I don't know how helpful this will be to others, but in my own investigation of this topic, including reading many different takes, I've found it highly helpful to notice/track different types of confusions that arise. Often value can be extracted and meaning can be triangulated from multiple takes by disentangling them. Especially for takes by people trying to get down to the actual mental events that are happening, I find it useful to pause and notice how the cached belief/concept I have contains one of these confusions. In this way, an initial 'ah-ha' moment from a good explanation can be milked for additional insight! Or to put it another way, noticing your confusion [? · GW] has perceptible structure. I run into at least these very frequently, there may be others worth categorizing as well.

Linguistic confusion: Korzybski coins the term multiordinal words, which are words that operate at multiple/ambiguous levels of abstraction, leading to easy misunderstandings. If the connotative space of a word is large (e.g. justice), it is unsurprising that people can use it while talking about completely different things [LW · GW]. This effect is magnified when we are translating from another language, and magnified further when it is from a dead language. Pali, the language that Buddhism was recorded in has no major surviving texts other than said discourses themselves.

Abstraction level confusion: While usually manifesting as a linguistic confusion, it is worth separating this out explicitly. An abstraction level confusion occurs when an explanation switches mid-stream between goal, representation, method, and implementation details and then fails to go back and connect things to the original level. Imagine that I want an explanation for why we need a table and you start discussing the expense of different table materials. This is much more pernicious when it occurs in the context of trying to learn about something new.

Pedagogical confusion: What is intended as formal practice instructions (i.e. sit down and do this for one hour) is either confused with the results of practice (e.g. a clear mind as a result, rather than something to do), or confused with a life philosophy/the final goal of the practice (e.g. the idea one should strive to have a clear mind at all times). So a subtype of this might also be

Measurement confusion: where it isn't clear what the metric for success is supposed to be.

Metaphysical confusion: Map-territory confusion as standard here. I'd also include positive-normative equivocation under this heading, i.e. claims about what-is confused with claims about what-ought. These kind of reference-referent mixups get worse when we're talking about modifying or examining the thing you are using to do the examination [LW · GW].

You probably noticed that this isn't a totally clean ontology, in that things may fall into multiple categories. Improvement is possible! And I've also noticed how much clearer my thinking gets when I get better at noticing that, that an explanation or argument hinges on several of these mixed together.

Epistemic Status: I've spent a couple decades attempting to understand Buddhism from a non-mystical, scientific perspective, so I can appreciate a lot of the work you've put into this post. I don't have much to add at this point in discussion of the science behind it all, but I do have some personal thoughts. I took refuge back around 2012, and my practice mostly centers around attempting to practice right speech, right thought, and right action. I am also trying to be somewhat non-chalant in my writing style, I'm still learning to develop it.

There isn't much here to disagree with in my opinion, but I often wonder these days what it is that people who want to study Buddhism without practicing it are looking for. I fully admit as a child in the 80's I fell in love with Japanese cartoons, martial arts, asian food and the esoteric mysticism of the East. 

As a half jewish, half white male who came from a strong catholic and jewish background, living in the protestant midwest, I was looking for something different in terms of understanding my place in the world and the meaning of life anyway.

For various reasons, I came to Buddhism through the culture and media I immersed myself in at a time before the Internet; It came as part of a package deal along with training in and studying martial arts, appreciating asian food, culture and history and aspiring to learn Japanese. These all helped me to put Buddhism into an historical and social context, and I think this is a very important point.

I'm often offended at pop culture ideas surrounding 'esoteric' or 'mystical' things, or even just half baked attempts to integrate different cultures and ideas. My mom studied Anthropology, Photography and Film studies/Media Critique and Women's Studies in College as I was growing up, so I grew up with a healthy respect for other cultures, and how media is used to influence people. I think the Internet has really warped peoples ideas about how to 'best' or 'respectfully' integrate other peoples cultures into our own. Buddhism is a prime example to me.

As a teenager in the 90's, I read more about Buddhism, and saw how it presented the world (mostly from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective through books by the Dalai Lama) and I wanted the happiness I thought was there. Through a life filled with counseling I also learned about and practiced CBT and psychotherapy, which I continue to engage with, study and research to this day, because of issues with Depression, PTSD, and ADD which still take up a fair amount of my time. 

I developed interests in Cognitive/Neuro Psychology/Biology, Psychology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Computer Graphics, Media Studies and Sociology and they all paired well with an introspective approach to understanding myself and other people, but I still didn't "get it." I read a lot and thought a lot about Buddhism and what concepts like enlightenment meant. I meditated some, but did so without supervision and looking back, trying to do insight meditation without a teacher wasn't responsible. 

