Recent comments

Could you expand on how cognition in stage 3 looks like?

I get rational thinking (orienting to a system), and to some extent metarational thinking (orienting to context/situation). These have a certain feel to me. For stage three I could only come up with examples: there is no felt need for justification and implicit is usually preferred to explicit.

But what is the gestalt/organizing principle for stage 3 cognition?
Also, how is reasonableness as on metarationality.com related to stage 3?

“You cannot run a modern economy if everyone believes that the world is flat, hell is a cave a few miles under ground, Buddhist rituals cure diseases, and magic amulets sold by monks are the best protection against demons.”

It’s not clear that this is true; if you have ever worked a shit blue collar job, you have encountered multiple people with a medieval era enchanted worldview - prone to unhinged speculation re: conspiracies, UFOs, etc. Flat earthers even.

Even among elites it occasionally causes some minor scandal when it emerges that someone with weird beliefs has slipped through. The power of compartmentalization is great; it’s not clear that a young earth creationist couldn’t be a competent civil servant, judge, pilot, etc. In many parts of the non WEIRD world (including South Korea) you will find elite tier professionals who consult folk magicians and shamans.

Eckhart Tolle does not teach eternalism. I think your understanding of what he talks about is skewed / mistaken. You did write “His books are not well-written.” and “He comes across as explaining things very clearly and simply, so that they seem obviously right. After a ten-minute video, however, I had only the vaguest recollection of what he had said.” ......things that don’t make it seem like you gave the guy a fair shot.

Anyways, here are the major differences from Buddhism…and really ANY religion/belief system I’m aware of:

• There is no past or future. Why? Because the only thing that can be experienced is “now” and the past is merely memories, which are suspectible to distortion and the future, which is guestimating at best and avoidance of now at worst.

• The “you” you think you are is the ego - the product of thoughts caught up in the lie of past, present and future all being real (only the now is real). He calls the observer of the ego the real you, and the ego/form-based you the false you. The ego-based you relies completely on time to add meaning and substance to itself. The real you – the observer – he refers to as “Being” or the “I Am”

• There is “clock time” which helps separate events in a linear sense, but that is all it is. Even if I know I have a trip in a week, focusing on it now aside from ensuring certain pre-trip things are done is a waste of time. So “clock time” exists, but only for us in this form where focus on time is unavoidable.

• When this form ceases (dies) whatever is not our ego (the observer) is what’s actually us. With the form gone, the ego is gone, which means the focus on past and future is gone. If the Being (real you) once again takes on a form, then the same problems will arise because the form will again be in clock-time-based existence.

• He alludes to but never says that becoming aware/present now will stop the cycle of taking on a form after death. But if one does stop being focused on the past or future, and realizes the ego-self is merely the body and thoughts BUT is not the real you (the observer), I can understand how one would be so at peace with things, there would be no desire to get another form after this.

• He says evil is not actually real, but rather is just the form forgetting its oneness with all others. He also says love is not actually real, because when people think they ‘love’ someone, what they really mean is they are aware of the inerconnectedness between them. As far as I’m aware, he does not speak much or emphasize compassion like Buddhists do. He does not teach to save all others and does not tell others to save others. He simply said he, decades ago, felt the creative urge upon awakening to write the books, and that consciousness shared among all is that caused the books to appear, not him specifically.

• He never explains what happens to consciousness/Being after death. Only that it likely will take on another form. He has never said there is a creator god who made all things, and while he has said ‘God” he just says that is a term some may use to describe the idea of Being, in that all life is a reflection of “God” and he said that helps show interconnectedness. “Being” as described by him is just the awareness that everything is one and the same. But an ego in a form struggles immensely with that notion. He also doesn’t make it seem like eventually all forms will become formless Being and reunite at the source, in a Hindu-like version of God.

=====================

He actually doesn’t say anything really about eternalism. He might say the interconnectedness of “Being” always ‘is,’ but that’s not the same. He also doesn’t speak of heaven or hell either. He makes it clear that ignorance of things is the worst thing possible in this form.

