Most enlightened people don't even know they're enlightened.
The ones who arrived there without conscious effort, through some intense concentration on some other aspect of life, simply lose their angst. Asked to explain, they usually have some kind of muddled folk mysticism about how it happened. Very few of them teach.
I know of well attested enlightenment from an olympic-grade swimmer, and a guy who really liked fly fishing, for example. The swimmer counted breaths while swimming, very much like one particular zen practice.
The desire to go out and teach is much more a side-effect of the people that were trained in schools founded by people who decided to go out and teach: the desire to teach is not embedded in the enlightenment experience for most people.
In that, it describes people as outwardly exactly the same as before, but their internal experience changed dramatically. This sounds to be the opposite of what you're describing.
Thanks for posting this. It’s interesting and goes some way towards explaining why everyone I’ve met who extols the benefits of meditation is just as prone to mistakes, ineptitude, emotional reactions, pissing people off, etc as everyone else but (unlike those who don’t meditate) seem to have no awareness of it and never apologise!
Sure. It's an ancient study of academic interest in Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism etc. They all have sophisticated methodologies for evaluating enlightenment in individuals or even texts.
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 in the world. It's a surprisingly deep insight.
I honestly don't get the point of the article. Is it supposed to be a jab at the modern mindfulness wave? Or is it actually speaking of "enlightenment" as it's understood in most spiritual practices, in which case none of the questions even make sense?
The article desperately tries to push all the triggers like a nerd on a party who tries to small-talk about science with a beauty queen who already has achieved inner emptiness.
What i wanted to say is that it doesn't really seem to understand the subject and is directed at people who also don't understand the subject but who like to talk about it. It goes off in all angles in order to spark some kind of conversation.
Many beautiful people are not content with just being beautiful. It even gives them some kind of inner unrest that they don't feel they deserve what they have and yet can't achieve what they urge.
Seriously. But presumably it's easier to write a snarky article than it is to spend years learning about that enlightenment really means for different traditions.
> Or is it actually speaking of "enlightenment" as it's understood in most spiritual practices, in which case none of the questions even make sense?
You'd think that (and I agree that the article doesn't make much sense) but as a matter of fact, quite a few people seem to think that they are enlightened in the spiritual sense you're talking about, and that this means that their view of enlightenment should definitely be turned into a quasi-cult, with them at the lead. Daniel Ingram (author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha - a surprisingly pragmatic take, all things considered!) has repeatedly expressed his frustration with this.
Enlightenment is the action of achievement, even in a moment, of the state of Nirvana. Nirvana can mean "quenching" (like from a forge) or "blowing out".
There are definitely various interpretations what this actually means, but the early texts indicate it to be the extinguishing of Dukkha (stress) in the target subject.
The subject arrives at this state (of no suffering) by way of understanding the origins of stress to be the fact of impermanence of all things, including a soul.
Of course there are thousands of ways to become enlightened (science for one tells a lot about impermanence), but there is a single effect of those ways which is the most direct for the given context.
If you really want to see behind the curtain, go sit in Vipassana. This is what Buddha suggested, if one is interested in this attainment!
Upon reading it my thoughts went to yesterday's Verge article on the audio recordings of Zuckerberg's Q&As. Facebook has many vocal rank and file people who seem to believe they've arrived at Enlightenment and want Zuckerberg to toe the line. His imperfect attempts to walk a tightrope that keeps everyone happy infuriate the Enlightened, who believe tightrope walking is in its very conception a concession to Evil. They conclude that he's an Agent of Hatred and start taking steps to coerce him into compliance with Correct Thinking.
You can be the enlightened one in many things. Here is an example: Edward Snowdon. Re-read the article imagining yourself to be him and it might make more sense.
Was he enlightened? Well yes. He could see the system for what it was in a very Matrix type of way. Before he came out with facts we were tin foil hat wearers, certainly not enlightened.
Because Snowdon knows some of the truths he has a vantage point to see the rest of the way government works for what it is. He also has a vantage point for seeing his fellow human beings for what they are. You can count on one hand the amount of people in the spy agencies that came out in a way inspired by Snowdon. It didn't happen, they just hunkered down.
I would say that Snowdon has got the measure of his fellow man and is therefore enlightened.
You can achieve enlightenment in many ways and the spiritual practice world does not have a monopoly on enlightenment. There are probably more fraudsters than genuine enlightened in the religious world.
Enlightenment is a thing though and with it comes a whole host of other thoughts, as per the article.
Do you have any reason to not see it in the light of your first alternative reading? I would not necessarily have put it that way myself, but on seeing you do so, it resonated.
Very good article. This also applies not only to "the enlightend" but especially those who think they are "enlightend" or so to say, know better. It doesn't has to be on an existential level. Even things like climate, privacy, politics... How do you establish that _your_ view is the one? Food for thought.
edit: and the biggest question is: How do you know you are right? I think t he answer is: you can't. Not you alone. You need to discuss it with others and see what works out (probably?). Therefore respect of others and their opinions is very important for me.
