Kenshō

It is occasionally said to me,

"Have you considered meditation and buddhism? Enlightenment is really powerful."

This feels similar to saying

"Have you considered giving up a massive resource - one of your scarce slots for a life-long habit, a daily time-sink with week-long retreats - to Buddhist meditation? It supposedly makes you feel funny at the end, as though you've had a major epistemological insight (but you aren't able to produce corresponding output as a result)."

Given the amount of people offering me something like the above, my background skepticism is very high.

The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result. If, for example, you wrote sequence of recognisably useful insights unrelated to enlightenment (example), and then afterwards told me that it was due to your having felt enlightenment, I'd consider that interesting evidence. But I do predict that I find your subsequent post not much evidence either way.

I will mention that I have some notion of a thing you might be pointing towards: I've experienced ontological updates - updates to the feelings that make up the building blocks of how I think. And this does require a certain 'get out of your head / no seriously look up' motion, which you might be pointing too. Also, Buddhism is an old old religion and there's this notion that religions do capture truths of human nature, which is why they're able to be so widespread yet profound. So maybe you'll manage to capture that.

But sometimes when someone has a hard time explaining something, it's because they're just confused. So many people are trying to communicate supposed fundamental truths, and aren't showing much for it. As I say, my background skepticism is high.

I think that the only coherent way to convince us that Enlightment is real is to provide a model from a 3rd party perspective. To use your phone parable, you can send the other person a diagram of a person holding a phone, explain to them how eir current perceptions arise (e.g. the phone is a computer attached to an LCD display, the display generates light according to commands from the computer, light enters eye retina; brain controls eye muscles, neck muscles and leg muscles etc.) and then explain how the new perceptions can arise (if eye + neck muscles rotate your line of sight s.t. it doesn't intersect phone display...) Scientific epistomology can be in principle explained in a similar way, through models such as Solomonoff induction (although in this case it took a lot of time from the invention of scientific epistemology to the invention of a sufficiently precise model.)

The model doesn't have to be fully mathematically rigorous: as always, it can be a little fuzzy and informal. However, it must be precise enough in order to (i) correctly capture the essentials and (ii) be interpretable more or less unambigously by the sufficiently educated reader.

Now, having such a model doesn't mean you can actually reproduce Enlightment itself. Your interlocutor can understand the diagram but still fail to understand how to use eir neck / eye muscles in the right way. Indeed, one can imagine people whose brain was atrophied so that they are physically incapable of looking up from their phone. Similarly, it is possible that you are experiencing qualia that some (or even most) people simply don't have and I don't see strong evidence to the contrary at the moment (the vague notion that "we already know" doesn't strike me as strong evidence.)

However, producing such a model would give us the enormous advantages of (i) being able to come up with experimental tests for the model (ii) understanding what sort of advantages we would gain by reaching Enlightment (iii) being sure that your are talking about something that is at least a coherent possible world even if we are still unsure whether you are describing the actual world.

I think drawing may be a similar skill. I can't actually draw well, but my model of how one does this is by not interpreting your visual field by the laws of perspective and instead making lines that correspond to your actual sensations. This is why sometimes one sees it recommended, as a learning technique, to put a photo upside down and then try drawing that. It forces you to pay attention to the lines instead of performing the visual parsing step one ordinarily does. (The other half of drawing is causing the lines to show up on the page in the place where you want them to; this is not part of the analogy.)

One could consider this Looking at one's raw visual phenomena. The skill described in the OP would be Looking at one's own mental phenomena, a layer or two further up the stack from the raw visual phenomena. It's possibly important not to think one has the generalized skill of looking if one just knows how to draw (it may block you from actually learning how to Look). However, if this analogy holds as strongly as I think it does, then one ought to be able to learn both skills with similar techniques?

For drawing that implies perhaps spending time studying your visual field without parsing it may improve your skill, even without practice (clearly at some point you also have to learn the skill of putting lines where you want them). This sounds a lot like meditation, but applied to different sensory input. This seems like a testable prediciton of this hypothesis/theory.

Then again, I might be normie-splaining; I don't draw well, and I either haven't had the experience described in the OP or have but don't consider it remarkable (honestly can't quite tell). But this seems like a stronger analogy than any I have had heard.

G’Kar: You must understand, Ta’Lon. I have had a revelation!

Ta’Lon: What kind of revelation?

G'Kar: A most profound and substantial one, Ta’Lon. The kind of revelation that transforms your mind, your soul, your heart—even your flesh—so that you are a new creature, reborn in the instant of understanding.

Ta’Lon: That was a stirring reply, Citizen G’Kar. Unfortunately, while all answers are replies, not all replies are answers. You did not answer the question that I asked. What do you understand now that you did not understand before?

— “Point of No Return” (Babylon 5, season 3, episode 9)

Ta’Lon’s reply is, basically, my reaction to this post.

So you’re enlightened. Ok. Now what? What do you understand now that you did not understand before? What do you know now that you did not know before? What can you do now that you could not do before? What have you gained? (And why should anyone want this thing? Or should they?)

Or, to put it another way: suppose that, just prior to reading this post, my view of enlightenment was “I suspect this ‘enlightenment’ business is mostly nonsense, though there’s a chance it’s not nonsense”. Would you predict that reading this post would shift my view? If so, in which direction would you predict that my view would shift?

Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced.

Can you say how? (Was it drugs?)

