Note that the people Martin studied were systematically wrong about what they looked like to the external observers. They sound disassociated from their bodies. This sound bad, and, in fact, the opposite of enlightened: suffering more, noticing it less.
Over the course of a week, his father died, followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth.
Note that the people Martin studied were systematically wrong about what they looked like to the external observers.
That’s not what your quote is saying, though—it specifically says that the interviewer asked the person about his internal state, not what he looked like to external observers. The person’s report is consistent with the hypothesis that while he is still experiencing the physical symptoms of stress, those have stopped causing him suffering.
Also it’s not clear for how many other people this was the case; Martin’s paper says that
The same was observed in a total of three participants and I went on to conduct other experiments into this. The overall suggestion from the data was a disconnect between the internal subjective experience in these participants and other parts of their psychology and physiology. While this was especially pronounced during times of high stress it seemed more broadly measurable. Two examples illustrate aspects of this.
This wording is ambiguous for exactly how many participants the “claims to be stress-free even when they are exhibiting physical signs of stress” was observed. “The same was observed in a total of three participants” suggests that this specific thing was only observed in 3⁄50 of the participants and that for the rest, other things were observed that Martin decided to lump into the same category.
The “two examples” mentioned say that the participants thought they had more bodily awareness than they did, and that they said they couldn’t be racist while still showing signs of implicit racism. These examples seem to be about overconfidence of what their internal experience implies, rather than about them being mistaken of what their internal experience is. The “bodily awareness” example is also ambiguous:
I arranged and observed private yoga sessions with a series of participants as part of a larger inquiry into their bodily awareness. During these sessions it became clear that participants believed they were far more aware of their body than they actually were. For example, the instructor would often put her hand on part of the body asking the participant to relax the tense muscles there, only to have the participant insist that s/he was totally relaxed in that area and did not feel any muscle tension.
In that example, are the participants really claiming that they have complete bodily awareness, or are they just reporting that they cannot find any tension? If someone were to tell me to relax tense muscles in a part of my body that felt totally relaxed to me, I might also say that I feel totally relaxed and can’t find any muscle tension. Not because I thought I had perfect bodily awareness, but because I can’t relax the tension if I can’t feel it, so I want to explain why I can’t follow the instruction that I’m given.
Also the implicit racism was measured using the Implicit Association Test, whose reliability is rather dubious, but I’m more willing to let that one slide. I’ve met enough advanced meditators who are very visibly overconfident about their unbiasedness that my stance here is “yeah that definitely happens”. :-) In general I do find it easy to believe that people who’ve reached various states of enlightenment are often overconfident about what that gets them, but that feels like a weaker claim than “they are suffering more and noticing it less”.
It is also possible that the participants for which something like this was observed—again, 3⁄50 so only 6% - thought they were enlightened while actually being dissociated… since descriptions of “enlightenment” and dissociation sound very similar and can be hard to distinguish from the outside. (The difference is very apparent if you’ve personally experienced both, though.) I can’t resist the opportunity to drop in one of my favorite quotes from meditation, from a meditation teacher I went to a retreat with:
There’s no way to tell enlightenment and delusion apart from the inside, so you should have feedback and you should have friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They are willing to listen to you talk about it because you’re their friend and it’s one of your interests, but if you start talking about how you’ve become enlightened, they’ll tell you how you’re full of shit.
Tucker jumps from outside feedback to feedback from skeptics. Why isn’t feedback from a meditation community sufficient? Martin’s subjects were certified enlightened, so apparently it isn’t, but a meditation community should have a lot more experience with failure modes.
In part he was probably just expressing the point humorously as is his style, in part for most Westerners it’s probably easier to be friends with skeptics than with meditators with the right competencies. (Especially since even knowing who would have the right competencies is highly nontrivial question.)
This sounds like enlightenment to me. Enlightenment is the absence of suffering, not the absence of pain or bodily reactions. If both reports are true, then the person was reacting normally in terms of observable symptoms but not experiencing any suffering as a result.
The usual claim about enlightenment is that it doesn’t reduce the pain, but that it makes pain less distracting. Trouble sleeping doesn’t match that. I think that people usually imply that acknowledging pain reduces stress responses. The guy didn’t just say that he was peaceful, he said he wasn’t stressed. It would be one thing if he acknowledged his tense muscles and said that his enlightenment helped him function despite them, but the implication is that he simply denied them. We don’t have a transcript of such a question, but the article talks about lots of participants having false beliefs about muscle tension and appearing serene. Richard linked to excerpts about that and other negative quotes, not all of which I see as dissociation.
