Wow, great to see a review of the Finder’s course here! I have a bunch of thoughts, but let me first say that most mainstream meditation teachers are not happy with Jeffrey Martin. Taking a bunch of thousand-year-old techniques offered for free elsewhere and making people pay 250$ (this is much better than a few years ago, when it was 4000$) for them goes against basically all the norms of Buddhist and meditative culture. The techniques are considered priceless, and there is no price high enough to reflect the value of awakening, so it’s in very bad taste to slap a price on the techniques. That said, I also know a few people who got legitimately awakened on the course, but they all had very solid prior meditative chops, and practiced way more than the minimum of 1h a day. I am very very skeptical that people are actually getting awakened (on the technical “first cessation = stream-entry” definition of awakened) on the course. There are a bunch of stages on the path to first awakening where you feel things that might fit the words “fundamental wellbeing”, I’ve had stages where I went weeks on end being beatifically happy throughout the day, nothing being able to break through my calm joy, and it still wasn’t awakening. There were 4 of these cycles of me believing I was awakened before realizing I wasn’t (this included 2 teachers who confirmed I was awakened), before I abandoned trying to label my experience and I just practiced.
Awakening is heavy stuff, and doesn’t necessarily reduce suffering in the way you expect right away, the catchline from Daniel Ingram is “Suffering less, noticing it more”. It’s such a heavy shift from everyday consciousness that most people kind of struggle to adapt to daily life at first, and they need a deliberate practice to reintegrate to family and work life after the experience. The higher levels of awakening bring even greater changes to daily life, one of my teachers who practiced intensively for 30 years used to say “if I could show an untrained person my experience of this moment, they would scream away in terror and incomprehension”. He said this while smiling and claiming that the very thing that would terrify normal people is what brings him ultimate fulfillment. Getting used to the leviathan of Emptiness takes time and practice.
65% awakening rate is a batshit insane rate for something that only makes people practice 1h a day for 4 months. To give you a sense of comparison, in the 1980s the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts invited Mahasi Sayadaw to give a 3 month retreat course based on his method of Noting. On this intensive, 3 month, 12h/day meditation retreat, they had a 10% awakening rate by the standards of the teachers there, which are some of the best meditation teachers in the country. This was such a huge fraction of awakened people that the main teachers at IMS, the largest meditation center in the US, permanently changed the main technique they taught to Mahasi Noting. And it wasn’t like IMS hadn’t tried telling people to mix techniques to see what resonates with them. Awakened people are out there, and some people do stumble into it with minimal practice, and I wish it were this easy to get to it, but It’s probably not.
Wow, great to see a review of the Finder’s course here! I have a bunch of thoughts, but let me first say that most mainstream meditation teachers are not happy with Jeffrey Martin. Taking a bunch of thousand-year-old techniques offered for free elsewhere and making people pay 250$ (this is much better than a few years ago, when it was 4000$) for them goes against basically all the norms of Buddhist and meditative culture.
I see no good reason why Buddhists idea about how one should think about money should matter a lot to the average person who reads this post.
To me, this sounds like: “A lot of people reject Jeffrey Martin because of bad reasons instead of looking at the merits of what he teaches.”
*shrug* I wrote that to give people a sense of how he relates to the wider meditation community. If he was really teaching something different and his 65% success rate was true, then 250$ would be an absolute bargain, hell, even 100 000$ would be a bargain for that.
Yes, you describes that the relationship is that he primarily gets a bad reputation for reasons that don’t matter to the rationalist community and not for the merits of the techniques he teaches.
What I took away from this comment was: Mainstream meditation teachers are not happy with Martin because he has redefined “awakening” to mean a thing that is good and people want (being happier), rather than a thing that is strange and possibly bad that people don’t want, and is teaching people the good and wanted thing instead of the weird mysterious thing.
Not really. Martin’s “Locations” 2 and 3 are somewhat in line with traditional definitions of awakening, his course is, in fact, aiming at the weird esoteric stuff, not the low-hanging-fruit that techniques like MBSR are picking. It’s his “Location 1″ that is more contentious, where he seems to place the bar lower than other traditions. The course itself still seems net-positive to me, even if I disagree with charging money for the techniques. I just don’t want people to self-diagnose as being in “Location 1”, and think that they’re awakened by the more common definitions. Thinking you’re awakened when you’re not tends to hurt your practice more than the inverse.
As an aside, being happier is a relatively early fruit of the meditative path. You can learn to do something called The Second Jhana, where you basically generate happiness on demand. What happens after you get that is that you realize that happiness wasn’t actually what you were looking for, there is a more fundamental problem to be solved than just not being happy. Somewhat unintuitively, being happy isn’t enough to truly Satisfy, it works for a few months while the novelty hasn’t worn off, but it’s not the ultimate answer. For that you need the strange and scary esoteric stuff.