1. https://www.liberationunleashed.com - the folks who focus on delivering people the "it was here all along" realisation. They have a book of transcripts and you can read the forum. From the outside it looks entirely gibberish. From the inside it looks like they are pointing at something, and as you get closer in you can see what they are pointing at.
2. http://bearlamp.com.au/how-i-accidentally-discovered-the-pill-to-enlightenment-but-i-wouldnt-recommend-it/ My experiences in enlightenment states including links to a lot of things. This is woo-territory so you need to get people to not outright reject ENL before the conversation starts.
3. PNSE paper. talking about enlightnment states. Which location do you think you arrived at?
4. http://bearlamp.com.au/zen-koans/ My take on zen koans with a recording that I ran at a dojo in Sydney.
5. http://bearlamp.com.au/filter-on-the-way-in-filter-on-the-way-out/ Some notes on convincing people of a thing. And how to frame the information.
6. NVC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc Val would know this but everyone else might not. It's possible to transmit understanding easier by understanding the reverse of NVC. Say - by repeating the words, combining with focusing and talking about the resultant knots that arise internally.

There's a lot here and I am glad to see other people writing about it.

The awakened community definitely needs more rationality and the rationality community could probably benefit from some Insight, so thank you for starting this conversation. Hopefully it's just the first step. For anyone interested r/streamentry is a mostly woo-free, friendly community for discussing this sort of thing.

A particularly useful and traditional guideline is to wait a year and a day before claiming an attainment and completely making up your mind. This is slippery stuff sometimes, and many states and stages can easily fool someone into thinking that they are something they are not.

Do you have a teacher? I ask for two reasons. Firstly a reputable teacher will be able to provide confirmation of your attainment. Secondly what you’re describing doesn’t sound like stream entry, it sounds like A&P. There’s typically a difficult period after this which can be brutal if you’re not expecting it and it’s extremely useful to have the support of a teacher who knows the territory to guide you through it. Whatever it turns out to be it sounds like it's reduced suffering considerably, so congratulations.

You linked to Rinzai Zen, is that the tradition in which you’ve been trained? The impression I get from your comments is that the “sudden enlightenment” paradigm is operating as a background assumption and that’s leading into conflict and unnecessary dead ends in some comment threads. The “I want cake”, “I’m giving you cake” thread is the best example of this. I think gradualism better maps onto reality, provides a better support for a daily practice and provides a better explanation of enlightenment as a concept. Gradual versus Sudden is an old debate (I'm not sure how familiar you are with it) and I don’t want to simply rehash that but I do want to point towards a few advantages that can help avoid the pitfalls I'm seeing here.

Telling people (rationalists in particular) that everything is already perfect or it doesn’t matter if they get “it” just annoys people. Gradualism provides a better framework for learning and leads to less frustration. Small steps are easier to take than a huge inferential gap. The success of The Mind Illuminated is testament to this.

Stream entry is a good example of the blurry line between sudden and gradual attainments. It’s seems like a discrete stage, you either are or you aren’t a stream enterer. Except there are many different definitions of what stream entry is and where you should place the dividing line. It’s better described as a spectrum with several significant shifts along it.

Meta: it looks like a few people (including me) are getting confused about comments disappearing on this thread. The page by default only displays 100 comments, presumably chosen by magical algorithm, and you need to request at the top to get it to display more comments.

To me this effect is jarring because when I see that a comment I wrote has disappeared I don't know whether it was 1) eaten by a bug, 2) put on another thread by a bug, 3) deleted by a moderator, or 4) hidden in this way, which is not a hypothesis I had before looking more carefully because I already had 3 other excellent hypotheses. I don't have concrete suggestions for what to do about this.

I think you're talking about doing your own perceptual chunking, instead of projecting socially received models (or your own prior models) on top of something. This is absolutely critical for being able to do anything new, and almost definitionally difficult to verify based on legible standards. I don't actually think the problem is that people don't know how to do it - it's usually that they perceive an incentive not to do it, and to cover up this fact. And sometimes they're right!

Related: Do One-Eyed Rule Blind?, The order of the soul

[Edit: this comment starts off on a critical tone. After reading more comments which are very critical, I wanted to edit my comment to first at least indicate that I think you are communicating about it as best you can and am somewhat annoyed with those suggesting otherwise. Nonetheless, my comment focuses on a single paragraph in which you make a decision about how to communicate which I disagree with. This is neither a criticism of the central point of the essay, nor a criticism of the overall way in which you try to make your point here.]

[Edit 2: I think I get what Looking is now; see my reply to Moral Of Story's comment.]

Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to interpret them: if you think something like “Oh, that’s the map/territory distinction”, then all I can say is you are still looking at your phone.

There's something very frustrating about this. Explaining in-parable: if you're trying to tell me to look up, and I send a diagram of person-phone-gaze theory with anatomical markings indicating what I think you mean by "look up", I know that understanding the graphic is not the same as "looking up". What I want from you is any corrections you might have to the graphic. This may not actually help me to look up, but it may help -- and more likely, it'll help me know roughly the sort of thing I'm missing even if I can't move my eyes as a result.

If someone doesn't yet get the map-territory relation, you wouldn't keep trying to show them the territory. It would help to make a map of the way the map-territory relation works, even though the ultimate goal is to help them look past maps in a sense. It could also help to show them some places where reality doesn't work the way they think it does, to remind them that there's a difference between what they think and what's real. But if they don't yet see an alternative they'll just think you're being mean, and say things like "just because I'm wrong sometimes doesn't mean I should stop trying".

Out-of-parable: my understanding is that there are two different things you're getting at: the Kenshō itself, and the epistemic operation of Looking. The paragraph quoted above makes me think that the two are closely related, though.

My texting-you-a-diagram-of-phone-and-eyes-with-arrows-indicating-what-looking-up-would-mean:

It seems to me (based on this and other posts / interaction with you) like Looking has to do with the idea that we normally parse the world in pre-set ontologies, but there has to be a thing which builds the ontologies in the first place. Here, "ontology" does not mean the build-in framework of the hardware we run on (like telling a computer to look past bits and bytes to the thing which created bits and bytes in the first place -- something it can't physically do). Rather, "ontology" refers to provisional frameworks developed through experience. "Looking" intentionally engages the facilities which are involved in ontology-building-and-shifting.