Ok, you’re probably right. The one thing that confuses me about it is that I tend to think people’s reports of their degree of suffering are reliable, but maybe that’s not true. Or maybe the course created exceptions.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: I’m not talking about the course. I’m talking about the people Martin studied before creating the course. These results are already common. I doubt that Martin is promoting special techniques more likely to produce them than other methods.
If dissociation is the opposite of enlightenment, maybe the same mind-hacking techniques that can produce enlightenment can produce dissociation.
Note that the people Martin studied were systematically wrong about what they looked like to the external observers. They sound disassociated from their bodies. This sound bad, and, in fact, the opposite of enlightened: suffering more, noticing it less.
That’s not what your quote is saying, though—it specifically says that the interviewer asked the person about his internal state, not what he looked like to external observers. The person’s report is consistent with the hypothesis that while he is still experiencing the physical symptoms of stress, those have stopped causing him suffering.
Also it’s not clear for how many other people this was the case; Martin’s paper says that
This wording is ambiguous for exactly how many participants the “claims to be stress-free even when they are exhibiting physical signs of stress” was observed. “The same was observed in a total of three participants” suggests that this specific thing was only observed in 3⁄50 of the participants and that for the rest, other things were observed that Martin decided to lump into the same category.
The “two examples” mentioned say that the participants thought they had more bodily awareness than they did, and that they said they couldn’t be racist while still showing signs of implicit racism. These examples seem to be about overconfidence of what their internal experience implies, rather than about them being mistaken of what their internal experience is. The “bodily awareness” example is also ambiguous:
In that example, are the participants really claiming that they have complete bodily awareness, or are they just reporting that they cannot find any tension? If someone were to tell me to relax tense muscles in a part of my body that felt totally relaxed to me, I might also say that I feel totally relaxed and can’t find any muscle tension. Not because I thought I had perfect bodily awareness, but because I can’t relax the tension if I can’t feel it, so I want to explain why I can’t follow the instruction that I’m given.
Also the implicit racism was measured using the Implicit Association Test, whose reliability is rather dubious, but I’m more willing to let that one slide. I’ve met enough advanced meditators who are very visibly overconfident about their unbiasedness that my stance here is “yeah that definitely happens”. :-) In general I do find it easy to believe that people who’ve reached various states of enlightenment are often overconfident about what that gets them, but that feels like a weaker claim than “they are suffering more and noticing it less”.
It is also possible that the participants for which something like this was observed—again, 3⁄50 so only 6% - thought they were enlightened while actually being dissociated… since descriptions of “enlightenment” and dissociation sound very similar and can be hard to distinguish from the outside. (The difference is very apparent if you’ve personally experienced both, though.) I can’t resist the opportunity to drop in one of my favorite quotes from meditation, from a meditation teacher I went to a retreat with:
Tucker jumps from outside feedback to feedback from skeptics. Why isn’t feedback from a meditation community sufficient? Martin’s subjects were certified enlightened, so apparently it isn’t, but a meditation community should have a lot more experience with failure modes.
In part he was probably just expressing the point humorously as is his style, in part for most Westerners it’s probably easier to be friends with skeptics than with meditators with the right competencies. (Especially since even knowing who would have the right competencies is highly nontrivial question.)
This sounds like enlightenment to me. Enlightenment is the absence of suffering, not the absence of pain or bodily reactions. If both reports are true, then the person was reacting normally in terms of observable symptoms but not experiencing any suffering as a result.
The usual claim about enlightenment is that it doesn’t reduce the pain, but that it makes pain less distracting. Trouble sleeping doesn’t match that. I think that people usually imply that acknowledging pain reduces stress responses. The guy didn’t just say that he was peaceful, he said he wasn’t stressed. It would be one thing if he acknowledged his tense muscles and said that his enlightenment helped him function despite them, but the implication is that he simply denied them. We don’t have a transcript of such a question, but the article talks about lots of participants having false beliefs about muscle tension and appearing serene. Richard linked to excerpts about that and other negative quotes, not all of which I see as dissociation.
Ok, you’re probably right. The one thing that confuses me about it is that I tend to think people’s reports of their degree of suffering are reliable, but maybe that’s not true.
Or maybe the course created exceptions.Sorry, I should have been clearer: I’m not talking about the course. I’m talking about the people Martin studied before creating the course. These results are already common. I doubt that Martin is promoting special techniques more likely to produce them than other methods.
If dissociation is the opposite of enlightenment, maybe the same mind-hacking techniques that can produce enlightenment can produce dissociation.