'If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life & feels like telling himself everything is quite easy now, he need only tell himself, in order to see that he is wrong, that there was a time when this "solution" had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too & the solution which has now been discovered appears in relation to how things were then like an accident. And it is the same for us in logic too. If there were a "solution to the problems of logic (philosophy)" we should only have to caution ourselves that there was a time when they had not been solved (and then too it must have been possible to live and think).' - Wittgenstein
That's fascinating but I don't understand his argument. Wouldn't it mean that no problem can be solved? There was a time before Wiles proved Fermat, for example.
I think the central thesis of his argument is closer to, "No matter how big of a problem you've solved, life went on without that solution previously, so don't get too big of a head about it"
I'm a little confused what this article is trying to say besides being on a peak state high doesn't mean much when it comes to really changing things. Don't get self-deluded about yourself by having a peak state experience.
If we are saying "enlightened" as in a general broad category of shift in mentality/emotions/peak state then that's one thing. If we're talking about a technical term that is used specifically within certain traditions then that's a different thing. I think it's very problematic that in a lot of people conflate the two as the same thing.
Even Buddhists who spend the decades realizing enlightenment still continue training to deepen. It's still possible to re-enter delusion after awakening.
And most real meditation masters I know do not make any claims about enlightenment meaning you're now a great ruler or CEO or something. That would be the Halo Effect.
Zen saying: "Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water".
Some more from Ram Dass:
“Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.”
"If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back into the model of "I'm Sam who empties the garbage." You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage."
What I get from it is that if you are considering starting a cult, creating your own government, going to war, or how to integrate your newfound knowledge into the bureaucracy of the world, you're not quite out of the woods yet.
Your first quote reminded me of this from Bruce Lee:
> Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.
Thanks for the quote, Bruce is a really admirable guy. May have been paying homage to another old Zen saying:
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
A hobby of mine is taking sayings like that and saying, "Well, if it weren't mumbo-jumbo, then what might it mean?" In this case, it would seem to be: At the start, you have a bunch of knowledge, concepts built on other concepts; studying Zen involves breaking all of that down and reforming it from scratch; at the end of the process, you have a new bunch of knowledge and concepts built on concepts, and you have similar labels for the concepts of material objects like mountains and waters, but it's possible that (e.g.) the lower-level concepts they're built on are different.
Physics is kind of like that as one develops successively better models of molecules, atoms, and particles, replacing the bottom-level concepts each time. Though the stuff on top of them doesn't change a huge amount every time.
Really? I'm flattered! To me it's just a simple description of what I'm guessing something might be supposed to refer to, but if it's sufficiently non-obvious to others...
Well, I haven't kept a list, but here's another that comes to mind. Someone's signature was "How do you prepare for death? Learn to live. How do you learn to live? Prepare for death."
On the face of it, this is a trollish non-answer. However, there is a way to interpret it. The first sentence is straightforward: Death is going to happen, how do I prepare for it? The second sentence is saying: You can't stop it, so the best you can do is figure out what to do with the life that you have. The third sentence is also straightforward: How do I figure out what to do with my life? The fourth sentence is saying: Imagine you're going to die, figure out your obligations that you'd want to fulfill before you die, fulfill them now, and then you will have freedom to focus on exploring what you really want to do. The phrases "prepare for death" and "learn to live" are each used twice, with different intended meanings each time.
There is always the possibility of getting a quote that is actually nonsense and was meant as nonsense (or, today, was generated by a computer), and "interpreting" wisdom into it that comes from the interpreter rather than from the quote. Or there could be multiple, similarly wise-seeming interpretations. For example, I could have interpreted the fourth sentence instead as: Imagine you're going to die; then, from that perspective, observe which things seem important and which no longer seem so important; thus, the thought-exercise of imagining you'll die is an exercise that teaches you how to live.
It's possible that cryptic sayings were devised to hold wisdom. It's also possible that they were devised by trolls surrounded by gullible admirers. Perhaps there were wise people who, as an apparently necessary evil, made themselves look cryptically impressive so as to attract funding from gullible rulers, or to keep their ideas from being misused by outsiders who might have bad intent. Perhaps there was a mixture of trolls and well-intentioned wise people. I really don't know.
I am generally a fan of straightforward textbook explanations that don't play word games, or, if they do, they have straightforward explanations of the word games. Still, it is possible that there's something to the cryptic stuff. And so it can be a fun game to try to get meaning from them.
If you are in flat land (a beginner), you see mountains as mountains. Well defined features on the horizon.
Once you start climbing, you concentrate on the details of the concrete mountain in front of you (rocks, moss, shrubs, ice, snow, caves) and your inner concept of a mountain changes into a collection of such details.
But once you summit, mountains around look like well defined features on the horizon again. Just like from the flat land of the beginners, only the perspective has changed.