Also, I found his writings to be well-made. You can’t expect modern readers to read hundreds of discourses with highly repetitive passages like in Pali content, nor can you expect modern readers to easily comprehend Tibetan-sourced content being translated into English – especially if mind-being concepts are discussed. His books (he really only wrote 2 major books, the newest one being ~20 years old) are a pretty good read for westerners who are looking for very different approaches to living.

is the “Dark Night of the Soul” nightmare some modern vipassana meditators experience a consequence of monist distortions? (I suspect so.)

That’s very interesting, could you elaborate?

Hi David,

Thanks for this site.

the Aro gTér, which I used to be a student of

Why are you no longer a student of the Aro gTér?

I want to challenge the (fundamental) assumption of the model that development necessarily (i.e. in every single case) needs to proceed in the order of the stages as described/ that “higher” stages have the ability to also function in “lower” stages.
And as datapoint I bring myself:

I cannot remember that I ever have been able to function in stage 3. And I make the claim that many people on the autistic spectrum can easily function in stage 4, but not in stage 3.

What do you think?
Might that show a boundary of this model?

Regards!

Hi David,
Through you above message I learn that my long time former buddhist monk friend Thomas Flint has moved on. I want to write him. Can you give me an email address or other solid contact?
with thanks,
Troy Harris
Berlin
sritantra@gmail.com
troy-material.blogspot.com

It would seem to me (again, as someone actively and excruciatingly regressing from stage 5 to stage 2 as the world walks whistling by) that, unfortunately, societies that do not follow the Western liberal individualist model, actually have the upper hand at producing hypothetical “stage 6” individuals.

Roughly speaking, I picture a society where “the institutions are there to serve the individual” as a “cold war of all against all” where 50% of participants achieving stage 3 is be sufficient to maintain economic output at stable levels within the scope of living memory (which, in this case, is less than or equal to ~1 generation, due to deficiencies of further perception as inherent to the given stage.)

OTOH, a totalitarian society where “the individual is there to serve the institutions” would naturally cause individuals achieving a higher development stage to, well, rebel. This would make them visible to the institution, which would initially crush them - to its own detriment - then eventually one of these projects would figure out how to co-opt and incorporate these challengers to its own hegemony; or, from the opposing viewpoint, those who are able to rebel invisibly would figure out how to take over the societal institutions from the inside, thinking they are “bending them to their will” but instead just becoming one with them.

“You Are The Ones and We Are The Many”, to be overly dramatic and obtuse about a point I find difficult to express in the language that I am given by The Many.

I find the whole idea repugnant, tbh. In my head, it is the human individuals that are the bearers of conscious experience, and therefore moral value. Systems of individuals, on the other hand, are of course vastly more powerful than individuals, but have no consciousness, and I have come to perceive them as parasitic entities that exist in “behavior-space”. Who would win? Whose side are you on? Do you believe there are no sides? Does the forces that oppose you believe the same?

Fascinating, fascinating stuff! And everyone who I used to be able to talk with about such things now seems to be across something from me! Baseless speculation includes that some have found a place in the “system” that rewards them enough for Upton Sinclair’s law to apply (easy if you cound “not being crushed today” as reward), and yet others have been broken by their unilateral search for peace with a world that is at war with them for no reason, and become unaware operatives of rot.

And me, I just sit around bored and frustrated, hardly even finding it worth to write thoughts on Internet, lest they also be incorporated into the immortal unconscious which took away my sense of purpose “for my benefit” (as the Wilsonites would also probably rationalize to themselves the selling of false maps of shared interiorities to any seek of correct truths that passes by. “Hey, man’s gotta eat an if they get burnt it’s their fault.”)

Really gotta read the original Kegan.

This systematization is positively fascinating: a rigorous map of modes of consciousness about whose existence authors like R. A. Wilson would hint at, then sell you a fake to see if you figure it out for yourself.

I would like to report that over a period of ~15 years my state of being has regressed from precocious stage 5 (intuiting the presence of such patterns as described in the article, experiencing frustration that nobody seemed to know or care about such things, seeking a way out of a partially modernized mess of a society by virtue of “meta” awareness ascribing me further degrees of freedom) to exhausted stage 2 (where the only thing I can speak for is my personal experience, and other humans literally have no meaning or existence to me other than as relates to my present necessities - which I had thankfully struggled to minimize over time, and can now apparently persist in this state indefinitely.)

