Attacking enlightenment

As a practicing Zen Buddhist this post worries me a bit. Yes, lots of people see juicy things they could gain. Yes, lots of other folks have written books trying to explain how to get them. But to me this approach is missing most of why we practice since we practice no-gain; that is, there would be reason to practice even if you (the big "you", the imagined, closed self) gained nothing. In fact, the more you try to gain we say the further away you are from attainment! I worry this is leading people down a path that will take them farther away from the Dharma rather than closer to it.

I'm also further worried because meditation and other practices pulled from Buddhism are part of an integrated system that includes a community and teachers to help guide you. There are actually a lot of psychological dangers lurking in your mind and approaching them using isolated bits you pull from systems risks inflicting psychic harm on yourself. I rarely see this mentioned to people, though, who get enthusiastic about isolated parts of Buddhist practice like meditation and excitedly go off to do it in their own life without the support structures in place to enable it.

Maybe my worry can be boiled down to this: Buddhism teaches humility, especially epistemic humility, and I feel like there is an undercurrent in this post suggesting "hey, forget those weird monks and rituals; we can take their ideas and do it without all the weirdness and do it better". This may not have been Elo's intention, but if you read the post that way and were thinking of going in that direction, I'd encourage you to reconsider the value of both inter-generational accumulated wisdom and practicing within the context of a tradition with a community to support you in your practice.

Mastering the Core teachings of the Buddha 2 - Daniel Ingram

The Mind Illuminated

The art of learning

Circling handbook

Impro

Transform your self

While I can see some connections between all of these books, I feel that if "enlightenment" is to mean anything, defining it so broadly as to have all of these books be about it makes the term vague enough to be useless. In fact, some of these works pretty much outright state that by their definition of enlightenment, the other books are not about enlightenment - e.g. MCTB2 explicitly denies that enlightenment would be particularly useful in terms of conventional mental health (while e.g. "Transform Your Self" is all about psychological health):

Here is another thing that didn’t happen upon awakening: psychological perfection. While the mainstream Western Buddhist world is absolutely drowning in the notion that somehow Buddhist practice will either eliminate all their psychological “stuff”, or at least cause them to become self-actualized in the good old psychoanalytical sense, nothing could be further from the truth except totally bogus models such as the Action models. I think that I learned more about reasonable psychological health from reading one book on transactional analysis (Ian Stewart and Vann Joines’ fascinating book TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis) than I did from over a decade of highly successful Buddhist meditation. That doesn’t mean that I have achieved perfect psychological health, not by a long shot! [...]

While the dharma is vast, and the teachings of the wisdom traditions contain a lot of material for helping us grow psychologically, we can’t conflate psychological growth and maturity with awakening, and letting people get stuck in the Great Dismal Crap Quagmire does them little service, if you ask me, which you clearly did, as you are reading this book. As I said before, working on our psychological stuff can have lots of value, and Western psychology has added a vast array of useful conceptual frameworks and techniques to the world of psychological health and human development, but I firmly believe that clearly drawing the line between insight practice and psychological work is essential to doing either well. I have been to therapy and really got a lot out of it, just on a totally different front from what insight practices got me. It is not that I haven’t had psychological insights of great value when on retreat, as I have had plenty, but those psychological insights came from good insight practice as some surprising and appreciated side effect rather than the other way around.

What's the value proposition of enlightenment?

If I have a choice between taking up organized religion and going to church or taking up spirituality and following empirical instructions to scale the mountain of enlightenment, why should I do the latter instead of the former?

What's the common theme in all these books? I don't see it. Impro contains some useful exercises, although I think most of the value in the book would come from people getting together IRL and actually doing them, and I haven't heard of anyone doing this. (I tried to get someone whose social network is much bigger than mine to make this happen, but then she moved to the Bay.) But it's about developing acting skills, not Buddhism...

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen koan

What does that mean you cryptic bastards! If enlightenment is so great then give me some step by step directions to it!

Here's another, slightly more informative quote:

The famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin [Seigen Ishin]

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

These classic quotes cut right to the essence of Zen, but provide no context or path for getting there.

I see a few key reasons for the persistent "woo-woo" vagueness. (1) Many persons are attracted to what they see as a doorway to mystical, occult, supernatural, etc. knowledge and powers. Good, I suppose, to the extent it keeps them on their journey of discovery... (2) People come from different backgrounds and harbor different preconceptions of "the Truth" and (in my experience) it usually takes a vast and indeterminate amount of effort to convey and address all these aspects of what Zen is not, leaving the very simple but powerful essence of what Zen is. So the standard approach is to offer small kernels intended to avoid the myriad possible objections while still engaging the mind of the seeker in resolving the apparent paradox by discovering the appropriate context.

