Comments on “Epistemology and enlightenment”

A very insightful (ha!) article.

It has occurred to me also that different Buddhist traditions quite obviously have different definitions of enlightenment. It escapes my understanding how anyone can read Mahasi-style talk about ‘cessation’ side by side with, say, descriptions of rigpa or (what is the same?) the result of Mahamudra practise and conclude that they are actually talking about the same thing - ‘cessation’ is very clearly a not-knowing, a phenomenological black hole, whereas rigpa is the pure awareness aspect of mentality (do pardon me if I have made a hash of that). I do know of a couple of Theravada teachers who (more or less privately) suggest that once one has done the work of seeing through the self, trying to see the nature of the mind as it is is the next step - so go talk to those Tibetans!

Moreover, as you have pointed out, enlightenment is presumed by everyone to have definite relational qualities vis-a-vis our ethical interactions with the world. Compassion is just the tip of the iceberg, since being compassionately disposed doesn’t straightforwardly tell us anything about what an enlightened person ought/has to do in any given circumstance. Conservative Theravada holds that an enlightened individual must join the monastic order within a week of his/her awakening or actually die, meanwhile there are no Nyignma monks. Does compassion require us to vote for a strong government welfare program but not to give money directly to those in need, or is it the other way around (or both/neither/it depends)? Does being compassionate towards a severely injured animal mean that we should take it home and try to nurse it back to health or that we should put it out of its misery? None of these seem to have much to do which phenomenology, yet they are all considered to be crucially important to defining enlightenment and identifying those who have it.

And does enlightenment require an enlightenment experience? Say we went looking for someone who fits a characature of the Theravada account of enlightenment (deep insight into anatta, anicca, dukkha, as well as ethical perfection and a limited emotional range) and we found such a person. If that person claimed never to have had any enlightenment experiences at all (maybe even to never have done formal meditation) would we be willing to say “yes, this person is enlightened, though it must have been pretty boring for him/her”?

Ah, incohate thoughts. Sorry about that.

David - well said!

David said:
“If you have practiced for long enough to make progress, you can see that the path points ahead, in a direction. Then you may wonder how far it is possible to go. However, if you are happy with your direction, the question “is there some final destination, beyond which it is not possible to go?” may not matter.”

This paragraph negates everything you say before it. Progress, path, direction, destination, points ahead. These are all what Glenn Wallis calls buddhemes. Just other buzz words for enlightenment. If there is such a ‘direction’ why is everyone who meditates having different experiences and reactions?

Enlightenment is simply the detection of the inexorable inevitability of everything that exists. There is nothing that an individual can think, say, or do that will modify the outcome of the process of existence. I myself happen to be totally fearless and terminally content with everything and everyone. And not because I dropped acid on numerous occasions forty-five years ago. Or maybe for that very reason.

And what is the “outcome” of the process of existence? There isn’t one.

David-
Thanks for the response. I see where you’re coming from. My response was as much for me as the blog. It’s so difficult to talk about anything buddhist without all those loaded terms. You make that point through out this piece. However, at the end we’re left with this idea of path etc. What else can you say. (shrug shoulders). What I’m saying is that I’m a kindred spirit. I meditate and, dare I say, it helps. Can’t really say much more these days. Is it like exercise where if you do it a lot you can do it a lot more? Talking about meditation with out the myth and metaphysics is a hard one.

William-
I like your idea that Enlightenment is realizing inevitable process of existence and the fact that we really can’t do anything about it. I am curious about your terminal contentment with everything. How’d you manage that? Also, the outcome, well, annihilation comes to mind.

@William: This is more or less the “God willing” and “there but for the grace of God, go I” point of view - one which I have found invaluable when I’m able to keep it in mind for the humility and gratitude it can bring to the mind (even though I don’t literally believe in God). Did you come to this view on your own or have you been strongly influenced by anyone, I wonder?

@Craig: I think William meant by “process of existence” the grand total process, not our individual ones! Although, if you stop thinking that your process is a discrete thing then it doesn’t really end, it just sort of disaggregates and all these aggregates wind up doing other stuff. Of course, not that any of the sub-personal processes are themselves things either… So it becomes a headachey mess to think about

David-

I like that analogy. I’m a guitar player, so I can relate. I’m self-taught. However, I don’t think it holds up, especially with the questions you are bringing up in this blog post. What is meditation? What is the path? What is the direction? What is it for? With guitar, it’s quite clear. I learned chords because I wanted to play music that I liked in a band. Also, I aesthetically love the sound of a strummed steal string. It’s soothing. At the same time, there are some unexplainable things when it comes to music. So, it kind of works. What I’m currently interested in is the framework around which we ‘do’ meditation. If it’s for Enlightenment, that’s a slippery slope. If it’s an aesthetic soothing practice, then that’s a little more down to earth, so to speak.

This whole question of What is Enligitenment? has always been interesting to me. Your blog raises lots of great questions. The vids of Sujato are entertaining. I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about! ;-)

David,

One of your best, thank you. I liked seeing the way emptiness and form played themselves out in it.

OK, David, I’ll take your questions on, and I won’t use a single scrap of Buddhist orthodoxy to do it.  

My conclusion will be that the reason there is an insoluble epistemological tangle around your set of questions:  What is enlightenment?  Was there a Buddha?  and so on, is that in some cases you are asking the wrong questions, and in others you are asking them in the wrong form.  As it stands, many of your questions are of the same form as:  Where is the residence of the present King of France?  Other questions, such as:  Should we care about enlightenment? are the wrong questions because they are questions about our attitude toward the “present King of France”.  The way this question should be asked is:  What should we care about in Buddhism?  You get to this point yourself, but it is easy enough to do this without any of your “questions that Buddhists should be asking”.

Now, in order to do this, I must point out that there are three Western traditions of thought I will draw on, all of which your analysis has largely ignored, the Humanities, (from which my personal intellectual discipline comes); the Philosophy of linguistic analysis, and the Science of direct field observation and classification without the aid of experiment and technology.  I’ll be using all of them.

The critique that the existence of the historical Buddha cannot be known or proven can be made with equal force about George Washington.  Nobody who knew him is now alive, as there are still people alive who knew Winston Churchill, so there can be no direct and personal testimony of Washington’s existence.  The only evidence we have for it are “texts”, using the term in the broad sense of referential artifacts and living oral traditions, as well as written texts.  This is where the Humanities come in, specifically the discipline of History.  There are no “experts” in the Humanities in the way you use that word, we are all “students”.  Some students are merely more familiar with the relevant texts than others.  There is no implication whatever that people in the first group have better judgment than the second.

For history is a matter of rational judgment.  But since it uses texts and testimony exclusively, it cannot use the same standard of judgment as Science.  We can assert “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Earth is a sphere and it travels around the Sun.  In the Humanities, we are forced to use “the preponderance of the evidence” as the sole possible standard.  The preponderance of the evidence clearly supports the existence of the historical Buddha nearly as strongly as that of Washington.  Neither is a myth.  A myth is something different.  Apollo driving the chariot of the Sun is clearly a myth, because there is plenty of evidence in the texts that people such as Socrates were in considerable doubt about the matter.

