So this was pretty much an altered state of consciousness, making it hard for me to recall specifics about the phenomenology afterwards; much of my recollection is based on notes that I made during / immediately after the experience. So I will do my best to answer, but I need to caution that there is a serious risk of me completely misremembering something. That said...
During the event, there was no experience of a separate “doer” nor an “observer”; if I looked at my hand, then there was just a sight of the hand, without a sense of somebody who was watching the hand. The sensations that had previously been associated with a sense of self were still present, but it was as if the mind-system was not interpreting them as indicating any separate entity; rather they were just experienced as “raw sensations”, if that makes any sense.
There was also no sense of being in control of my thoughts or actions. Intentions and experiences would just arise on their own. In the shower, there was a strong negative valence arising from the cold; but the subjective experience was that the part of my mind that was experiencing the negative valence, was distinct from the one that made the decision of leaving the shower or remaining in it. The negative valence did not compel “the deciding subsystem” into any action, it was just available as information.
I do not recall the exact phenomenology associated with stepping out of the shower, but my best guess would be that it was something like: the thought arose that staying in the shower for too long might be unhealthy. This was followed by an intention arising to step out of the shower. That intention led to the action of stepping out of the shower.
From a third-person perspective, my guess of what happened was: different subsystems were submitting motor system bids of what to do. For whatever reason, the subsystem which generated the judgment that staying in the shower might be a bad idea, had the kinds of weights associated with its command pathway that caused its bids to be given the highest priority in this particular situation. (E.g. maybe it had made successful predictions in situations-like-this before, so the system judged it to have the highest probability of making a correct prediction; see the quoted excerpt’s discussion of selecting decision strategies according to context in this comment.)
This selection process is not consciously accessible, so one only gets to experience the end results of the process: intentions, actions, experiences and thoughts arising seemingly on their own, with the exact criteria for choosing between them remaining unknown.
Now if the selection process is not consciously accessible, then that implies that under more normal states of mind, we do not know the exact reasons for our behavior either. And there’s plenty of research suggesting that we are in fact systematically wrong about the causes of our actions. Rather, the subsystem which creates the experience of the self normally has access to the information that does emerge in consciousness—the end results of the actual selection process, i.e. the intentions, actions, experiences and thoughts—and it then generates a narrative of how “the self” has chosen different actions. If that narrative gets temporarily suspended—as it did during my experience—then it becomes apparent that the exact causes of behavior were never known in the first place, only inferred.
One person who achieved stream entry (the traditional “first major step of enlightenment”) reported that his first thought after it was “I don’t know how I’ll ever decide what to do next again.” Then he sat still until he got tired, and went to bed. We may not know the exact reasons for why we do things, but that does not prevent our mind from doing things anyway.
Thank you for this comment. Even if you don’t remember exactly what happened, at the very least, your story of what happened is likely to be based on the theoretical positions you subscribe to, and it’s helpful to explain these theoretical positions in a concrete example.
I guess what I don’t like about what you’re saying is that it’s entirely amoral. You don’t say how actions can be good. Even if a sense of good were to exist, it would be somehow abstract, entirely third-personal, and have no necessary connection to actual action. All intentions just arise on their own, the brain does something with them, some action is performed, and that’s it. We can only be good people by accident, not by evaluating reasons and making conscious choices.
I also disagree that you can generally draw conclusions about what happens in normal states of consciousness from examining an abnormal state of consciousness.
The person who experienced stream entry whose thoughts you link to says (in the very next line after your quote) that he decided to sit still until he experienced a physiological drive. That seems to be a conscious decision.
(I am not at all endorsing anything said in the video.)
To put the point starkly, as far as I can tell, whatever you’re saying (and what that video says) works just as well for a murderer as it does for you. Meditating, and obtaining enlightenment, allows a murderer to suffer less, while continuing to murder.
We can only be good people by accident, not by evaluating reasons and making conscious choices.
Well, we can certainly still evaluate reasons: in my example, “being under a cold shower for too long might be unhealthy” was a reason for stepping out of it. And it was evaluated consciously, in that the thought was broadcast into consciousness, allowing other subsystems to react to it—such as by objecting if they happened to disagree, or if they felt that continuing the experiment outweighed the risks. If other subsystems had raised objections, possibly I would have stayed in the shower longer.
