Thread by @EpistemicHope

In the past few months I've shifted my implicit thinking about meditation and enlightenment.

I've gone from thinking:

"Enlightenment is probably a real thing, and probably related to processing epistemic technical debt somehow.

Probably it also has something to do with noticing the 'edges' of how you're projecting your reality, and getting a visceral sense of the difference between 'the movie' and 'the screen the movie is projected on.'

In particular, enlightenment (probably) is or is the result of progressing far enough down a particular psychological axis, in the "good direction".

Something like your mind builds up all kinds of cruft, in the business of living, and OBVIOUSLY you're better off, ceteris paribus, if you clear it out, so you don't have that cruft, and are less constrained.

(Or maybe 'cruft' doesn't name the axis, and it is better to think in terms of 'building concentration power', or something, but it is still an axis being progressed along, if non-monotonically.)

Clearing that cruft (or fully clearing it) is desirable, to the point of being one of the things to check off on the list of 'necessary to be a fully realized / fully adult humans', but this one seems particularly costly to attain (tens of thousands of hours), so...

...I'm not really going to do much about it now, except maybe meditate on the margins as is practically useful for other stuff."

to

"It seems like there are actually a handful of different more-or-less robust mind-states that are called 'enlightenment', and none of them are _obviously_ better than the default.

Instead of thinking of this domain as a psychological axis that a person can traverse by training, and of which one end, all else being equal, is 'good', it makes more sense to think of this a wide state space, in which one can inhabit many different points.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem that the people who have attained any particular kind of enlightenment are obviously practically better for it.

It seems like it is compatible with 'bad [read abusive] behaviors.'

Several of the people who meditate a lot (@SamHarrisOrg), or who claim something-like-enlightenment (@Aella_Girl) do seem to be taking WAY more responsibility for their reactions to things than most people do which is super commendable, and worthwhile, and if the...

...meditation / enlightenment helps with that (as I suspect that it does), that is a good argument in its favor.

But it isn't like they don't get triggered at all, or that they are an order of magnitude less likely to get triggered than I am.

And if the hard-core people still have triggers and anxieties, it seems like triggers are not basically traumas that are cleared away by mediation.

It puts meditation in the category of "helpful boost", not "radical game-changer, required for full maturity as a human."

Furthermore, some people seem to...'melt into a puddle' from doing a lot of mediation / drugs. They become less of a person, or seem to become unmoored, or at least become actively worse at a number of competencies that seem relevant for doing things in the world.

So it not only does 'enlightenment' seem more like a space to explore instead of an axis to progress along, but it isn't as clear that there is an obvious 'good' direction.

It feels less like there's lever that will cause 'improvement' and more like there's a lever that will cause 'change', and there's less of simple principled way to evaluate whether the change is good or bad.

I don't obviously want to become enlightened."

As near as I can track, this shift has mainly come from...

1) @Aella_Girl's enlightenment interviews, and her own experiences (as discussed in Spencer Greenberg interview with her)

clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=017

2) thinking further about Duncan Sabien's recent facebook post on the topic (which I still think, and I believe he now thinks is too strongly worded).

facebook.com/duncan.sabien/…

(Probably there's also some background variable about how I'm thinking about the world and the frequency of clear gradients of progression, that also changed, and is upstream of this change?)

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