Now, let’s look at the word “enlightenment”.  What your analysis makes clear is that what we have is a concept and a plethora of different and partially contradictory opinions about this concept.  But what that means is that enlightenment is what Wittgenstein in the Blue and Brown books called an “open textured” concept:  the opinions about it clearly share a “family resemblance” to one another, though there is no one thing common to them all.  All opinions about enlightenment are just that, opinions, and adduce no convincing reason to believe that enlightenment is anything more than a concept in the same way that the present King of France is merely a concept.

This is a much different conclusion than an epistemological assertion that what enlightenment refers to is “unknowable”.  We can easily know that the “present King of France” is a concept without an objective referent, and we could conceivably know that about enlightenment.  The mere fact that we don’t know this is purely circumstantial, and in no way epistemologically necessary.

Now let’s consider Freud and Psychology.  It is clearly Science, but science at an earlier stage of development, just like the Sweet Peas of Gregor Mendel or the Galapagos species differentiation of Darwin.  Technological progress advances Science, but that does not mean that pre-technological observation and hypothesis is “bad Science” or non-Science, even if the observation is limited and the hypothesis suspect.

The capacity to use technology to see brain activity is far younger than I am.  The only way Freud could observe the brain directly was through dissection, which tells you lots about structure, but nothing about function, which is what we really want to know.  The notion that this function could be measured indirectly by experiments with behavior was years in the future and all Freud had to rely on was oral reports from his patients, and had develop his theories from there.  And they were patients being treated by a medical doctor for the condition called neurosis.  Freud had little to no access to the non-neurotic, but there is nothing unreasonable in assuming as he did  ( in the absence of direct evidence one way or the other) that brain function in neurotics was to some degree similar to brain function in the healthy.

In the same way as Freud, the only thing we can directly observe about these matters is what Buddhism does to and for us personally.  Now I’m just as certain as you are that “peak” experiences are suspect and usually ephemeral.  But it’s perfectly possible to look rationally and carefully at our own memories with enough confidence that a simple question like:  Am I happier being a Buddhist than before I was one?  has a real answer, and, probably, a right answer.  It is the questions that don’t derive from personal experience such as:  Am I closer to Enlightenment than I was before?  that are functionally unanswerable, because they assume a relation to an objective referent that may or may not be there, like asking if the present King of France is your long, lost uncle.

To return, then, to what is taught about Buddhism by monastic scholars of various sects with a clear lineage back to the earliest transmissions of monastic vows, all I can say is that what the Kagudpas have taught me has led me to a much different set of questions than you propose.  This because the primary focus of their teaching is about suffering and non-enlightened confusion.  Thus:

1. Does karma, cause, and effect work in the world as Buddhism describes it?

2. Is the belief in past and future lives reasonable even if you have no direct memory of them?

3. Why does experience appear to have a private and possessive reference point? I.e.  “I, me, mine.”

4. Why does experience also appear to be “public”, allowing both you and I to experience the same exterior world, and for both of us to believe that this exterior world does not vanish when we aren’t experiencing it?

5. Why does our mental and emotional contact with the world seem so liminal , changeable, and so little like the apparent stability of objects outside us?

6. What should we think and do about the fact that there appear to be other people with private “reference” points of their own?

In other words, the relevant questions are not about religion particularly, Buddha particularly, or enlightenment particularly.

They are about us.

I’ve already wasted too much of David’s bandwidth, but, from the Kagudpa viewpoint, these questions are sequential, and the answers the lamas give to them derive initially from the problem of karma, cause, and effect. Without going into detail, public and private experience are both the results of the karmic process, which must be understood (and assented to) to give sensible explanations for the other five. Thus this view starts from Ontology rather than Epistemology.

Justin’s reference to stream entry as a workable model for determining progress on the ‘path’ popped into my mind when reading the earlier comments. Stream entry as a waystage is used by the Pragmatic Dharma chaps (Ingram, Folk, Horn), and also by Shinzen Young and others. From a practice position, it seems to a be a fairly workable model, with steps, rather than present an abstract final goal. As the first stage of the Four Path model, I have found it useful, even though I don’t practice Theravada Buddhism. Of course, how objective it is, how measurable it is, how applicable it is in different Buddhist schools, whether it is pliable enough to be applied outside of the Buddhist path, are all issues not easy to resolve and easily deconstructed by those with more advanced philosophical skills.
Sometimes I wonder whether all of the deconstruction that is applied to the Buddhist Path shouldn’t be balanced out with better attempts at reconstruction; attempts at formulating new definitions of meaning and experience on the path? This is perhaps held back by notions of enlightenment and enlightened beings, which keeps us in a sort of collective deferral to whoever seems to be the super-Buddhist/s of our time. I have said it before on this blog, I feel strongly we need to take fuller ownership of not just the paths of Buddhism, but fruition, progress and results. We can then probably feel freer to reformulate, play with and see what works in ongoing experimentation.
I thoroughly enjoy reading the Speculative Non-Buddhist website for their lacerations of Buddhist insider themes and myths, and yet, I still leave their site and then practice and have need to address the issues that arise within the experience of ongoing practice on and off cushion, which are not just part of an ideology, but of a a very down to earth human experience regarding suffering/dissatisfaction, emotional and mental well-being and my deficiencies as a human. Their site and approach is wonderful for recognising the deficiencies of Buddhism, but it does not provide alternatives as far as practice is concerned and builds very little in the way of alternatives to what is criticised except for encouraging critical thought to how we think about Buddhism and more specifically x-Buddhism as it is defined there. This is great, but the next step has to be, what’s left? What do I do now? You are still challenged if you wish to meditate to work with the body, the breath and immediate experience. Excessive deconstruction often leads to poverty of experience in which possibilities are denied as they may mean a descent into x-buddhistic falsity.
My answer then is that I sit, I meditate, and I reflect on my experiences and after take some of the more traditional descriptions of practice as metaphors and attempts at describing actual experience, and attempt further to use more updated understandings of the human condition to inform and interpret, critical certainly, what is emerging in practice and how that shapes and affects my day to day life and my relationship to the world around me. I still require some method of determining progress on the path, which is the one I and you construct through practice, whilst attempting to follow, at times, vague or pre-prescribed external possibilities. I do this because what has happened in twenty years of meditating is of immense value.
With regards to ‘enlightenment’ though, I think it is easier for us to agree that the concept is always contextually dependent and therefore quite useless outside of a given Buddhism, or other path. I like the Four Path model because it implies freedom, as opposed to an imagined/promised super-state, and it indicates freedom from a specific form of illusion. As a starting point, defining progress in Buddhist practice in terms of freedom from specific obstacles/kleshas/strata of identification, etc, could be very, very useful. I don’t see why we couldn’t eventually reformulate the Four Path model into a more westernised form, using data from MFRI mapping of progress in advanced meditators and by doing so perhaps find a workable model that crosses the variety of Buddhist traditions.
As a slight aside, the thought returns to me that perhaps these outer reflections of Buddhism are not only political and social and historical entities that need to be de-constructed and reformulated (which they do in my opinion), but could be recognised in part as successful attempts at skilful means for disseminating the teachings in new contexts to the best of the ability of the folks of those times and in the contexts in which they existed.
As Karmakshanti says, the path ultimately comes down to the question of whether you are living better after practice and the adoption of the four noble truths (interpretation from either vehicle will do), or not. You can philosophise as much as you like, but well-being does not usually emerge from it. This point is sometimes challenged as opposite to the goals of analysis, the finery of logic, but it isn’t. It’s more of a case of being able to adopt multiple views and inhabit multiple positions and recognise what the priority is in given moments. After thinking about whether the kettle exists, you still use it to boil water for a nice cuppa.