For example, it used to be that when I would hear arguments for intuitionistic logic, I would interpret them in the framework of classical logic. This felt like using the best tools I had to evaluate proposed alternatives. Similarly, I still evaluate alternative ethical frameworks with a basically utilitarian lense. However, at some point, I gained the ability to evaluate arguments for intuitionism on their own. I think this was both an example of Looking and an insight which had to do with the nature of Looking (because it had to do with refactoring the map-territory relation). This instance of "Looking" seemed to basically require a lot of time with the subject -- if there's something earlier-me could have done to stop evaluating things through a purely classical-logic lense, I don't know what it would be.

You're claiming, as I understand it, that there's a skill of Looking which can be immediate -- not necessarily coming to the right conclusions immediately, I suppose, but immediately getting out of the evaluate-through-current-ontology trap. I mostly of believe you, and I can guess at mental motions which you might mean, but they are things like "use your inner sim rather than your inner narrative machine" or "try to look at a chair without seeing a chair, only splotches of light; then generalize this" or "turn your thoughts to what put the current ontology there in the first place" or "seperate your thinking about whether things 'make sense' from your thinking about whether they connect with evidence, so that you can notice when something has explanatory power even if it doesn't fit with your preconceptions". I don't know which of these things you mean, if any.

Now, more speculatively, the Kenshō itself:

I have an intuition that whereas Looking is epistemic, the Kenshō is instrumental. Just as we can set up an ontology which becomes so familiar that we forget our basic ability to look, we can set up a way of doing and being which becomes so familiar that we forget the place it comes from. (So far, this is essentially your CFAR-level-two class, The Machine of You.) The connection between "It's okay" and "The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look" is, on this understanding: once you engage your core rather than existing in your constructed way of being, there's something supremely silly about worrying all the time or using guilt-driven motivation.

My sense is that "enlightenment" is a perceptual-emotional shift rather than any change of belief or judgment, and this makes the communication difficult, same as communicating any other qualia to a person who hasn't had it. It's not unlike trying to communicate what a hypothetical novel color looks like to someone who hasn't seen it.

Of course, if I can see ultraviolet colors (due to some novel Crispr treatment or something), I can offer a good description of the mechanics which are producing my unique experience , i.e. "I can see a wavelength you can't." In the case of enlightenment, however, we don't have commonly accepted and understood models like wavelength of light. If we did for qualia too, I think Val could communicate in an understandable what was going on his mind, even if the mechanical description cannot convey the actual experience. (I'm reminded of the Mary's Room thought experiment.)

In the case of Val's Kensho, I don't think I've ever occupied that mental state, but I've experienced enough variations in relevant dimensions of perception, emotion, and relation to reality that I get that he's gone in a certain direction in a certain coordinate system of sorts. I don't occupy the same perceptual-mental state though through my understanding alone, but I feel like I could follow if I did the right things.

I think the advice to get used to using fake frames as leading towards this is on point since it's close to the skill of shifting one's perceptual-emotional state. Rationalists focus on having a map which matches the territory and are therefore constanty drawing in new lines and editing old ones; Val's pointing at the skill of reconsidering the ontology of the representation. What if roads, houses, and trees weren't the basic units of a map? This thought maneuver requires a pulling back from one's "object level models", and I see that pulling back generalizing to pulling back entirely from models and being able to see "raw perception-emotion". At that level, there are mental transformations possible which aren't about beliefs or judgments. You don't shift to consider death less bad, but your relationship to it is changed, even if it still horrific.

"Okay" is such an underqualified word for what I think Val is trying to convey. At least if it's the same thing I have a sense of.

I'm trying to decide whether or not I understand what "looking" is, and I think it's possible I do, so I want to try and describe it, and hopefully get corrected if it turns out I'm very wrong. 

Basically, there's sort of a divide between "feeling" and "Feeling" and it's really not obvious that there should be, since we often make category errors in referring to these things. On the one hand, you might have the subjective feeling of pain, like putting your hand on something extremely hot. Part of that feeling of pain is the very strong sensation on your hand. Another part of the pain is the sense that you should not do that. This Feeling is the part that sucks. This is the part that you don't want. 

It turns out that those two types of subjective experience aren't one in the same and aren't inseparable. For the vast majority of situations where you notice that one occurs you also notice the other. However, (and it's a big however), there are some times where the first type appears without the second type. It just so happens that our brain is wired so that you never notice that specific situation. But it occurs frequently enough that if you could notice, if you could Look, you would immediately discover that it's always been a factor of your experience. And that's what I'm guessing Valentine means when he says "just look up, it's so obvious!" It IS obvious, once you see it, but seeing it for the first time is probably hard. 

To describe a situation where I think this is likely to occur, imagine accidentally stubbing your toe, feeling the pain from it, then shortly after being told some stunning news about the death of a loved one from someone else. In that brief moment where you are stunned by the news and your mind shifts to that new piece of information, it briefly loses the sense of suffering from the pain of the stubbed toe, although the sensation is still there. Once your mind has completed the shift, it may return to feeling the unpleasantness of the pain combined with whatever new feeling it received. 

But importantly, it turns out your brain is doing things like the above constantly. I used that example only because the effect would be much more pronounced. But your mind does these awareness shifts so frequently and so quickly that it's usually unlikely to be aware of the brief moment where there can be a sensation of something before the associated emotional response. Learning to Look is basically learning to detect when these shifts happen and catch them in the act, and that is why meditation is usually prescribed to make this more likely. It's also about learning that this effect can be controlled to some degree if you have some mastery over your attention. 