Furthermore I have a fundamental suspicion that my parents had experienced a societally-induced process of regression before and during my early upbringing; my observation over the years is that only after shedding the burden of
“breadwinning and childrearing as the only legitimate purpose of an adult person’s existence in a mixed stage 2-4 society” were they able to regain some degree of higher functioning. I consider it evil to create new thinking beings on such shaky grounds, but what is done is done.

What I took away from the whole ordeal that has been my lived experience as a conscious human being is that it has a strong “curated” flavor to it; from your description on what miscomprehension between stages 2/3/4 looks like, I infer that an individual might theoretically gain the following capability: they would be able, through persistent reinforcement, to force others into a certain developmental stage, thus qualitatively changing the system through which they perceive the world. The ethics of this process are contingent on the stage of development at which the perpetrator has developed that capability. Common pararational traps such as “conspiracy theories” and “esotericism/occultism” seem to me like the experience of an individual participating in the system at developmental stage N-1, figuring out the existence of stage N, extrapolating the existence of stages N+1,2…M, and becoming either terrified or power-mad about it, depending on where their locus of control was situated at the moment of realization.

Please, send help. I am trapped in a talking monkey.

Yes yes yes

Thank you for reflecting back to me how I intuitively practice spirituality

Feeling gratitude upon re-reading. The idea of “asking raw questions” changed my life.

I am reminded, in a similar vein, of Ken McLeod’s statement that ‘your teacher is not there to answer your questions – they are there to ask you questions that you can not answer as you currently are.’

Hopefully comments on decade+ old posts are taken as complementary and not annoying - I was a child when you wrote much of this book, and it’s adding great value to my life today as a young adult.

Your Yanas posts throughout Vividness have greatly clarified the whole conversation for me. But one issue (and it’s almost certainly actually a non-issue) is the classification of Zen - and by that I mean the whole of Zen, including Chan, Seon, Thiên, and Japanese Zen.

It seems to me Zen could be considered a yana, developed from dhyana but now its own distinct yana inclusive of dhyana. Zazen is a specific approach to meditation, koan study is a unique method of pointing to, playing with, and integrating the understanding of emptiness, and there are unique rituals and devices that approach and play with emptiness in specific ways (Zen poetry, gardens and sculpture, ritualized living).

If Zen is considered a yana, then sects would be the schools and lineages, such as Sōtō, Ōbaku, Rinzai, Jogyesa - all of which primarily focus on Zen the yana, but also frequently incorporate other yanas, like sutra.

I do see, in my very limited understanding, Zen the yana as a cousin to Dzogchen - similar to your framing in Beyond Emptiness, particularly at the highest level of koan practice… So that begs the question of whether Zen as a yana fits within Mahayana or Vajrayana, or neither.

What unites Dzogchen and Tantra conceptually and mechanically under Vajrayana, beyond aesthetic and sequential development? Is the difference between core yanas purely the aim - Arhat through Hinayana, Bodhisattva through Mahayana, and Buddha through Vajrayana? If so, Zen might constitute a fourth core yana standing outside the traditional three - as often Zen seeks a goalless Buddhism, although this is controversial across practice lineages (the Bodhisattva-ideal runs deep throughout Zen-focused sects).

In climbing the big mountain we’re all facing, it really is irrelevant to me if Vajrayana is or isn’t Tibetan. What matters is that the person practicing Vajrayana is becoming a better, happier person for the benefit of others!

You could spend 1000 years analyzing dharma, histories, monks, tantrayana, and sutrayana and more, but still, it is, for me, connecting with the individual deities/archetypes that brings release, not academic speculation.