Matthew wrote:
“but of a a very down to earth human experience regarding suffering/dissatisfaction, emotional and mental well-being and my deficiencies as a human.”

I could be wrong, but this is classic x-buddhism as is this whole notion of path and progress. However, your description of your meditation practice seems very non-buddhist. I highlight this not to be critical, but to comment that I struggle with the same thing. I meditate and it helps. That’s about all I can say about it. As far as poverty of experience goes, I think the myths etc. are more responsible than deconstruction. I jog because it feels good and I seem to have a more skillful day. However, I don’t bow to Jeff Galloway before I set out on a run :-)

As far as the buddhist geeks go, I used to really think they were the cutting edge, but they are say the same damn stuff. It’s like Christian rock worship services. New dressing, same old story. I at most leery of Daniel Ingram. He’s got a whole enlightenment-speak unto himself. I bet if I had the balls, I could start a website, claim full enlightenment and make a living teaching retreats.

@Justin, Matthew, and Craig: I don’t want to invade your privacy by asking you about these matters, so, at the risk of championing Buddhist orthodoxy, I will say that I, personally, was both Buddhist and adrift until I found a human teacher with whom I had a genuine and indubitable connection, with a lineage that I also was clearly and indubitably connected to.

We often miss the point in reading the narratives of the historical Buddha that none of his students became Streamwinners or better without his personal guidance. This personal guidance by a teacher is like yeast in bread, both flatbread and yeast bread go into the oven (meditation) but they come out of the oven quite differently. The first yeast breads were all essentially sourdough, and required you to keep a starter to be able to bake a consistent, but new, loaf.

I personally think, based on my own Buddhist autobiography, that the really significant question is where can I find a teacher who has kept some yeast. I started in the Dharma in a social world that has almost totally vanished, where I was not troubled by a search for a neo-Buddhism, under whatever name you may call it, that needed to be “relevant” to anything, but I certainly had important intellectual questions tangential to Buddhism that clearly became subordinate and optional issues after I committed to a teacher’s guidance. By now most of them have changed from subordinate to irrelevant, but my relationship to a genuine teacher with a real lineage (sourdough starter) has remained rock steady amid all sorts of long and short term personal upheavals.

So, if you do not have a teacher you know has some yeast, I think the first order of business is to find one without worrying much about any abstract intellectual questions. And, if you do have one, what is important is to follow his or her guidance and not worry much about any abstract intellectual questions, either. The best bread recipe is the one that you actually happen to know well, and you can’t bake it by becoming a critic of cookbooks.

karmakshanti-

what is your lineage? my experience with teachers is that they are all ultimately full of shit. asking that one follow their guidance without intellectual question is ridiculous and the reason why i haven’t worked that much with a teacher. also, ‘the buddha’ is a myth. there is no ‘real’ story there. all these teachers claim lineage back to a ghost and basically say they are seasoned practitioners and teachers because they say so. it’s all seems to be as much a scam as TV preachers.

I am a Karma Kagyudpa, my personal teacher is Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the abbot of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra. He is monastic, and he personally has never made any claim in my hearing beyond being well schooled in the traditional Lama Training Retreat and monastic shedra. He always has had an outstanding intellect, even for a Khenpo, and, at 89 is still sharp as a tack. The head of my lineage is the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa Orgyan Trinley Dorje.

My lineage is very clearly and thoroughly traced back to Tilopa the Mahasiddha of about 950 CE. A second, less well documented, lineage extends reliably from Mahasiddha Matripa, about 1000 CE, and is said to go back in the human world to Saraha the Great Brahmin 800 CE?, though independent and detailed historical confirmation of this is scarce. My private practice derives from Rechungpa, student of Milarepa 1150 CE, and he received it from the Indian yogini Machig Drubpay Gyalmo.

Besides being my teacher, KKR has authored what I think is an objectively excellent introduction to the general view of the Karma Kagyudpa Three Vehicle analysis of Buddhism called Dharma Paths, as well as an extensive English commentary on the Karma Kagyu retreat manual Mountain Dharma by Karma Chagme 1650 CE. He has personally told me that everything a Karma Kagyu practitioner needs to study is in Mountain Dharma. I have read it carefully in the light of other texts such as Gampopa’s namthar Jewel Ornament of Liberation and Jamgon Kongtrul the Great’s Foundations commentary The Torch Of Certainty; and, so far as my limited experience goes KKR is correct.

As far as relating to him (or any teacher) is concerned, I have carefully evaluated his descriptions of the nature of my mind, my emotions, and my confusion (all of which I can observe directly on my own). Over nearly thirty years his personal teaching about this has been unfailingly correct. Like any other Tibetan monastic, he has taught and talked about a great deal in the Dharma that I cannot confirm one way or another, so I’ve cultivated an agnostic and open mind about this–particularly since most of it is background and only supplements, at most, the core teachings about how to do Dharma practice.

It seems to me that to evaluate what you can check about teachings and to defer fixed views about what you can’t directly check, is the most sensible (and fruitful) way to relate to any teacher.

Karmakshanti-

thank you very much for describing your tradition. very interesting. your lucky to have had such a teacher around. why haven’t you graduated? seriously.

You have to understand what “graduation” might be. KKR recieved one of the most stringent Buddhist educations there is. And, since he was born in 1924, he recieved it in Tibet before its living tradition was disrupted in 1958. As a Khenpo, he recieved the highest honors. But he is a monk, which means (among other things) that you become a Buddhist 24/7 for as long as you keep your vows. Only monastics have enough free time to pursue all the details of Buddhism, including the memorization of thousands of lines of texts, and formal debate with each other to sharpen their analytical skills.

