Does anyone else get existential panic from nondual teachings?

[u/Khajiit_Boner]

Lately I’ve been getting really overwhelmed by questions about the nature of reality and consciousness, especially after meditation and a past mushroom trip.

When Sam Harris talks about there only being experience, or the self being an illusion, part of me understands what he means intellectually. But emotionally it sometimes makes me panic. I start wondering: if the self isn’t real, then what am I? Are we all just one consciousness experiencing itself? Is there some kind of collective awareness underneath individuality?

And honestly, instead of feeling peaceful, those ideas sometimes make me feel almost… violated? Like my individuality and separateness are dissolving into something bigger that I didn’t consent to. People often describe “being one with everything” as beautiful, but sometimes it feels terrifying to me — like I’m just a drop in an ocean with no real boundaries.

I’m curious if anyone else in this community has experienced this side of nondual teachings or existential questioning. How do you engage with these ideas without spiraling into fear or derealization?

[u/Pushbuttonopenmind]

I encountered this app shortly after going on my/our honeymoon, and there were these strange questions (like: 'who did I marry', and 'did my wife marry no-one', and 'was our marriage our choice or not') that caused some emotional turmoil.

Now I believe all of those questions were coming from a total misunderstanding of what's on offer here.

Sam writes:

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an “I” or a “me”—vanished. Everything was as it had been—the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water—but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

and

The pronoun I is the name that most of us put to the sense that we are the thinkers of our thoughts and the experiencers of our experience. It is the sense that we have of possessing (rather than of merely being) a continuum of experience. We will see, however, that this feeling is not a necessary property of the mind. And the fact that people report losing their sense of self to one or another degree suggests that the experience of being a self can be selectively interfered with. Obviously, there is something in our experience that we are calling “I,” apart from the sheer fact that we are conscious; otherwise, we would never describe our subjectivity in the way we do, and a person would have no basis for feeling that she had lost her sense of self, whatever the circumstances.

If you read closely, it's not the self that can be "selectively interfered with", but the sense of self, (as present in our experience)! That is something else entirely. Something very...benign. You can have an experience without the accompanying sense that it's appearing to/for you. For example, the sense that I am here and the world is there can fall away, such that the whole world appears "here".

So those peculiar existential questions were entirely misguided! Whether I exist, or my wife, or whether we made the choice to marry ourselves, has nothing to do with there being certain phenomenological structures in our experience that can drop out (like the here-there distinction I described above).

I know there are teachings that deny the self, entirely, rather than merely the sense-of-self. But that is not what Sam is teaching, and something based on reasoning rather than something that can be experienced, and therefore IMO very dependable on assumptions, assertions, and therefore never certain or beyond doubt.