I guess what I don’t like about what you’re saying is that it’s entirely amoral. You don’t say how actions can be good. Even if a sense of good were to exist, it would be somehow abstract, entirely third-personal, and have no necessary connection to actual action. [...]
To put the point starkly, as far as I can tell, whatever you’re saying (and what that video says) works just as well for a murderer as it does for you. Meditating, and obtaining enlightenment, allows a murderer to suffer less, while continuing to murder.
A draft for a later post in this series actually contains the following paragraphs:
.. you can still be far on the path of enlightenment and have blind spots. As you have less craving to reduce your own craving, you may become less motivated to work on your emotional issues and remaining issues. If you become irrationally depressed, you may just go “oh, depression, why not”, rather than using your skills to actually investigate the depression in detail. Or if subtle craving triggers and makes you irrationally angry at someone else, you may go “oh, I’m angry at someone and probably ruining their life with my behavior, why not”, if your non-craving motivations do not have strong reasons to avoid doing this.
This is likely the reason why many traditions also consider training in morality to be at least as important as practicing meditation. Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path involves clearly meditation-related items, such as “right mindfulness”, but also items related to moral virtue, such as “right action”, “right livelihood”, and “right speech”. If you want to have a positive impact on the world, it is not enough to reduce the impact of craving on your motivations; you also need to ensure that your non-craving-based motivations actually cause you to take the right actions.
It is somewhat unclear to me why exactly this bothers you, though. To me, meditation practice—together with the insights that it brings—is just a skill that brings you benefits in some particular areas, just like any other. Getting better at, say, physical exercise, also doesn’t tell you anything about how actions can be good. (Why would it?) Physical exercise also works the same for a murderer, possibly allowing them to murder better and easier. (Why wouldn’t it?)
I do think that there’s definitely some reason to expect that meditation could make you a better person—e.g. many of the reasons for why people are motivated to hurt other people, involve psychological issues and trauma that meditation may be helpful with. But if a sociopath who completely lacked an empathy subsystem (I don’t know enough about sociopathy to say whether this is an accurate description of it, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it is) happened to meditate and became enlightened, then of course there’s no reason to assume that meditation alone would create an empathy subsystem for them.
Your values are what they are, and meditation can help you understand and realize them better… but if your values are fundamentally “evil”, then why would meditation change them more than any other skill would?
Of course. You are, at the very least, technically right.
However, I think that obtaining enlightenment only makes it harder for you to change your values, because you’re much more likely to be fine with who you are. For example, the man who went through stream entry you linked to seems to have spent several years doing nothing, and didn’t feel particularly bad for it. Is that not scary? Is that likely to be a result of pursuing physical exercise?
On the other hand, if you spent time thinking clearly about your values, the likelihood of them changing for the better is higher, because you still have a desire (craving?) to be a better person.
For example, the man who went through stream entry you linked to seems to have spent several years doing nothing, and didn’t feel particularly bad for it.
He did, and then eventually his mind figured out a new set of motivations, and currently he is very actively doing things again and keeping himself busy.
Even apart from enlightenment, it is my own experience that one’s motivations may change in ways that are long-term good, but leave you adrift in the short term. At one point in my life I was basically driven by anxiety and the need to escape that constant anxiety. When I finally eliminated the source of anxiety, I had a period when I didn’t know what to do with my time anymore, because the vast majority of my habits (both physical and mental) had been oriented towards avoiding it, and that was just not necessary anymore.
Likewise, if people have trained learned to motivate themselves with guilt, then eliminating the guilt and trading it for a healthier form of motivation may be long-term beneficial, but leave them without a source of any motivation until their mind readjusts.
Whether enlightenment makes it easier or harder to change your values—I don’t know. Reducing craving means that you are less likely to cling to values that need revising, but may also eliminate cravings that had previously driven changes to your values. Certainly you can still spend time thinking about your values even if you are enlightened. (Though I am unclear to what extent anyone ever really changes their values in the first place, as opposed to just developing better strategies for achieving what, deep down, are their actual values.)
Personally I am not enlightened, but I certainly feel like developing deeper meditative insights has made it easier rather than harder for me to change my values. But human motivation is complicated, and which way it goes probably depends on a lot of individual factors.
EDIT: Thanks again for the discussion. It has been very helpful, because I think I can now articulate clearly a fundamental fear I have about meditation: it might lead to a loss of the desire to become better.
