1. In what sense is enlightenment permanent? E.g., will a truly enlightened person never suffer again? Or is it a weaker claim of the form “once one learns the motion of enlightenment, it can be repeated to eliminate suffering at will”? Or something else entirely?
2. I’ve read Shinzen Young’s “The Science of Enlightenment”. He describes how in some intermediate stage, he started hallucinating giant insects in his daily life. Have you made similar experiences? How do you interpret them? Do you consider such experiences dangerous? Are such experiences distinct from schizophrenia in a relevant way?
3. As far as I understand, enlightened people don’t cling to a specific reality anymore, but they may still have strong desires. Is this your typical experience? How do you relate to your desires? Is it compatible to be (a) enlightened, (b) have a desire that leads to amoral actions when acted upon them, and (c) acting on those desires?
4. Is any amount of pain/anxiety/sadness/anger/etc. compatible with being in a state of zero suffering? Is zero suffering in practice harder to maintain for higher levels of these displeasures, or will a once-enlightened person not find any of these experiences difficult to combine with a state of non-suffering?
5. Are there degrees of enlightenment, or is it more of a discrete change?
6. How much control can an enlightened person have over their experience? Is it possible to decide to not hear/see/smell/feel/taste something? Is it possible to stop thinking at will? Is it possible to feel pleasure or bliss at will? Is it possible to change ones experience at will / to hallucinate arbitrary experiences at will?
1.1 In what sense is enlightenment permanent? E.g., will a truly enlightened person never suffer again?
Daniel Ingram reports once temporarily losing his insights and ending up back in a state of suffering during a bout of severe sickness.
As for “never” suffering again, it is important to understand that awakening drops suffing by perhaps an order of magnitude, but not to zero. There are many different kinds of suffering. Each awakening cures one or more kinds of suffering (usually the most salient ones), but not all of them. It’s like cleaning a room. After you throw away the junk, there’s still dusting to do.
1.2 Or is it a weaker claim of the form “once one learns the motion of enlightenment, it can be repeated to eliminate suffering at will”? Or something else entirely?
This is a tricky quesion, so I’m going to give a simplified answer.
In the case of stream entry via Zen, first you learn to eliminate suffering at will. Then, after you put in the work, that temporary altered state eventually becomes a permament altered trait.
I’ve read Shinzen Young’s “The Science of Enlightenment”. He describes how in some intermediate stage, he started hallucinating giant insects in his daily life. Have you made similar experiences? How do you interpret them? Do you consider such experiences dangerous? Are such experiences distinct from schizophrenia in a relevant way?
I have had two psychotic episodes. Both of them were dangerous, temporary, and precipitated by a combination of insight cycle + sleep deprivation + psychomagic. In this sense, they are not something that occur in my daily life. In both experiences, I experienced schizophrenia-like delusions, but not schizophrenia-like hallucinations[1]. The most important difference (to me) is that these experiences were temporary, unlike schizophrenia.
Both of these experiences accelerated my progress of insight, but it wasn’t worth the damage they did to my daily life. If I had had similar experiences under controlled circumstances, perhaps they would have been a net good, instead.
3.1 As far as I understand, enlightened people don’t cling to a specific reality anymore, but they may still have strong desires. Is this your typical experience? How do you relate to your desires?
I’m going to nitpick some terminology here. Enlightenment cures desire. What it leaves are motivations. This can be confusing to unenlightened people because to unenlightened people, desire and motivation are difficult to untangle from one another.
As an example of what motivation without desire can feel like, consider a doctor who has treated countless cancer patients. Some live; others die. The doctor works hard to help them all, but she’s long past suffering when one of them dies.
When I hit stream entry, my desire was (mostly?) annihilated. For the next several months, my desire-motivated habits slowly ran out of inertia. Since then, I my brain has been integrating non-desire-based motivational systems.
3.2 Is it compatible to be (a) enlightened, (b) have a desire that leads to amoral actions when acted upon them, and (c) acting on those desires?
Technically-speaking, it is impossible to be enlightened and have desire. However, in the Zen tradition, enlightenment is sort of a like a limit point (in the mathematical sense) or absolute zero temperature. It’s more of an abstract concept you’re calibrating toward rather than a place you can really get to. Awakening is, in this sense, imperfect. It’s possible to have traces of desire after awakening—just at trace levels much lower than un-enlightened people.
