Comparing enlightenment experience

Before "pragmatic dharma/vipassana" I'd had years of off and on zazen practice with groups, at zen centers, at home.

In my opinion, I have a pretty good idea of how to sit zazen, at least at a basic level.

Now, when I started getting good at getting to "high equanimity" doing vipassana, my sitting practice for a long time became -- get to high E, then just watch experience very very carefully while disembedding from it continuously. (which can lead to frutions) At one point about a year ago I realized that that sitting technique is ............ zazen. (without the obsession with posture, however, I also noticed that my body just naturally formed into the zazen shape when I was doing it just right)

I for one would love to see this discussion continue... I can't speak to the experience of enlightenment itself, but as part of a book project I am working on with our colleague Alex we happen to be working on a section where we are collecting accounts of experiences along the path - various levels of partial awakening, etc. - and finding the common elements outweigh the differences. The differences seem to be largely about metaphor and language. That is, if, for example, you compare the personal accounts of people in dark night periods just before (any) awakening experience, whether it's one of our colleagues in various traditions or The Buddha or St. Anthony or whoever, the descriptions of the temptations, torments, struggles, fear, misery, etc. and the realizations afterwards are nearly identical. The pattern seems to apply similarly (if perhaps less profoundly and obviously less permanently) during the earlier partial awakenings as at full enlightenment.

Do you think in the end the stumbling block is the vocabulary? ie speaking of a demon or the presence of God instead of an abstract sensation of fear or a unitive experience?

Do you think experiences could be so shared for say "stream entry" (or whatever you call it in your own tradition), for example, but be radically different at enlightenment?

And Chris, I agree, I think there is a biological commonality here, something rewired in the circuitry, that makes the experience a shared one across traditions. But that's just my suspicion, too.

Hi Ona,

Great points and questions. You asked, "Do you think in the end the stumbling block is the vocabulary? ie speaking of a demon or the presence of God instead of an abstract sensation of fear or a unitive experience?"

I think that is a very important question. Language plays such an important role in human cognition, feeling and behavior that I don't think it can be considered secondary to "reality". If the real world is somewhere "out there", and we're all just using different words or concepts to describe this one reality, than the task of discovering the essence of this one reality seems more possible. However, if language itself is a conditioning factor of experience (cognition, feeling, behavior), then finding this one truth "out there" seems a lot less likely. Of course, you'll recognize this as a post-modern critique.

That's not to say that there aren't deep features of experience and meaning that can found within all of our worlds various cultural and spiritual expressions. It seems obvious that SOMETHING is happening for those of us who engage in spiritual practice, and that this something not best explained via biology or physics alone. In the end this something is not only going to be understood differently by different people or groups or traditions, but it will also actually be different in some ways.

And for those who appeal to either/or thinking, one side of the coin (Universal/relative) will be more heavily emphasized. "What matters are the differences!" some say. Others declare, "What matters is that we're all the same!" So I think that an emergent spirituality of awaking will have to find a way to hold both, without reducing either side to a status of lesser importance. I think this is what the Integral community set out to do, but I don't think they're doing it very well. Wilber et al. are a little heavy on the "Spirit" side of things, and it really colors and shapes their view of the other "value spheres". That's just my opinion.

I just wrote all that and now I'm wondering if it was even relevant to the discussion. I guess I'll find out.

Jackson

This discussion is very important, I believe, because it points in the direction of understanding Awakening as an event that may occur to people from different practice traditions, and asks the important question of whether this is a singular event or a class of similar events. (In addition, there is the issue of degrees of Awakening, but I'll assume that issue is subsumed within this larger discussion.)

The book Alex and Ona are working on is something to be commended. I can't wait to read it! Examining many people's self-reports of Awakening is crucial.

I believe, like Chris, that we are all basically the same anatomically but with slight variations, so I also look forward to scientific studies of what's going on in the bodies and brains of people who undergo these Awakening events.

