Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, “enlightened” as you and the people you mention are using the word, but not through any practice thought of or labelled as devoted to achieving “enlightenment”. They are not aware that they have achieved anything: it is not a thing for them, it is their everyday state. Then they come upon people preaching various paths to something they call “enlightenment”, and some claiming to have achieved the goal of these paths. How might this presumptively enlightened person (sans le nom) locate himself on these maps?
ETA: See also, a draft I wrote a while ago but never published until now.
I didn’t realize that what I’d done to myself was noteworthy or unusual – I sort of assumed other people must be doing this a lot, because of course I wasn’t the only person who’d tried acid—all this was no big deal. As far as I was concerned, I existed in a vacuum. I hadn’t read any texts, followed any rules or traditions, undergone any training, or talked whatsoever with any spiritual teachers. I had no calibration of my experience with the rest of the world – until a few years later I talked about my experience at a dinner party and people responded with shock, which was a sudden and strong reframe for me. I was different from other people, apparently, in a much bigger way than I’d thought. This shook me up.
Once this whole thing became A Story, it started getting even weirder. I wrote about it on reddit and got a huge amount of attention. People started referring to me as the Acid Queen. Opinions were divided – some looked to me with awe and asked for advice, while still others explained how I was infantile or unbalanced, and that you can’t get very far with LSD, that only meditation would get me to the real stuff. At this point, for a while at least, I found myself immune to the spiritual opinions of others – this thing within me was utterly beyond doubt, and the words others spoke seemed like games around the Knowing. People tried to match the things I described to various traditions or stages, but these discussions felt like play. Why describe the unnameable?
The “talking about it” was weird. The place I had been was always this presence behind me, like this slow strange god had thrust its hand into the world and I was a character painted on the tip of its thumb. And to talk about it was to give it form, to say what it was and was not. How was I supposed to talk about it at all? It felt dishonest, or silly – and yet talking about it was hard to avoid – I was now different, and I found myself sitting at parties sipping on wine like an alien in human skin – and to be honest about what was most relevant, or to talk about philosophy (a common topic in my friend circles), the strange god was hard to avoid. I could feel the silliness of it whenever I tried, and if I tried too hard I started falling into intense spasmatic episodes where I experienced pleasure, pain, and ego death, which has occasionally embarrassed me in otherwise normal human conversations.
I sought out other people who I felt understood, though this isn’t quite the right way of saying it. Other people understanding was a concept that disappeared with the dissolution of my character. Maybe better is to say I sought a mirror in others – to be in the presence of another who, for whatever reason, induced divinity. This happened occasionally, and when it did my thoughts became a mantra: THEY KNOW, THEY KNOW, THEY KNOW – and then my experience of them as an other would break apart, because their knowing became my knowing and I felt myself expand to encompass them, and I would start crying or something equally confusing. This process occurred independently of [the frame of] them actually “knowing” – sometimes they would end up very confused, without having experienced anything special at all.
But in general, the conversion-to-story became a point of ongoing muddiness for me – I was trying to believe in my human character again, but now my character had this mystic spiritual journey backstory, and what was I supposed to do with it? Go around talking about consciousness until I started crying at people? Even alcohol had become psychedelic for me; it lowered my carefully cultivated inhibitions over the screaming divinity, and this which resulted in awkward things like me going to a party, drinking a beer, and then staring at my hands while going “whoah, man, they’re like… flesh claws.”
Over the years, without realizing it, the Mystic Spiritual Journey Backstory began to calcify – as in, it began to slip from a flexible framework I took as object into an indication of reality to which I was subject. This was marked by a few things:
An increased interest in becoming a guru or spiritual teacher.
A belief in the authority of existing gurus and spiritual teachers
An insecurity around my identity as someone who had Been Somewhere
While previously the opinions of confident spiritual people had slid off my back, now they gained hold in me and moved me.
The Void was still within me, but it started to fade from an intense, ever-present vibration just behind my consciousness, into a warm memory flitting occasionally at my edges. I knew it was leaving, but I was even more confused – isn’t losing the Void exactly what I was aiming for? How much Void should I lose? How close should I be?
