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LWMap/Explaining Insight Meditation and Enlightenment in Non-Mysterious Terms

08 Mar 2022 - 06 Feb 2025
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    • It's hard for me to evaluate writing on this topic, because I don't trust my own knowledge and opinions very far. I know just about enough about meditation practice to know that my theories are probably wrong, and that theorizing about it is missing the point anyway, just another technique of avoiding practice.
    • Despite that caveat, this was a pretty good effort, and I basically agreed with the author's view and didn't find much to object to.
    • He introduces the term cognitive fusion from a method called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which sounds interesting in itself), meaning roughly the state where a person identifies strongly with their thoughts and feelings. If those thoughts and feelings are troubling, ACT offers up techniques for defusion or distancing that help you not do that. Eg, when on the verge of getting angry, you instead notice that you are getting angry, and thereby avoid getting overwhelmed; your emotion is no longer an unavoidable part of your innate being but just another external phenomenon that you can deal with.
    • Meditation, then, is largely a set of techniques for achieving this sort of defusion. You observe your thoughts and in the process make them more distant from your self, and making them seem more like activities you can control rather than things you are subject to. This seems almost too ridiculously simple-minded, but jibes with my own experience. Simple or not, achieving this kind of distancing is almost like a physical skill, and the point of meditation is to train yourself in that skill so you can do it better.
    • Another term of art I learned from this essay: alief , "a belief-like attitude, behavior, or expectation that can coexist with a contradictory belief." We have an alief that "pain is death" which causes us to frenetically avoid pain, converting it into neurotic suffering. Meditation is also training in not doing this reflexive flinching. Enlightenment is success in freeing yourself from this process; you still experience negative emotions like fear or anger, but you don't experience aversion to them.
    • There's some grappling with the essential paradoxes of meditation. If it really lets you step outside of your normal thoughts and motivations (defusing) – then how does this version of you that is outside of motivation actually manage to do anything? All the motivation for action is left behind!
    • The answer is that this is not really what happens. Or it only sort of happens. You don't defuse, your emotions and motivations keep going as before, they just don't result in a suffering. Not ordinary negative emotion, which works as before and is not something you really want to be rid of, but you can stop building of vast empires of false narratives on top of them.
    • enlightenment means that you no longer experience emotional pain as aversive.
    • This is indeed a non-mysterious way to characterize enlightenment. But maybe it's too common-sensical; it feels oversimplified, not quite capturing a concept that is after all famously ungraspable. It sounds more like Stoicism than Buddhist enlightenment. Not that there's anything wrong with Stoicism, but I think that enlightenment has to mean more, something that is harder to capture with the tools of reason, something that is ultimately mysterious.
    • Or maybe mysterious is the wrong word, more like "inexpressible". According to at least some schools of Buddhism, you are already enlightened, there is no magical state to achieve, it's more a matter of realizing the real nature of what is already there, aversions included. And according to other schools, it's a matter of achieving a kind of nondual awareness, where all distinctions vanish, including those between enlightened and non-enlightened mind. These aspects of enlightenment seem to be inherently resistant to rationalization.
    • So the defusing theory does not seem to be adequate to capture these aspects. But maybe that doesn't matter. The mysterious aspects can't be explained, but this is a fine way to think about the non-mysterious aspects, which are plenty valuable whether or not they lead into the ineffable.

    • Does meditation have a purpose?

      • Chögyam Trungpa suggests not, or that meditation is somehow meta to purpose:
        • Q. Would you care to sum up the purpose of meditation? A: Well, meditation is dealing with purpose itself. It is not that meditation is for something, but it is dealing with the aim. Generally we have a purpose for whatever we do: something is going to happen in the future, therefore what I am doing now is important — everything is related to that. But the whole idea of meditation is to develop an entirely different way of dealing with things, where you have no purpose at all. In fact, meditation is dealing with the question of whether or not there is such a thing as purpose. And when one learns a different way of dealing with the situation, one no longer has to have a purpose. One is not on the way to somewhere. Or rather, one is on the way and one is also at the destination at the same time. That is really what meditation is for. (Meditation in Action, p 83)
      • OTOH obviously there have to be reasons, at some level, for people devote time and energy to this activity. But I suspect these are way beyond the reach of the rationalist framework.