As for amoral actions, awakened people absolutely can commit them! They’re just not desire-motivated. An awakened person could crash a car and kill pedestrians, for example. It’s easy for me to imagine an awakened cult leader who brainwashes people.
4.1 Is any amount of pain/anxiety/sadness/anger/etc. compatible with being in a state of [approximately] zero suffering?
I’m going to erata your question from “zero suffering” to “approximately zero suffering”. The word “zero” can easily cause confusion because mystics use a absolute zero-based scale for suffering whereas people who haven’t done insight practice percieve what feels like an absolut-zero-based scale but is actually a non-absolute-zero-based scale. In physics, things get weird when you approach absolute zero. The same is true of insight into consciousness.
Pain: Sensory inputs that, in un-enlightened people, coalesce into pain is compatible with zero suffering. In enlightened people the coalescing doesn’t happen and you feel the raw sensory inputs directly. It feels like vibrations.
Anxiety: Anxiety is incompatible with non-suffering. Cure suffering and you cure anxiety.
Sadnesss: Perfectly compatible with zero suffering. I’ve written about the experience here.
Anger: With rare exceptions (truly righteous anger), anger is incompatible with non-suffering.
4.2 Is zero suffering in practice harder to maintain for higher levels of these displeasures, or will a once-enlightened person not find any of these experiences difficult to combine with a state of non-suffering?
This confuses altered states with altered traits. Altered states of consciousness, like jhanas, are temporary states you put effort into maintaining. Altered traits like awakening don’t require any effort whatsoever to maintain. They’re like your belief in gravity. You don’t have put practice into maintaining your belief in gravity. No matter how much someone waterboards you, it’s not going to change your belief that water is wet.
5 Are there degrees of enlightenment, or is it more of a discrete change?
There are degrees to it. They can be continuous, but in my experience they are more often discrete. Each insight cycle roughly correlates with one awakening.
That said, your first awakening is so important it has a special name: “stream entry”.
How much control can an enlightened person have over their experience? 6.1 Is it possible to decide to not hear/see/smell/feel/taste something?
I haven’t done this, but people on the jhana side of things do. All you have to do is concentrate on something else. Think about when you’re so engaged in reading a book that you don’t notice the sounds coming through your window. It’s the same thing.
6.2 Is it possible to stop thinking at will?
You mean discursive thinking like that voice in your head? Yeah, we do that in shikantaza. After you turn it off what’s left is the sensation of the breath, the sound of wind chimes outside and, if your eyes are open, the image of the wall in front of you. It takes me about 30 minutes of deliberate intention in a peaceful room to get into this state.
6.3 Is it possible to feel pleasure or bliss at will?
Yes. There are even different kinds of bliss. The jhana practitioners say that first jhana is like this. The easiest way to turn on the happiness hose is probably through metta meditation.
6.4 Is it possible to change ones experience at will / to hallucinate arbitrary experiences at will?
Truly arbitrary experiences? No. But you can get a lot of control over things. But you can get controlled staticish visual hallucinations, MDMA-like experiences on demand and, of course, dismantle the machinery of suffering.
As for “never” suffering again, it is important to understand that awakening drops suffing by perhaps an order of magnitude, but not to zero.
When you say this, are you talking about frequency? Duration? Intensity? Something else?
What are the units here? (Assuming that we’re talking about something other than frequency or duration, for which the units are, presumably, the obvious ones.)
There are many different kinds of suffering.
What are the different kinds of suffering?
Each awakening cures one or more kinds of suffering (usually the most salient ones), but not all of them.
How many awakenings are there? Are you awakened in all the ways, or only some?
As for “never” suffering again, it is important to understand that awakening drops suffing by perhaps an order of magnitude, but not to zero.
When you say this, are you talking about frequency? Duration? Intensity? Something else?
What are the units here? (Assuming that we’re talking about something other than frequency or duration, for which the units are, presumably, the obvious ones.)
All of them, but more importantly I (as well as normal people) had a baseline suffering that can be removed.
Metaphor time: For most of my life I’ve had trouble wearing socks because I find them too uncomfortable. Then I discovered seamless bamboo-rayong socks for diabetics. Now I can comfortably wear socks. And then I discovered that there exists bamboo-rayon shirts, pants and underwear too! Awakening feels like that.
