many enlightenments? (a nonrigorous position) (old post):
[ Draft self-forward (it's pompous and has other issues, to say the least):
This is an old blog post that is sort of the beginning of my thinking about a "unified theory of enlightenment" (which also has to harmonious with neuroscience, among other things, even if in a very different ontology). Overall, I've wanted a response to someone saying "there's different kinds of enlightenment in different lineage traditions, wisdom traditions, contemporary communities of practice, and so on." In contradiction, I would say something like, "There's only incomplete enlightenment and complete enlightenment." Of course, I'm certainly not the first person to say "my enlightenment is better than all these other enlightenments." And I'm certainly not the first person to, not just say that, but to also (try to) construct careful arguments that somehow refute other conceptions or enlightenment or show how they are imperfect or lacking something important. (I don't even have a careful argument, in one place, yet, as I'm writing this, though I hint at it in a bunch of places.) I think the stakes are pretty high, for a few reasons. First, one wants practioners to have an appropriate level of confidence and focus in/on a particular system--I say appropriate because different systems work better and worse for different people, loosely speaking, and one wants to only put the amount of time into a single system that makes sense, for them. And a good system should disclose when it's not the right system for a particular practioner (erring in some right direction of minimizing false positives and false negatives). Second, flaws in systems produce individual suffering and also damage communities. To the degree that a system can point out issues in individual practice, and point out issues in other paths or conceptions of enlightenment, presuming (challengingly!) tact, grace, and humility, then multiple communities of practice are elevated, and so on.
In all his, my general critique (and of course this critique is leveled by like every meditation system at every other meditation system) is that most other meditation systems "don't go far enough." For their "center of mass" of practioners, "people tend to get stuck" and/or the tradition becomes anemic and vague about far reaches and thus potentially fails at transmission to the next generation.
A meditation system or bodymind practioner should be able to operate on itself/themself and apply to itself and critique and meta-critique itself, comprehensively/exhaustively, and without remainder, thus transcending itself and pointing at groundlessness and like any and all of any other things behind the thing, unceasingly.
My conception of "better" doesn't guarantee the above (see that section in the document, noting nonmontonicity, multidimensionality, globality, etc.). But, the argument tht I haven't made yet is supposed to go something like, "tacking towards 'better' will produce 'subjective convergence'." That is, people pursuing their own aims/goals, on their own terms, in their own words, "correctly" will produce subjective convergence or similar high-level features to other correctly practicing practitioners, "from the inside,' along with, of course, optimized contingency perfectly-fit to the individual practioner, as well, that itself will still be imbued, infused with that high-level convergence. Rather, this is the claim, and then I still need to work out a good argument, or, rather, just an explanation for this claim, that isn't too circular. But analytic circularity (or something; someone slant-called this "platonicity") might be all that's needed, here, or all that's possible, in any case. (There can also be an appeal to latest and greatest neuroscience and physics, cf. very-high-dimensional energy landscapes, attractive basins, stable attractors, global minima/maxima, entropic dissipation, "teleodynamics", the relationship between telos and mechanism, and so on, and plenty more, over the next three hundred years, and beyond.)
(I just want to note, as I'll also note, in parallel, below, that words like "globality", "correctness", "convergence", "optmized", "perfectly-fit,"--let alone "platonicity," contra impermanence, non-eternality, groundlessness, etc., heh--are sort of problematically self-reifying, and I hope the reader will hold all this very loosely in their intrepretation and how these words do or don't affect practice. In some sense this is just toy schemas, just pedagogy, just [sometimes] skillful means, just etc.)
Some general qualifying and hedging:
- Above, I use words like "incomplete," "complete," "perfect," "imperfection," "enlightenment," etc. I'm sort of using all these words in the "relative sense," and "speaking relatively," noting of course that the "real thing" is ultimately groundless, nebulous, empty, etc. (And all those words are groundless, nebulous, empty, too, etc.)