The answer might seem something like “Just find the balance that allows you to live your life,” sort of like “If you really like golfing and also family time, figure out what percentage of time spent maximizes everybody’s happiness”, but you must understand the kind of process happening here is totally different. This was not the weighing of two desires, this was reality deciding how self-aware to be. My character wanted self-preservation (and thus to not Know); the Void didn’t want anything at all. My character wanted balance; the Void was formless and absolute and utterly beyond desire. Only one side could do any figuring out about what balance even meant.
And so somewhere I knew that I was becoming Character again, and trying to go around teaching people some concrete, definable truth. Somewhere “else”, the world was without form, and void; and darkness was beneath me, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the Character was perfect, ‘more advanced’ than the baby it had been, for it had engaged in successful forgetting.
Feeling less like I am the thing that is thinking my thoughts – especially during periods of intense concentration or problem solving. I ‘catch myself thinking’ from the outside much more often, in more unexpected circumstances, and during more mentally intensive periods. Like, normally I am sitting in a glass box, and I’m popping out colorful little ‘reasonings’ and ‘conclusions,’ and of course I know they are popping out *from me* – but then sometimes I find myself standing outside the glass box looking in, and I am surprised to find that the ‘reasonings’ and ‘conclusions’ are continuing to pop out of the empty air where I used to sit. I realize that the “reasonings” and “conclusions” are independent of me, that I’m not the one popping them out.
Permanently increased wellbeing in a way it’s hard to put my finger on.
My internal experience and feelings of thought processes are now way more nonverbal, whereas pre-acid I used to be full of ‘words.’ I feel silenced, but not any less quiet.
The mental processes I take to explain my own behaviors to myself have shifted drastically – particularly ones surrounding the sense of agency. I rarely use mental movements around ‘sense of agency’ anymore. It’s like a word that’s dropped out of my internal vocabulary.
Existential masochism. The sense of pleasure and pain – in a mental sense – have been seriously churned together. It’s not that pain is any less painful, or that pleasure is any less pleasurable (probably the opposite, really), it’s that they more often coexist, and tend to coexist at greater extremes.
This sounds interesting. The “independently enlightened” person would probably be unfamiliar with the Buddhist lingo, so their self-description would not resemble the typical ways.
It is possible that they would have a problem putting their experience in words. Then again, if they could, we could get a description free of the Buddhist lingo.
Maybe even their experience would be different. Like, maybe there is a thing called “enlightenment”, but there are multiple ways to get there, and traditional Buddhist way includes some steps that are not strictly necessary. That person might find a different way (perhaps with different unnecessary components).
People who stumble into awakening on their own very much do have a problem putting their experience into words because they’re trying to communicate a subjective experience that most of the people they talk to have no base of reference for.
Once anecdote I’ve read had a woman describe the experience as being “bigger”. I interpret this to mean that the non-self objects in her consciousness no longer feel like “non-self” because the self/non-self duality has evaporated.
There are indeed different ways to get to awakening. Traditional Buddhist methods are not the only effective means.
While rare, people do stumble upon awakening / stream entry time to time. At least some of these people (there’s no way to know how many) get confused, go looking for help, and eventually find their way to Zen. That said, I’ve never heard of someone being born into this condition.
As to your actual question: There are a few different types of maps. Some kinds of maps would apply to your hypothetical person. Others wouldn’t.
Trait-based maps based on questions like “do you feel a sense of self?” would apply to the person. We could use these maps to locate the person’s stage of awakening. Here is my favorite trait-based map.
Insight cycle maps would not apply to the person, because insight cycle maps are about the process of becoming awakened and a person who was always awakened need not have gone through the process. Here is an example of a simple insight cycle map and a complicated insight cycle map.
Direction-based maps like “just sit” are more useful as a compass than a map because they don’t tell you where you are—just what direction to go.
It can be difficult to figure out how you differ from other people due to internal mental experiences, but it can be done. I’m autistic, for example, and it wasn’t until my late 20s that I pieced together exactly how I differed from the baseline.
People who are highly awakened have small tells if you know what to look for. One woman I know, for example, has her hands failing from arthritis. She barely talks about it. I’ve never even seen a trace of hurt or tension on her face.