The denizens of LessWrong can sometimes be found in the first category, under the influence of almost magical belief in the power of "Rationality" as they imagine it, and quite often in the second, where their intelligence gives them a view of things somewhat above that of the crowd, but where they tend to stay and admire the superior view rather than strive to take it up (and out) another level of context and meaning making.

[I realize that the above could be taken as demeaning, but could easily provide the basis for a 3rd justification for pedagogical vagueness--not to create a barrier by offending the other's pride. A 4th justification, and probably the strongest, would be that understanding that is constructed, rather than conveyed, tends to have greater impact. But time is short...]

Zen enlightenment is simply about re-conceiving the relationship between the observer and the observed.

Once this re-conception is attained, everything is just as it was before but ontologically simpler--there is no separate, privileged "self" in the model of reality. To grok this is liberating and may cause one to laugh with joy at the silliness of having carried that imagined burden for no gain; indeed it only got in one's way. Then, back to cutting wood and carrying water, the same as before but feeling lighter.

I hope that this might help.

-Jef

While a focus on the exterior may very well contribute to the high rate of mental health problems in the community, I've always thought it had more to do with selection effects.

A large portion of the thought in the community revolves around how to think, which is something most people never study (and likely never feel the need to). But those who are thinking badly - that is, those who realize that they have patterns of thought that don't correlate well with reality - have a reason to seek out a better way of thinking.

There's also some evidence to suggest that higher intelligence by itself correlates with mental illness:

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/intelligence-mental-illness-iq-study-findings-depression-a8005801.html%3famp

Other than that, great post and thank you for assembling that list of resources.

I am rather embarrassed to say that I always classified Buddhism as a religion. (...) What I didn’t realize was that it’s more like (slightly gibberish) empirical instructions to follow, after which you should find your way up the mountain to enlightenment.

Also, stories of magical healing.

I'm reading Altered Traits & have been impressed with its epistemological care. Perhaps helpful for your project?

The tacit stance behind 'just say what you mean!' is that if they were smarter they'd be able to do a better job of explaining themselves. Consider that they might be just as smart as you. If that were the case, what might they be trying to tell you?

I'll try to say it with rationalist flavor: they are trying to point out to you that you have a major blindspot (it's actually both an object level and meta level blindspot!) and want to induce the cognitive jitter necessary for you to directly see it. The fact that you ask for them to give you simple directions when they *have* given you simple directions *over and over again* and yet you ignore these simple instructions points at the blindspot.

This is a very interesting post, thank you for bringing this up. This a going to be a very personal thought i'd like to share.

I think that, as you well sayed, your enlightenment needs to follow both paths; "emotionnal" and "rationnal" to simplify. The difference imo lays in the distance you can travel on these paths. I actually think this distance is finite and actually pretty limited. Every questioning whether it is about the nature of reality, consciousness, or the inner meaning of our joys or fears ends in a space where words lack. I truly believe this is the root of every fear, every question. We have a tendency to find sentences, maxims that synthesize our fears and our thoughts because this is our only way of retranscribing our insights and this is great ! But i've always found these summary of a vaccum ironically pretty empty and meaningless.

My opinions on the subject is that we can reach SOME unlightenment by questionning our relation to this "End of the word". But most part of the work is to admit that we NEED put words and ideas on things in order to appreciate them as thinking beings, and that in this way we're unable to reach anything further. Whoever wants to reach some answer needs to give up the very word answer and admit that all he can do is scratch the edges of the caneva forever.

A lot of religions/spiritualitys adress this opinion but still let a door opened to Unicity, this is the idea of a buddha, if there is one person who succeded to transcend word and meaning it's him. But I think, and again this is abundantly subjective, that a buddha is and must stay an unreachable goal.

In way the key to unlightenment is giving up the idea of unlightenment but still perpetually trying to reach for it. It's in this way that all people needs a different path, everyone needs a different way to "loose the word without loosing the mind". Personally I like trying to reach some contemplation of the unthinkable, at least contemplating the beauty OF the unthinkable, i won't be able to go any further anyway.

So this is my personnal opinion, scratch the edges, abandon the idea of ever getting out because your bounded to the word, and try to appreciate the beauty of what will ever be unreachable and the eternal terror that emanates from it, which is imo the elemental brick of every existential question. (If i had to speculate as a psychology student i would say that this is the very begenning of every psychopathology, but this is another topic that needs strongest arguments than philosophy itself)

Thank you for taking the time to read, sorry if this is a bit clumsy English is not my native language i tried to correct this post several times.

I've achieved several different kinds of contradictory enlightenment. It's pretty overrated to me at this point.