There are many different kinds of suffering.
What are the different kinds of suffering?
According to people who have gone into deep jhanas, all conscious experience contains an element of suffering. But when explainint this stuff it’s easier to point to course feelings like anger, hatred, selfishness, separation from other people, and anything less than universal love toward everyone and everything.
Each awakening cures one or more kinds of suffering (usually the most salient ones), but not all of them.
How many awakenings are there? Are you awakened in all the ways, or only some?
The exact number and order (probably) differs from person to person.
I’ve lost count of how may awakenings I’ve been through. Maybe something like 5-8, depending on how you count? This has been happening for years and my last one was <2 months ago, so it’s very unlikely I’m at the end of this road.
It’s like the first time you’ve ever tasted chocolate, ever felt love, ever had your heart broken, all at once, and then you die, and you can never tell anyone what you’ve seen, or how precious life is, unless they’ve seen it themselves. Then you go to work and pay your taxes.
Thanks for doing this AMA!
1. In what sense is enlightenment permanent? E.g., will a truly enlightened person never suffer again? Or is it a weaker claim of the form “once one learns the motion of enlightenment, it can be repeated to eliminate suffering at will”? Or something else entirely?
2. I’ve read Shinzen Young’s “The Science of Enlightenment”. He describes how in some intermediate stage, he started hallucinating giant insects in his daily life. Have you made similar experiences? How do you interpret them? Do you consider such experiences dangerous? Are such experiences distinct from schizophrenia in a relevant way?
3. As far as I understand, enlightened people don’t cling to a specific reality anymore, but they may still have strong desires. Is this your typical experience? How do you relate to your desires? Is it compatible to be (a) enlightened, (b) have a desire that leads to amoral actions when acted upon them, and (c) acting on those desires?
4. Is any amount of pain/anxiety/sadness/anger/etc. compatible with being in a state of zero suffering? Is zero suffering in practice harder to maintain for higher levels of these displeasures, or will a once-enlightened person not find any of these experiences difficult to combine with a state of non-suffering?
5. Are there degrees of enlightenment, or is it more of a discrete change?
6. How much control can an enlightened person have over their experience? Is it possible to decide to not hear/see/smell/feel/taste something? Is it possible to stop thinking at will? Is it possible to feel pleasure or bliss at will? Is it possible to change ones experience at will / to hallucinate arbitrary experiences at will?
7. What is it like to be enlightened?
Thanks for asking such great questions!
Daniel Ingram reports once temporarily losing his insights and ending up back in a state of suffering during a bout of severe sickness.
As for “never” suffering again, it is important to understand that awakening drops suffing by perhaps an order of magnitude, but not to zero. There are many different kinds of suffering. Each awakening cures one or more kinds of suffering (usually the most salient ones), but not all of them. It’s like cleaning a room. After you throw away the junk, there’s still dusting to do.
This is a tricky quesion, so I’m going to give a simplified answer.
In the case of stream entry via Zen, first you learn to eliminate suffering at will. Then, after you put in the work, that temporary altered state eventually becomes a permament altered trait.
I have had two psychotic episodes. Both of them were dangerous, temporary, and precipitated by a combination of insight cycle + sleep deprivation + psychomagic. In this sense, they are not something that occur in my daily life. In both experiences, I experienced schizophrenia-like delusions, but not schizophrenia-like hallucinations[1]. The most important difference (to me) is that these experiences were temporary, unlike schizophrenia.
Both of these experiences accelerated my progress of insight, but it wasn’t worth the damage they did to my daily life. If I had had similar experiences under controlled circumstances, perhaps they would have been a net good, instead.
I’m going to nitpick some terminology here. Enlightenment cures desire. What it leaves are motivations. This can be confusing to unenlightened people because to unenlightened people, desire and motivation are difficult to untangle from one another.
As an example of what motivation without desire can feel like, consider a doctor who has treated countless cancer patients. Some live; others die. The doctor works hard to help them all, but she’s long past suffering when one of them dies.
When I hit stream entry, my desire was (mostly?) annihilated. For the next several months, my desire-motivated habits slowly ran out of inertia. Since then, I my brain has been integrating non-desire-based motivational systems.