At first, I saw things in the normal everyday way, with conceptual thought labels attached strongly to everything. Then, through Zen practice, I came to see things in a more direct way, without the constant presence of words and thoughts, and this was kind of amazing. Now, having thoroughly internalized this wordless perspective, I again use words with no problem, seemingly the same as anyone else, but with the freedom and playfulness that comes from the wordless perspective.
I think this is the one I can relate to the most. The 'wordless perspective' is a nice substitute for the common expression of 'you can only experience it and cannot express it'.
I love how “technical & analytical” your interpretation is.
My view: In the same vein but a different lens - enlightenment has a component where it is a “state of mind”/feeling(a kind of ah-ha)/a new perspective where ‘mountains are no longer mountains’.
But it’s also a cycle, one of living->death->rebirth->living where it’s through that process of “enlightenment“, the core and primary concepts and perspectives may have changed, but mountains are again mountains once everything known about mountains from before has been “re-integrated”.
Nice, I like that. It meshes with my own experience learning and internalizing various skills. If I'm interpreting it correctly, upon learning an art, each aspect of that art becomes a wide topic unto itself, to be picked apart and studied in detail. But in mastering an art, those lessons learned are internalized, and each aspect seen again as only its whole self.
It seems to easy to reach enlightenment when you are living in a monastery with a bunch of dudes and no responsibilities but to "chop wood, carry water."
But an enlightenment philosophy that can help a father of 3 with a hard marriage and a fulltime job or two...?
Hmm, maybe the enlightment philosophy project will take a few thousand more years...
The Vimalakirti Sutra is about exactly this. Vimalakirti is a laymen householder who achieves enlightnment. Upon his passing, Buddha sends a bunch of spiritual masters and bodhisattva's to Vimalakirti's deathbed.
Vimalakirti proceeds to chastise them for how useless their 'enlightenment' is when it doesn't help anyone in the real world, and is only a self centered quest to save one's ego from suffering.
The Bhagavad Gita is similar to the OP's issues. It deals with the conflicts we all face in life and how to resolve our wants with our duties. It's not a very long read, actually.
Note: Find a translation that works for you. Specifically, the word 'duty' meant something very different than it does today.
EDIT: For a more western take, I'd also recommend the Bible's knowledge books: Ecclesiastics, Proverbs, and Job. Again, a good translation is essential here, but I'm not about to recommend that.
My opinion is, it's realizing that your ego is an incredible temporary coincidence and that this doesn't make life meaningless but allows you to choose what meaning you want to give it. Your ego is no more special than the billions of other souls who have rejoined the collective unconsciousness of the universe, which makes us all one in the end.
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.
I think the definitions and models (the four path model specifically) from the pragmatic dharma crowd are the most interesting by far. Mostly because they can be tested. It's (Theravada) Buddhism stripped of a lot of the religious dogma.
They describe awakening as an actual, irreversible natural process that can be triggered by concentrating your awareness onto bare experience for a long enough time. Doing this intensively enough will bring about a "discontinuity" / cessation of space-time experience called a "fruition" (nirvana). Coming out of that discontinuity goes with a blissful "what was that?" feeling and some level of understanding of "ultimate reality", meaning a permanent perspective shift (instead of "I am seeing" and "I am hearing": in seeing there is merely the seen, in hearing the heard, etc...).
Makes me think of the thich nhat hanh quote: There is a saying: If a tiger comes down off his mountain and goes to the lowlands, he will be caught by humans and killed. It means if a practitioner leaves his or her Sangha, it becomes difficult to continue the practice. Taking refuge in the Sangha is not a matter of devotion. It is a matter of practice.
>It seems to easy to reach enlightenment when you are living in a monastery with a bunch of dudes and no responsibilities but to "chop wood, carry water."
Do you find it easy to confine yourself to a monastery with a bunch of dudes and no responsibilities but to "chop wood, carry water"?
Because the challenges of marriage and kids and work present challenges for self improvement that are real opportunities for the growth of my soul. I can be happy to have a trainer that gives me such heavy weights to train with
This just sounds like rationalization of your own choices. It is easy to be judgemental about monks when you already think that your choices offer real opportunities for growth.
My combo is bringing together stoic philosophy, perennial enlightenment philosophy (it's all one, man) with a design thinking and new thought mentality (manifesting reality). That's what works for me.
The very underrated movie "Redbelt" kind of addresses it. It's not about enlightenment, but the challenges of following a warrior's ethos in a modern world. It includes job, money, friendship, legal, and marriage challenges and the main character struggles to stay true to himself and his code throughout.
I agree with you, in parts, but: actual philosophy and meditation is not meant for you to be more productive at your job, or not need sleep to be able to work extra hours, or anything like that.
But it would help you worry less about things that can't be helped, and focus on this that can. It would help lessen the mental strain that we have for not being able to do more, or help us deal with the marriage problems in a way that it affects you less during your work hours.