Now I'd like to present another aspect of this. What happens to people *after* Awakening? How do their lives change over the long term? Are any changes that may result somehow related to the path they had practiced? In other words, are the changes different for a Vipassana practitioner than for a Vajrayana practitioner or a Zen practitioner, etc.?

What do you all think?

Mike "Gozen"

@awouldbehipster - I bet the vocabulary issue will be a much stronger stumbling block for people who have only been exposed to one tradition - either because they were raised in that culture or because they have only every practiced in one system. I suspect it is much less of an issue for people who have been in multiple traditions, even if the unfolding of enlightenment only took place in one of those traditions. ie someone who spent time at an ashram, then later did some Castaneda stuff, then went to Sri Lanka on retreat for a while, then went to a Tibetan center, then poked round with pragmatic dharma, etc. - someone with that diverse background is going to have a much more flexible ability with language. Perhaps because of the circles I run in, most people I know have had that kind of diversity - from youthful dabblings to later more serious practice. I have met very few people who only ever did one practice from start to finish.

Does that seem true to you?

@mlatorra - there is an academic researcher who just did a big study of enlightenment, interviewing dozens of people from different traditions (all modern Westerners, though, I think) about how they perceive things and what they experienced. It's not out yet and I don't think I can share any details until it is published. But it promises to be interesting.

@Ona - Actually, what I'm trying to say is that the qualitative experience of awakening (both as an event and a lasting expression) may vary depending on the language one has learned in relation to it. In modern times, access to all of the worlds great contemplative traditions can lead an individual to acquire many forms of language about what we assume is a single process. But I contend (at least now) that the acquisition of language not only shapes one's way of speaking about awakening, but may actually affect the direct experience of it. I say this because I think that language isn't merely a way of describing objective reality, but rather a process of shaping and engaging with our experience and environment.

This is not an attempt to say "There is no awakening. Everything is relative." I don't mean that at all. I guess I mean to say that each individual's expression and experience of awakening is going to vary, and to think otherwise is to miss something very important about human experience.

Is any of this making sense to anyone? I can try to think of some examples, if that would help.

I see. Yes yes. Do you listen to RadioLab? There was a story about an Aboriginal group that didn't use words for right and left, instead they said "northeast" or "southwest" or whatever - but depending on which way you were facing. So their understanding of which hand they were using or what leg an ant was crawling up was always tied to a sense of their position in the environment. Like that?

College stuff I've half forgotten!

Well, in that sense the question becomes even more interesting.

I'm not even sure this forum has a common vocabulary.

What is enlightenment?

What is awakening and is it the same or different from enlightenment?

Are enlightenment/awakening experiences? Are they events?

Does enlightment/awakening create a lasting change in one's brain or in one's life somehow? Or, is it a fleeting thing that has to be developed over time in order to be integrated in one's life?

I used to read accounts of "enlightenment experiences" in various dharma books. Most of those seem to be tales in which people have some kind of profound realization of "oneness" or unity with all things, in which the non-dual is experienced or perceived or seen or something. These experiences seem to vary greatly in their intensity and their lasting influence on the person.

Now, since my 20s (I'm 54 now) I've intermittently had such moments (I'm going through a period right now where they happen more often) but I kind of prefer to think of those times as "unitive" rather than as enlightenment experiences.

More later

Since enlightenment (or, awakening - let's say the two are equivalent) are not "things" in the same way that a chair, or a rock, or even a person is a "thing", than it must be an event, a happening. An event can vary widely in duration. It can be a fraction of a second, like tingle in your finger. Or, it can last years, like a war, or an era. One's human life, from birth to death, could also be considered an event.

Now, because enlightenment is not a "thing", we can only derive from the words of others what it must be like for them. When someone describes something, we reflect and come to some conclusion about whether or not we want or don't want it, whether we have or don't have it, whether we experience or don't experience it, etc. But we can't say, "This, over here, is enlightenment," the same way we could say, "This, over here, is a horse."