It also is not really limited to physical sensations. Any kind of thought or state of awareness may have associated positive or negative mental states, and these too can be sort of detached from in a similar way. 

When phrased like the above, the benefits seem obvious. If you had the choice not to suffer, wouldn't you take it? The reason I think Valentine may not state that so bluntly is that there is an equally obvious objection: if I could choose to not suffer on demand, what would prevent me from doing harmful things to myself or others? Would I even be aligned with my current goals? And I think that question needs an extremely careful answer. 

I think the much less obvious and surprising answer is that you are still aligned with your previous goals, and may even be better equipped to reach them, but I don't feel like I have the skills to really argue for this point, and will completely understand any skepticism towards this. 

It's very possible I'm describing some thing either completely different or at least much more mundane than Valentine is. The biggest factor that leads me to believe this is that Kensho seems to be a much more black and white, you either see it or you don't sort of thing, whereas what I'm talking about seems to require a gradual process of noticing, recognizing and learning to influence. 

FYI, I have an impression that 150 comments in some kind of progress in understanding was actually made by at least some people, and I'd be interested in someone who learned anything significant writing a (much condensed) summary of the output of this thread.

Fantastic. It's seemed to me for awhile now that the stuff that people are actually talking about in-person (e.g. at CFAR workshops) has far outstripped the pace of what's publicly available in blog post format and I'm really happy to see progress on that front.

For what such claims are worth, I don't think this has happened to me yet, but I think I've gotten near enough to it that I believe it exists.

Not to put too fine a point on it: through the tone and content of the post, I can still see the old attachments and subconscious messed-up strategies shining through.

I am, of course, not free of blame here because the same could be said about my comment.

However, I reach out over both of these and touch you, Val.

In the dialogue between "YOU" and ALEX, not only does ALEX not have a place in their mind for "look up" to land, YOU does not seem to have a place in their mind for that fact to land. YOU just keeps on repeating "look up" and "you are not looking up yet", without noticing even after six repetitions that he is offering nothing that ALEX can use. Scott's green bat does the same thing in saying "get out of the car". Illusion of transparency, in spades.

Loren ipsum

How accurate would it be if I characterized Looking as "the skill of being able to notice concept-shaped holes"? (with the difference that the "hole" in question may be an entirely different ontology that's necessary for making sense of something)

I've been talking to some friends in philosophy for some time in what they describe as in the realm of post-rationality. Based on my reading of what post-rationality among ex-rationalists/rationalist-adjacents doesn't match what my friends have been talking about, so I guess they mean it in the sense that what they're pursuing seems thematically typical of what techniques rationalists tend to pursue after they feel they're not getting new value out of applying or re-applying mindsets typical of the rationality community. One feature that seems common among post-rationalist techniques is people find ways of reframing their perception that feel personally very meaningful in ways difficult to put into words, and are hard to find examples of in the territory. A hard part of that is the commonest type of example for such is specific and uncommon experiences, but people don't know how to spot that in the territory until they've experienced it themselves.

Anyway, some of what I've experienced feels like I'm at least beginning to know how to Look. I haven't read the philosophy which try to capture what Looking is, as I've mostly tried things passed along to me by friends who have, and have tried introspection by myself. It seems learning how to Look is related to:

• phenomenology, in particular learning to notice things you hadn't noticed before, i.e., noticing existing parts of your own experience you weren't previously paying attention to.
• focusing
• altered states of consciousness

This is particularly vexing in the case of kenshō because enlightenment isn’t an insight. I claim it’s not a matter of inferential distance. It’s more like bothering to notice what you already know. When the moment of seeing struck me, I fell over laughing and basically didn’t stop laughing for two days, because it was so incredibly stunningly obvious. There isn’t something to learn: it’s already always here.

This certainly feels similar to my observation of my friend Daniel's relation of what he's called "the phenomenological ontology" to others. People take for granted the lenses they're always looking at the world through to the point they don't notice the lenses and when you ask them to look at things directly without the lenses, i.e., preconceptions, they're unable to.

In the last couple years, I feel like I've shifted how I think so the the below statement resonates with me more than it would've in the past. For example, reading this now, I don't find anything wrong with this; it doesn't at all feel wrong; I have no urge welling inside me to push back against it.

Here’s one way I used to try to convey part of the “it” from my kenshō:

“I’m okay. You’re okay. Everything is fundamentally okay. Whatever happens, it will be fine and good. Even our worry and pain is okay. There is something deeply sad about someone dying… and their death is okay. Obliteration of humanity would be tragic, but the universe will go on, and it’s okay.”

However, I don't know what to do with this info. My object-level goals seem to still be to prevent the conventionally bad things in the world despite however much they may be in another sense okay. I know some rationalists and effective altruists struggle with anxiety thinking about such things. A practical benefit of feeling in sync with the above statement is that doesn't happen for me anymore. But other than that upon self-reflection I can't identify a reason I'd act differently. Switching between ontologies doesn't produce results that what I do should be different. After reading your post, I'm noticing perhaps the point is to change how I do things. It seems recalling what our goals are in the moment by Looking would be effective in not switching out the pursuit of a goal for an unendorsed behaviour and not noticing.

But ultimately that the differences don't seem substantial enough is why I'm not making an effort to Look more often. If I can't discern how or why to apply the induction of different mental state, I'm left with a feeling of "what's the point?". I'm at a loss of where to go from here. Do you have any suggestions for next actions I could pursue?

-edit: did not know about the pm feature

Brief footnote:

The post I mention at the end was already planned before September. It's (to me) the natural follow-up after Fake Frameworks. Having it work so quickly to result in kenshō just came as a surprise and had me delay the sequence I'm writing.

Not critical for y'all to know. I just thought it was amusing.

Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced. I think I understand the mechanisms behind how, and I believe I can convey them in a usable way. I plan to do so in an upcoming post.

If you learn how to Look, you can see things that you can learn to interpret as novel patterns. This gives you a lot more room to do some pretty epic stuff.

…but explaining that more concretely is really best left for the upcoming post.

The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several things like reach kensho, and the model has been refined as a result of what I’ve come to see as a result of Looking.

Has this follow-up post been written? (Apologies if I missed it; could I get a link, if so?)

Earlier I quoted this from the PNSE paper:

"Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference."

I am wondering, has anyone, after achieving some great insight, or doing some sort of personal development work, received, from people unaware of it, unsolicited favourable comments on how they have changed?

Thank you for your very interesting post Valentine.

I am coming to this topic from a quite different viewpoint than most of the comments I read (did not read them all). That is because I believe I know exactly what you are talking about due to having this experience myself. Nevertheless, I think you are mistaken to call it enlightenment.

The base of what you are describing as 'Looking' is that there is a different way of perceiving the world. Something like a separate perceptual channel or mode. This concept and its various distortions can be indeed found in all the mystical traditions as well as in all kinds of gurus, cults and New Age formulations.

If you study primary material more in depth you will find a good description of the phase you are (to my estimation) in. You got a glimpse of something existing and you try to teach it. This is analogous to understanding that something called number 1 exists, ignore the rest of mathematics and try to convince others of the existence of the number 1. This is very common when people have what can be called a 'mystical' or 'religious' experience through drugs or application of certain exercises without prescription. What is called in some systems the ‘commanding’ or ‘lower’ self consumes the experience as a status/ego inflating mechanism. Jung encapsulates this issue in his warning to “beware of unearned wisdom”.

My suggestion would be to study the works of Idries Shah. Not skim, study. Start from the more psychological books like Knowing How to Know and Learning How to Learn. Most people will not read his writings because they refuse (for good rational reasons) to entertain the hypothesis of extrasensory perception. But since you are accepting the hypothesis, I guarantee you that you won’t find a more lucid exposition of what the mystics refer to as ‘the science of man’. Just a warning though. You will have to let go of the conviction that you have already achieved something, together with its associated positive feelings. That is the minimum sacrifice you have to make..

Let me know what you think of all that :)

P.S: Concerning your attempts to communicate your experience you might be interested in my description of the problem in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence

I'm a very occasional meditator but I think I mostly get what you mean by Looking. But it's 4am and I'm commenting more to report that something weird happened as result of this post. I read this earlier today, then later via Scott's review read this page about A&P events: http://integrateddaniel.info/the-arising-and-passing-away/

Then tonight in bed I started having some strange sensations. I started seeing some of those vibrations, maybe. This part was only visual and could have been imaginary. Then I started getting a strong sense of "inadequateness" of all sensation which was quite disturbing. Again I might be been tricking myself somehow - though it kept going even when I was up and out of bed. This went on and off for a while. Then when I was in a hypnogogic state (and seeing vibrations), I started to experience strong flow of "energy"* flowing up my upper spine into the back of my head, while my upper body was tense and shaking, which lasted a few seconds. Unlike the previous stuff this was an undeniably real thing. During this time the visual that popped into my head was something like a webcomic featuring crudely drawn anthropomorphic toasters(!) with no legible dialogue, which gave the whole thing an almost comical sense of un-profundity. The sensation was perhaps somewhat enjoyable but not exactly euphoric or anything. This seems like the basic physiological description of an "A&P" event, but as mentioned, no accompanying euphoria or sense of understanding the universe or whatever.

Also, while I don't recall having had this happen before, the "A&P" bit didn't seem entirely unfamiliar and I wouldn't be shocked to learn I'd experienced something similar in childhood. But I wouldn't be surprised if not either.

Anyway I'm a little disturbed by this whole course of events (feels like I was somehow hypnotized into having strong mental sensations) and hope there won't be any bad outcomes. Advice welcome.

* That's a vague way to describe it but it wasn't really like burning or electricity or anything, just some sort of "rush" of... something.

This post really captured my attention. So much so I read it and most of the comments thrice.

Two of Valentine's claims:

A) Certan types of things are meta-cognitive blindspots (cfar jargon). For example, alcohol impairs your driving ability, it also impairs the ability to tell whether or not you're okay to drive. Given you've had N drinks, the feeling of "I'm okay to drive" is not to be trusted. Another example is recognising good outfits, If you're lacking in fashion sense you can't tell whether or not the clothes you are wearing look good, or even notice if your outfits are a problem.

It's a blindspot on the object level and the meta level. So how does your epsitemology deal with this? There's this new skill X however you need a certain ammount of X to realise X is a skill worth having.

B) There's this thing "Looking" that's hella beneficial. Really hard to tell you why.

I'm on board with A. So here's my take on "Looking":

My first time focusing, was a new kind of experience. In some sense I'd been doing it all along. But also it was totally new.

Looking at the phone screen is perhaps the talky part of my brain. You can't do focusing with only your verbal models. I've had a few experiences trying to teach focusing with similar responses to the ALEX dialogue above. You need to consult your gut. And feel your response to an issue physically and seek its name. This can't be done with only your verbal monalogue.

So I'm left in the positon, that there's some quality/flavour of experience I'm missing. It's seriously benficial. Or the process of updating your previous epistemology in this direction is benfical. I can see that these types of updates are very difficult to convey in words. Yet I don't have the qualia. alas. :)

I remember that I had enlightenment for about two days, back in fourth grade.

But of course, it wasn't real enlightenment, because I can explain what I mean.

When you consider whether to do something (e.g. my fourth-grade homework), you do many things. You think about what other people will think. You execute habits, both good and bad. You might let yourself get distracted, which is itself a sort of habit. And there is also some small part of you that can predict the costs and benefits of doing the thing.

