Mastering the Core teachings of the Buddha 2 - Daniel Ingram
The Mind Illuminated
The art of learning
Circling handbook
Impro
Transform your self
While I can see some connections between all of these books, I feel that if “enlightenment” is to mean anything, defining it so broadly as to have all of these books be about it makes the term vague enough to be useless. In fact, some of these works pretty much outright state that by their definition of enlightenment, the other books are not about enlightenment—e.g. MCTB2 explicitly denies that enlightenment would be particularly useful in terms of conventional mental health (while e.g. “Transform Your Self” is all about psychological health):
Here is another thing that didn’t happen upon awakening: psychological perfection. While the mainstream Western Buddhist world is absolutely drowning in the notion that somehow Buddhist practice will either eliminate all their psychological “stuff”, or at least cause them to become self-actualized in the good old psychoanalytical sense, nothing could be further from the truth except totally bogus models such as the Action models. I think that I learned more about reasonable psychological health from reading one book on transactional analysis (Ian Stewart and Vann Joines’ fascinating book TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis) than I did from over a decade of highly successful Buddhist meditation. That doesn’t mean that I have achieved perfect psychological health, not by a long shot! [...]
While the dharma is vast, and the teachings of the wisdom traditions contain a lot of material for helping us grow psychologically, we can’t conflate psychological growth and maturity with awakening, and letting people get stuck in the Great Dismal Crap Quagmire does them little service, if you ask me, which you clearly did, as you are reading this book. As I said before, working on our psychological stuff can have lots of value, and Western psychology has added a vast array of useful conceptual frameworks and techniques to the world of psychological health and human development, but I firmly believe that clearly drawing the line between insight practice and psychological work is essential to doing either well. I have been to therapy and really got a lot out of it, just on a totally different front from what insight practices got me. It is not that I haven’t had psychological insights of great value when on retreat, as I have had plenty, but those psychological insights came from good insight practice as some surprising and appreciated side effect rather than the other way around.
I have a problem in that I can cite 50+ other books that were vaguely relevant to me but really don’t help a more general path. And yeah often the descriptions of the enlightenment stuff conflict each other.
And yes, enlightenment isn’t mental health cure-all. At the same time, it’s got helpful information.
While I can see some connections between all of these books, I feel that if “enlightenment” is to mean anything, defining it so broadly as to have all of these books be about it makes the term vague enough to be useless. In fact, some of these works pretty much outright state that by their definition of enlightenment, the other books are not about enlightenment—e.g. MCTB2 explicitly denies that enlightenment would be particularly useful in terms of conventional mental health (while e.g. “Transform Your Self” is all about psychological health):
I have a problem in that I can cite 50+ other books that were vaguely relevant to me but really don’t help a more general path. And yeah often the descriptions of the enlightenment stuff conflict each other.
And yes, enlightenment isn’t mental health cure-all. At the same time, it’s got helpful information.