You still have to work, still have sickness, marriage problems. But being better at separating those things, and suffering less because of the problems, is really beneficial
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.
"chop wood, draw water" means "standard daily chores". Perhaps in context of HN and modern times it could be replaced with "drive to work, write code".
It is not that our complicated lives prevent us from enlightenment. Quite the opposite, it is our lack of enlightenment that make our lives appear complicated.
But what do I know, my only zen knowledge comes from C64 game Usagi Yojimbo I played some 30 years ago :)
Yes! : ). I came here to remind everyone about chopping water and carrying wood as well ; ).
I'd add that, imho, the aphorism means, enlightenment isn't an answer to the struggles of your material existence, or even your own unhappiness, from whatever source.
Enlightenment is just enlightenment, it's not a magic happy pill which makes you no longer a flawed human being.
At the lsd height, i was everyone and the world only progressed through me.
I also knew that i wanted to keep this enlightend state and thought about mechanism to bring me back into my 'normal' form. I thought up religion to only discover that it did not work, i came to the idea of creating an idol something like lsd. Something which will give me access back to this state and will be discovered and easily to be distributed.
After that, i was normal again. Continuing my life.
> But a question nags at you: why can’t the world already know what you know? They’d be so much better off. So much happier.
we can't define "enlightenment" but we can probably name endless things that would not be a central feature of enlightenment. That above would be pretty high on the list.
I have felt a great sense of enlightened several times in the past. It's most similar to the feeling of flow while programming... When you're juggling all the pieces of a big question and somehow they all slot into place. Everything just makes sense, but it's easily disrupted.
It's impossible for me to maintain for long, but I do my best to collect takeaways while I can.
Mostly what comes back with me are cheesy phrases like "just do your best" or "everything will be ok". Occasionally I come back with some type of specific insights about how to approach a problem that has been causing me problems or newfound motivation to persevere.
Occasionally I think about starting a cult afterward, but I really just want to collect kind, intelligent and motivated people around me. Would that really be so bad?
I have had a couple of moments in life when a lot of pieces fall in place and perspective changes. A friend of mine found a nice metaphor for this: a supercooled water, the mind looking for an answer or a solution to a problem and then something happens and the crystallization starts and now everything is suddenly ice.
Definitely great moments leaving strong emotional impact and sense of joy and happiness.
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.
I guess after some realisations the instinct is to go out and tell everyone to make them happy. This too shall pass. Also there are so many gurus.. The answers to the questions in this post can be found by observing them.
Interesting point of view since it's so directly in contradiction to mine. I always viewed enlightenment as an unique, untransmissible experience (unique as in it's different for each individual, not that you can only have it once).
I think it's near impossible to be able to convey these as teachings since it's such an intimate experience ultimately modeled by the world around you. Perhaps that's just my definition of enlightenment, an intimate understanding of the internal and external world.
If I am ever to reach this state, I hope it's an inner state of peace and acceptance because my current angst is wearing me down.
I knew a guy, twenty years my senior, who claimed he had once been enlightened for a week. He had just stumbled into it, to borrow a phrase from the article. As far as I know he did nothing with it. Just revelled in it (if that is an appropriate word for such a dispassionate state) and after a week he fell back into his old self. He regretted that.
To me it sounded awfully like a temporary mental affliction back then, but who is to say?
What a weird article. It makes several assumptions that seem entirely unproven, such as that someone who is enlightened would immediately want to "spread the word". Similarly, worries about the practicality (or not) of enlightenment seem very un-enlightened almost by definition.
It feels like working towards enlightenment is what gets us there, once we are there and not thinking about achieving it, do we just settle down and willow in comfort? Losing the enlightened state. So all these back to chopping wood quotes make sense.
JavaScript frameworks haven’t significantly changed market share for like three or four years, it’s React with niches of Vue and Angular exactly like it was in ~2017. Even the build systems haven’t changed.
Philosophy is, literally, the love of knowledge. It covers a lot of ground, but much of that is directly or indirectly relevant to computing and information systems:
Epistemology, the nature of truth, value, aesthetics, ontology, logic, proof, categories, symbolic logic, quantity, ethics and morality....
I think I was the first to upvote it this morning when I was browsing the new section. Pretty sure it just had 1 point. It just struck a chord with me because my brain goes through the same thought process when I consider practicing mindfulness to ease my seemingly ever-increasing anxiety and though maybe some people here would have some ideas that oppose it so I could get past my own lazy "why bother" conclusion.
The submitters older posts don't have more than 1 or 2 points, I don't think they're manipulating. Maybe my highish karma gave it a bit of a boost?
Regardless of how one feels about the article, the thread is surprisingly not bad, and it's an intellectually interesting topic that doesn't get discussed here much. That makes for a great submission! Your notion of what belongs here is narrower than what the site guidelines call for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This one doesn't hit that standard because it falls into one highly predictable sequence (promoting a blog) but it's unexpected enough along other axes to be a fine one-off.