As an unenlightened person, why would I want satisfaction while living in a world that has things I want to change? I guess I’m asking if drives persist with perfect contentment, and if so, how?
Very good question, I’m not too sure why you got downvoted, this is a point very frequently discussed in meditation circles. It is true that at some batshit-insane high point of meditation prowess (that basically only the most extreme of monks get to), you have the option to literally just sit there, full of contentment, ignoring thirst, hunger and pain until you just die. Hermits that renounce the world do exist, and this is a pitfall of the meditative path that needs to be avoided, the good news is that knowing about the pitfall gets you 90% of the way to avoiding it.
There are examples of the exact opposite of a hermit, the highly accomplished meditators I know are extraordinarily productive, one guy in particular said that at some point he could just sit there programming for 16 consecutive hours without getting bored, getting tempted by distractions, or anything else, day after day after day. Shinzen Young is an advanced meditation teacher in his late 70s now, and he’s trying very hard to change the world (from the pov of his own values). I’m not advanced enough to actually understand how this works at the high levels, but from my own experience I notice that the drive to improve the world starts coming more from compassion for others, rather than from the desperation of seeking my own happiness. I know I have the ability to ultimately be content no matter what happens to the world, but I still know that changing the world would be good, and I still work towards that end.
In the end I don’t really have a good answer for you apart to say that the pitfall does exist, but that knowing about it gets you a long way to avoid it, and that there are lots of examples of advanced meditators who still work unbelievably hard to improve the world.
“Awakened people are out there, and some people do stumble into it with minimal practice, and I wish it were this easy to get to it, but It’s probably not.”
Having read the preceding descriptions, I find myself wondering if I’m one of those stumblers. If “awakening” is defined by the quote you provided, “suffering less and noticing it more”, that’s exactly how I feel today when I compare to myself a few years ago. In casual terms, I’d say I’ve been blessed with the almighty power of not giving a crap; I know exactly when something should feel bad, but I can’t bring myself to let it affect my mood, because I’ve successfully and singularly focused myself on what truly matters and can never be taken from me. The thing is, I’m not a meditator; although it’s been recommended to me plenty in other circles, my feeling has always just been “I don’t need it”, because I’m very adept at directly editing my cognitive schemata. If I really want to change something about myself, I just do it, and it happens. So I got to this point simply by finding a very compelling reason to put in the effort of changing how I internally relate to external circumstance, and it worked. So I’m curious how you would precisely define “awakening”, or as others call it “enlightenment”, and how would you advise one to self-diagnose whether or not they’ve got it?
Wow, great to see a review of the Finder’s course here! I have a bunch of thoughts, but let me first say that most mainstream meditation teachers are not happy with Jeffrey Martin. Taking a bunch of thousand-year-old techniques offered for free elsewhere and making people pay 250$ (this is much better than a few years ago, when it was 4000$) for them goes against basically all the norms of Buddhist and meditative culture. The techniques are considered priceless, and there is no price high enough to reflect the value of awakening, so it’s in very bad taste to slap a price on the techniques. That said, I also know a few people who got legitimately awakened on the course, but they all had very solid prior meditative chops, and practiced way more than the minimum of 1h a day. I am very very skeptical that people are actually getting awakened (on the technical “first cessation = stream-entry” definition of awakened) on the course. There are a bunch of stages on the path to first awakening where you feel things that might fit the words “fundamental wellbeing”, I’ve had stages where I went weeks on end being beatifically happy throughout the day, nothing being able to break through my calm joy, and it still wasn’t awakening. There were 4 of these cycles of me believing I was awakened before realizing I wasn’t (this included 2 teachers who confirmed I was awakened), before I abandoned trying to label my experience and I just practiced.
Awakening is heavy stuff, and doesn’t necessarily reduce suffering in the way you expect right away, the catchline from Daniel Ingram is “Suffering less, noticing it more”. It’s such a heavy shift from everyday consciousness that most people kind of struggle to adapt to daily life at first, and they need a deliberate practice to reintegrate to family and work life after the experience. The higher levels of awakening bring even greater changes to daily life, one of my teachers who practiced intensively for 30 years used to say “if I could show an untrained person my experience of this moment, they would scream away in terror and incomprehension”. He said this while smiling and claiming that the very thing that would terrify normal people is what brings him ultimate fulfillment. Getting used to the leviathan of Emptiness takes time and practice.
65% awakening rate is a batshit insane rate for something that only makes people practice 1h a day for 4 months. To give you a sense of comparison, in the 1980s the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts invited Mahasi Sayadaw to give a 3 month retreat course based on his method of Noting. On this intensive, 3 month, 12h/day meditation retreat, they had a 10% awakening rate by the standards of the teachers there, which are some of the best meditation teachers in the country. This was such a huge fraction of awakened people that the main teachers at IMS, the largest meditation center in the US, permanently changed the main technique they taught to Mahasi Noting. And it wasn’t like IMS hadn’t tried telling people to mix techniques to see what resonates with them. Awakened people are out there, and some people do stumble into it with minimal practice, and I wish it were this easy to get to it, but It’s probably not.
