Mic Hoe:
Well, that's a double thumbs up! Thanks for those reflections.
But you are taking the positive interpretation, and I'm wondering what the dyaddicts(sic) would get out of meditation other than a dopamine boosts, a ritual fixation that places well being outside of novelty, and a further dislocation of identity from experience (there's a disembedding that distances and one that... rejoins, or some better word I can't think of. Ah let me try again, does the disembedding increase or decrease ones intimacy with experience?).
And further I wonder if the noting practice, particularly one that involves 'naming', could be food for the hungry Ghost Not to simply shore up it's boundaries. I think Buddhist practice can be seen as a negative path of delusion, stripping everything down to a final delusion*, in the hope that it pops; then people have trouble describing what they find except in terms of the conceptual apparatus that took them there. An absolute view that knows little of the relative, perhaps that's why people have integration issues. But now I'm rambling, so I'll finish, in the spirit of rambling, with this: there seems to be two opposite directions that lead to the same place, but one removes everything before dumping you in it, and the other takes away the removal until you admit you're are in it. And I wonder if the mapper/packer split (of the articles) could have people choosing the wrong path for themselves, or getting one confused with the other.
(* Consider even the Buddha's investigatory model: observe something, notice your observing of it, and repeat 'this can't be "I"' as "I" am observing it. A whole practice based on the premise of being the observer, which never gets questioned by the practice...unless you get lucky.)
I can't speak for the dyaddicts except that properly developed and fully engaged the full course of treatment via SamathaVipassana does seem broadly effective enough to work for most everyone who keeps at it long enough. I am far less certain that AF could be made to work for the dyaddicts straight up or dry, so to speak, and probably pretreatment with SamathaVipassana would typically be necessary.
I can speak for the naturally immune and have referred to a little of that experience in passing more in DhO 1.0 than DhO 2.0 although I think a little bit of it is still around, at least I think I noticed something on it still in the Kasina thread. I am so highly resistant to externally applied and unnatural methods of dopamine tampering that to date no known pharmacological or electromagnetic counter-agents are known to exist (yaaaaay!). So in terms of novelty I can say that, in cases like my own, fixed postures or other forms of extreme confinement be these externally or self imposed (in other words insight practice), without the inclusion of various types of a calming practice(s) or concentration practice(s), naturally leads to the presentation of a continually expansive array of ever more novelties and anomalies because any and/or all of the available naturally implicit internal patterns and orders are very quickly rendered transparent and naturally obvious. Unmodified by the employment of some kind of calming, concentrating or centering method either naturally encountered or learned one eventually encounters a series of threshold degrees of novelty which will lead to circumstances such as the processes involved in forms of Laingian Schizophrenia referenced in link one above. These periods of vulnerability between the encounter with internally revealed truths and prior to the reconciliations of those truths with the prevailing external ignorances of the corresponding external truths are typically the points at which external social structures tend to attempt to intervene, with mixed results.
In any case, left to its natural course, without recourse to the stabilizing counterbalances of sufficiently modifying calming and centering processes, the naturally hyper-investigative mind in pursuit of ever deeper insights and wisdom will have to repeatedly pass through the A/P et al in increasingly intense and dramatic forms or, in simpler terms, increasingly come to terms with ever more subjectively overwhelming truths. What I am shuffling towards pointing out here is that ultimately, the subjective pov be it internal or external has no real lasting center or home, there is no one home. Be it in the form of a series of manic depressive or bipolar episodes or psychotic breaks and periods of schizophrenia, brief or prolonged, by whatever names or in whatever terms, the individual will have to either come to both accept and enjoy their own ultimate subjective absence and simultaneously learn to cope with and operate in terms of the all of the commonly referenced conventions that do little but subscribe to the realities of these ghosts be they of one kind or another and regardless of their suitability to the more naturally occurring forms of centering and counterbalancing experience found either internally or externally.
There is a lot of new terminology to play with here, so my apologies for my natural inclination to complex run on sentences. Put simply, yes, disembedding continues until there is nothing but intimacy with experience both internally and externally along with a correspondingly complete lack of resistance, apart from appropriate and suitable forms of centering or timely reference to the given familiarity with the inherent wisdom within the natural universe. The counterbalancing engagement with forms of centering is the conversion of pattern recognitions which are all temporary and provisional into the concretization of various kinds of explicit orders of one kind or another. The plasticity of the natural order always overcomes the concretizations of the imposed orders. This is why all metaphysics ultimately fail and why the more appropriate phenomenological approaches tend to outlast all others.
In principal all maps, models and scaffolding are useful so long as it is clearly understood that these are also necessarily conditionally provisional and temporary. In other words all attachments and acquisitions, relative to the depths and degrees of suitabilities and accuracies or unsuitabilities and inaccuracies, inevitably and ultimately become impediments to further expansion and intimacy with the directly realizable, knowable and understandable universe. In principal the closer or more appropriate the methodology is to the true nature of the universe the more closely it resembles no method at all and instead freely, compassionately, appropriately and intimately connects with the known and unknown, knowable and unknowable universe and is simultaneously wisely void of any resistance to any loss of connection with the known and unknown, knowable and unknowable universe.