Like the lay Lamas he has trained in America, KKR also has done the practical training retreats where you learn to practice the main Kagyudpa teachings (and some others) for 3+ years where you and your fellow trainees don’t leave the building, don’t cut their hair or beard, and don’t see anything out the window except the surface of a high surrounding wall. During this time you do meditation, group ritual, and practical skills such as the Kagyudpa tradition of shrine offerings, during a day that begins at 3:30 am with renewal of vows, formally ends at 9:00 pm, but usually is spent in private sitting meditation for several hours longer. By the end of the retreat, the most promising students actually cease to sleep at all, and stay in upright meditation posture all night. People who go through this are styled Lamas, but only the best qualified and most emotionally mature ones are given permission to teach the Dharma by KKR.

Only a handful of his committed students can take off 3+ years of their lives to even do this, interrupting work, marriage, and family commitments for that length of time. It is also very physically demanding and folks in our culture are largely unable to keep up with it after about age 45–which is just when most people in our culture have enough relief from ordinary affairs to even think about doing this.

Then there are long term students like me, who are given a narrow (but essentially complete) segment of the Lama Retreat to practice privately. This segment begins with a set of preliminary practices that are both physically demanding and time consuming, particularly when they are constantly interrupted by the rest of your life. I am one of only six students at my home Dharma center who have actually completed this (I was #5)–and it took me 23 years to do it. There are about 3-4 more in the pipeline who should finish in the next five years. After this, you are given a practice to do for the rest of your life, which prepares you for death, bardo, and fortunate rebirth, and can potentially induce Insight (Vipassana, lhak’tong).

No, it hasn’t done it for me yet, but the possibility is there.

It’s over 35 years since KKR came to America, and by now his total number of students is well over 1000, and perhaps even much more. For those who can’t commit to what I have done they are given easier practices to do alone or in groups that are not all that different in kind from my own, or the Lamas’ practices, but without those tough preliminaries, the intensity and speed with which they work is less.

No degrees necessary.

I’ll be as clear as I can then. First, I have made the first five Genyen (Upasaka) vows, one of which is broken by false claims to spiritual attainment. I have been taught by example that it is wise to err on the side of caution in such matters. That having been said, I received a glimpse of the nature of my mind three times, in my first interview with KKR in 1983, shortly thereafter when listening to a teaching by Kalu Rinpoche II, and once during a guru yoga focused on the current Karmapa. From that first meeting I have never had any doubt that the Buddhist teachings are correct in substance about the nature of the world and my mind. I consider these 3 men to be my root gurus and have no doubts that they are beyond Samsaric confusion.

I have also made the Bodhisattva Vow not to rest until I have attained complete and perfect Buddhahood, and to help any sentient beings in any way I can to achieve it also. I have never doubted that this was possible from that day forward. It has taken me years to purify a sufficient amount of past karma to practice the Vajrayana without constantly running into major obstacles that distract me from my practice; to accumulate enough merit to rest assured that I can, in fact, be of real and permanent help to beings that I encounter along the way; and to gain confidence that I will, in fact, do this routinely in the future whether in this life or beyond it.

I have, finally, made the Tantric Vows to regard all phenomena as completely pure from the root. These vows are very difficult to keep and I work hard to maintain them and repair them daily. I have learned from empirical experience that you can cause yourself some real problems if you neglect to do this, and lead a life of confidence and happiness if you do do this.

Finally, after listening to teachings about Khenpo Gangshar and contemplating his text, Naturally Liberating Whatever You Meet (currently in print in English as Vivid Awareness), I have resolved my lack of understanding of the relative permanence of apparent objects (a result of the ripening of past karma) and the constantly changing nature of subjective appearances in my mind which are the seeds of further karmic accumulation.

This is about as precise as I can be about it without making false claims. I’m not familiar enough with terms such as Streamwinner to be confident in using them to describe my own spiritual life. My lineage does not use them as its primary terminology. But to the degree that I can use its terms to describe where I now stand, I have done my best.

Matthew wrote:
“but of a a very down to earth human experience regarding suffering/dissatisfaction, emotional and mental well-being and my deficiencies as a human.”
Craig wrote:
“I could be wrong, but this is classic x-buddhism as is this whole notion of path and progress.”

Hi Craig. We must stop meeting like this :) You can certainly argue that such comments belong to x-buddhism, but I can also state that they are not the property of x-buddhism and sum up nicely my own predicament. Down-to-earth means do the results of my meditation practice and commitment to responding in situations differently actually work with my son and wife, students and colleagues and those annoying old people in the supermarket long-term? Am I acting the part of a good Buddhist, or have I gained a more consistent ability to not indulge in my own arrogance and intolerance and be more straight up with people? What’s my intent for doing so? Is it mine or borrowed mindlessly from a Buddhist path? And, perhaps most importantly, am I suffering less, really? (I would include under the umbrella term of suffering; frustration, stifling anger, intense irritation, a lack of positive emotional states, a lack of equanimity, loneliness, anxiety, stress, feeling isolated from others/experience, a lack of intimacy, confusion that leads nowhere, etc). I borrowed the suffering question from the Buddhists, I confess, but it turns out to be an excellent question for avoiding narcissism and self-importance and is now thoroughly my own. What plays out in my day to day life is the level of mental and emotional well-being and my ability to be consistent in my commitments, which are also emotional. I consider authenticity to be of paramount importance, so faking it is not an option, plus my wife and son are not easily fooled and would probably spit on me if I started spouting Buddhist memes and smiled all the time.
I think that what’s important is making concepts and ideas your own and experimenting with them to see how they actually apply to a lived experience, in this life, if they do at all and that doesn’t have to be done on x-buddhism terms, or consensus Buddhist terms. The x-buddhism argument, in my experience, has at its heart the uncritical adoption of popular Buddhist stances and behaviours and the unwillingness to look outside a given tradition, and then Buddhism as a whole, in order to get valuable feedback on what’s going on in one’s relationship to a tradition (path) or ongoing personal experience of practising something (path). If you take Buddhism as an elaborate set of tools that you can pick and choose from and explore on your own terms, the path becomes self-created/generated. If in doing so, you couple it with free-thinking and active experimentation, then the issues of x-buddhism become less of a prison and more part of the challenge to navigate and also part of the rewarding intellectually stimulating aspect of making the path your own that is building/navigating your own way through a personal and personalised relationship with the world of Buddhism. Later on you may find something works for you and find someone capable enough and intelligent enough to work with you in exploring it further, as opposed to following a master.
I tend to think of Ingram, Horn, Young and even folk such as Rick Hanson and the Secular Buddhist as attempting this. I wouldn’t say they’ve gone as far as I would like, but it doesn’t mean I have to condemn them for their perceived failures. I would view them as part of a collective learning process, which I actually benefit from. Traditions in this day and age that are aware of their own internal structures/ideology/limitations/rigid adherence to tradition and are willing to engage and criticise and adapt to external structures (i.e. non Buddhist realities including the western academic tradition in all its glory) are about, but its early days in the meeting of Buddhism with the west and it can take effort to find someone, or a group that you can work with and they are all works in progress. This is a further aspect of the comment I Made at SNB about not throwing the baby out with bath water.The majority of Buddhism in the west does still seem to consist of middle-class, middle-age folk playing nice and smiling a lot, but I have nothing to do with them. They certainly do not get to have the final say though on what is worth exploring in the multi-faceted world of Buddhism.
As for Buddhist practise. In actively applying a given teaching for a given period you get to have some personal experience with it and see what actually emerges from doing so and formulate your own questions, many of which will inevitably reflect, or be a rephrasing of pre-existant questions from those who have attempted similar practices. At that point the practise becomes your practise by definition.
I agree with Karmakshanti that a teacher with whom you can actually explore the ‘path’ is more likely to provide ‘progress’. I do have a teacher (he doesn’t define himself that way, prefers the term mentoring to describe the process rather than assign himself a role with rigid rules) by the way; non-traditional and thoroughly western. Defining progress and path usually takes place within a tradition, but you could do so by yourself if you wanted:

Example
Path: developing tolerance in x situation with y colleague within the next three months by using deep breathing when I see y.
Progress:
1. express urge to punch y is slowly reduced during first two weeks as urge subsides after 5 minutes of effortful breathing
2. y starts to appear as a simpleton instead of a malicious selfish assehole
3. I couldn’t care less about y and he no longer bothers me.
(Optional: Good x-Buddhist add on: I feel ever lasting love and compassion for y, we are getting married next week in a Buddhist chapel)

Matthew,
Thanks for the response. Lots to consider. I like the way you break it down into really concrete examples. I think that is where non-buddhism is heading. The progress section is something I’ve been working on for years, but not necessarily in a meditative/buddhist way. More from a self-awareness of how I relate to people. I gained this insight through a corrective experience (supervision, analysis). Ironically, my interest in meditation was precisely as a adjunct to this insight. It takes lots of work and once you get to seeing one person as a simpleton, another one comes along and blows you out of the water :-) The best way I can talk about meditation, buddhism etc. these days is that it helps me be more skillful. Literally, to think before I act. I think this also might be where non-buddhism is heading. Think, Pay Attention, Meta-Cognition, Question. Now to me, that is being awake.

BTW, I love the x-buddhis add on there :-)

Justin,
How the hell did you get stream entry? Aren’t these the buzz-type notions that David is attempting to question? I’m really curious as talking about attainments is taboo.

@Justin “On the larger scale, dodging and only hinting about claims to attainment is tiresome and, frankly, dishonest. Its okay to be wrong and make mistakes – an open honest discussion helps everyone.”

I find being open about personal practice attainments not be actually very helpful. One obvious reason is that it can give rise to all kinds of pissing contests, which are always stupid. But other reasons are more important. Here some:

1.It does not really communicate: When I started intensive practice, and the practice begun to have its effects, I was rather open about it with my friends. I have grown up in a culture which values certain openness and I am a science guy who appreciates freedom of information. However, my personal experience has shown that talking openly about such things does alienate people who have not had the same experience and nothing really even communicates. How can you talk about the taste of fine Finnish mämmi(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A4mmi), if the other person has never tasted it? Communication can be possible with people who share the same experience - even then I want to leave it to confidential situations. Of course you can praise taste of fine Finnish mämmi, but the food itself look quite suspicious actually. Many foreigners do not dare to taste it, if they see it.

1. Maps do not necessary fit: I can go and pick some attainments from some list (like Daniel Ingram’s Four Path Model) which would fit into my experience somehow. However, I do not have any connection to the Theravada teachings. My self assessment could be completely wrong. My interpretation of my own situation even within my lineage’s “maps” could be wrong too. But why it is problem to be wrong in public forum about these things? ->

2. Practice peace: That is because I want some peace. I not want especially other Internet commentators to give me feedback concerning my Buddhist practice. I do not even want such feedback from my fellow sangha members. There are many essential and very private matters, of which I only want to talk about with my lama. He is the correct person to give me actual feedback. Other people lack personal information and competence to do that.

@sky serpent:

I can’t see why any should be intimidated by mammi. It looks no worse than devil’s food cake, double chocolate brownies, Christmas fruitcake, or even Unagi, Japanese barbecued eel. I don’t know what happens to rye flour after such prolonged soaking and the only thing I might find unfamiliar in such a dessert is the sharp taste and coarse texture you find in good rye bread. I’d also probably find it a little too sweet. I’ve had to alter my diet to deal with Type II diabetes and most sweet food now tastes far too sugary when I have a little of it.

I think the main thing is not to get too swell-headed about good experiences. In my own case, they have generally been far less than what is really possible, even when they are far more than any you’ve had before. A good teacher keeps you grounded about this sort of thing, where fellow students usually don’t and other Buddhists actually can make you more swell-headed even if they violently disagree with you.

@karmashanti: I find myself guilty of FInnish humor. I does not translate very well into English, and Americans take it too literately… Maybe I should have used salmiakki as an analogy instead. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtMY_27PTc) ^_^

Sky Serpant & Justin: I think we should definitely talk about attainments and by doing so bring them out of the traditions and into the wider realm of human experience. Claiming attainment should be with a proviso or two in my opinion; firstly, test the attainment long-term to see if it holds up and try it out in a great variety of scenarios that are both within and outside the norms of what you have known so far in your life, secondly define it as accurately as possible using your own language.
The attainment of stream entry tends to mature with time and become, dare I say, richer. One of the illusions regarding spiritual attainment is that they are fixed, permanent realities; a sort of badge that you obtain and then show off to peers and friends. Achieving stream entry is more like shedding unwanted psycho-emotional fat, which does dramatically alter your relationship with experience and phenomena, reducing the distance between path and practitioner. You start to become the lived experience of the path. For Craig, you can no longer separate from a process of shedding identification with a fixed, separate self and the layers of identification that lie under such a false experience of the world.
One of the risks that’s run is of attainment being claimed when a mere peak experience is had or an important shift has taken place, but does not actually imply a stage on the path i.e. stream-entry. The non-dual/advaita camp if full of these folk. I’ve met many of them over the years and the number of stories of supposedly (self-claimed) enlightened individuals (almost always men) inevitably turning up months, or a few discreet years later, caught up sexual misconduct, manipulation of followers, theft of money or megalomaniac behaviour is impressive.
We don’t have a normalising of the attainment of spiritual states in western society and so therefore one of the dangers is that a new insider club is created which acts to define and affirm its own insider perspective on attainment and how its results (should/have to) take shape. Another issue is that of attainments remaining in the realm of the mysterious and abstract and viewed as super-special, which puts us in the situation where nobody ever achieves them, as in the case of some Tibetan Buddhists schools such as the Gelugpa.
Define stream entry, or other attainment, in terms that make sense to any reasonably intelligent person and not just Buddhists, and that can be tested. Let’s go scientific! If there is consistency in what people are claiming (including what I wrote above), then there should be a pattern to the attainments and therefore they will be testable. Jeffery Martin has been supposedly attempting such a thing researching self-claimed enlightened beings from all traditions. I believed he coined the phrase ‘persistent non-symbolic consciousness’ to describe the experience of these folk, although how genuine he is I’m not sure: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drjefferymartin

Maintaining taboos is ridiculous and probably has as much to do with the hangover of power politics in monasteries than it does with attainments going to a person’s head. Normalising achievements and redefining them in western language whilst developing systems for testing them should remove the notion of special and make them more accessible to anyone; Buddhist or otherwise.

skyserpent-

what is deep practice?