So, there seems to be a change that occurs for the individual that participates in some form of contemplative inquiry and happens upon some information that brings some sort of profound insight into reality and or their experience, indicating that things are the way they have always seemed. Whatever the particularities of that experience, I think that's one way of describing what we could call "enlightenment" - a life changing event based on arriving at deep insight into the way things are (as opposed to the way they had been previously conceived), which seems to happen through deep inquiry into direct experience.

Since enlightenment (or, awakening - let's say the two are equivalent) are not "things" in the same way that a chair, or a rock, or even a person is a "thing", than it must be an event, a happening. An event can vary widely in duration. It can be a fraction of a second, like tingle in your finger. Or, it can last years, like a war, or an era. One's human life, from birth to death, could also be considered an event.

Now, because enlightenment is not a "thing", we can only derive from the words of others what it must be like for them. When someone describes something, we reflect and come to some conclusion about whether or not we want or don't want it, whether we have or don't have it, whether we experience or don't experience it, etc. But we can't say, "This, over here, is enlightenment," the same way we could say, "This, over here, is a horse."

So, there seems to be a change that occurs for the individual that participates in some form of contemplative inquiry and happens upon some information that brings some sort of profound insight into reality and or their experience, indicating that things are the way they have always seemed. Whatever the particularities of that experience, I think that's one way of describing what we could call "enlightenment" - a life changing event based on arriving at deep insight into the way things are (as opposed to the way they had been previously conceived), which seems to happen through deep inquiry into direct experience.

-awouldbehipster

nice.

It looks to me like my "awakening" (I'm a little more comfortable with that word as a way of describing my experience than "enlightenment) in it's most significant form happened a long time ago while getting really good at "choiceless awareness." I wasn't doing any formal seated meditation, I just managed to develop really good momentum and continuity at being aware of moment to moment experience. When the momentum and the skill reached just the right point, I started to see the fiction of the "self," the utter futility of achieving any lasting pleasures or satisfactions, and the way things kept on changing and dying and starting and stopping -- all the freaking time. I had cessations as well, usually while just sitting and resting or while laying in bed and sometimes in activity.

Now, my experience back then when I had the continuity is very similiar to my experience now that I've gotten that continuty back from time to time -- and that is that no matter how many experiences I have, I can fall right back into ignorance and darkness and misunderstandings about who and what I am as long as I stop practicing.

Also, when this first happened to me years ago, it did really have any religious context, or the context of a particular style of dharma. I knew about zen and vipassana and had tried them quite a bit but I was mostly just reading Krishnamurti and trying to do the things he was talking about. I wasn't trying to acheive any particular goals, I was only trying to get good at being aware and paying attention and seeing myself as clearly as possible. In fact, a big part of my practice then and now is an attempt to have no conclusions ever in order to see each moment as fresh as possible.

I guess what I'm curious about is how is what happened/happens to me would be different if I was a more religious Buddhist, if I was a formal zen student, or had a real vipassana teacher/student relationship with someone, or, if I was more influenced by the culture of yoga and Indian gurus?

@mlatorra - there is an academic researcher who just did a big study of enlightenment, interviewing dozens of people from different traditions (all modern Westerners, though, I think) about how they perceive things and what they experienced. It's not out yet and I don't think I can share any details until it is published. But it promises to be interesting.

-ona

Hi Ona,
Yes, I believe I know the researcher you referred to. I met him at a conference and gave him contact information for Alex and several other people. He interviewed me.

@michaelmonson I don't have answers for you, but I have an anecdote. I was speaking to a person a couple weeks ago whom I have known for decades. To my knowledge she had pretty much no interest in spiritual pursuits, certainly she has always been a bit anti-religious, if at the same time kind of open to lay-accessible Buddhisty kinds of articles about being compassionate and finding inner peace. But she never meditated at all until very recently.

Well, we were having a chat a couple weeks ago, and it turned into one of these "I've never told anyone before, but..." discussions, where she said she'd had the strangest experience years ago when she was attending the deathbed of a good friend. She said she sat there holding her friend's hand and all of a sudden there weren't two people there holding hands, but this infinite boundless unconditional love, the source of everything, and the whole world was just that somehow, and really hard to explain. She found it transformative, and said the experience lasted for several days. She's certainly never forgotten it.