As someone who was very young at the time, I liked the idea of becoming "enlightened" and "letting go of my ego." I believed I could learn to use my time and energy for the benefit of other people and put away my 'selfish' desires to help myself, and even thought this was desirable. This backfired as I became a people-pleaser, and still find it hard to put my needs ahead of other peoples to this day.

I can't put this fully at the feet of my lone and ill advised forays into meditation, but it's only much later I learned the idea that in order to let go of something, you have to have it first. I don't think I had fully developed my ego at the point I started learning to "let it go" and healthy formation of identity is a crucial step to a happy life I think.

So I think the warning against meditating without a responsible guiding framework is particularly important. Personally, I also think having an actual teacher who comes from a Buddhist tradition is important, in order to put things into social and cultural perspective. While I see benefit to understanding the underlying structure and functions of the brain and consciousness - after all I have spent a fair amount of time reading and studying about it - I do think it's possible to get so caught up in trying to understand it, that it ceases to become useful. I fully endorse the idea of a 'middle way' and 'everything in moderation.' 

Epistemic Statement: My opinion, based on slightly more than superficial study of Asian culture, but done over a long period of time. I'm not a teacher, so don't take my word for it, but I'm fairly certain I've got at least a rough handle on some of these issues. 

And I am unimpressed with 'stealing' other peoples cultures, and ignoring ideas we think are strange out of hand, as we tend to want the benefits without the responsibilities associated with them. My mom spent some time on a Navajo reservation as a young woman in the late 60's, and at first wanted to put cameras into the hands of traditional people so that they could record their own cultures without the taint of mainstream prejudice (I'm paraphrasing badly.)

But she used to tell me as a kid the same story again and again, about the aboriginal tribes people who refused to have their pictures taken when photographers first started exploring tribal areas around the world. They believed that cameras 'stole your soul', and didn't want to have anything to do with cameras. How silly is that? 

She realized that not all cultures can benefit equally from technological advances, and just because you can make some cultural exchanges, certainly doesn't mean the trades offs are fair. Native people have lost their cultures and their land, but we sure do have some interesting documentation of what their cultures looked like before modern society destroyed them. I think the same is potentially true of Buddhist practices and beliefs (and other traditional cultures being decimated as we speak.) 

So issues like being able to put current concerns into historical context is sobering for me. Do I think everyone should learn to mediate? No, I don't. Meditation, especially the type associated with Buddhism comes from a sort of horrible tradition in my opinion. Ascetics are generally people who have either been rejected by society, or have become disillusioned with it to the point they separate themselves from society. 

By removing themselves from society and taking the time to explore their minds, they come to understand things about themselves and society, most people aren't interested in knowing. Society has a hierarchy, some people get to 'live' life, while others suffer from poverty and scarcity. This is the way it is, not the way it should be in my opinion.

From my understanding, many religious orders - nuns and priesthoods - first develop out of a scarcity of resources within a society, so that by taking vows of chastity they avoid bringing new life into a world that can't support more life, by taking vows of poverty they pull themselves out of the competition for money, food and other resources. By pulling themselves out of society, they stop contributing to the problems associated with over population and scarcity of resources, but they find they still have the rest of their lives to do something with. Why not sit in a corner, still, for hours on end every single day and then eat small healthy portions of food, get some good sleep and do it all over again the next day for the rest of your life?

They develop the introspective ability to 'become happy' with not having anything, with rejecting worldly pleasures (what most of us think of as 'living our lives') and they train themselves and other nuns or priests, to be able to live their lives in a way that reduces the stress on the communities they come from, but live apart from. Meditation wasn't a path to happiness and peace and prosperity, it was in many ways a practice of self denial sometimes just short of committing suicide. How these initial traditions developed over time varied from country to country, but the main take away was learning to be happy without living life like 'normal' people.

This type of tradition stands in stark contrast to how most people want to benefit from Buddhist ideas and traditions today. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but many of the associate ideas, like Karma and Nirvana and Reincarnation, that come from Buddhist practices, often become distorted. Karma was what you exchanged your ability to 'live' your life for as a priest or nun. In this exchange, you hoped for either Nirvana, or being reborn at a higher level in your next life; this is what was supposed to motivate you to 'right action, right thought, right speech' as you denied yourself the ability to live like other people. There were a whole host of responsibilities that came along with the 'benefits' of meditation, which is why in some ways I think the study of Buddhism with out practicing it is much less 'beneficial' for the world at large.