In my state of enlightenment, I felt the costs and benefits, and then I did the thing. And what this felt like was that I was just able to satisfy or turn off all those other things I do when planning. There is a relationship here to generating validation from within - and then using that validation to fix some of your mental machinery, like the mental machine that worries about what other people will think, in one state.

So, either enlightenment, or someone spiked my water with Ritalin.

So glad you wrote this, and looking forward to where you take this thread of posts. There is a whole bunch of stuff here that doesn't get touched upon enough for what we're all trying to do, and I think writing about it needs to happen more.

Good post! I'm excited for your milestone. I'm not sure if I can discern between my having enough experience with mindfulness and acceptance to get what you're pointing at, or if I'm simply using my closest conceptual bucket, but I believe your experience is real (if not always your interpretation of it).

Disclaimer: I am not sure I've done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.

If I "get" the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven't yet meditated much or find the idea of a "non-verbal thought" elusive.

I'm thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It's the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new awareness or new knowledge, without any conscious chain-of-thought, any verbal reasoning behind it.

Focusing hammers that home again and again, yes, there's a way and it's right there. It gave me a lot of confidence to try the mental move of "step back and wait until I See Something" in a variety of contexts.

PS: Thank you for pointing out the purpose of koans. I had "dissolved" them, but now I see, that perhaps I can try to answer them anyway!

Note: as the original post is 4 years ago, this is more of a note to self, the remains of an introspection process that was first meant to be private. I post it to challenge the part of myself that wants to stay comfortable in my beliefs, like a signal to myself that i need to write and be less afraid of sharing the results, to let my thoughts be criticised. So here goes:

i think I've experienced the same thing, at a particularly hard moment of my life. looking back, it didn't occur to me to spiritualize it, or pretend it cannot be rationally understood and communicated. The fact i could not introspect it fully was just a limitation of my own understanding, I had put too little conscious effort trying to explain exactly what it is. So it seems that I should read this post, be content about how it frames and even legitimizes something close to what I've felt, and move on. But instead, I notice that the post bothers me. Huh.

Here, I try to introspect: I notice that the Kensho post bothers me. No, it even almost makes me slightly angry. That's unusual, i think. Ok, let me try to understand why

Is it that it feels to me like giving up? My brain associates it 1 to 1 with moments in my life when people tried to tell me that things like rationality or morality cannot and should not be explained, that they are beyond science, and we should focus on the useful and on being good and faithful. Okay, that sounds about right, but I dont really associate those moments with anger, why the emotional reaction then?

I notice that when i read the post, inside my head, it comes out in the voice of the people who have tried to assure mystical authority over others, advocating intellectual laziness because it makes them sound wise and gives them status. And in the past these conversations had made me feel helpless, and frustrated, even angry. Closer!

What would I tell someone who said this to me? Maybe: did you, for example, have a realization that your sense of self is an illusion, which is useful for keeping you focused on optimizing your brain's value function, but which limits you when trying to make intellectual sense of the universe? Great! That can be described accurately, even though it's obviously foolish to expect the clear description alone would result in the same mental state being transferred to the reader (does anything work that way, anyways?), it is still useful to do so. In that situation, discussing the exact realization feels like progress in the common goal of rationality, whereas discussing the kensho (or qualia, or uniqueness in exact manifestation of the realization) aspect of it does not.

Or maybe you glimpsed some other deeper truth about the world, not in a way that you can accurately reason about what you know of this realization and how you know it, but in a way that it still affects your decision making, and you can notice that - a feeling of unexplainable improvement of one's subconscious compass, a first step towards understanding, a situation where your neural machinery encodes this new truth but higher level meta-analysers cannot yet introspect it. Fantastic! However, at that point not much can be done in terms of communicating its essence to others, since it is locked away from even being communicated to yourself.

Im sure that the author experienced what they say they experienced. I'm surprised, that that's what they would write about it, in LessWrong of all places.

It looks like part of the lesson here is that I must let go of my preconceptions, not everything that sounds wise and spiritual is bad, some of it must be limits of my own vision which I should keep an open mind towards. But also, some things in the original post do not pass my intuition's smell check, and following that smell I think there's something there too, this topic could have been approached differently.

I guess I may not see the use that crystallising this Kensho concept in the context of a rationalist tool, it seems more likely to do harm than be productive (maybe a 9:1 ratio?). Except maybe as a counter-example, a way to point towards dead ends? "Kensho-traps", feelings of spiritual understanding that are not empty of meaning, yet also not true understanding of a thing, but somehow give enough self gratification that they discourage further examination.

I finally feel I understand this post. I also feel I understand why it was hard for me to understand originally.

The car analogy is being used to explain both looking and why looking is difficult to explain. This encourages trying to understand both at the same time, when it'd be simpler to focus on the later first.

Beyond that, as a story, it is hard to completely understand without a more realistic example to clarify. Unfortuantely, the only real example is the skill of Looking is anything but clear. So to understand Looking you have to understand why explaining Looking is Hard which is explained with the Car Example which is only completely clear once you understand Looking.

From Buddhist Phenomenology by Henk Barendrekt

1.7 Explaining apparent contradictions

Now we will explain how contradictions, which happen to occur in some buddhist texts, are possible. Suppose some part of reality U is described using some language L. Some of the regularities observed in L are in fact physical laws, but may be confused with logical laws. If we extend the reality U to U+, but keep as the describing language L, then statements may result that contradict statements made about U. Although the contradictions are only apparent, because the statements are about different `worlds', it may seem that logical laws are violated.

