate into the world of concentration states. They can also bring up lots of our psychological “stuff”. This last limitation could be a benefit if we were in a
...more