Cool. :) And yes, it might; it also comes with several other risks. If you feel like these risks are too large, then avoiding meditation may indeed be the right move for you. (As I said in the introductory post, I am trying to explain what I think is going on with meditation, but I am not trying to convince anyone to meditate if they think that it doesn’t seem worth it.)
All the gurus say that physical pain is just something from the body, and you can only have suffering (from it) if you are not enlightened. Would they still maintain that after being tortured for decades? I seriously doubt so.
This has lead me to believe that enlightenment is not about discovering truth, but quite the opposite. It’s about deluding yourself into happiness by believing that this world is actually something good.
That’s why I quit meditating. The only real hope is in eradicating suffering, a la David Pearce. Not ignoring it. Sure you can use meditation as pain management, but it isn’t the truth.
For what it’s worth, none of the people who I’d consider my meditation teachers have suggested that it’d be feasible to avoid suffering during extended torture, nor that it’d be practically possible to become so enlightened as to have no suffering at all.
That’s why I consider this world a not good world, for that (and less) being possible. Whereas all of them (Osho, Sadhguru, Ramana Maharishi) say that enlightenment is about realizing that you’re living in a good world. Hence it’s a lie imo.
Whereas all of them (Osho, Sadhguru, Ramana Maharishi) say that enlightenment is about realizing that you’re living in a good world.
If any of the teachers I’m most influenced by (Tucker Peck, Culadasa, Loch Kelly, Michael Taft, Daniel Ingram, Rob Burbea, Leigh Brasington) make that claim, I at least don’t remember encountering it. Pretty sure that at least some of them would disagree with it.
Maybe not is these exact terms, but maybe, I don’t know “realizing the benevolent tendency of existence”, “realizing the source as a benevolent force”, “realizing that all is love, that existence loves you”, etc. I’ve been hearing these kinds of claims from all gurus (although I’m not familiarized with any of the ones you mention, maybe you think the mainstream gurus from Osho to Eckhart Tolle are all bs? I don’t know).
Anyway, isn’t enlightenment also about losing fear, about being at ease? I once bought into it by understanding that ok, maybe all cravings are indeed futile, maybe death is indeed an illusion, maybe a back ache isn’t the end of the world and can be greatly alliviated through meditation… But how can you at least lose fear and be at ease, in a world where extreme physical pain is possible? Impossible.
maybe you think the mainstream gurus from Osho to Eckhart Tolle are all bs?
I haven’t read any of their stuff so I don’t know. :)
Anyway, isn’t enlightenment also about losing fear, about being at ease?
“Enlightenment” is a pretty general term, with different traditions and teachers meaning different things by it; not all of the people I mentioned even use the term. Some people do say that it’s something like what you describe, others disagree (e.g. Ingram is quite vocal about his dislike for any models of enlightenment that suggest you can eliminate negative emotions), others yet might agree in part and disagree in part (e.g. they might agree that you can eliminate specific kinds of fear that are rooted in delusions, without being able to eliminate all categories of fear, or without it even necessarily being practically possible to get to all the delusions).
(There might also be some confusion going on in that “being at ease” in the sense used by meditation teachers does not necessarily mean “being without pain or negative emotions”; it might also mean that pain and negative emotions still appear, but the craving to be without them does not, so their appearance does not cause suffering. I think most of the people I mentioned wouldn’t claim you can get rid of all craving, but they would hold that you can substantially reduce it.)
However, there is something else I would like to ask you: do you think meditation can provide you with insights about the nature of consciousness? Those hard questions like “is the brain running algorithms”, “is consciousness possible to emulate or transfer into some other medium”, etc? I’d give a lot to know the answers to those questions but I don’t think that science will arrive there any soon. (And as for psychedelics I think that they just tell you what you want to hear, like dreams).
Ever had any of such kind of insights yourself? Or even about the nature of existence too.
Well, basically my whole multi-agent models of mind sequence (which talks quite a bit about the mechanisms and nature of consciousness) was motivated because I started noticing there being similar claims being made about the mind in neuroscience, psychotherapy and meditation, and wanting to put together a common framework for talking about them. So basically everything in all those posts is at least somewhat motivated by my experiences with meditation (as well as by my experiences with psychotherapy and my understanding of neuroscience).