I see no good reason why Buddhists idea about how one should think about money should matter a lot to the average person who reads this post.
To me, this sounds like: “A lot of people reject Jeffrey Martin because of bad reasons instead of looking at the merits of what he teaches.”
*shrug* I wrote that to give people a sense of how he relates to the wider meditation community. If he was really teaching something different and his 65% success rate was true, then 250$ would be an absolute bargain, hell, even 100 000$ would be a bargain for that.
Yes, you describes that the relationship is that he primarily gets a bad reputation for reasons that don’t matter to the rationalist community and not for the merits of the techniques he teaches.
What I took away from this comment was: Mainstream meditation teachers are not happy with Martin because he has redefined “awakening” to mean a thing that is good and people want (being happier), rather than a thing that is strange and possibly bad that people don’t want, and is teaching people the good and wanted thing instead of the weird mysterious thing.
Not really. Martin’s “Locations” 2 and 3 are somewhat in line with traditional definitions of awakening, his course is, in fact, aiming at the weird esoteric stuff, not the low-hanging-fruit that techniques like MBSR are picking. It’s his “Location 1″ that is more contentious, where he seems to place the bar lower than other traditions. The course itself still seems net-positive to me, even if I disagree with charging money for the techniques. I just don’t want people to self-diagnose as being in “Location 1”, and think that they’re awakened by the more common definitions. Thinking you’re awakened when you’re not tends to hurt your practice more than the inverse.
As an aside, being happier is a relatively early fruit of the meditative path. You can learn to do something called The Second Jhana, where you basically generate happiness on demand. What happens after you get that is that you realize that happiness wasn’t actually what you were looking for, there is a more fundamental problem to be solved than just not being happy. Somewhat unintuitively, being happy isn’t enough to truly Satisfy, it works for a few months while the novelty hasn’t worn off, but it’s not the ultimate answer. For that you need the strange and scary esoteric stuff.
As an unenlightened person, why would I want satisfaction while living in a world that has things I want to change? I guess I’m asking if drives persist with perfect contentment, and if so, how?
Very good question, I’m not too sure why you got downvoted, this is a point very frequently discussed in meditation circles. It is true that at some batshit-insane high point of meditation prowess (that basically only the most extreme of monks get to), you have the option to literally just sit there, full of contentment, ignoring thirst, hunger and pain until you just die. Hermits that renounce the world do exist, and this is a pitfall of the meditative path that needs to be avoided, the good news is that knowing about the pitfall gets you 90% of the way to avoiding it.
There are examples of the exact opposite of a hermit, the highly accomplished meditators I know are extraordinarily productive, one guy in particular said that at some point he could just sit there programming for 16 consecutive hours without getting bored, getting tempted by distractions, or anything else, day after day after day. Shinzen Young is an advanced meditation teacher in his late 70s now, and he’s trying very hard to change the world (from the pov of his own values). I’m not advanced enough to actually understand how this works at the high levels, but from my own experience I notice that the drive to improve the world starts coming more from compassion for others, rather than from the desperation of seeking my own happiness. I know I have the ability to ultimately be content no matter what happens to the world, but I still know that changing the world would be good, and I still work towards that end.
In the end I don’t really have a good answer for you apart to say that the pitfall does exist, but that knowing about it gets you a long way to avoid it, and that there are lots of examples of advanced meditators who still work unbelievably hard to improve the world.
“Awakened people are out there, and some people do stumble into it with minimal practice, and I wish it were this easy to get to it, but It’s probably not.”
Having read the preceding descriptions, I find myself wondering if I’m one of those stumblers. If “awakening” is defined by the quote you provided, “suffering less and noticing it more”, that’s exactly how I feel today when I compare to myself a few years ago. In casual terms, I’d say I’ve been blessed with the almighty power of not giving a crap; I know exactly when something should feel bad, but I can’t bring myself to let it affect my mood, because I’ve successfully and singularly focused myself on what truly matters and can never be taken from me. The thing is, I’m not a meditator; although it’s been recommended to me plenty in other circles, my feeling has always just been “I don’t need it”, because I’m very adept at directly editing my cognitive schemata. If I really want to change something about myself, I just do it, and it happens. So I got to this point simply by finding a very compelling reason to put in the effort of changing how I internally relate to external circumstance, and it worked. So I’m curious how you would precisely define “awakening”, or as others call it “enlightenment”, and how would you advise one to self-diagnose whether or not they’ve got it?