An example will be helpful. Consider a tribe living on an isolated island. Vision of the tribesman is such that they can only see the colors black and white. In their description of the world they say: ``Something is either black or white." Although we know that this is for them in fact an empirical law, the people of the island are tempted to consider this as a logical law. Sometimes they use the words `white' and `non-black' interchangeably. On some day someone has a mystical experience. In our language we can say that that person has seen the color green. In the language of the tribe she says: ``I have seen something very impressive. It was neither black nor white." For most of the people of her tribe she was saying: ``It was neither black, nor non-black." Therefore on the island one may think she is speaking nonsense. However, we know that she is not.

There are, however, stronger contradictions. In his book Exploring Mysticism already mentioned, F. Staal discusses the following so called `tetra lemma' occurring in buddhist texts.

It is not A; it is not non-A; it is both A and non-A; and it is neither A nor non-A.

Even this contradiction may be explained. Simply consider again the tribe seeing only black and white. But now our mystic sees the color gray. Indeed gray is not white, not black. And it can be said that gray is both white and black. But also that it is neither white nor black.

I hope that the examples show that contradictions occurring in texts of mystics are not a sign that something essential is wrong. Nevertheless it is preferable that descriptions of altered states of consciousness are free from contradictions in the sense of logic. I will try to fulfill this requirement in sections 2 and 3.

I feel like this is correctly pointing at a thing. I would also like to try to put it into my words to see what Val thinks about them:

The map/territory analogy illustrates a way to eventually be able to engineer the territory. Engineering the territory is not a goal in itself though so we need to continuously Look to remind us of there being an actually desirable end state. That end state is there, always, we can access it even now. It's just that our current reality will not enable us to access it nonstop and accessing it too much will either kill us or detach us into a happy bubble, leaving everyone else in chaos.

Unlocking permanent access for all to the end state is only of instrumental value. But to those who cannot see the goal, freeing up the path becomes a wonderful thing to do. Only they will eventually not have anything to care for anymore, once the path is free and also they lack an experience that is beyond what they can imagine. But it still isn't bad. It's perfectly okay. It doesn't make their experience worse or less true. They just don't know what they are missing even though it's right there.

Or differently put:

We can always develop and acquire better glasses to see further, wider, in more detail etc. And for the most part that's crucial to create better maps of the territory. Only once we learn to Look without glasses (or blindly), though, will we understand why it is worth wearing them and why it's worth trying to create better maps.

The territory isn't perfect, so we need to understand how to improve it. But the actual goal is not to create ever better glasses to create ever better maps. The goal is to be able to take off the glasses one day and not have to worry about the territory because it'll be perfectly reengineered.

People get obsessed with improving the glasses and anxious when people aren't using the best glasses available, they lose sight of the goal. Only if we know that not wearing glasses is the goal, it is useful to put on glasses. Otherwise we will get attached to our glasses that will become outdated.

If no-one sees the beauty, then beauty will cease to exist.

But the flowers will still grow.

Seems worth linking to Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, given that it contains a parallel to your phone analogy in the form of a "get out of the car" analogy.

Is this enlightenment anything like described in https://aellagirl.com/2017/07/07/the-abyss-of-want/ ?

Also possibly related : http://nonsymbolic.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/PNSE-Article.pdf (can you point on that map where you think you found yourself)

This sound suspiciously like Plato telling people to stop looking at the shadows on the wall of the cave, turn around, and see the transcendental Forms.

Curious if you're almost done with the followup post. This sounds extremely interesting, and I'm curious to see what you have to say on how to reach kensho.

The thing is, I don’t mean “it’s okay” as something to think. I mean it more like an instruction, like “look up” in the cell phone parable. Trying to understand the meaning is analogous to Alex posting a photo of their phone and then scrolling above it in the text chat.

Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to interpret them: if you think something like “Oh, that’s the map/territory distinction”, then all I can say is you are still looking at your phone.

Is this related to non-judgemental observation/awareness that is talked about in the spheres of mindfulness? Ie, the things that are happening just... Are, and we are observing that the Are. While these things may ellicit emotion and judgement in ourselves, we can put that aside to another part of our minds and just observe how they Are. Is this what you are experiencing with Looking, or a precursor to it/part of it?

(I may just be replacing "It's okay" with "It just Is", without the positive conotations of okay)

I have read this post multiple times and allowed myself being confused about it.

With this recent reading my associative bridges matched more on Nolan's movies which also seem to have some kind of funky communication going on.

In Memonto in the runtime finale, which is chronologically in the middle, there is a kind of philosphical or psyhcological dilemma which seems connected to this "jam up your phone" thing. The protagonist has just experienced a lot of stress and has committed murder by lying to himself despite having a principle and life foundation by staying true to oneself. He begins to wonder whether there is an external world outside of his imaginations and interpretations.

Then in Inception, the ending is about a spintop being used as a totem to determine whether the protagonist is dreaming at the moment. He walks away not caring about the result but the audience is left to wonder whether the top stops spinning or not.

And what has kept Nolan recent in my mind, is that Tenet continues on with similar kind of theming. Having "faith in the mechanics of the world" but it not being excuse to do nothing.

In all of these it seems noticing and daling with metaphysical-like characteristics of their world is kind of important for the characters. If you were in a Nolan film as a character it would probably be of benefit to pay attention so you get a grasp of the gimmick of the movie. I feel it would be very challenging to develpo an algorithm or attitude that could catch all three twists.

IS there a community out there for people who have been able to do this? I find it very difficult to find people who can stay present, yet it improves every single aspect of my life. I try to explain it and you can see it in their eyes they are understanding, but then you can see doubt enter their minds and they lose it as soon as I stop talking. You explain it perfectly which is how I know you figured it out. I learned just by listening to podcasts and audio recordings and one day it clicked. Now I re-listen to everything and more stuff is being said. But the more I listen the more stuff people are saying that just clicks in my head. Im learning at an incredible speed. I'd like to continue this process by surrounding myself with other people who can do this.