That Wei Dai post explains little in these specific regards. Every Eastern religion, in my opinion, from Buddhism, to Induism, to Yoga, to Zen, teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence. Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence. If you’re gonna keep dribbling this fact or invoking fringe views (regardless of their value) as the dominant ones, then we might just agree to disagree. No offense!
teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence
Oh, I’m not disputing that bit. The things I was saying there’s disagreement on were:
Whether it’s practically possible for someone to always experience such extreme well-being, as opposed to just most of the time (since you brought up the example of extreme torture, and it’s true that probably nobody is enlightened enough that they wouldn’t break down eventually if tortured)
Whether that extreme well-being necessarily takes the form of having only positive emotions, as opposed to being more at peace with also having negative emotions.
Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence.
I think the teachers mean something slightly different by “the nature of existence”. The way I interpret it, “existence” is not so much a claim about the objective external world, but rather about the way your mind constructs your subjective experience. Things are confused by some of the teachers having a worldview that doesn’t really distinguish these, so they might talk of the two being one and the same.
Still, you can steelman the underlying claim to be about subjective rather than objective reality, and to say something like: “The nature of your subjective experience is that it’s entirely constructed by your mind, and that your wellbeing does not intrinsically need to depend on external factors; your mind is just hardwired to delude itself into thinking that it needs specific external conditions in order to have wellbeing. But because wellbeing is an internally computed property, based on interpretations of the world that are themselves internally computed, the mind can switch into experiencing wellbeing regardless of the external conditions.”
Note that this not require any delusion about what external reality is actually like: it would require delusion if internal wellbeing required the external universe to be good, but that’s exactly the kind of dependence on external conditions that the insight refutes. You can acknowledge that the external universe is quite bad, and then have lasting happiness anyway. In fact, this can make it easier to acknowledge that the external universe is bad, since that acknowledgment is no longer a threat to your happiness.
Though there’s also another nuance, which is that the same insight also involves noticing that your judgments of the world’s goodness or badness are also internally generated, and that considering the world intrinsically good or bad is an instance of the mind projection fallacy. And further, that the question of the world’s goodness or badness is just an internally-computed label, in a very similar kind of sense in which a thing’s bleggness is an internally computed label rather than there being an objective fact about whether something is really a blegg. Seeing that can lead to the experience that the world is actually neither good nor bad in an intrinsic sense, as its goodness or badness depends entirely on the criteria we choose for considering it good or bad; and this may be seen on a sufficiently deep level to relieve any suffering one was having due to an experience of the world being bad.
But that kind of nuance may be difficult to communicate, especially if one comes from a tradition which didn’t have terminology like “mind projection fallacy” or knowledge of neural networks, so it then gets rounded into “the world is intrinsically good”. This is because the emotional experience it creates may be similar to that which you’d have if you thought the world was intrinsically good in objective terms… even though there’s actually again no claim about what the external world is really like. You can have an internal emotional experience of feeling good about the world while simultaneously also acknowledging everything that is horrible about the world and still wanting to change it, since the key insight is again that your happiness or motivation does not need to depend on external factors (such as any specific properties of the world).
So this was pretty much an altered state of consciousness, making it hard for me to recall specifics about the phenomenology afterwards; much of my recollection is based on notes that I made during / immediately after the experience. So I will do my best to answer, but I need to caution that there is a serious risk of me completely misremembering something. That said...
During the event, there was no experience of a separate “doer” nor an “observer”; if I looked at my hand, then there was just a sight of the hand, without a sense of somebody who was watching the hand. The sensations that had previously been associated with a sense of self were still present, but it was as if the mind-system was not interpreting them as indicating any separate entity; rather they were just experienced as “raw sensations”, if that makes any sense.
There was also no sense of being in control of my thoughts or actions. Intentions and experiences would just arise on their own. In the shower, there was a strong negative valence arising from the cold; but the subjective experience was that the part of my mind that was experiencing the negative valence, was distinct from the one that made the decision of leaving the shower or remaining in it. The negative valence did not compel “the deciding subsystem” into any action, it was just available as information.
I do not recall the exact phenomenology associated with stepping out of the shower, but my best guess would be that it was something like: the thought arose that staying in the shower for too long might be unhealthy. This was followed by an intention arising to step out of the shower. That intention led to the action of stepping out of the shower.
From a third-person perspective, my guess of what happened was: different subsystems were submitting motor system bids of what to do. For whatever reason, the subsystem which generated the judgment that staying in the shower might be a bad idea, had the kinds of weights associated with its command pathway that caused its bids to be given the highest priority in this particular situation. (E.g. maybe it had made successful predictions in situations-like-this before, so the system judged it to have the highest probability of making a correct prediction; see the quoted excerpt’s discussion of selecting decision strategies according to context in this comment.)