Many of the problems associated with Religion in general can be attributed to Buddhism as well. That is to say that a reason many people offer for not wanting to practice Buddhism, is that it is an organized religion in the same vein as Christianity. But unlike Christianity, many of the practices, like meditation, which developed through non-western Religious traditions like Buddhism, continue to grow in popularity and gain traction in places like Scientific communities, whereas religions like Christianity tend to be considered an impedance to scientific inquiry and seem to be waning in popularity. As western society continues to develop socially and culturally, why is it we're drawn to Buddhism, but don't want to practice it?

I've heard of a lot of christian churches beginning to incorporate things like meditation and yoga and asian martial arts into their cultures, but I believe they tend to do it in a way that completely ignores the social and cultural heritages the practices come from. They don't like the cultural connotations of the practices, and they get around this by removing the cultural aspects of the practice and just teach the 'core principles'. So while they gain the benefits of the practices, they lose sight of the responsibilities that come along with them, by abandoning the 'esoteric' and 'questionable' aspects of them. 

I'm not suggesting that 'mysticism' should be taught along side these practices. As rational people, considering pop culture ideas of 'magic' as fact should be hard to accept. But people who benefit from these practices do a disservice to all of us, when the traditions which balance out the benefits of a practice with the responsibility of the knowledge that comes with it, are put aside. In this Digital Age it's too easy for some people to get 'it' all without giving back, and I think this understanding is somewhere near the heart of all that 'mysticism' and 'esoteric' and 'mysterious' stuff.

If you want a non-mystical theory-of-everything for meditation, you can't do much better than Shinzen Young. His article, "What is mindfulness" is a good start and I highly recommend his book "The science of enlightenment"(science being metaphorical here). He had multiple free PDFs of meditation practice manuals on his site and many YouTube videos as well.

While at deeper levels, meditative experiences enter the ineffable territory quickly, Shinzen has done an excellent job defining terms precisely and breaking down things into relatively simple terms. He writes as an engineer/scientist would and in my opinion, brings a much needed clarity to the theory and practice of meditation.

"I started out skeptical of many claims, dismissing them as pre-scientific folk-psychological speculation, before gradually coming to believe in them - sometimes as a result of meditation which hadn’t even been aimed at investigating those claims in particular, but where I thought I was doing something completely different."

Did you come to believe in rebirth and remembering past lives?

Great post. I can't wait to read the subsequent parts.

I proceed from the assumption that regardless of whether the original frameworks are true or false, they do systematically produce similar effects and insights in the minds of the people following them, and that is an observation which needs to be explained [LW · GW].

Any particular reason to believe that? It's true that when googling for reports of meditators, many results seem consistent with each other. However, there are at least two strong biases at play:

• Confirmation bias - because the meditator doesn't want to admit that they have wasted their investment and did not experience what was supposed to be the result of the practice.
• Selection bias - because reports diverging from the common theme don't get as much attention.

Kaj, are you familiar with the idea of a plurality of enlightenments? Both in the sense of a difference in degree (à la the Theravadan 4 path model) and a difference in kind (à la Jack Kornfield's Enlightenments). Wondering what your take on it is and how this series is going to navigate that. I suspect this is one reason I've noticed meditation practitioners trending toward the term awakening rather than enlightenment.

Interesting. Curious to see the rest.

Getting deep in meditation requires a huge investment of time and effort

Not really. You can start with just 5 or 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day for six weeks is just 5 hours (taking weekends off). Not such a huge investment for most. Just cut out a few hours of Netflix over the course of a month-and-a-half.

I think you'll find some interesting ideas which address your first point in this Tim Keller talk, especially the points about "recipes vs understanding," seeking first principles, and the point that 99% of what you think is wrong and you only have the remaining 1% to deal with that situation. I see meditation as a process to strength and expand that 1% part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

On the second point, Robert Wright's book "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment" does a pretty good job.

I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled, the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the womb, the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the timeless wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns. Down and back through ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler—a thin string of molecules going through the trial and error of getting itself into the right order to be a unit of organic life. Relentlessly back and back through endless and whirling dances in the astronomically proportioned spaces which surround the original nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as remotely distant on the inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the outside.

Down and at last out—out of the cosmic maze to recognize in and as myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten yet familiar sensation of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity, inmost light, ultimate center, self more me than myself. Standing in the midst of Ella's garden I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home behind home, that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning. Plucked like the strings of a harp, the warp and woof of the world reverberate with memories of triumphant hymns. The sure foundation upon which I had sought to stand has turned out to be the center from which I seek. The elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe is discovered as the immediate gesture of my hand. But how did I ever get lost? And why have I traveled so far through these intertwined tunnels that I seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my conventional self?

