You're enlightened – now what?

Who says quietism is good? Or romantic? It seems to me that the Romantic vision is of an exotic kingdom where the state and religion are a utopian whole.

Look, you can be against Orientalism without pushing nonsense like all religions just being the same under the skin. Religions are really different from each other, because they do different things in their societies. Some things are the same in all or most societies because we are all humans, but there’s also a lot of cross society diversity and you can talk about those differences by making sweeping generalizations. Yes, generalizations are simplifications and can be done poorly, but if you try to do without them, you just have to give up on understanding anything at all about humans.

Excellent! I linked to this story in my other comment: https://www.ibiblio.org/zen/gateless-gate/2.html

The point is that nobody should claim to be free from causality (though maybe the esoteric interpretation is that this is not because one can't be, but because the non-Enlightened will misuse or misunderstand the teaching). We are always culture-bound, and thus always biased, and thus mistake-prone, even if or when we achieve samadhi.

Have you ever lived in a place where you had to chop your own wood and carry your own water? Living at the mercy of nature itself. It can be as challenging and stressful as this whole society thing we put ourselves through, too.

Tangential, but apropos your comment especially on "The higher you go the simpler you become...", "The Midas Plague" from 1954 by Frederik Pohl is a funny story about a socio-economic perspective shift -- related to a situation where "wealth" and social status in an age of robotic automation and automated factories essentially means material simplicity and the opportunity for meaningful work. The story is available at the Internet Archive (and elsewhere on the net): https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-04/Galaxy_195...

The story was also was made into part of a larger book called "Midas World".

I can wonder if "The Midas Plague" might have helped inspire the 1956 sci-fi story by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Skills of Xanadu", which in turn inspired Theodore Nelson to create the Xanadu hypertext system, which in turn helped inspire the web? https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195... https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08

James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a more modern version of that theme of a shift in socio-economic culture with abundance -- with an old scarcity-based culture in conflict with a culture rooted in abundance-based thinking: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...

For me, the socio-technological version of enlightenment these days involves appreciating the insight summarized in the sig I use: :-) "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

It's just amazing how difficult it is to get people to appreciate that simple-seeming idea. Perhaps Upton Sinclair was indeed right (even as regards various forms of enlightenment?) when he said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

And that sig came from thinking about such stories as well as writings of others like Langdon Winner, Buckminster Fuller, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, or Albert Einstein (among others) -- so it is not like the core insight there is completely new.

For example, Einstein wrote in 1945: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Although in an age where digital watches have more computer power than was used to design the first atomic bombs, even being a watchmaker these days can be problematic in the 21st century. And that is even ignoring the "Acceleration of Addictiveness" (Paul Graham) "Pleasure Trap" (Douglas J. Lisle & Alan Goldhamer) potential of watch-based "Supernormal Stimuli" (Dierdre Barrett) given the "pretty neat idea" of digital watches networked to large organizations with problematical short-term profit-driven goals involving socializing costs and privatizing gains.

Or in Douglas Adam's insightful and potentially-enlightening words: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. ..."

I've enjoyed learning from the various comments here and pointers to other resources on the main topic of spiritual/psychological enlightenment -- especially the link to the Slate Star Codex review of "The PNSE Paper".

I’m not saying simplifications aren’t valid. I’m saying this simplification is simply wrong.

Theologically Buddhism is not a quietist religion. Buddhism has both communal and vocal worship rituals (mantra chanting). It has some quietist rituals, like meditation. But you can’t just pick one aspect of a religion and say it describes the whole thing. Otherwise a contemplating monk would make Christianity quietist too.

In terms of social issues it’s certainly not quietist either. Some Buddhists will argue that Buddhism is apolitical, and others will argue the opposite. I’ve heard Christian priests take either side of that issue too.

Then when you put theology aside, it’s not quietist in practice either. Any place that you have a large population of Buddhists, you’re going to have Buddhist political activism (which is more to do with them just being people, rather than specifically Buddhists).

The simplification only makes sense when viewed from the misinformed, romanticized perspective.