As someone who has had stream-entry, and the change-in-perception called Enlightenment… I endorse your read of it as being potentially useful in this case?
I’m going to give more details in a sub-comment, to give people who are already rolling their eyes a chance to skip over this.
So, here’s the specific thing I can think of that seems like it might be helpful...
I try to be cautious about using meditation-based wire-heading or emotional-dulling, but at minimum, there’s a state one step down from enlightenment (equanimity) that perceives suffering as merely “dissonance” in vibrations. The judging/negative-connotation gets dropped, and internal-perception of emotional affect is pretty flat (Note of caution: the emotions probably aren’t gone, it’s more like you perceive them differently. I’m not 100% sure how it works, myself. While it might sound similar, it’s not quite the same as dissociation; the movement is more like you lean into your experience rather than out of it. Also, I read in a paper that its painkiller properties are apparently not based on opiods? Weird, right? So neurologically, I don’t really know how it works, although I might develop theories if I researched it a bit harder.).
Enlightenment/fruition proper doesn’t even form memories, although I’ve never been able to sustain that state for longer than a few seconds. But when it drops, it usually drops back into equanimity… so I guess between the two, it’d be a serious improvement on “eternal conscious suffering”?
Unfortunately, to get into Enlightenment territory, there’s a series of intermediate steps that tend to set off existential crises, of widely-varying severity. Any book or teacher that doesn’t take this and the wireheading potential seriously, is probably less good than one who does. That said, I still recommend it, especially for people who seem to keep having existential crises anyway. But it’s a perception-alteration workbench; its sub-skills can sometimes be used to detrimental ends, if people aren’t careful about what they install.
Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).
Here’s one plus-side that you don’t need the additional context to understand: I kinda suspect that at least most people would eventually find the right combination of insights and existential-crises to bumble into enlightenment by themselves, if they had an eternity of consecutive experiences to work with. Especially given that there seem to be multiple simple practices that get around to it eventually (although it might take a couple of lifetimes for some people).
As someone who has had stream-entry, and the change-in-perception called Enlightenment… I endorse your read of it as being potentially useful in this case?
I’m going to give more details in a sub-comment, to give people who are already rolling their eyes a chance to skip over this.
So, here’s the specific thing I can think of that seems like it might be helpful...
I try to be cautious about using meditation-based wire-heading or emotional-dulling, but at minimum, there’s a state one step down from enlightenment (equanimity) that perceives suffering as merely “dissonance” in vibrations. The judging/negative-connotation gets dropped, and internal-perception of emotional affect is pretty flat (Note of caution: the emotions probably aren’t gone, it’s more like you perceive them differently. I’m not 100% sure how it works, myself. While it might sound similar, it’s not quite the same as dissociation; the movement is more like you lean into your experience rather than out of it. Also, I read in a paper that its painkiller properties are apparently not based on opiods? Weird, right? So neurologically, I don’t really know how it works, although I might develop theories if I researched it a bit harder.).
Enlightenment/fruition proper doesn’t even form memories, although I’ve never been able to sustain that state for longer than a few seconds. But when it drops, it usually drops back into equanimity… so I guess between the two, it’d be a serious improvement on “eternal conscious suffering”?
Unfortunately, to get into Enlightenment territory, there’s a series of intermediate steps that tend to set off existential crises, of widely-varying severity. Any book or teacher that doesn’t take this and the wireheading potential seriously, is probably less good than one who does. That said, I still recommend it, especially for people who seem to keep having existential crises anyway. But it’s a perception-alteration workbench; its sub-skills can sometimes be used to detrimental ends, if people aren’t careful about what they install.
Relatedly: I would bet someone money that Greg Egan does something insight-meditation-adjacent.
I started reading his work after someone noted my commentary on “the unsharableness of personal qualia” bore a considerable resemblance to Closer. And since then, whenever I read his stuff, I keep seeing him giving intelligent commentary and elaboration on things I had perceived and associated with deep meditation or LSD (the effects are sometimes similar for me). He’s obviously a big physics fan, but I suspect insight meditation is another one of his big “creativity” generators. (Before someone inevitably asks: No, I don’t say that about everything.)
To me, Egan’s viewpoint reads as very atheist, but also very Buddhist. If you shear off all the woo and distill the remainder, Buddhism is very into seeing through “illusions” (even reassuring ones), and he seems to have a particular interest in this.
I can make up a plausible story that developing an obsession with how we coordinate-and-manifest the illusion of continuity from disparate brain-parts… could be a pretty natural side-effect of sometimes watching the mental sub-processes that generate the illusion of “a single, conscious, continuous self” fall apart from one another? (Meditation can do that, and it’s very unsettling the first time you see it.).
Here’s one plus-side that you don’t need the additional context to understand: I kinda suspect that at least most people would eventually find the right combination of insights and existential-crises to bumble into enlightenment by themselves, if they had an eternity of consecutive experiences to work with. Especially given that there seem to be multiple simple practices that get around to it eventually (although it might take a couple of lifetimes for some people).