Interestingness declines exponentially, though, so I wouldn't say we want follow-up posts of this nature for a while (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Much better to find something else that's equally unexpected and completely unrelated.
Well, observing the decrease in quality and increase in frustration on HN over the years, I'd double down on my opinion any day.
The more junk on HN that has nothing to do with code, the more people complain, the worse the quality is, etc. Year after year, it's held true.
I don't hesitate to posit either that moderation decisions have severely decreased the quality of the HN experience. A a cyber-hammer as the arbiter of discussions which they possess nothing worth contributing to, saying "these loosely worded guidelines are what is right" despite dozens, probably hundreds of conversations that moderation members have had with contributing individuals about what kind of posts belong on the front page.
Anyhow thanks for the links, they were "enlightening"
Sorry, I don't think I'm parsing this completely, but if you fish around in the archives using HN Search it's not hard to see that complaints like this go back to the beginning of the site. Actually it's kind of fun:
If you don't mind me asking dang, what sort of technical work do you do?
If you'd prefer a private conversation, I'd be open to that; I'm curious to know if you write code on any kind of regular basis professionally.
As I see it, your response further cements my point, that there's a huge chunk of people unhappy with content here, and a moderation instrument that is acutely aware of it and firmly poised to change it, and yet refuses to.
You might say something about diversity of content, I just don't think that's what HN is best to pursue. I'm here to read news that appeals to me. I write code, I read code, I want to read news about that. Enlightenment is not it.
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 the complaints always posit.
I'm happy to answer your question about technical work but why does that matter in this context? (I'll tell you why I ask: you've already made more than one comment about the moderators here which express that you've got a problem with us for some reason, so this feels like a gotcha question, and it feels lousy to be cross-examined.)
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 themselves, and then there's you. There's almost nothing about you on Google, and there are MANY examples of your supposed entitlement to act as executor over conversations here.
I'm not meaning to accuse. I know what it costs and what it demands from a person to even attempt to moderate a community of this size and as diverse as this one. I do appreciate the role you possess, I just can't really appreciate your opinion, given so much evidence that the quality has decreased.
You probably used reddit early on, surely you wouldn't say the quality has skyrocketed since then? It's terrible. That's really all I'm saying. HN totally IS getting worse, and posts like these are directly attributable, given a long enough time frame.
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.
One question alone may lead to a meaningful conversation. Search for enlightenment goes hand in hand with the search for the truth, at least to me.
But yes, the article isn't that well-thought out, but if it triggers interesting conversation, it's all good for me.
You're Enlightened implies an "I am Enlightened". Now, you're somebody special. This very realization takes you out of Enlightenment.
Impossible to define Enlightenment, we can only point to what it is not.
Maybe not...
I believe that my love relationship with Love makes me very special, and so do most people I meet. May I not be happy with my lot? Is my Happiness in my beautiful Friend so fragile?
Everything on Earth is illusory, and the only lasting truth is that there is only ONE. Shall such understanding be its own undoing?
I find my Friend in your eyes; in helping you I help Her - I do her work.
Spiritual life is not really founded on brain-twisting mysteries at all. It unfolds bit by bit OK? Hre is encouraging news: Happiness is the reward of those who do the work of Love, and those who partake of the Happiness of Love also partake of Love's Beauty.
If you're not asking yourself some version of any of these questions, it doesn't sound like you've very enlightened at all. Going with the light terminology, you are perhaps blinded and/or overexposed.
You seem to have missed the point. An enlightened person would not need to ask these questions since they would already know what to do and so on is what I think was meant.
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 rather understand the teachings instead.
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.
It's a good question and the answer pushes the dichotomy of
1) do you prefer civilization law and order?
2) do you prefer to stay "deconstructed" and make your ego and personality to be molded by the trends of a global non-identity?
Which leads to another interesting question:
Which of these alternatives makes you to be the owner of your own destiny in this universe?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadThe ones who arrived there without conscious effort, through some intense concentration on some other aspect of life, simply lose their angst. Asked to explain, they usually have some kind of muddled folk mysticism about how it happened. Very few of them teach.
I know of well attested enlightenment from an olympic-grade swimmer, and a guy who really liked fly fishing, for example. The swimmer counted breaths while swimming, very much like one particular zen practice.
The desire to go out and teach is much more a side-effect of the people that were trained in schools founded by people who decided to go out and teach: the desire to teach is not embedded in the enlightenment experience for most people.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/
In that, it describes people as outwardly exactly the same as before, but their internal experience changed dramatically. This sounds to be the opposite of what you're describing.
Feel free to correct me and kindly point out the agreed definition between the practices you mention.
Now, go chop wood and carry water.
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.