This selection process is not consciously accessible, so one only gets to experience the end results of the process: intentions, actions, experiences and thoughts arising seemingly on their own, with the exact criteria for choosing between them remaining unknown.
Now if the selection process is not consciously accessible, then that implies that under more normal states of mind, we do not know the exact reasons for our behavior either. And there’s plenty of research suggesting that we are in fact systematically wrong about the causes of our actions. Rather, the subsystem which creates the experience of the self normally has access to the information that does emerge in consciousness—the end results of the actual selection process, i.e. the intentions, actions, experiences and thoughts—and it then generates a narrative of how “the self” has chosen different actions. If that narrative gets temporarily suspended—as it did during my experience—then it becomes apparent that the exact causes of behavior were never known in the first place, only inferred.
One person who achieved stream entry (the traditional “first major step of enlightenment”) reported that his first thought after it was “I don’t know how I’ll ever decide what to do next again.” Then he sat still until he got tired, and went to bed. We may not know the exact reasons for why we do things, but that does not prevent our mind from doing things anyway.
Thank you for this comment. Even if you don’t remember exactly what happened, at the very least, your story of what happened is likely to be based on the theoretical positions you subscribe to, and it’s helpful to explain these theoretical positions in a concrete example.
I guess what I don’t like about what you’re saying is that it’s entirely amoral. You don’t say how actions can be good. Even if a sense of good were to exist, it would be somehow abstract, entirely third-personal, and have no necessary connection to actual action. All intentions just arise on their own, the brain does something with them, some action is performed, and that’s it. We can only be good people by accident, not by evaluating reasons and making conscious choices.
I also disagree that you can generally draw conclusions about what happens in normal states of consciousness from examining an abnormal state of consciousness.
The person who experienced stream entry whose thoughts you link to says (in the very next line after your quote) that he decided to sit still until he experienced a physiological drive. That seems to be a conscious decision.
EDIT: You can find another example of someone being completely amoral (in a very different way) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9XGUpQZY38
(I am not at all endorsing anything said in the video.)
To put the point starkly, as far as I can tell, whatever you’re saying (and what that video says) works just as well for a murderer as it does for you. Meditating, and obtaining enlightenment, allows a murderer to suffer less, while continuing to murder.
Well, we can certainly still evaluate reasons: in my example, “being under a cold shower for too long might be unhealthy” was a reason for stepping out of it. And it was evaluated consciously, in that the thought was broadcast into consciousness, allowing other subsystems to react to it—such as by objecting if they happened to disagree, or if they felt that continuing the experiment outweighed the risks. If other subsystems had raised objections, possibly I would have stayed in the shower longer.
This seems correct to me. My understanding is that the samurai actually practiced meditation in order to do well at battle and fear death less, that is, to be better at killing.
A draft for a later post in this series actually contains the following paragraphs:
It is somewhat unclear to me why exactly this bothers you, though. To me, meditation practice—together with the insights that it brings—is just a skill that brings you benefits in some particular areas, just like any other. Getting better at, say, physical exercise, also doesn’t tell you anything about how actions can be good. (Why would it?) Physical exercise also works the same for a murderer, possibly allowing them to murder better and easier. (Why wouldn’t it?)
I do think that there’s definitely some reason to expect that meditation could make you a better person—e.g. many of the reasons for why people are motivated to hurt other people, involve psychological issues and trauma that meditation may be helpful with. But if a sociopath who completely lacked an empathy subsystem (I don’t know enough about sociopathy to say whether this is an accurate description of it, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it is) happened to meditate and became enlightened, then of course there’s no reason to assume that meditation alone would create an empathy subsystem for them.
Your values are what they are, and meditation can help you understand and realize them better… but if your values are fundamentally “evil”, then why would meditation change them more than any other skill would?
Of course. You are, at the very least, technically right.
However, I think that obtaining enlightenment only makes it harder for you to change your values, because you’re much more likely to be fine with who you are. For example, the man who went through stream entry you linked to seems to have spent several years doing nothing, and didn’t feel particularly bad for it. Is that not scary? Is that likely to be a result of pursuing physical exercise?
On the other hand, if you spent time thinking clearly about your values, the likelihood of them changing for the better is higher, because you still have a desire (craving?) to be a better person.