Matthew,
i’ve always found it so ironic that all the suffering problems of society and individuals still manifest in monasteries of so-called enlightened folk. i mean, if enlightenment makes you more of an asshole, then what’s the point:)
study of enlightenment probably needs to start with some exhaustive lit reviews and lots and lots of qualitative research and coding. that would at least show some themes if they exist.

my idea is that nothing is going to stop human suffering. to exist is to suffer. before you can do anything that might help, we need a society that is focused on human well-being rather than violence and profit. at that point, meditation practice might be able to help us sit with and maneuver skillfully in this world.

justin,

thanks for the info. it really is hard work. i’m gonna check this blog out you recommended.
:-)

“I totally get your reasons for not wanting to talk about attainments. For me, personally, if guys like Kenneth Folk, Nikolai Halay, Chris Marti, Ron Crouch, and xsurf/Eternal Now hadn’t spoken very clearly about their experiences and attainments, there is absolutely no way that I would have made progress as fast as I did.”

That stuff gave me some ideas initially, so perhaps it was useful back then. It stopped to be useful material after a point. To explain why would require longer conversation.

I think that it is good to at least discuss about these things, even though I might disagree personally with some models.

“Thusness’s map has been extremely useful to see where dead-ends may lie and penetrate deeper.”

I can just send email to my teacher, or ask when I meet him, if there are obstacles around in my practice. It is one of those good sides when practicing methods of a not really popular lineage.

@Graig:

Deep practice is like you are being eaten alive while beautiful dakinis have sex with you.

Hi David, I just skimmed (late here already) through your essay thinking that there are points we both touch and here at the end of the text I find your link. Thanks a lot. I once called you an outright x-buddhist in a discussion. I am thinking since a while now I have to revise this judgement. It may be done hereby.

I like it very much that here at your site there is also going on a discussion which is free to explore new creative ways to look at Buddhism – although at some points in the above discussion I got a slight stream-entry-hick-up…

Good to read your work.

‘Stream entry hick up’: stream entry pick me up. There’s nowt wrong with a bit of stream entry Mr Steingass :) Off to read your post now at the SNB on why it probably doesn’t exist…

I’ll remain silent about this for the time being Mr. O’Connell B-)

Hello David,

thank you very much for your interesting and important post.

I have one question regarding the transformativeness (is this even an english word) of certain experiences.

Martine Batchelor explained once at a retreat, that in her opinion an insight/meditative-experience is not enough, but that one needs to set in into practice in order to get something out of it on the long run.

To me, this sounded very plausible: An experience is only transformative, if you make it that way. Does this fit within your own experiences?

From the perpective of an orthodox jew, mormon, or a conservative protestant christian the founding myth of buddhism is a sordid tale of a guy dumping his wife and kid and responsibilities to chase after a state of mind and once having achieved that had the charisma to persuade others if they followed the eight item to do list they could do the same! And at the same time depend on those dreary people doing the normal stuff to subsidize them in exchange for some sort of intangible spiritual benefits. The stuff buddha abandoned is to those theists is the acme of life, the arena where one becomes fully human and expresses being made in the image of God and the future eternity is continual growth before the open instead of the now unseen face of God.

Great: That’s the best thing in a long time I heard about Buddhism!

@David. I don’t understand my project either. I don’t know why I am still talking about Buddhism. It is silly.

@ Gottheo - there are alternate readings and presentations of the foundations of Buddhism in general, and particularly those Buddhist vehicles which in historical terms are held to have manifested later than Sutrayana. Many are entirely different to the Gautama tale, or are radically different readings of that same tale of renunciation and asceticism. None of those I’ve encountered have a great deal to say about God however - even though some do wholeheartedly embrace the ‘acme’ of everyday working family life as a basis for spiritual practice. Seekers after the divine will find Judaism, Christianity, Islam or any number of other theistic religions will provide more fertile soil for spiritual inspiration than Buddhism.

David,
I’m coming late to the party, but am thoroughly enjoying and inspired by your updated tantra. Your critique of ‘enlightenment’ is great. It identifies many of the things that make me uncomfortable with the word (I still use the word occasionally, although I don’t identify as Buddhist). There are a few other things in this post, however, that leave me a bit uncomfortable. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I’ll give it a try:

1) The criticism of non-ordinary experiences through common sense materialism fall flat. As you wrote in your ‘unclogged’ posting: “The aim of tantra is to liberate [the world] from imposed meanings.” The most hoary of those imposed meanings are precisely the common sense perception of fixed bodies & clear cause and effect. The need to distinguish cheddar from chalk is a practical one, necessary for the maintenance of our bodies. But it may (as some scientists argue) emerge just as much from the wiring and training of our bodies as from the material difference between cheddar and chalk.

Even if the neurologists are right that the unity experience comes from a breakdown of the ‘boundary-tracking mechanism’ (is that the same as the ‘soporific principle’ that makes opium work?) that says absolutely nothing about the significance of the experiences and perceptions that happen when that mechanism shuts off. What do we do with that new perception? I think most of us just left stunned, or–as you have described in another post–automatically apply some culturally or scripturally based interpretation (or, as in the case of my drug experiences, apply 3-4 interpretations almost simultaneously). Trying to measure these experiences against real-life common sense is a way to impose meaning on them not much different than calling them ‘enlightenment,’ or constraining them within any other premature concept on them.

2) Unruffled by adversity, considerate and charismatic (which you later gloss as confidence, mastery and charisma). These are all nice effects. Plenty of people obtain them without tantra. And, frankly, if these were my goals, I could think of better, and easier, ways to attain them than through tantra. These are not goals, however, that would draw me to a modern tantra. They are goals that seem inappropriate to what we know about the universe.

I want to give more weight to the mystical experiences, to learn how to explore them while reducing the weight of the concepts I will inevitably impose. Yes, it is extremely hard to have abiding experiences, to give them a lasting effect on our lives. But rather a tantra that points me back to ‘real life’, I would like one that helps me to better explore those non-ordinary experiences. We should instead be paying more attention to how we can live a life in more awareness of what we perceive through mystical experiences; not bring the mysticism down to real life issues.