Technically-speaking, it is impossible to be enlightened and have desire. However, in the Zen tradition, enlightenment is sort of a like a limit point (in the mathematical sense) or absolute zero temperature. It’s more of an abstract concept you’re calibrating toward rather than a place you can really get to. Awakening is, in this sense, imperfect. It’s possible to have traces of desire after awakening—just at trace levels much lower than un-enlightened people.
As for amoral actions, awakened people absolutely can commit them! They’re just not desire-motivated. An awakened person could crash a car and kill pedestrians, for example. It’s easy for me to imagine an awakened cult leader who brainwashes people.
I’m going to erata your question from “zero suffering” to “approximately zero suffering”. The word “zero” can easily cause confusion because mystics use a absolute zero-based scale for suffering whereas people who haven’t done insight practice percieve what feels like an absolut-zero-based scale but is actually a non-absolute-zero-based scale. In physics, things get weird when you approach absolute zero. The same is true of insight into consciousness.
Pain: Sensory inputs that, in un-enlightened people, coalesce into pain is compatible with zero suffering. In enlightened people the coalescing doesn’t happen and you feel the raw sensory inputs directly. It feels like vibrations.
Anxiety: Anxiety is incompatible with non-suffering. Cure suffering and you cure anxiety.
Sadnesss: Perfectly compatible with zero suffering. I’ve written about the experience here.
Anger: With rare exceptions (truly righteous anger), anger is incompatible with non-suffering.
This confuses altered states with altered traits. Altered states of consciousness, like jhanas, are temporary states you put effort into maintaining. Altered traits like awakening don’t require any effort whatsoever to maintain. They’re like your belief in gravity. You don’t have put practice into maintaining your belief in gravity. No matter how much someone waterboards you, it’s not going to change your belief that water is wet.
There are degrees to it. They can be continuous, but in my experience they are more often discrete. Each insight cycle roughly correlates with one awakening.
That said, your first awakening is so important it has a special name: “stream entry”.
I haven’t done this, but people on the jhana side of things do. All you have to do is concentrate on something else. Think about when you’re so engaged in reading a book that you don’t notice the sounds coming through your window. It’s the same thing.
You mean discursive thinking like that voice in your head? Yeah, we do that in shikantaza. After you turn it off what’s left is the sensation of the breath, the sound of wind chimes outside and, if your eyes are open, the image of the wall in front of you. It takes me about 30 minutes of deliberate intention in a peaceful room to get into this state.
Yes. There are even different kinds of bliss. The jhana practitioners say that first jhana is like this. The easiest way to turn on the happiness hose is probably through metta meditation.
Truly arbitrary experiences? No. But you can get a lot of control over things. But you can get controlled staticish visual hallucinations, MDMA-like experiences on demand and, of course, dismantle the machinery of suffering.
I have heard that visual meditation (kasina) is more likely to produce visual hallucinations. I have done only a little kasina.
When you say this, are you talking about frequency? Duration? Intensity? Something else?
What are the units here? (Assuming that we’re talking about something other than frequency or duration, for which the units are, presumably, the obvious ones.)
What are the different kinds of suffering?
How many awakenings are there? Are you awakened in all the ways, or only some?
All of them, but more importantly I (as well as normal people) had a baseline suffering that can be removed.
Metaphor time: For most of my life I’ve had trouble wearing socks because I find them too uncomfortable. Then I discovered seamless bamboo-rayong socks for diabetics. Now I can comfortably wear socks. And then I discovered that there exists bamboo-rayon shirts, pants and underwear too! Awakening feels like that.
According to people who have gone into deep jhanas, all conscious experience contains an element of suffering. But when explainint this stuff it’s easier to point to course feelings like anger, hatred, selfishness, separation from other people, and anything less than universal love toward everyone and everything.
The exact number and order (probably) differs from person to person.
I’ve lost count of how may awakenings I’ve been through. Maybe something like 5-8, depending on how you count? This has been happening for years and my last one was <2 months ago, so it’s very unlikely I’m at the end of this road.
It’s like the first time you’ve ever tasted chocolate, ever felt love, ever had your heart broken, all at once, and then you die, and you can never tell anyone what you’ve seen, or how precious life is, unless they’ve seen it themselves. Then you go to work and pay your taxes.