He did, and then eventually his mind figured out a new set of motivations, and currently he is very actively doing things again and keeping himself busy.
Even apart from enlightenment, it is my own experience that one’s motivations may change in ways that are long-term good, but leave you adrift in the short term. At one point in my life I was basically driven by anxiety and the need to escape that constant anxiety. When I finally eliminated the source of anxiety, I had a period when I didn’t know what to do with my time anymore, because the vast majority of my habits (both physical and mental) had been oriented towards avoiding it, and that was just not necessary anymore.
Likewise, if people have trained learned to motivate themselves with guilt, then eliminating the guilt and trading it for a healthier form of motivation may be long-term beneficial, but leave them without a source of any motivation until their mind readjusts.
Whether enlightenment makes it easier or harder to change your values—I don’t know. Reducing craving means that you are less likely to cling to values that need revising, but may also eliminate cravings that had previously driven changes to your values. Certainly you can still spend time thinking about your values even if you are enlightened. (Though I am unclear to what extent anyone ever really changes their values in the first place, as opposed to just developing better strategies for achieving what, deep down, are their actual values.)
Personally I am not enlightened, but I certainly feel like developing deeper meditative insights has made it easier rather than harder for me to change my values. But human motivation is complicated, and which way it goes probably depends on a lot of individual factors.
EDIT: Thanks again for the discussion. It has been very helpful, because I think I can now articulate clearly a fundamental fear I have about meditation: it might lead to a loss of the desire to become better.
Cool. :) And yes, it might; it also comes with several other risks. If you feel like these risks are too large, then avoiding meditation may indeed be the right move for you. (As I said in the introductory post, I am trying to explain what I think is going on with meditation, but I am not trying to convince anyone to meditate if they think that it doesn’t seem worth it.)
All the gurus say that physical pain is just something from the body, and you can only have suffering (from it) if you are not enlightened. Would they still maintain that after being tortured for decades? I seriously doubt so.
This has lead me to believe that enlightenment is not about discovering truth, but quite the opposite. It’s about deluding yourself into happiness by believing that this world is actually something good.
That’s why I quit meditating. The only real hope is in eradicating suffering, a la David Pearce. Not ignoring it. Sure you can use meditation as pain management, but it isn’t the truth.
For what it’s worth, none of the people who I’d consider my meditation teachers have suggested that it’d be feasible to avoid suffering during extended torture, nor that it’d be practically possible to become so enlightened as to have no suffering at all.
That’s why I consider this world a not good world, for that (and less) being possible. Whereas all of them (Osho, Sadhguru, Ramana Maharishi) say that enlightenment is about realizing that you’re living in a good world. Hence it’s a lie imo.
If any of the teachers I’m most influenced by (Tucker Peck, Culadasa, Loch Kelly, Michael Taft, Daniel Ingram, Rob Burbea, Leigh Brasington) make that claim, I at least don’t remember encountering it. Pretty sure that at least some of them would disagree with it.
Maybe not is these exact terms, but maybe, I don’t know “realizing the benevolent tendency of existence”, “realizing the source as a benevolent force”, “realizing that all is love, that existence loves you”, etc. I’ve been hearing these kinds of claims from all gurus (although I’m not familiarized with any of the ones you mention, maybe you think the mainstream gurus from Osho to Eckhart Tolle are all bs? I don’t know).
Anyway, isn’t enlightenment also about losing fear, about being at ease? I once bought into it by understanding that ok, maybe all cravings are indeed futile, maybe death is indeed an illusion, maybe a back ache isn’t the end of the world and can be greatly alliviated through meditation… But how can you at least lose fear and be at ease, in a world where extreme physical pain is possible? Impossible.
I haven’t read any of their stuff so I don’t know. :)
“Enlightenment” is a pretty general term, with different traditions and teachers meaning different things by it; not all of the people I mentioned even use the term. Some people do say that it’s something like what you describe, others disagree (e.g. Ingram is quite vocal about his dislike for any models of enlightenment that suggest you can eliminate negative emotions), others yet might agree in part and disagree in part (e.g. they might agree that you can eliminate specific kinds of fear that are rooted in delusions, without being able to eliminate all categories of fear, or without it even necessarily being practically possible to get to all the delusions).