So, as an example of someone having what I would probably call an A&P type experience, without having any practice context for it. She found the term "unconditional love" most useful.

I'm not even sure this forum has a common vocabulary.
What is enlightenment?

-michaelmonson

Here's mine: Not fooling myself. Yes, this kinda echoes Kant's definition. I'm not reducing this to a philosophical exercise, though.

BTW, in German, "enlightenment" as in "the age of enlightenment" is Aufklärung, (literally, "clearing", as in clearing fog, or "elucidation"; the same word also signifies telling children about sex); and there is another word, Erleuchtung, which corresponds to spiritual enlightenment

I like the English situation better, with a single word, because it makes it more natural to apply Kant's definition to spiritual enlightenment:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance
from another.
This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it
without guidance from another.
Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have
courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of
enlightenment.

-Kant

I think this is very elucidating when applied to spiritual enlightenment.

What is awakening and is it the same or different from enlightenment?

-michaelmonson

Awakening is just what it sounds like: the shift from being asleep in a dream to being awake, no longer sleeping, and certainly no longer dreaming. If enlightenment is no longer fooling myself regarding whether I'm dreaming - some kind of "lucid dreaming" in this analogy, then awakening is really waking up.

Remember the Simile of the Magic Show from the pali canon? Enlightenment is no longer being fooled by the tricks performed on stage; they are seen through. Awakening is no longer looking at the stage at all, perhaps leaving the crowd of spectators; I don't really know what that would correspond with. The metaphor only goes so far.

Again, my use of the words.

Are enlightenment/awakening experiences? Are they events?

-michaelmonson

I'd like to separate the content of experience, the specifics, the details, the meanings etc., from experience itself for the purpose of discussing this.

An enlightenment experience would be the moment one stops fooling oneself. It's content - Something happened and was perceived, there is a memory, a meaning is attached to it, we can discuss it like any other experience.

Does enlightment/awakening create a lasting change in one's brain or in
one's life somehow? Or, is it a fleeting thing that has to be developed
over time in order to be integrated in one's life?

-michaelmonson

What makes this experience stand out is some general difference in experience - not in specific details - between before and after the enlightenment experience.

Integration, to me, is changing specifics - content - of experience; expressing the general difference in experience through the specific details of experience.

Does enlightment/awakening create a lasting change in one's brain or in one's life somehow? Or, is it a fleeting thing that has to be developed over time in order to be integrated in one's life?

-michaelmonson

Seems to come in stages, seems to be a big lasting change, doesn't have any automatic implications for the specifics of experience (intergraiton).

I used to read accounts of "enlightenment experiences" in various dharma books. Most of those seem to be tales in which people have some kind of profound realization of "oneness" or unity with all things, in which the non-dual is experienced or perceived or seen or something. These experiences seem to vary greatly in their intensity and their lasting influence on the person.
Now, since my 20s (I'm 54 now) I've intermittently had such moments (I'm going through a period right now where they happen more often) but I kind of prefer to think of those times as "unitive" rather than as enlightenment experiences.
More later


-michaelmonson

Me, I enjoy a unitive experience as much as anyone. I wouldn't want to catch me fooling myself about it, though. I mean, eat the right plant parts, bang! instant extraordinary experience. But that would just be a new decoration, a new bit of content, I think.

I think unitive experiences can be the bit of content that coincide with the switch to no longer fooling oneself, just as a mundane experience can be this bit of content. There are Zen stories about people getting it while sweeping garbage away. I think the extraordinary experiences get over-represented because they are so special-seeming, hard to get right and so on, and so people tend to pay attention more closely. At the end of the day, being one with everything is the same as everything else, fundamentally, and being awed by them is just another roadblock. Killing the Buddha on the road seems to point at this situation, as far as I can tell.

Just my take, of course. Good discussion, nice points, everyone.

Cheers,
Florian

That Buddha on the road better watch out.