u/jwaofi

This is a follow-up question to the HH video "The Most Acute Description of the Right View". It's not clear how to distinguish the Right View from depersonalization/deralization? Let's imagine that a friend of mine, due to some historical reasons, easily slips into the state of depersonalization/derealization. For him it's always just a glance away: just "look in another way" and the sense of self is lost. But for him this doesn't seem "freeing" at all - on the contrary, the experience is that of impending doom. The whole existance is permeated with the feeling of impending doom and imminent death. So this is surely an immature defensive mechanism which has little to do with Awakening, enlightenment or whatever. This was actually one of the reasons why my friend took up all this meditation stuff - he believed that he could get rid of relying on it so heavily. Another reason he took up the whole "meditation thing" is to get some bliss and happiness - but what he got instead was completely contrary. Instead he constantly and predictably keeps falling into this state of depersonalization and realization due to meditation. At the and of any Goenka or Mahasi-style vipassana retreat he predictably feels very dissociated. It's usually reinforced by his complete loss of sleep at those retreats, which is either side-effects of intense meditation or direct instructions from the teacher. So to summarize, in the video they talk about "liberation", i.e. Right View somehow setting them free, but this poor guy consistenly feels quite the opposite of this "liberation". He feels "enslaved" by the "flow of things", which he cannot change in the slightest. It looks very gloomy in part because of complete loss of self-agency, i.e. it feels like he can't exert even a slightest influence on the "flow of things". So the only option for him is to "observe" this "flow of things" in this dismal awe. So what would you recommend this poor guy? How should he approach the Right View, if even he is to approach it at all?