- Also, especially when I say "complete" or "perfection," I'm speaking loosely. Like, yes, in one sense, there is "one relevant thing" that feels like that, sort of (sort of the phenomenological field and the moment-by-moment relationship to it) but also in another sense something asymptotes, never completes, and that's something like wisdom or the combination of (a) non-reactivity-with-no-suppression-and-no-remainder (plus fluidity, flexibility, non-fixed-ness, non-constraint, structural liquidity) and (b1) proactive constructiveness with respect to life's challenges, and (b2) which is sort of concommitent with metabolization, integration, processing of samskaras, karma, impressions, imprints, etc.. But, there's extraordinary subtlety and possibility for incompleteness, here--failure modes of self-suppression, non-constructiveness, process errors. I am calling for a superlative standard that is itself nuanced and unfortunately prone to misinterpretation (leading to e.g. subtle self-suppression, errors, over-reification) This can't be overstated. Perhaps all contemporary meditation teachers fail on this, in my opinion. I could of course be wrong or missing something big!!!! And there are still contingencies of (mis)fortune and (dis)privilege!!! Or it could look like that if I get a neurological disease or whatever (as can happen to anyone), as the proof is partly(!) in the lived actualization/exemplification. Search elsewhere in this document for "purification" for further critique on (my understanding) or other conceptual schemas for this sort of thing. (Mainly-ish near the bottom of this section: mark's approximate practice summary highlights
- While I disagree with lots of details of what I think the buddha may or may not have said, noting I am not a careful reader of buddhist materials let alone a scholar, nor do I mean to especially privilege buddhism over several other esoteric traditions that I think do a bunch of things better, I just wanted to mention that, every few years, I'm struck anew by how much of a genius the buddha was, and I generally expect that to keep happening, as my practice continues to progress. And/also, most of my disagreements with "what the buddha actually said," as best I perhaps vaguely understand them, have seemed to remain stable, for whatever that's worth.
- I strongly suspect some existing meditation systems will implicitly (or explicitly) perfectly or nearly perfectly dovetail with my thinking, here, in path and fruit.
- Some systems work better and worse in different historical periods and sociocultural/socio-financial milieus. They are products of their time and place in history, and sometimes "explicit flaws" are corrected by implicit features of community and environment. And, of course, things that look like "flaws" to outsiders, from a distance, may be not be flaws at all, etc., etc. etc.
The old blog post is immediately below.
[First posted: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/many-enlightenments-a-nonrigorous-position/ Last accessed: 2021-12-08]
[This is a heavily edited transcript. It’s not as organized or nuanced as it could be. It’s more like a position than an argument, for sure.]
[by enlightenment I mean a state or property of a mind versus an social/cultural/intensional [sic] construction. I think there are many of the latter, of course.]
Lots of people think that there are a bunch of different enlightenments. I actually strongly disagree with this. I think there are intermediate things that can be cultivated, and certainly different people will have a preference at least mediately for different things that they want based on what they think is out there, what they think they can get, and what they think is good/useful.
But, I tend to think that the mind is only trying to do one thing. I don’t know exactly what that is, but it’s probably something like predicting what’s going to happen next as elegantly and correctly as possible. Something in that space.
I think it used to be popular to model the brain as a heinous kludge, but I think that neuroscience is going to go in the direction of there being one fundamental operating principle for how the mind works. After all, in some sense animals or say especially humans have a fragmented telos, but in another sense the telos of a humans (and animals) is quite unified.
And that unity increases with training, etc. Importantly, people have different goals. But people’s goals can change, and there’s a question of how deeply those goals can change. And arguably, meditation or enlightenment are tools for changing desires/preferences/goals in a very deep way. So, what are the fundamental principles, neuroscientifically or phenomenologically, that underly the transformation of telos?
One way to look at this is using the concepts of goodness and “betterness.”
I think that, nonmonotonically, people can tack towards goodness or betterness in sort of a global way. Like, with dips and valleys and mistakes and backtracking, just aim for things being better and better.
Like someone might want to experience things as empty or someone might want to have less life problems, or realize that there’s no goal or one goal or lots of other things…
But, imagining people who’ve been doing the thing for forty years… I think that there’s a way in which people who don’t asymptote or who don’t paint themselves into a corner, or don’t get stuck, I strongly suspect that in the limit they will agree more and more about what the right thing to do is and what it looks like when it’s more and more “done”.
Like, the metaphor, there’s many paths up the mountain, but only one peak.
So, for the people who say there’s multiple enlightenments or multiple axes of development, I would imagine that, yes, that’s the case when one is say 5/7’s up the mountain. But 6/7’s, 7/7’s…
There will still be contingency in life situation, personal experience, and use of mind.
But, I think there’s this globally significant invariant or isomorphism at some level of abstraction, that does have a concrete referent, that is converged on at the highest levels of skill and attainment.
[Update: A part of this thread: https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1119037981501853697 ]