I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name).
He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that.
As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me".
When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me.
What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts".
To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix.
For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time.
Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol.
What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word).
It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.
I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name).
He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that.
As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me".
When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me.
What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts".
To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix.
For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time.
Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol.
What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word).
It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.