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You're enlightened – now what?

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com

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Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#211

Post by dang »

adenozine wrote: post #210
dang wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flaw in your argument is that you assume that it would be possible to make everybody happy. That's extremely not possible, and often trying to appease one subset ends up pissing off a much larger subset. These complaints are not coming from a "huge chunk of people", and the fact that they've been more or less stable since the community started is at least evidence that there isn't a massive decline, which is what…

Well, you didn't answer it. Curiosity, more than anything. You're an enigmatic figure. Little is known about you, though you act as gatekeeper over a large number of conversations, I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything in this context. I could gather thousands of voices that want to read news leaning to the hacker side of the content spectrum. All these voices with commits and code reviews to show for th…

Statements like "I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything" come across as more aggressive than curious. FWIW I've been a professional programmer for many years and write code every day, though not as much as I'd like to.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#212

Post by dwaltrip »

cvaidya1986 wrote: post #202
mrwnmonm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that he/she is wrong?

Yes

I am sure you realize that this one word answer is not very useful.

I've been there -- too tired or busy to write out a proper response. Lately, I have been thinking that not responding is better in such cases.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#213

Post by MichaelZuo »

One afternoon a student said “Roshi, I don’t really understand what’s going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I’ve been doing this for two years now, and the koans don’t make any sense, and I don’t feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Well you see,” Roshi replied, “for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It’s impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid.

So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse.

And the student was enlightened.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#214

Post by adenozine »

dang wrote: post #211
adenozine wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you didn't answer it. Curiosity, more than anything. You're an enigmatic figure. Little is known about you, though you act as gatekeeper over a large number of conversations, I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything in this context. I could gather thousands of voices that want to read news leaning to the hacker side of the content spectrum. All these voices with commits and code reviews to show for th…

Statements like "I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything" come across as more aggressive than curious. FWIW I've been a professional programmer for many years and write code every day, though not as much as I'd like to.

Well, your attributing my opinion to "flawed arguments" seems to be tit for tat.

I call it a wash ;)

Thanks for sharing. I assumed you didn't code, and just existed perhaps attached cybernetically to the news.yc HTTP pipeline. Nice to know there's at least some depth to ya.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#215

Post by andrei_says_ »

Enlightenment is not what we think or what we can think.

The best metaphor I’ve heard is - you’ve walking all your life with a rock in your shoe, and now suddenly it’s gone. Forever.

You can’t “get” it - it’s about something you lose.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#216

Post by dr_dshiv »

tinco wrote: post #179
darkerside wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That father's life of suffering is also a life with a sizable family that he had the privilege of supporting. That is enlightenment.

What is enlightenment?

Realizing that we are all one, man.

But as a continual process - you can't just experience that once and go right back into old habits.. Or you can bring it into everyday interactions with the world. Business, family, politics, science, technology - all the hard stuff.

And it manifests as a cultural phenomenon as well an individual experience.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#217

Post by dang »

adenozine wrote: post #214
dang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statements like "I'm curious what makes your opinion worth anything" come across as more aggressive than curious. FWIW I've been a professional programmer for many years and write code every day, though not as much as I'd like to.

Well, your attributing my opinion to "flawed arguments" seems to be tit for tat. I call it a wash ;) Thanks for sharing. I assumed you didn't code, and just existed perhaps attached cybernetically to the news.yc HTTP pipeline. Nice to know there's at least some depth to ya.

Ok, peace :)

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#218

Post by volume »

dwaltrip wrote: post #159
volume wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard it said, that if you understand yourself you understand the universe. Some say there are levels to go through in order to get to this "universal understanding". There's this one Youtuber who filmed himself on 5-MeO-DMT - his gateway drug to universal understanding. Well he was more blunt, in that he became God.

I'm pretty firmly in the naturalist camp. I've had numerous psychedelic experiences. I can see how one could think such things. But I don't think we have solid reasons to start making strong claims about the supernatural. Here's one piece of evidence out of thousands more. Consider that the psychedelic effects of LSD can be prevented simply by blocking 5-HT2A receptors in the brain [1]. This is what you would expect…

thanks for sharing about 5-HT2A receptors! I'm just generally casually curious about how consciousness works. Check this out from 2020: https://psychedelicreview.com/the-structure-and-function-of-...

Even though neuroscience intimidates me, I'm smart enough to regurgitate the summary: "The 5-HT2A receptor is central to the effects of many psychedelics, but it may not be the only receptor involved." Also I know enough about myself that I don't kknow any of these topics enough to evaluate Barbara E. Bauer, or https://psychedelicreview.com. I can keep Googling though ...

This was quite interesting news: https://psychedelicreview.com/uc-berkeley-opens-the-center-f...

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#219

Post by monktastic1 »

motohagiography wrote: post #42
raxxorrax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never have attributed that quote to Pascal as he mostly is depicted as quite judgmental. Or perhaps he thought he only needed to forgive himself? Well, after enlightenment you clearly know that you need to chop wood and carry water on your own volition. Ok, technically very likely not for yourself, but still. "You do it for yourself" is the same lie we tell children when they need to go to school after all.

Similarly, in Ted Chiang's story of a rivalry between two super-intelligences, the way that one ultimately prevails is by challenging the other to do just this. The idea is that the path to understanding anything is necessarily through developing the ability to forgive, (which is the seed and the foundation for many religions) is at the same time ridiculously difficult, yet within the grasp of literally every person…

Do you remember which story? The other comment here links to a good story, but it seems to have nothing to do with forgiveness.

Re: You're enlightened – now what?

#220

Post by gregfjohnson »

katsume3 wrote: post #40

Well Hitler was known to co-opt and misappropriate esoteric teachings[0] for his own horrible acts. That's the problem with occult teachings; so often they are weaponized for evil deeds. As for enlightenment, it can only be understood by explaining it in paradoxes or riddles. My favorite is: If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha Which is meant to explain how we should not be attached to Buddha as a personality, but…

I would be interested to hear the various things this (initially shocking) phrase means to people. The transformation of consciousness that it invites may be a function of the consciousness of the person considering it. I.e., it might mean different things to different people, each valid in its own way. For me, it means that during meditation practice "profound realizations, deep spiritual or theological insights, etc." are simply distractions, on par with daydreaming about what to have for lunch. Meditation, as a practice of pure consciousness and wordless awareness, invites us to a deeper place than words or concepts can reach. Self-congratulatory ego-driven behavior can be subtle and creative, and can easily don the cloak of the Buddha, especially for practitioners who are starting to move into deeper waters in their practice. It is this "false consciousness" Buddha that the phrase directly addresses for me. In twenty years it may mean something new, depending on where I am at that point.
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