I’m not necessarily embracing irrationalism (although I do think there are limits to rationality). Much of what drives me are the findings of modern science: the infinitessimal yet empty and unknowable spaces of quantum mechanics; the incredibly vast spaces and huge numbers of the universe; the rise and fall and constant changing of species (including our own); emergent properties and statistical patterns. Not to mention the more speculative ideas such as multiverses, string theory, black holes as universes, the big bang, etc. And the inevitability of death. How should one live in a world like this? A “real life” orientation seems hardly appropriate. It would require me to ignore everything that science teaches me about the universe. What attracts me to tantra (and psychedelic drugs) is their ability to create experiences that ( can more directly engage this meta-nature . . . . which includes not only the mystical experiences, but also much of what you have explained such as the charnal/pure land and the acceptance rather than judgment of emotions.

Hi David,

have you got the name of an author and/or publication for the “monkey thesis”? I like it, and would like to read more about it.
Joshua Jonathan

I have many disagreemets, and unfortunately, not the articulate capacity to put them in proper arguments. I will just say these - There might be a difference between the types of Knowledge, Truth and\or Knowledge-experiences between Epistemology and Buddhism (and approaches within each). For a discussion on these, I refer you to David Loy’s “Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy” and his reading of Prajna; In my own words, in the spirit of Dogen, I think what we are looking for is a (deeply profound) Confirmation rather than ‘Truth’ which always hints at a subject\object gap.
Also, I think the blind spot running through all this critique is a kind of [Americanized] hedonistic injuction, a ruthless “does it work” purposefulness that remains unattended to, and which is foreign to exactly the buddhist project- the wholly ambigous character of the middle way, built exactly on exhausting the epistemological driveness.

“The theory is obviously false. All is not one; chalk is not cheddar. (Try making a melted chalk sandwich.) ”

Diamond is obviously not charcoal, ice ks obviously not steam, you are obviously not the person you we’re five minutes ago..

Mm, how do we conclude that any experience is common between two people ? We seem to do fine believing that we share communicable experiences of food, sex, music - why not enlightenment ?
Why not go the whole hog and doubt whether an orgasm experienced by someone in another sect or in another century is the same as yours ?
What if, when it comes to prohibitions on sex, that monks a thousand years ago had a different experience of it than we do ?
What if eating meat was a totally different experience ?
Etc.
Why not be consistent and doubt it all ?

“In some of the sutras, you become not merely a god but a God: you create your own universe and rule it, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2015/10/13/the-cosmos-inside-your-head-neuroscientist-david-eagleman-tells-the-story-of-the-brain-on-pbs/

“we generally think of “seeing” as the result of processing information that comes through our eyes, but the truth is that several times more of what we “see” consists of information produced within the brain. All of us carry around internal models that the brain uses to construct, from endless perceptual fragments, what we call reality. In other words, much of what we experience of reality is, in Eagleman’s words, a “beautifully rendered simulation.””

shrug

Problem with Sharf’s paper - page 10, claims to know what it’s like to be dead. Tricky. Needs more work.

Interesting stuff, David. I was amused and surprised by the shared background in Wicca/Discordianism. You may (or not) find this article of mine interesting. It attempts to explain why so many people have the monist experience, and why that’s probably not actually what’s going on. http://deconstructingyourself.com/universe-not-one.html