That said, I’ve never heard of someone being born into this condition.
I didn’t find any case of someone being born with it, but there’s something called athymhormic syndrome which sounds a lot like something like enlightenment, and is acquired by having a stroke or injury. See also Shinzen Young on the syndrome.
When awakening happens, there’s no feeling of having achieved anything, it’s simply natural. Others, too, appear enlightened. Only when you observe and speak with people do you notice they take themselves to be something they are not: a separate self.
Only when you observe and speak with people do you notice they take themselves to be something they are not: a separate self.
What does that look like? When I think of the interactions I have with people, face-to-face even, I don’t know what the signs would be that “they take themselves to be … a separate self” or its opposite. I can appreciate people’s intelligence, their creativity, their initiative, their practical wisdom, their practical skills, and so on, or the lack of these qualities, but I draw a blank on “they take themselves to be a separate self”. I don’t know what the opposite of that would be.
I mean, here I am sitting at home typing this, and until I click SUBMIT, no-one knows I’m doing any such thing. There’s separation, distinction from others, right there. I am aware of thinking these thoughts and hitting the keys, and aware of being aware of all that, and so on. What else is that but “self”? I have met people who seemed to have no or a very limited introspective capability: that is what the words “not being a separate self” suggest to me, and it looks to me like a deficiency, not a state to seek out.
Distinctions appear like ripples on one lake. The extra move is the claim, “this ripple is me and those ripples are not.” That added ownership is what “separate self” points to, not a facial sign but a subtle tightening around experience.
How does it show up? As the reflex to defend an image, to compare, to grasp at praise and recoil from blame. Intelligence, creativity, and skill still shine; what changes is the felt need to protect a center that supposedly owns them. When that claim relaxes, the same capacities move with less friction.
Privacy, typing alone, unseen by others, does not prove separateness; it is just a pattern inside one field. Yesterday I found out about Korzybski; funny to find you wrote an article about him. “The map is not the territory” fits exactly here: the label “me” is a map laid over the territory of experience. Boundaries remain as useful conventions for coordination, not as absolute edges in what is.
This contraction is felt first as suffering: unease, fear, shame, anger. Scaled up, many such contractions synchronize into collective stories of scarcity and threat; they harden into identities, borders, and eventually wars. The one body mistakes its own limbs for enemies, and pain multiplies.
The “opposite” of a separate self is not blankness or poor introspection; it is clearer seeing. Before the thought “I am doing this” arrives, sensations, thoughts, and keystrokes are already present, unauthored. Then a thought lands and says “mine.” Noticing the gap between raw appearing and the late-arriving claim is the whole point.
This recognition does not remove persons from practical life; it removes the confusion of taking the mask as the substance. Reactivity softens, care becomes simpler, and action continues: typing happens, choices happen, without the extra weight of a fictional owner, with responsibility felt as love moving through the whole.
Suppose someone was, unknown to themselves, “enlightened” as you and the people you mention are using the word, but not through any practice thought of or labelled as devoted to achieving “enlightenment”. They are not aware that they have achieved anything: it is not a thing for them, it is their everyday state. Then they come upon people preaching various paths to something they call “enlightenment”, and some claiming to have achieved the goal of these paths. How might this presumptively enlightened person (sans le nom) locate himself on these maps?
ETA: See also, a draft I wrote a while ago but never published until now.
Not exactly the same, but your question reminded me of Aella’s You Will Forget, You Have Forgotten:
Related Aella’s article: Permanent Mental Effects from LSD. Relevant parts:
This sounds interesting. The “independently enlightened” person would probably be unfamiliar with the Buddhist lingo, so their self-description would not resemble the typical ways.
It is possible that they would have a problem putting their experience in words. Then again, if they could, we could get a description free of the Buddhist lingo.
Maybe even their experience would be different. Like, maybe there is a thing called “enlightenment”, but there are multiple ways to get there, and traditional Buddhist way includes some steps that are not strictly necessary. That person might find a different way (perhaps with different unnecessary components).
People who stumble into awakening on their own very much do have a problem putting their experience into words because they’re trying to communicate a subjective experience that most of the people they talk to have no base of reference for.
