My guess is that meditation trains a lot of different skills, that whatever my brain does trains an overlapping but slightly different set of skills and at different proportional effectiveness, and that the end result is me being all over the place and not really possible to place on the scale.
From my experience, it seems that the core skill related to enlightenment is “second-order recognizing” (with two aspects: speed, and range of phenomena that it has access to), and everything else is downstream from it. Other skills built in meditation seem to be either to be incidental or merely helpful in developing second-order recognizing.
In light of that, I would not be so quick to assume some kind of personal uniqueness in terms of the model I laid out, especially given that that kind of thinking does seem to be a common human bias.
Hmm, some of my many of my psychological problems that’s been ruining my life for more than a year or so actually sounds a lot like how you describe stage 3… Than again half f every psychological effect or condition I’ve ever heard of does, so it’s not very string evidence.
Right, I wouldn’t take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough.
more something like “I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain (I call all of these “thoughts” and am confused abaut how people seem to classify some as “imagery” some as “thought” some as “feeling” etc. Those words are complete synonyms to me.) and some happen outside of my brain, but other than location they don’t seem any different and I get information about them through the same channel not sorted into two different piles like most people do.
If you intuitively and self-evidently see some phenomena as happening outside and some phenomena happening inside, which is what “[...]other than location they don’t seem any different[...]” means to me, that seems precisely to be sorting phenomena into two different piles. As if they come pre-tagged with “location” data.
As a long-time meditator, I don’t recognize phenomena as intuitively or self-evidently “inside” or “outside” or “neither inside nor outside” or “both inside and outside.” That entire classificatory scheme has ceased to exist for me. (In some ways I lack the ability to conceptualize what it would mean, although I remember that it used to mean something to me.) There is no location tag, and there is no empty field where the location tag would be. Of course, my model of the world tells me that some phenomena (sensory experience) represent stuff in the external world (albeit produced produced “inside,” through brain activity), while other phenomena (cognition) merely represent the activity of my brain, but that is just a model, something which can be altered for all sorts of reasons, and not the default way that my experience is parsed.
How would you really know what’s inside your brain and what’s outside your brain, except by applying an explicit detailed model of how the world works? Is that what you’re doing when sorting phenomena? Or are you using some more primitive way to sort (e.g. “sort by location tag”)? Because sorting by the application of a model is not a low-level cognitive process, and has all the implications for what that sorting is like which follow from not being a low-level cognitive process.
Apart from this, I’m not sure why you think thoughts and imagery and feelings are synonymous. If someone asked you how you felt, do you think “visualizing purple monkeys” could be an appropriate response? (Are you a synaesthete?)
I can sort events by where they happen and put aside those who have the location ‘armoks brain’ but it’s not somehting by brain does all the time if I don’t tell it to. ”
My guess is that this refers to the explicit sorting by the application of a model; for you, things come tagged by location, and you can choose to use the location tag to sort phenomena, or you can simply not sort.
So, unless I’m wildly misunderstanding you, my guess is that you aren’t partially enlightened. But, who knows. Have you tried the cessation-of-consciousness test I described to Adelene?
When I said I had no self I meant it more literally than you describe the meditation- attained one. “my mind is comprised of various automatic processes, there is nothing that ‘subjectively experience’ them, and words like ″me and ‘I’ are just pragmatically useful labels the usage of which varies with context and which obviously don’t correspond to anything in the real world. ”.
As far as I can tell, “me” and “I” correspond to things in the world, or at least, there is a way to interpret them so that they do. They may not correspond to anything ontologically unique, but they definitely do describe features of the functioning of a physical system (your brain / body complex in relation to its environment) as precisely as might be expected from natural language terms.
What you’re describing sounds to me like some kind of dissociative state.
(Speaking of which, if you ever need an expendable human to be tortured for 3^^^3 years or somehting I’ll volunteer so that an actual person wont have to do it.)
In your opinion, what are you missing that would make you an actual person? The feeling of being an actual person formed of processes that cohere? (regarding my “dissociative state” guess.)
I can assure you (with high probability) that most people you run into would consider you an actual person rather than a sequence of unrelated processes, regardless of whether or not you feel like an actual person. I’m sure (with high probability) that you recognize that all the processes in your experience function together in a precise, finely-tuned way, which is how you’re managing to have this conversation with me, and handle the rest of your life. So what’s missing?
Cool. You probably are partially enlightened. I take the cessation-of-consciousness test pretty seriously. But, two follow-up questions:
1) How do you know that consciousness ceases? What is it like?
2) Do you notice any difference in your attention / perception in the second before, and the second after, consciousness ceases?
Anyhow...
The degree to which you’re partially enlightened (or fully enlightened) will be hard for me to say much about, because most of the information I have about this relates to what people say about their current experience compared to their pre-enlightened experience (and you claim not to remember ever being un-enlightened), or relates to guessing on the basis of their meditation experience over time (which you obviously have none of apart from what I asked you to do just before). Even so, here are a few thoughts.
Moments where consciousness ceases tend to fall into three basic categories:
1) Consciousness ceases, and there is a big change in the way things appear to be afterwards. The basic model of enlightenment involves four stages of enlightenment (not directly related to the four stages of meditation experience I’ve described previously), and this category of consciousness-cessation occurs after advancing to the next stage. However, it can also occur when advancing towards enlightenment in a way that the four-stages model doesn’t cover, which is surprisingly common. (The four-stage model of enlightenment is somewhat primitive and doesn’t cover enough.) Some of your experiences seem to have been along these lines.
2) Consciousness ceases, and there is some small change in the way things appear to be afterwards. These tend to indicate advancing towards enlightenment in a way that isn’t covered by the model. Some of your experiences also seem to fit in here.
3) Consciousness ceases, and there are no changes afterwards apart from attention / mood / mindstate. These tend not to indicate anything except that that one has cycled through the perceptual modes (and is a test for partial enlightenment). You had five instances of this after running my test.
You claim always to have experienced things approximately the way you do now, except you have noted a number of moments where consciousness has ceased, and various large or moderate changes afterwards. So you were not born fully enlightened, and I would guess (on other theoretical grounds) are still probably not, but are probably beyond the first stage of enlightenment.
If you’re interested in this subject and want to pursue it further (publicly or through PM), let me know, I’d be glad to talk with you about it.
Other than that, I’d like to ask you some questions about your experience of the world. I’d like to hear how someone outside the culture of communities interested in enlightenment would describe her experience, and am interested in doing this publicly in order to provide evidence for or against the claims I’ve made in this series of posts. I’m also interested in how someone without any experience of being un-enlightened would describe things. (The descriptions may be radically different, for all I know, because so many of the typical descriptions are built around the contrast between before and after enlightenment, so I’m curious for all kinds of reasons how that turns out.) I can also try to give you some insight into how enlightened you are on the basis of your answers, if you’re interested. Also wanted to ask you about your synaesthesia, for reasons that may or may not turn out to be related to meditation / enlightenment. So let me know if all this is OK with you.
About your pronoun thing, not sure what to think, except that maybe this is a “meditation hangover,” which I assume has gone away since then.