Things of a kind go together. All probability timelines exist, for each and every difference. There is infinite room for them all in infinity, and, they are repeated an infinite number of times, each and every one. Yet, in infinitely dimensioned Hilbert space each and every probability timeline is only Planck’s distance from any other probability timeline.
Access only depends on the tuning. If over fifty percent of your brain believes anything, it will become your reality by drawing you by inductive resonance to the probability timeline where your belief is reality.
It’s all true and real. Here is an example, presented by Dr. Max Tegmark, professor of quantum physics at MIT. Here is the Multiverse: http://www.space.mit.edu/home/… http://space.mit.edu/home/tegm… … _sciam.pdf
By increasing your percentage of conscious brain use you may switch to the timeline where what you imagine is reality there, by varying extents of will, inversely proportional to your percentage of conscious brain use. The power of the mind is will times imagination. The MRI shows that we normally use 10% conscious brain use. From 10% to 19% brain use, the world feels euphoric. That is called “perinatal matrix one”.
But, from 20% brain use to 49% brain use, the mind is flooded with that which has been called “the knowledge of good and evil”, and this is called “perinatal matrix two”. From 20% to 29% brain use, if you symbolize what you want, especially with a logo of solid colors in an emblematic form you will go to the timeline where getting what you want is reality. From 30% to 39% brain use, if you write down what you want, you will get it. It is what has been called “real magic”, for, you don’t even feel that you have gone anywhere. You just get what want by writing it down. Between 40% and 49% brain use, what ever you say will become your reality. Jesus Christ said, “If you have the faith of a mustard seed and say to this mountain move it shall be moved”.
But, from 50% to 100% brain use, called “perinatal matrix three”, every thought manifests as your reality. I don’t know anyone who can control every thought all the time. If you imagine what you don’t want to think of, it too will then become your reality. Things go wrong, and soon you wish you were someone else, and “zap”, you are in the body of that someone else, but, now probably with a body down to 10% brain use again. But, it isn’t your body, so that when that body sleeps or dies, it’s into another body you go, and, in this way you body switch backward and forward in time into everyone you have seen, and, this can go on for about a hundred years duration. This was called an “aioniu amartematos”, an aeon of failure, in the Greek New Testament, but it was mistranslated into English, “eternal damnation”. There has always been much secrecy about this hyperdimensional travel. Psychiatry presents it as delusions within the brain; but, we now know that these hyperdimensions exist. Over 50% conscious brain use, “perinatal matrix three” has been used for punishment.
What awakens the brain like this? We have inhibitory neurons in the brain which keep our conscious brain use down to 10% brain use. Blocking these inhibitory neurons causes higher percentages of conscious brain use. LSD, and similar seratonin blockers block seratonin, the neurotransmitter of our brain’s inhibitory neurons, thereby awakening our brains to more that the normal 10% conscious brain use. Large doses of LSD were used for the “Clockwork Orange” treatment to put it’s victims into perinatal matrix three, after showing these victims horrible films of human torment, so that these torments are experienced as real as life, for it is real on those timelines.
But, these inhibitory neurons may be overriden by the muscarinic nervous system, like the parasympathetic nervous system, stimulation, mechanical, even with one’s own hands, or chemical, like by muscarine which doesn’t even pass through the blood/brain barrier, so it doesn’t even have to enter the brain. Muscarine excites the whole parasympathetic nervous system, therefore it is messy, and not popular in the West. The West has mechanical ways of exciting muscarinic nerves near the brain, therefore, cleaner.
Crucifixion forces what is called “holotropic” breathing, which stimulates the parasympathetic nerves of the respiratory nervous system, the stimulation of which, spreads to the brain. Remembering the body switching, you can see how Jesus Christ, being God the Son, body switched, backward and forward in time, into everyone who ever was, is, or will be, and that is how Jesus Christ is in you and I. With ordinary people, therefore on a lesser scale than Christ’s, waterboarding has been recently used to inflict the Clockwork Orange treatment.
In “Living Systems” by Dr. James Miller, he made the basic statement that, “There are two things in the universe: energy; and, information, which is the conformation of energy. It is obvious that energy is the “one substance” of the universe. It is also obvious that in one substance motion can only be in closed circuitry, that there be something to move out of the way and fill in behind. Some of these closed circuits have been called “magnetic fluxes”.It is also obvious that these basic closed circuits would only slip by one another, and no one would be conscious of anything, if there wasn’t the granularity of Planck’s volumes to provide a frictional grip. Planck’s volumes are moving in closed circuits of Planck’s volumes in the matrix composed of Planck’s volumes.
This is how information is differentiated from energy. Dr. James Miller called matter “alpha code information”. The perpetual and eternal mechanisms of manifestation are: The infinitesimal point nothingness, . , is rastered by time into timespace, U , that exerting its oneness in one direction, / , stirs closed circuitry, O , that all going the same way, vO^XvO^ , clashes (a Big Bang), X , forcing confluency, = , undifferentiating individual closed circuits into nonexistence.
The energy that maintained their differentiation is released as photons. Closed circuits being turned by that “exertion of the oneness of the one substance”, energy, on apparently both sides is allowed by one side being in timespace with a value of pi different from the other side, as this manifestation of a world expands, also fifth dimensionally. This fifth dimension was defined for science by Harvard University professor of quantum physics, Dr. Lisa Randall, in her book “Warped Passages”.
The counterclockwise and clockwise of these closed circuits are the basic opposite polarities. Structure, maintained by orthogonality, is the cause of the separation of opposite polarities. Now we take the variously bent timespaces into consideration, that Scientific American has written about before. As we leave the rigid orthogonality of flat timespace, where the value of pi is 3.14159265…, like, for example, by accessing globally bent timespace by the mechanical velocity analogues in electricity, current, and thermodynamics, entropy production rate, etc., we depart from that rigid orthogonality of flat timespace that maintained the separation of opposite polarities, so that individual closed circuits may undifferentiate into nonexistence. `
We wouldn’t be conscious if differentiation didn’t cause consciousness. Reciprocally, all the differentiations have caused energy itself, God, to be eternally conscious. As you know, everything is “trying” to run down, or is being built up by that which is running down. In other words all differentiations are being pushed to undifferentiate. To undifferentiate is the actual true will of every differentiated thing in the universe.
Descending into globally bent timespace matter acquires a tenuousity that has been called “spirit”, and as we descend into globally bent timespace it gets more and more flexible until, especially with the fast polarity cancellation rate allowed there, all is literally flames. But, undifferentiating being pleasure, undifferentiating into nonexistence is the attainment of the satisfaction of all desires.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that in our infinite universe, also including what has been called the “multiverse”, the reunion of previously associated Planck’s volumes back into their original closed circuits is impossible so that the attainment of total undifferentiation is the eternal satisfaction of all desires. It can also be said that there are three things in the universe: entities, properties, and relationships. In the one substance, energy, a sphere can manifest as a closed circuit. A sphere can turn on itself. That could be called a particle. We know we are entities. “I hurt therefore I am”.
Our entity is a closed circuit of the one substance, energy, in the one substance, energy, that is a ring, that qualifies to be called a unit of “dark matter”. Dark matter is composed of all those closed circuits that don’t qualify to be called particles. Remember, we are the information, not energy. If we were energy we would never sleep. God never sleeps. Dr. Hugh Everett said that for every possibility there is a “parallel universe”. Actually, these “parallel universes” can be called probability time lines sideways in time. This direction, sideways in time can now be called the sixth dimension.
So, we have all the entities, and their “similarities”, in all their possible probability time lines. We can call them “similarities” rather than duplicates, though MIT professor of quantum physics, Dr. Max Tegmark, revealed that in the infinite eternal universe, that he calls the “multiverse”, each entity has an infinitude of exact duplicates, hyperdimensionally.
“The fact that an entity is a closed circuit, its shape is a property, and the rate of its circulation, counterclockwise on one side, and clockwise on the other side are also properties, etc. Counterclockwise and clockwise circuits, ^OvvO^ , able to go confluent when face to face, is a relationship. Side to side they draw other entities in like a ringer, which pushes them apart, of course, also by closed circuit configurations. But, all is pushing to face to face confluency to undifferentiate back into nonexistence.

Someone doesn’t understand that modern physics, qft, is telling us is one. You’re made of out of particles, fields, and waves. So is everyone else. Obviously we’re still trying to make sense of what’s going on but physics is reaching a point where you can’t explain the experience in words because it’s beyond our senses. Reality is much more than our small narrow-minded radar.

Most physicists know that the reason things are solid is due to electrons spinning in a very condensed area at incredibly fast speeds giving the illusion of a disk (almost like a fan).

That’s the idea where everyone calls you God. God is something that is incomprehensible and that’s pretty much the entire universe. Science is an approximation of the world but we neglect certain aspects because error is supposedly low enough. This is rather unsatisfactory.

You’re using words that have multiple definitions to skew an entire practice that delves into the idea that you can’t express the experience in words because you’re just a small part of it.

However, the other aspects obviously need to change with the times and that’s something a lot of stringent philosophies and religions have and, I agree, that is an issue.

Enlightenment, which can’t be explained in words so this is a very rough idea, is effectively seeing the world and recognizing that your words and labels aren’t real and that everything, is in fact, one.

Also, isn’t it a good thing that Buddhism has the ability to adapt when knowledge they didn’t know was presented to them?

The Buddha never believed in metaphysics so probably never looked into that question he just wanted to figure out how to solve universal suffering in humans.

Yet you attack that as if it makes them wrong. You wouldnt care if they changed or stayed the same you would just use it as point to attack their ideologies.

Most sects I know, besides nchiren, have stated that all paths lead to the same place and that the decision is up to you in which one you follow.

Hi David,

First off, thank you so much for your writing. I devoured the whole Vividness site over the last 1-2 weeks and found it extremely interesting. I’m grateful to you for giving language to some of the discrepancies I’d struggled with and been unable to articulate.

Regarding the possibility that there may be multiple “flavors” of enlightenment, I thought you may be interested in this study.

I haven’t finished going through it, but one of the ways it was framed to me by a teacher I’ve worked with is that the evidence suggests the various maps of practice are in fact leading to different awakenings. For example, the hinayana map leads to neural changes that tend to shut down the sense of self, whereas the vajrayana tend toward changes that shift the seat of “self” from a more local to global sense of identification (e.g. identifying as lively spacious awareness itself).

I’m new to my explorations of vajrayana/tantra—I’m using those words as synonyms, which I think is how you do as well—but thought this was a fascinating bit.