In my experience with meditation literature, and with the sort of tech bro who takes acid, becomes enlightened in some way and becomes a metta bro, the “ontologies” or explanatory frameworks that they use are most always very bad and deeply incorrect and in some cases can lead people to very dark places for a long time. However they only provide interpretation and articulation of insight, or practice instructions for finding the insight in the first place, and are not the same as that insight. I do think the various insights are still valuable, and that they are necessary (but clearly quite insufficient) for doing good philosophy (eg. finding better explanatory frameworks, among many other things).
I would say that the main benefits of enlightenment are that I have cleared out a bunch of inefficient wasted motion in my mind, a sort of mental sludge, and I have direct access to a bunch of tools for more directly working with my emotions, motivations, beliefs and thoughts and as a consequence I am a lot more sane than I was six years ago when all that was fresh. Sane in the sense of being more emotionally regulated, and a more moral person, which is more important to me, but I would also claim in the classic LW sense of having less wrong beliefs as well I guess
I also now have a philosophy that is actually practically useful in my day to day life, doesn’t make me miserable, and doesn’t function as a distraction, and meditation was necessary for this. However it is somewhere so alien to LW that you’d probably lump me in with the very bad and deeply incorrect philosophies. However, I think it was because I had already moved somewhere else from LW philosophy before getting deeper into meditation that I ended up with a partial philosophy which is roughly correct on the parts that it covers. I think the scientismic “ontologies” in which LW’s is included directly lead to bad places in their interaction with meditation.
So idk. I think it’s good, I don’t know how to direct you towards the path that I went down unless you want to engage in tens of thousands of words between us, or in a similar amount of words in works of philosophy. I find the literature unsatisfying and I’m bad at writing.
There are risks, and it’s also necessary if you want to go down certain paths seeking knowledge. ymmv
In my experience with meditation literature, and with the sort of tech bro who takes acid, becomes enlightened in some way and becomes a metta bro, the “ontologies” or explanatory frameworks that they use are most always very bad and deeply incorrect and in some cases can lead people to very dark places for a long time. However they only provide interpretation and articulation of insight, or practice instructions for finding the insight in the first place, and are not the same as that insight. I do think the various insights are still valuable, and that they are necessary (but clearly quite insufficient) for doing good philosophy (eg. finding better explanatory frameworks, among many other things).
I would say that the main benefits of enlightenment are that I have cleared out a bunch of inefficient wasted motion in my mind, a sort of mental sludge, and I have direct access to a bunch of tools for more directly working with my emotions, motivations, beliefs and thoughts and as a consequence I am a lot more sane than I was six years ago when all that was fresh. Sane in the sense of being more emotionally regulated, and a more moral person, which is more important to me, but I would also claim in the classic LW sense of having less wrong beliefs as well I guess
I also now have a philosophy that is actually practically useful in my day to day life, doesn’t make me miserable, and doesn’t function as a distraction, and meditation was necessary for this. However it is somewhere so alien to LW that you’d probably lump me in with the very bad and deeply incorrect philosophies. However, I think it was because I had already moved somewhere else from LW philosophy before getting deeper into meditation that I ended up with a partial philosophy which is roughly correct on the parts that it covers. I think the scientismic “ontologies” in which LW’s is included directly lead to bad places in their interaction with meditation.
So idk. I think it’s good, I don’t know how to direct you towards the path that I went down unless you want to engage in tens of thousands of words between us, or in a similar amount of words in works of philosophy. I find the literature unsatisfying and I’m bad at writing.
There are risks, and it’s also necessary if you want to go down certain paths seeking knowledge. ymmv