If you get this, please message me. Id love to speak to someone else who can stay present, especially if you figured this out years ago you must be so advanced right now. You must have learned so many things.

Thanks, Valentine.

Howdy Valentine! Will you be posting anymore content related to Looking and Kenshō? I would really like to try and flip my perspective and Look for myself, but feel a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights... What I’m sensing is that ‘Looking’ is an apprehension of things before the ‘claiming’ mind jumps in ...which is harder to say than do. Do you have any practical advice for an aspirant? Many thanks, Oliver

Another metaphor that emerged from what i recognized as a kenshō experience.

We were in the ER for one of my late husband's health crises, I don't remember which. (As a survivor of a Soviet prison camp and a midwinter escape with gangrene in his legs, he had a few.) I was already in an extreme state. An apparently incorrigible alcoholic derelict, ravaged, scabbed, ragged, was also in the ER. Listening to him rave to the intake people I had all the usual feelings of deploring addiction and the damage it does to people's lives and our parlous, weak inability or unwillingness to withstand it. The physical sensations of deploring: my face drawn into an unhappy, disapproving rictus, my gut weighed down with a red-hot cannonball of protest and despair.

And then THE NET TORE.

That too was a physical sensation. The neural networks of conceptual moralizing in my brain, perhaps, simply ripped apart. The cannonball of anxiety fell away and I was in the ease of free fall. Everything was fine. The drunk was as he was and it was fine. Dear, even. The physical vulnerability and mortality that had brought us to the ER, that we struggle against and that eventually destroys us, that too was fine. THERE WAS NO PROBLEM.

I've had this experience a few times. Do I stay in that state? No way. Yet I know it's there, and even though that, too, is a concept, it relativizes and somehow belittles whatever my obsessions of the moment may be. Somewhere behind the scenes there is always a smile of serene and tender amusement at all the fuss we make.

I'm just commenting to give you another data point (and to reinforce to myself what I'm saying): your quote about everything being okay, and the way you describe the general reactions, resonates strongly.

Some days, I think "everything is okay" and it just is. Other days I fall off one side into nihilism, and yet other days I fall off the other side into boundless optimism. Rarely do I settle into the knowledge that it just is, and even more rarely does the resulting acceptance or (cliche) tranquility linger.

I haven't had words to describe this, so I've just been placing emphasis on certain words in phrases like "we just are" and "everything just is", and hoping that people who've had the same experience have that resonate with them. Your examples seem similar but more precise.

These may or may not resonate, but either way, kudos and I'm very appreciative of your post.

I feel that this is an area where engaging in some ameteur phenomenology may help clarify what you mean, or at least provide insight into what you don't mean.

So, as a very rough and off-the-cuff attempt to clarify the kinds of mental operations, we have the following:

• Beliefs - Here I'm only referring to the cognitive component, not to aliefs or the emotional component. I'm including the cognitive component of doubts or fears here as well, including the cognitive component of beliefs that people are in denial about.
• Qualia - This includes any emotions or sensations, including aliefs and motivation, including blocking out qualia.
• Focusing - This includes not only what you pay attention to, but what you don't pay attention to and things that you hold in your mind.
• Thought Generation - This includes all kinds of creativity, from music and art to maths and ideas about what you might have for lunch and whether conscious or unconscious.

I could also include physical actions or memory operations and even more if I wanted to spend the time, but I suspect that the four above are most relevant.

Now the first thing that we will note is that they are all linked. Beliefs affect your emotions, what facts seem most salient and the thoughts you generate. Qualia strongly directs your attention in particular directions and also what thoughts are generated. And you're more likely to generate thoughts related to the ones that you are holding in your mind.

So it might help to clarify which of those categories enlightenment falls into. From the accounts that I've heard, if they are true, it certainly seems to have a qualia component, related to calmness or equinamity and possibly even towards blocking certain emotions ect. I think it is also clear from your post that it doesn't seem to affect your beliefs directly, except for you beliefs about Enlightenment. Here, I mean in the sense that awareness of a new mathematically thereom would. This provides an interesting theory of why it might be so hard to explain: the qualia component is the easiest component to be put into words, which is why it is always mentioned and people also claim that it improves their beliefs, but not directly, so the whole story ends up sounding suspicious.

But what if it affected the focusing or thought generation operations? Or maybe even the aliefs? I think that it is pretty clear that if you read through an argument and focus first on the reasons why it might be true and second on the reasons why it might not be true, then you'll probably generate different ideas in each pass. Secondly, I know that I'm much better at generating thoughts when I have a clear head, than when I'm distracted by worry.

This last possibility, I want to give a bit more detail. Let's suppose you experience compassion, having never experienced this before. I mean, everyone has to experience things for a first time. You now have that experience and it feels like it is knowlege - I mean, it's widely accepted that experiencing things yourself gives you insight, even though it seems totally unlike any factual information. Part of it is that you can focus on that experience and make certain predictions - for example how other people might react to a situation and the kinds of thoughts or emotions they might have. If someone makes an argument and it is not well presented, but you have compassion for the group, then you are more likely to be able to generate a reasonable thought patten, ie. fill in that gaps. So experiencing compassion will shape your thoughts, but not directly.

Similarly, thinking of a pleasant memory would seem to be a good way to improve your ability to generate solutions to a problem without involving conflict. Looking at your reply to Ben Pace, it sounds like enlightenment involves certain ideas becoming more salient. What's not clear is whether this is because it fits into one of the models above. Maybe I'm still failing to look up from the phone, but I think this could help you clarify your claim.

I'll be looking forward to your next post, but meanwhile, is this something different from consciousness of abstraction?

A REAL LEVEL 5