And meditation? Great, relaxing, clears the mind etc. However, meditation can never be more than an ephemeral solution to suffering. Quit meditating, and the suffering pops back up–every time–maybe it’s less because you disassociated from it somewhat for a time, but trust my experience, the only way to constantly be happy and in bliss, for me anyway, and probably you, is to constantly connect with a deity. Constantly. Then you become a part of their bliss. It’s unexplainable. The other huge advantage comes at death; you need to be commiserating with an advanced being when you enter the bardo; otherwise, you’ll be like a leaf in a windstorm–you’ll be at the mercy of your own accumulated energies.

You connect with a deity through visualization and their mantra, but this isn’t understood or believed by the masses.

I hadn’t seen that article! Thank you so much!

I can tell this whole site is going to be a great resource to help me articulate to my wife and friends a great deal of my spiritual outlook. It is very difficult to put into words for your typical western atheist or agnostic who’s only familiar with Christianity - a fundamentally different way of relating to and experiencing the world, the self and one another.

Thank you for all your work and elucidation!

I really appreciate this blog, because it essentially summarizes much of my spiritual outlook. I formally practice Zen, but I have a deep fondness for Vajrayana and hope to deepen my understanding and pursuit of tantra in a parallel manner as time goes on.

One thought I do have, however, is on the difference between Vajrayana and Tibetan Buddhism. Obviously Tibetan Buddhism is a part, a derivative, of Vajrayana, but it is not the entirety of Vajrayana and Tibet does not own Vajrayana. I think a lot of resistance to our thinking comes from a desire to maintain indigenous culture and spirituality in the Tibetan tradition - we don’t want westerners appropriating and recreating “Tibetan” Buddhism according to their personal spiritual and philosophical proclivities. But we could develop distinct Vajrayana lineages in the west, potentially branching off from Tibetan lineages but explicitly reframed as fundamentally new interpretations distinct from traditional Tibetan understanding (say, western traditions branching from each of the 4 schools, with reinterpretations of myths and animus beliefs).

I think there have been a few attempts at this approach - like Diamond Way - but they tend to be marred by cultic behavior, sectarianism, western new age BS, and the general scandals and superficialities that tend to taint deliberate western reinterpretations of spiritual traditions. It might be useful for it evolve similar to western Zen, but retaining its myth, spirituality and symbology (western Zen is often so secularized and serious it can feel alienated from its spiritual and cultural roots). I think this could have organically happened if Chogyam Trungpa hadn’t gone so far off the rails in the 60s and 70s and made the horrid mistake of transmitting his authority to Osel Tendzin.

Is this aimed at people who are already giving benefit of the doubt to vaguely-Buddhist metaphysics, so to speak? When I attempt a translation into my own, some of it does feel already familiar, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of response to the self-posed “theoretical, abstract, implausible, or incomprehensible” charge.

There’s the notorious “Dodo bird verdict” that all forms of psychotherapies are equally effective, strongly implying their specific content doesn’t matter. Is there good outsider-accessible evidence that Buddhism-informed approaches fare any better in practice?

How about the sense of “spaciousness” that comes from having lots of unstructured time like during holidays?

Freedom from obligations and the have-to’s of day to day

Is that part of the spaciousness definition you have in mind here?

I also see how this spaciousness is closely linked to the awareness when you speak about the difference of awareness and mind elsewhere in vividness

In western psychology, awareness is a part of mind. Whereas in Dzogchen, mind is a part of awareness where awareness is like this infinite boundary-less vast space if i recall correctly.

Can you talk more about the difference between the awareness of Dzogchen and the spaciousness here?

Drop the involvement with judgment and subjective interpretation. So obvious and yet we find ourselves trapped in those constructs again and again. Crazy. Good stuff. Timely too.

I guess I was starting from the “difficult to describe” aspect. Now, of course, not everything that is difficult to describe is similar purely in virtue of it being difficult to describe. However, I felt a kind of connection, also felt alongside the Christian “apophatic” tradition. In my understanding of that tradition, one does not try to say what God is, but rather points, by saying what God is not. Or something…

https://psyche.co/ideas/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-consciousness-ending-meditation

Just curious, from a naive and pretty ignorant perspective....

I think I’ll stick with summoning demons, at least I understand how that is supposed to work..

I enjoyed this and thought it was laugh-out-loud funny. The second student’s description of why they’re interested in Dzogchen (vs tantra) helped me clarify my own interests.