I am a nerd, I do attend parties with all kinds of people - so you have my curiosity:)
You'd think that (and I agree that the article doesn't make much sense) but as a matter of fact, quite a few people seem to think that they are enlightened in the spiritual sense you're talking about, and that this means that their view of enlightenment should definitely be turned into a quasi-cult, with them at the lead. Daniel Ingram (author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha - a surprisingly pragmatic take, all things considered!) has repeatedly expressed his frustration with this.
There are definitely various interpretations what this actually means, but the early texts indicate it to be the extinguishing of Dukkha (stress) in the target subject.
The subject arrives at this state (of no suffering) by way of understanding the origins of stress to be the fact of impermanence of all things, including a soul.
Of course there are thousands of ways to become enlightened (science for one tells a lot about impermanence), but there is a single effect of those ways which is the most direct for the given context.
If you really want to see behind the curtain, go sit in Vipassana. This is what Buddha suggested, if one is interested in this attainment!
Was he enlightened? Well yes. He could see the system for what it was in a very Matrix type of way. Before he came out with facts we were tin foil hat wearers, certainly not enlightened.
Because Snowdon knows some of the truths he has a vantage point to see the rest of the way government works for what it is. He also has a vantage point for seeing his fellow human beings for what they are. You can count on one hand the amount of people in the spy agencies that came out in a way inspired by Snowdon. It didn't happen, they just hunkered down.
I would say that Snowdon has got the measure of his fellow man and is therefore enlightened.
You can achieve enlightenment in many ways and the spiritual practice world does not have a monopoly on enlightenment. There are probably more fraudsters than genuine enlightened in the religious world.
Enlightenment is a thing though and with it comes a whole host of other thoughts, as per the article.
edit: and the biggest question is: How do you know you are right? I think t he answer is: you can't. Not you alone. You need to discuss it with others and see what works out (probably?). Therefore respect of others and their opinions is very important for me.
If we are saying "enlightened" as in a general broad category of shift in mentality/emotions/peak state then that's one thing. If we're talking about a technical term that is used specifically within certain traditions then that's a different thing. I think it's very problematic that in a lot of people conflate the two as the same thing.
Even Buddhists who spend the decades realizing enlightenment still continue training to deepen. It's still possible to re-enter delusion after awakening.
And most real meditation masters I know do not make any claims about enlightenment meaning you're now a great ruler or CEO or something. That would be the Halo Effect.
Some more from Ram Dass:
“Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code.”
"If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, "Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!" it catches you back into the model of "I'm Sam who empties the garbage." You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage."
What I get from it is that if you are considering starting a cult, creating your own government, going to war, or how to integrate your newfound knowledge into the bureaucracy of the world, you're not quite out of the woods yet.
"How to Start Your Own Religion: Form a Church, Gain Followers, Become Tax-Exempt, and Sway the Minds of Millions in Five Easy Steps"
Cool guy and a very fun read!
https://www.amazon.com/How-Start-Your-Own-Religion/dp/144053...
> Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
― Dōgen
Physics is kind of like that as one develops successively better models of molecules, atoms, and particles, replacing the bottom-level concepts each time. Though the stuff on top of them doesn't change a huge amount every time.
Well, I haven't kept a list, but here's another that comes to mind. Someone's signature was "How do you prepare for death? Learn to live. How do you learn to live? Prepare for death."
On the face of it, this is a trollish non-answer. However, there is a way to interpret it. The first sentence is straightforward: Death is going to happen, how do I prepare for it? The second sentence is saying: You can't stop it, so the best you can do is figure out what to do with the life that you have. The third sentence is also straightforward: How do I figure out what to do with my life? The fourth sentence is saying: Imagine you're going to die, figure out your obligations that you'd want to fulfill before you die, fulfill them now, and then you will have freedom to focus on exploring what you really want to do. The phrases "prepare for death" and "learn to live" are each used twice, with different intended meanings each time.
There is always the possibility of getting a quote that is actually nonsense and was meant as nonsense (or, today, was generated by a computer), and "interpreting" wisdom into it that comes from the interpreter rather than from the quote. Or there could be multiple, similarly wise-seeming interpretations. For example, I could have interpreted the fourth sentence instead as: Imagine you're going to die; then, from that perspective, observe which things seem important and which no longer seem so important; thus, the thought-exercise of imagining you'll die is an exercise that teaches you how to live.
It's possible that cryptic sayings were devised to hold wisdom. It's also possible that they were devised by trolls surrounded by gullible admirers. Perhaps there were wise people who, as an apparently necessary evil, made themselves look cryptically impressive so as to attract funding from gullible rulers, or to keep their ideas from being misused by outsiders who might have bad intent. Perhaps there was a mixture of trolls and well-intentioned wise people. I really don't know.
I am generally a fan of straightforward textbook explanations that don't play word games, or, if they do, they have straightforward explanations of the word games. Still, it is possible that there's something to the cryptic stuff. And so it can be a fun game to try to get meaning from them.
If you are in flat land (a beginner), you see mountains as mountains. Well defined features on the horizon.