--Alan Watts

If you're going to double-down on the idea of "deep" meditation [LW(p) · GW(p)], would it be unreasonable to ask for some disambiguation? What are the key differences between "deep meditation vs. plain old meditation" in your "model"? Or are there more than two types? Are there 20 types? 200 types?

I don't mean to be pedantic, but I think this notion of "deep," or "serious," or "real" meditation vs. some false, light, or non-serious practice is dubious at best.

Sure, someone may be more likely to experience the benefits of meditation faster if she takes a 10-day retreat compared to 10-days of ten-minute practice. Or maybe not. She might just reject the experience as overwhelming, tedious and painful. Would you agree that someone who consistently runs for 10 minutes, three times a week, is going to realize greater long-term health benefits than someone who only run-walks one marathon a year? Furthermore, telling people that to do it right, physical fitness "requires a huge investment of time and effort" is more likely to discourage anyone from getting up off their ass. I appreciate that you raise awareness of potential risks, but your notion of the time required for "deep" meditation is curiously out of step with what leading meditation instructors advocate.

More importantly, this whole notion of "optimizing returns" is antithetical to the whole practice of meditation! More on this in a moment.

If I cook for only 10 minutes, am I not really "deep cooking"? If I read for 5 minutes, am I only "shallow reading"? How long do I need to exercise before I'm "deep" exercising? Or does this whole idea of "deep vs. shallow" only apply to meditation and not to aerobic sports, weightlifting, or other activities?

"Deep vs shallow (non-deep? light?)" smells like a dumbbell theory--an attempt to explain the world in terms of opposing forces or principles:

• Good vs Evil
• Conscious vs Unconscious
• Intentional vs Unintentional
• Thoughts vs Feelings
• Enlightenment vs Non-Enlightenment
• Self vs No-Self

Whenever I see such a two-part distinction, I try to see if I can separate things into three or four parts instead. If I cannot, then I suspect what we have isn't two things at all, but two extremes along a single continuum.

Sure, I'll grant that putting a frozen meal in the microwave barely counts as cooking. But when someone sets aside a specific amount of time to deliberately practice an established Vipassana meditation technique, even if for only 10 minutes, it seems wrong, and pretentious, to discredit that as insufficient and somehow fails to qualify as "real" hardcore meditation.

Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers. He's led meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (est. 1975). Joseph has conducted and produced countless short meditation sessions. Do you take the position that he's effectively wasting (quite a lot of) people's time with his "softcore" approach to meditation?

What if, in your quest to "dissolve the algorithm" you only succeed to dumb things down and distill away much of the nuance, subtlety, and non-obvious aspects of meditations effects before you even had a chance to notice some of them? Perhaps it's too much to hope that when Eastern philosophy encounters Western culture, it could ever result in the Easternization of the West and survive distortion and corruption by Western psychopathologies.

Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It's one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries--giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.

Now, say someone comes along and says they aren't happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into "straightforward terms" and come up with a "precise" language to "correctly capture the essentials" and make an "unambiguous model" that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I'm afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You'll end up with something, but I think you'll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn't know what they are missing--like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who's never heard a performance.

Why stop there! Maybe we can patent the "algorithm" and commodify it as a sort of Mindfulness Porn. Perhaps we could build an "enlightenment machine." Something akin to one of those Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices for people who want to short circuit a proper weightlifting routine. Who needs sex when you can have an Autoblow 2?

I'm sure I'll get accused of being anti-science or anti-intellectual for my position here. But I only hope to convey that there are limits to reductionism when it comes to complex, multi-dimensional (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) aspects of human experience. In a similar vein, it's well-documented that while the reductionist approach has been successful in the early days of molecular biology, unmitigated reductionism underestimates biological complexity and has had an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development.

Your focus on "results" and notions of "return on investment" and gamification of meditation by hacking the "algorithm" is profoundly antithetical to the practice and sounds misguided to me.

Abandon all hope of fruition.

--Atisha, an eleventh century Tibetan meditation teacher.

Pema Chodron calls this one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition, and she says that as long as you wish for things to change, they never will. As long as you're wanting yourself to get better, you won't. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. Pema admitted that she had been unconsciously thinking for decades that she was going to come to a place in the future when she was "really" enlightened. Eventually, she realized that the enlightenment had been happening all along the way, step-by-step, in each moment, and she let go of hoping for some big bang in the future.

The joke in meditation is that we get somewhere by not trying to get anywhere.

"Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment" is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. I think this is something that should be celebrated, not discouraged with artificial notions of status or classes of accomplishment.

To be clear, I don't accuse you of any ill-intentions, and I write this all in good faith. I just wanted to try and raise awareness of some things you might not be considering.

Cheers!