I hope you continue to write dialogue, as it conveys (to me) some texture that seems otherwise hard to convey.

“If something bizarre happens and you can’t find your mind… you have an opportunity.”

What can one do when this opportunity happens? I recognized something that might be similar to it this morning.

Also:
- Why does the teacher say “Excellent! So now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” Is his mother Swedish, and does it come out when he’s feeling jaunty?
- Is “all-pervasive, unchanging, beneficent, luminous, impersonal space” a description of rigpa in terms of the elements? If so, are these terms which indicate what happens when form and emptiness are perceived as non-dual?

Ok, I think I see what you’re going for now. I still feel aversion towards this approach but that’s just me :)

Quick comment: I liked this up until the ending which felt a bit “magical”. I feel like it might add unnecessary confusion.

For context: I’ve been practising dzogchen for 5 years and come from a similar background to you.

David,

Thank you for your extended reply. I appreciate the added context for Dangerous Friend, and the attempt to untangle the questions around devotion.

Re the pushback — it’s understandable to disregard if the criticism is coming from a refusal to acknowledge modernity, but what I meant was whether there is something that is diluted when the relationship shifts to coaching. For instance, I find it quite plausible that a typical coach will require more skill than a Lama in facilitating a shift in the student. Of course, the whole point is that a coaching relationship is more flexible and in principle can include even some of the wrathful display that certain Lamas have.

The presentation of the relationship, and the words used to describe the teacher have a markéd impact on progress. What I am curious about is whether there are crucial functions that traditional Lamas play that are not realized by this presentation of the coaching relationship.

Hey David,

I’ve been slowly making my way through this site after being introduced to it by a friend in college a few years ago. I’m currently practicing and volunteering/studying full-time as part of the mandala of orgs founded by Tarthang Tulku. Although the org is highly non-traditional by Tibetan standards and makes secular forms of understanding emptiness highly accessible, it’s also been really useful to be able to read your presentation of tantra, as a way to consider what the essence of the practice is, and how it might be changed in the future.

As I’ve made my way through your website, it seems you’ve sort of chronicled your gradual move away of tantra (i.e. the totaled sports car), towards essence traditions in terms of your personal practice and intellectual interest. It’s been almost ten years or so since you’ve published much of what is written here, and I’m curious how your perspective (and practice) has changed since then. Do you still find modernizing tantra to be a worthwhile goal?

Like many young, anxious people of my generation, I was initially introduced to practice through Sam Harris, and his secular presentation of the dzogchen style, in the spirit of “just look at what is happening right now.” It changed my life, and I have been falling deeper down the contemplative rabbit hole ever sense. You mention that dzogchen may be too inaccessible for most folks to benefit, but I find myself wondering if this is really the case (many, many people seem to benefit from Harris’ presentation), and I wonder how your perspective on this has changed over the years?

If we really are really talking about distilling the essence of buddhist practice into that is as portable as possible, why ought a person interested in modernization bother with tantra at all? I think the project of cultural preservation is important of its own right, and I’ve fallen in love with much of what TT’s organizations do in this respect. But if modernity is what we are looking for, I can’t help but wonder if re-modeling tantra is barking up the wrong tree. Although more groundless practices may not be themselves ‘ennobling,’ I wonder if this is really what is important to preserve, or if it is generally better to leave that work to the individual, and to western psychological and philosophical approaches for actuating such changes, rather than forcefully trying to yoke it to non-dual experience.

Thanks again for all you’ve done on this site. Would love to hear your thoughts.

-Alex

Great post, but I’d worry about the tight congruence between omnipresent coaches and current neoliberal economic logics, revolving on individualism, entrepreneurialism , adaptability, flexibility. Basically, little one-person shops to purchase one-on-one training, experience, and expertise. Also a semi-tragic facet in the vein of ‘humans of late capitalism,’ as the burn-outs of so many in prior professional or institutional contexts supplies the very capital for their reinvention of coaches for those who are still employees! Maybe the ubiquity of coaches is a cultural and economic symptom of sorts, not something to be taken for granted or idealized.