Once you start climbing, you concentrate on the details of the concrete mountain in front of you (rocks, moss, shrubs, ice, snow, caves) and your inner concept of a mountain changes into a collection of such details.
But once you summit, mountains around look like well defined features on the horizon again. Just like from the flat land of the beginners, only the perspective has changed.
At first, I saw things in the normal everyday way, with conceptual thought labels attached strongly to everything. Then, through Zen practice, I came to see things in a more direct way, without the constant presence of words and thoughts, and this was kind of amazing. Now, having thoroughly internalized this wordless perspective, I again use words with no problem, seemingly the same as anyone else, but with the freedom and playfulness that comes from the wordless perspective.
My view: In the same vein but a different lens - enlightenment has a component where it is a “state of mind”/feeling(a kind of ah-ha)/a new perspective where ‘mountains are no longer mountains’.
But it’s also a cycle, one of living->death->rebirth->living where it’s through that process of “enlightenment“, the core and primary concepts and perspectives may have changed, but mountains are again mountains once everything known about mountains from before has been “re-integrated”.
After learning the art, you have studied anatomy and you know how to punch with intent, you know how to slip punches and you know how to time them.
Liver Punch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa7S-BRNlsw
After Mike Tyson learned how to slip punches, most of his sparring partners "were too busy to spar anymore."
You don’t know what you don’t know.
You know what you don’t know.
You know what you know.
You don’t know what you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
Comparing acid trip on Burning Man to enlightenment is like comparing candle to the sun. Both emit light, that much is true.
But an enlightenment philosophy that can help a father of 3 with a hard marriage and a fulltime job or two...?
Hmm, maybe the enlightment philosophy project will take a few thousand more years...
Vimalakirti proceeds to chastise them for how useless their 'enlightenment' is when it doesn't help anyone in the real world, and is only a self centered quest to save one's ego from suffering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimalakirti_Sutra
Note: Find a translation that works for you. Specifically, the word 'duty' meant something very different than it does today.
I recommend : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586380192/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita
EDIT: For a more western take, I'd also recommend the Bible's knowledge books: Ecclesiastics, Proverbs, and Job. Again, a good translation is essential here, but I'm not about to recommend that.
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.
They describe awakening as an actual, irreversible natural process that can be triggered by concentrating your awareness onto bare experience for a long enough time. Doing this intensively enough will bring about a "discontinuity" / cessation of space-time experience called a "fruition" (nirvana). Coming out of that discontinuity goes with a blissful "what was that?" feeling and some level of understanding of "ultimate reality", meaning a permanent perspective shift (instead of "I am seeing" and "I am hearing": in seeing there is merely the seen, in hearing the heard, etc...).
Do you find it easy to confine yourself to a monastery with a bunch of dudes and no responsibilities but to "chop wood, carry water"?
If so, why don't you take this "easy" path?
My combo is bringing together stoic philosophy, perennial enlightenment philosophy (it's all one, man) with a design thinking and new thought mentality (manifesting reality). That's what works for me.
Parts of the video on resonance reminds me of this one: "This equation will change how you see the world (the logistic map)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk
Some other parts on design remind me of videos by Charles and Ray Eames.
You might want to consider adding Dialogue Mapping using IBIS to your design process if you have not already? http://cognexus.org/id41.htm
The ending scene is magnificent.
But it would help you worry less about things that can't be helped, and focus on this that can. It would help lessen the mental strain that we have for not being able to do more, or help us deal with the marriage problems in a way that it affects you less during your work hours.
You still have to work, still have sickness, marriage problems. But being better at separating those things, and suffering less because of the problems, is really beneficial
It is not that our complicated lives prevent us from enlightenment. Quite the opposite, it is our lack of enlightenment that make our lives appear complicated.
But what do I know, my only zen knowledge comes from C64 game Usagi Yojimbo I played some 30 years ago :)
I'd add that, imho, the aphorism means, enlightenment isn't an answer to the struggles of your material existence, or even your own unhappiness, from whatever source.
Enlightenment is just enlightenment, it's not a magic happy pill which makes you no longer a flawed human being.
At the lsd height, i was everyone and the world only progressed through me.
I also knew that i wanted to keep this enlightend state and thought about mechanism to bring me back into my 'normal' form. I thought up religion to only discover that it did not work, i came to the idea of creating an idol something like lsd. Something which will give me access back to this state and will be discovered and easily to be distributed.
After that, i was normal again. Continuing my life.
Have you heard of Open Individualism, or read the short story 'The Egg'?
> But a question nags at you: why can’t the world already know what you know? They’d be so much better off. So much happier.
we can't define "enlightenment" but we can probably name endless things that would not be a central feature of enlightenment. That above would be pretty high on the list.
It's impossible for me to maintain for long, but I do my best to collect takeaways while I can.
Mostly what comes back with me are cheesy phrases like "just do your best" or "everything will be ok". Occasionally I come back with some type of specific insights about how to approach a problem that has been causing me problems or newfound motivation to persevere.