(There might also be some confusion going on in that “being at ease” in the sense used by meditation teachers does not necessarily mean “being without pain or negative emotions”; it might also mean that pain and negative emotions still appear, but the craving to be without them does not, so their appearance does not cause suffering. I think most of the people I mentioned wouldn’t claim you can get rid of all craving, but they would hold that you can substantially reduce it.)
However, there is something else I would like to ask you: do you think meditation can provide you with insights about the nature of consciousness? Those hard questions like “is the brain running algorithms”, “is consciousness possible to emulate or transfer into some other medium”, etc? I’d give a lot to know the answers to those questions but I don’t think that science will arrive there any soon. (And as for psychedelics I think that they just tell you what you want to hear, like dreams).
Ever had any of such kind of insights yourself? Or even about the nature of existence too.
Well, basically my whole multi-agent models of mind sequence (which talks quite a bit about the mechanisms and nature of consciousness) was motivated because I started noticing there being similar claims being made about the mind in neuroscience, psychotherapy and meditation, and wanting to put together a common framework for talking about them. So basically everything in all those posts is at least somewhat motivated by my experiences with meditation (as well as by my experiences with psychotherapy and my understanding of neuroscience).
That Wei Dai post explains little in these specific regards. Every Eastern religion, in my opinion, from Buddhism, to Induism, to Yoga, to Zen, teach Enlightenment as a way to reach some kind of extreme well-being through discovering the true nature of existence. Such would be rational in an acceptable world, not in this one—in this one it is the opposite, achieving well-being through self-delusion about the nature of existence. If you’re gonna keep dribbling this fact or invoking fringe views (regardless of their value) as the dominant ones, then we might just agree to disagree. No offense!
Oh, I’m not disputing that bit. The things I was saying there’s disagreement on were:
Whether it’s practically possible for someone to always experience such extreme well-being, as opposed to just most of the time (since you brought up the example of extreme torture, and it’s true that probably nobody is enlightened enough that they wouldn’t break down eventually if tortured)
Whether that extreme well-being necessarily takes the form of having only positive emotions, as opposed to being more at peace with also having negative emotions.
I think the teachers mean something slightly different by “the nature of existence”. The way I interpret it, “existence” is not so much a claim about the objective external world, but rather about the way your mind constructs your subjective experience. Things are confused by some of the teachers having a worldview that doesn’t really distinguish these, so they might talk of the two being one and the same.
Still, you can steelman the underlying claim to be about subjective rather than objective reality, and to say something like: “The nature of your subjective experience is that it’s entirely constructed by your mind, and that your wellbeing does not intrinsically need to depend on external factors; your mind is just hardwired to delude itself into thinking that it needs specific external conditions in order to have wellbeing. But because wellbeing is an internally computed property, based on interpretations of the world that are themselves internally computed, the mind can switch into experiencing wellbeing regardless of the external conditions.”
Note that this not require any delusion about what external reality is actually like: it would require delusion if internal wellbeing required the external universe to be good, but that’s exactly the kind of dependence on external conditions that the insight refutes. You can acknowledge that the external universe is quite bad, and then have lasting happiness anyway. In fact, this can make it easier to acknowledge that the external universe is bad, since that acknowledgment is no longer a threat to your happiness.
Though there’s also another nuance, which is that the same insight also involves noticing that your judgments of the world’s goodness or badness are also internally generated, and that considering the world intrinsically good or bad is an instance of the mind projection fallacy. And further, that the question of the world’s goodness or badness is just an internally-computed label, in a very similar kind of sense in which a thing’s bleggness is an internally computed label rather than there being an objective fact about whether something is really a blegg. Seeing that can lead to the experience that the world is actually neither good nor bad in an intrinsic sense, as its goodness or badness depends entirely on the criteria we choose for considering it good or bad; and this may be seen on a sufficiently deep level to relieve any suffering one was having due to an experience of the world being bad.
But that kind of nuance may be difficult to communicate, especially if one comes from a tradition which didn’t have terminology like “mind projection fallacy” or knowledge of neural networks, so it then gets rounded into “the world is intrinsically good”. This is because the emotional experience it creates may be similar to that which you’d have if you thought the world was intrinsically good in objective terms… even though there’s actually again no claim about what the external world is really like. You can have an internal emotional experience of feeling good about the world while simultaneously also acknowledging everything that is horrible about the world and still wanting to change it, since the key insight is again that your happiness or motivation does not need to depend on external factors (such as any specific properties of the world).