Once anecdote I’ve read had a woman describe the experience as being “bigger”. I interpret this to mean that the non-self objects in her consciousness no longer feel like “non-self” because the self/non-self duality has evaporated.
There are indeed different ways to get to awakening. Traditional Buddhist methods are not the only effective means.
While rare, people do stumble upon awakening / stream entry time to time. At least some of these people (there’s no way to know how many) get confused, go looking for help, and eventually find their way to Zen. That said, I’ve never heard of someone being born into this condition.
As to your actual question: There are a few different types of maps. Some kinds of maps would apply to your hypothetical person. Others wouldn’t.
Trait-based maps based on questions like “do you feel a sense of self?” would apply to the person. We could use these maps to locate the person’s stage of awakening. Here is my favorite trait-based map.
Insight cycle maps would not apply to the person, because insight cycle maps are about the process of becoming awakened and a person who was always awakened need not have gone through the process. Here is an example of a simple insight cycle map and a complicated insight cycle map.
Direction-based maps like “just sit” are more useful as a compass than a map because they don’t tell you where you are—just what direction to go.
How would they, and therefore you, know?
It can be difficult to figure out how you differ from other people due to internal mental experiences, but it can be done. I’m autistic, for example, and it wasn’t until my late 20s that I pieced together exactly how I differed from the baseline.
People who are highly awakened have small tells if you know what to look for. One woman I know, for example, has her hands failing from arthritis. She barely talks about it. I’ve never even seen a trace of hurt or tension on her face.
I didn’t find any case of someone being born with it, but there’s something called athymhormic syndrome which sounds a lot like something like enlightenment, and is acquired by having a stroke or injury. See also Shinzen Young on the syndrome.
When awakening happens, there’s no feeling of having achieved anything, it’s simply natural. Others, too, appear enlightened. Only when you observe and speak with people do you notice they take themselves to be something they are not: a separate self.
What does that look like? When I think of the interactions I have with people, face-to-face even, I don’t know what the signs would be that “they take themselves to be … a separate self” or its opposite. I can appreciate people’s intelligence, their creativity, their initiative, their practical wisdom, their practical skills, and so on, or the lack of these qualities, but I draw a blank on “they take themselves to be a separate self”. I don’t know what the opposite of that would be.
I mean, here I am sitting at home typing this, and until I click SUBMIT, no-one knows I’m doing any such thing. There’s separation, distinction from others, right there. I am aware of thinking these thoughts and hitting the keys, and aware of being aware of all that, and so on. What else is that but “self”? I have met people who seemed to have no or a very limited introspective capability: that is what the words “not being a separate self” suggest to me, and it looks to me like a deficiency, not a state to seek out.
Distinctions appear like ripples on one lake. The extra move is the claim, “this ripple is me and those ripples are not.” That added ownership is what “separate self” points to, not a facial sign but a subtle tightening around experience.
How does it show up? As the reflex to defend an image, to compare, to grasp at praise and recoil from blame. Intelligence, creativity, and skill still shine; what changes is the felt need to protect a center that supposedly owns them. When that claim relaxes, the same capacities move with less friction.
Privacy, typing alone, unseen by others, does not prove separateness; it is just a pattern inside one field. Yesterday I found out about Korzybski; funny to find you wrote an article about him. “The map is not the territory” fits exactly here: the label “me” is a map laid over the territory of experience. Boundaries remain as useful conventions for coordination, not as absolute edges in what is.
This contraction is felt first as suffering: unease, fear, shame, anger. Scaled up, many such contractions synchronize into collective stories of scarcity and threat; they harden into identities, borders, and eventually wars. The one body mistakes its own limbs for enemies, and pain multiplies.
The “opposite” of a separate self is not blankness or poor introspection; it is clearer seeing. Before the thought “I am doing this” arrives, sensations, thoughts, and keystrokes are already present, unauthored. Then a thought lands and says “mine.” Noticing the gap between raw appearing and the late-arriving claim is the whole point.
This recognition does not remove persons from practical life; it removes the confusion of taking the mask as the substance. Reactivity softens, care becomes simpler, and action continues: typing happens, choices happen, without the extra weight of a fictional owner, with responsibility felt as love moving through the whole.