Occasionally I think about starting a cult afterward, but I really just want to collect kind, intelligent and motivated people around me. Would that really be so bad?
Definitely great moments leaving strong emotional impact and sense of joy and happiness.
In the context of this discussion, "masterful programmers" could be considered equivalent to "enlightened programmers".
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.
No more self-doubt, no more fear etc...
IMO it's the only goal that matters, since humans in one way or another do things to "remove" fear or doubt from their lives.
The state in which such a question arises is contradictory to the state of enlightenment.
I think it's near impossible to be able to convey these as teachings since it's such an intimate experience ultimately modeled by the world around you. Perhaps that's just my definition of enlightenment, an intimate understanding of the internal and external world.
If I am ever to reach this state, I hope it's an inner state of peace and acceptance because my current angst is wearing me down.
https://ebookppsunp.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/martin_heide...
To me it sounded awfully like a temporary mental affliction back then, but who is to say?
The author submitted and probably vote-manipulated to get it there.
It's a content-less article, it has nothing to do with hacker values or software or entrepreneurship.
Please vote responsibly, everyone!
“Minimalist” CSS frameworks eschewing JS though, whew.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Computational_logic
Epistemology, the nature of truth, value, aesthetics, ontology, logic, proof, categories, symbolic logic, quantity, ethics and morality....
https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/what.shtml
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-fuzzy/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-provability/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/
https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/rapaport_phics.pdf
The submitters older posts don't have more than 1 or 2 points, I don't think they're manipulating. Maybe my highish karma gave it a bit of a boost?
It’s okay for an author to post things they’ve written. Do you have any evidence of vote manipulation?
The guidelines of this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) contain
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
The same goes for comments about voting on posts. It’s boring.
Also please take a look at the very first section of the guidelines for a statement on what’s on-topic here.
The best submissions are the ones that can't be predicted from any sequence (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). This one doesn't hit that standard because it falls into one highly predictable sequence (promoting a blog) but it's unexpected enough along other axes to be a fine one-off.
Interestingness declines exponentially, though, so I wouldn't say we want follow-up posts of this nature for a while (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Much better to find something else that's equally unexpected and completely unrelated.
The more junk on HN that has nothing to do with code, the more people complain, the worse the quality is, etc. Year after year, it's held true.
I don't hesitate to posit either that moderation decisions have severely decreased the quality of the HN experience. A a cyber-hammer as the arbiter of discussions which they possess nothing worth contributing to, saying "these loosely worded guidelines are what is right" despite dozens, probably hundreds of conversations that moderation members have had with contributing individuals about what kind of posts belong on the front page.
Anyhow thanks for the links, they were "enlightening"
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20is%20this%22%20%22hac...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20is%20this%22%20%22hac...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20is%20this%22%20%22hac...
As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse. HN has been "turning into Reddit" since before it was HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21755721), getting "taken over by politics" for almost that long (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869), and so on.
If you'd prefer a private conversation, I'd be open to that; I'm curious to know if you write code on any kind of regular basis professionally.
As I see it, your response further cements my point, that there's a huge chunk of people unhappy with content here, and a moderation instrument that is acutely aware of it and firmly poised to change it, and yet refuses to.
You might say something about diversity of content, I just don't think that's what HN is best to pursue. I'm here to read news that appeals to me. I write code, I read code, I want to read news about that. Enlightenment is not it.
Thanks for the response.
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 the complaints always posit.
I'm happy to answer your question about technical work but why does that matter in this context? (I'll tell you why I ask: you've already made more than one comment about the moderators here which express that you've got a problem with us for some reason, so this feels like a gotcha question, and it feels lousy to be cross-examined.)
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 themselves, and then there's you. There's almost nothing about you on Google, and there are MANY examples of your supposed entitlement to act as executor over conversations here.
I'm not meaning to accuse. I know what it costs and what it demands from a person to even attempt to moderate a community of this size and as diverse as this one. I do appreciate the role you possess, I just can't really appreciate your opinion, given so much evidence that the quality has decreased.
You probably used reddit early on, surely you wouldn't say the quality has skyrocketed since then? It's terrible. That's really all I'm saying. HN totally IS getting worse, and posts like these are directly attributable, given a long enough time frame.
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.
Maybe they experienced it, maybe they didn't, but now they are concerned with what to do with their enlightenment. It's gone, if it ever was there.
But Enlightenment does not imply Clarity, which may come from more contemplation and perhaps some guidance.
Some people never experienced Bliss.
Some people experience Bliss all the time.
Some people can experience Bliss whenever they like, or need to.
Bliss is not Enlightenment.
So just because someone tasted ice-cream, doesn't mean they should eat it all the time, or that tasting good is all ice is good for.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occultism_in_Nazism
Which leads to another interesting question:
Which of these alternatives makes you to be the owner of your own destiny in this universe?