Re the comment: "I do object to any claim that these states somehow reveal the reality of life. To my profound disappointment Sam Harris seems to have absorbed this assumption also.":
If I understand what you are saying here I think that you read a different book of Sam Harris's than I did! Harris's point is surely that, as invaluable as meditation and altered states of consciousness are, it is a mistake to take subjective experience as evidence for how the world really is. (I happen to disagree with Harris - all experience is ultimately subjective and at the end of the day it's only experience that guides our view of life.) Although I get the gist of this argumentation that enlightenment is a misleading "concept" I always think to myself that surely if I was suddenly able to experience my life in a similar way to that of the Buddha after sitting under the Bodhi tree surely I would respond to life's events in a radically different way to that in which I do now. Ignoring philosophical niceties, isn't that what we mean by enlightenment? And if so, isn't it a useful term to have available? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote : <Snip> I think the term enlightenment is misunderstood. People think of it as something one acquires by doing certain things. But because it is about what we intrinsically are, this cannot be revealed by doing anything, because that value is already there. It is a tautology. We are what we are. Techniques are for the removal of psychological garbage. Me: I am not sure the word refers to anything more than a cluster of beliefs about someone's perspective on life. Although I have experienced fundamental shifts of my internal experience, I am not convinced that they represent anything close to how it gets hyped. It may not be realization of any reality other than something our brains can do if you think about things in a certain way or cultivate the altered states of consciousness from excessive meditation practice. I am not convinced that we all have psychological garbage that we need to remove. What some might view as garbage, I might view as a critical aspect of what makes me an individual. 'Enlightenment' is always about belief. It seems to me people respond to the prospects in which this term is embedded in different ways. Some belief is always involved. Some become true believers in whatever system they have adopted and they stay stuck in that system. Others simply drift away at some point, it did not pan out for them. Others follow the idea rather intently until at some point it simply evaporates, and one is left with what one started on the journey with. The term is only real to the true believer. To the dissatisfied person, perhaps a bad taste is left for the failure of the term to come to any distinct conclusion for them. For those for whom the pursuit has evaporated, there is the satisfaction that one never again need pursue that dream because somehow that trip of deception was built into the universe. These three different endpoints will never align in a discussion as far as I can tell. If an empty glass represents what we are, then all the stuff that prevents us seeing the empty glass is like water in the glass. Nobody really wants an empty glass, so they look elsewhere. A glass of clear water captures the attention more than an empty glass. The technique of enlightenment is like this: The glass with the water just sits still. The water slowly evaporates. When all the water has evaporated, voilà, the empty glass appears. Throughout all this, the glass did not change, nothing was gained as far as what we are, but the process we subjected ourselves to, shifted the perceptions. For those with mental impairments, this is a simple-minded analogy, not a truth; it might work for some, not others. Pursued to extreme, analogies break down. Me: Proof by analogy aside, I am not sure anyone has made a case for the need for such a concept concerning people who claim to be in such a state where they experience "whatever". Enlightenment is one of those words like "God" where the belief system it is embedded in needs to be evaluated together with the term. It is highly context dependent. I am interested in the belief systems that surround such terms to the extent that it helps me understand how people participate in shaping their conceptions of reality. So far, for me, I think it refers to a lot of mental states and perspectives that require a boatload of assumptions to be presupposed to exist. Even to evaluate one's mental state through such parameters is a filter choice on perception. I am not against someone believing this about themselves per se (must be Judy's influence) but I do object to any claim that these states somehow reveal the reality of life. To my profound disappointment Sam Harris seems to have absorbed this assumption also. Not sure how to respond to this. I found Harris' recent book interesting, but discovered he was really unable to disconnect from Buddhist philosophy. From my current point of view, 'enlightenment' has to do with undermining the tendency for the mind to believe things, and has nothing to do with states of mind in the sense that one kind of state represents 'enlightenment'. It has more to do with raw sensory experience, to the extent that a human nervous system can be free of filters (as raw experience is also filtered by the nervous system outside of our thinking processes). Maybe something like the interpretive filters of the thinking process step aside as it were, they do not come into play the way they did before even though one can still think and reason; perhaps the mind recognises an arbitrariness in applying thought to describing experience, in making up a story about what happened, what came down, and no longer assigns the term 'reality' to that story. In other words, raw experience, as raw as it is possible to be for us, becomes the primary sense of what we would call real, and the stories and ideas we attach to those experiences are frivolous icings on the cake, however fun they might be. But then I am the first to say that whatever enlightenment is, I am pretty sure I am not in it. So there is that. There may be a bit of Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" in play and I would never know it! I have been doing this stuff going into my fifth decade, and it is really difficult to be serious about it any more but the sense of 'I' for me, while not vanishing into the night, seems to have dissipated quite a lot, it decentralises and thins out, while the body, thoughts, become like objects in a uniform space, like chairs and tables in a room except they are just part of the universe and not 'me' specifically like an individual. The sense of consciousness, as it developed through meditation ceases to be like an object or a state, it is as if it evaporated and blended into the world so, even though one can say there is conscious experience, there is no sense of consciousness being something, it is as if it completely disappeared. It ceases to be a 'hard problem' or any problem at all. The whole apparatus of the discussion relating to this idea drops away as far 'my' thinking about it to 'myself'. As far as talking to someone else, you, for example, it is kind of like improvising music, and as you well know, some people will groove to certain music, and others do not. In improvising music there is no concern for what it means, or how to proceed, it happens and one does not go into an analytic state then. But when there is a dialogue, the analytic state comes into play and results in a secondary reality for each of us which may never line up, one with the other. Harmony and melody as a description, is not the music.
