Unfortunately there are many prominent examples of Enlightened/Awakened/Integrated individuals who act like destructive fools and ruin their lives and reputations, often through patterns of abusive behavior. When this happens over and over, I don’t think it can be written off as “oh those people weren’t actually Enlightened.” Rather, I think there’s something in the bootstrapping dynamics of tinkering with your own psyche that predictably (sometimes) leads in this direction.
My own informed guess as to how this happens is something like this: imagine your worst impulse arising, and imagine that you’ve been so careful to take every part of yourself seriously that you take that impulse seriously rather than automatically swatting it away with the usual superegoic separate shard of self; imagine that your normal visceral aversion to following through on that terrible impulse is totally neutralized, toothless. Perhaps you see the impulse arise and you understand intellectually that it’s Bad but somehow its Badness is no longer compelling to you. I don’t know. I’m just putting together the pieces of what certain human disasters have said.
Anyway, I don’t actually think you’re wrong to think integration is an important goal. The problem is that integration is mostly neutral. You can integrate in directions that are holistically bad for you and those around you, maybe even worse than if you never attempted it in the first place.
imagine that your normal visceral aversion to following through on that terrible impulse is totally neutralized, toothless. Perhaps you see the impulse arise and you understand intellectually that it’s Bad but somehow its Badness is no longer compelling to you.
Michael: Okay. So that’s how practicing samatha can help a dedicated meditator work through a lot of their baggage and material, and hopefully have less of a distressing type experience like Willoughby Britton’s talking about or less of a dukkha nana/dark night intense experience like Daniel’s talking about. And you’re using the meditation practice to help work with your stuff. But what about the other case that we both know of where people have reached very high levels of meditative capacity, they’ve got a lot of insight, maybe they’re at some level of awakening, and they seem to have, in a way, missed a whole pocket of material, or several pockets of material. It’s like they think they’re doing fine, but maybe everyone around them is aware that they’ve got these behavior patterns that do not seem awake at all. And yet the meditation has somehow missed that.
Culadasa: Yes, yes. [...] … there seems to be a certain level of the stuff that we’re talking about that it’s necessary to deal with to achieve awakening, but it’s sort of a minimal level. And, you know, we spoke in terms of dukkha nana, dark night, adverse effect things. What I think that is indicative of is that if that hasn’t been sufficiently dealt with earlier, it has to get dealt with in one way or another at that point. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to get resolved; it may just get reburied a little more deeply.
Michael: Pushed out of the way.
Culadasa: Yeah, pushed out of the way, or bypassed in some way. That allows a person to go ahead and achieve first path, second path, third path, even fourth path, and it’s unrealistic to think that everything has been resolved. What meditation and what the progress of insight is going to do is it’s going to resolve enough of it to allow you to basically undergo the shift in perception that we refer to as awakening. And what’s left? Well, a lot of the things that change as a result of a process of awakening actually help to push these things aside, to bypass them in one way or another, whereas before somebody has achieved, say, first or second path, these would have been sufficiently problematic in their life that, in one way or another, they would be aware of them, whether or not they did anything about them or were at a place of just taking for granted that I have these, quote, “personality characteristics” that are a bit difficult.
Michael: Yeah. So it’s in their face all the time; it’s hard to ignore.
Culadasa: Right. But then when you get to the place where, you know, you have the falling away of personality view, so now the ego structure itself is seen as transparent, and it’s via the ego structure that a lot of this stuff manifests. So it’s wonderful to no longer have that attachment to the conceptualization of “who I am,” to be free of the burden of that, to not have to react to threats to my ideas of who and what I am and things like that. But it also, at the same time, allows you to just dismiss in the same way whatever problems that you have that are there. The degree to which your experience of suffering and craving is diminished is just going to be more of the same – you’re going to direct your equanimity towards these problematic things when they do surface, and let go of them, and of course that’s not going to do anything to eliminate them; they’re going to still be there.
There’s something interesting happening here. Not quite irony, but something about seeing an expert notice and describe in details a general problem and then go on the suffer that problem themselves. It’s sort of like the only way to become really expert in something is to do it, and that goes for being an expert in all the ways we can fail to be integrated, even with bodhi.
Hmm, but is it really necessary to become an expert in… anything, really, much less anything so esoteric as meditation/enlightenment/whatever, in order to avoid doing any sexual misconduct? It seems like most people manage this without any great expertise at all…
I think you miss my point. He’s offering here a detailed explanation of how we can fail to integrate with what we value, and I point out that maybe that’s because he has such difficulty with it. I’m not making any particular point here about whether or not he is an expert in meditation, bodhi, etc. or whether that is relevant to sexual misconduct beyond it being an instance of failing to integrate his actions with what he claims to value. That most people manage not to engage in sexual misconduct, commit murder, steal, etc. doesn’t seem much relevant to the point of understanding the gears of how not to do it, even if most of us don’t need to know about the gears to get our desired outcome.
Depending on standards of what counts as sexual misconduct, men in powerful position quite often engage in it.
He basically engaged in extramarital affairs and wasn’t always fully truthful about them with his wife. He also seemed to have paid money to sex workers which is also an activity in which many people engage.
As far as people we know of in that kind of position of social power, this doesn’t seem untypical to me.
Unfortunately there are many prominent examples of Enlightened/Awakened/Integrated individuals who act like destructive fools and ruin their lives and reputations, often through patterns of abusive behavior. When this happens over and over, I don’t think it can be written off as “oh those people weren’t actually Enlightened.” Rather, I think there’s something in the bootstrapping dynamics of tinkering with your own psyche that predictably (sometimes) leads in this direction.
My own informed guess as to how this happens is something like this: imagine your worst impulse arising, and imagine that you’ve been so careful to take every part of yourself seriously that you take that impulse seriously rather than automatically swatting it away with the usual superegoic separate shard of self; imagine that your normal visceral aversion to following through on that terrible impulse is totally neutralized, toothless. Perhaps you see the impulse arise and you understand intellectually that it’s Bad but somehow its Badness is no longer compelling to you. I don’t know. I’m just putting together the pieces of what certain human disasters have said.
Anyway, I don’t actually think you’re wrong to think integration is an important goal. The problem is that integration is mostly neutral. You can integrate in directions that are holistically bad for you and those around you, maybe even worse than if you never attempted it in the first place.
Related:
Also related: https://engagedharma.net/2019/08/19/culadasa-charged-with-sexual-misconduct/
The article’s title is misleading. He didn’t harass or rape anyone. He had sex with prostitutes and hid that from his wife.
I think it’s completely fair to describe that as “sexual misconduct.”
Agreed. It’s definitely sexual misconduct in the sense generally meant by the lay precept against sexual misconduct in Buddhist schools.
There’s something interesting happening here. Not quite irony, but something about seeing an expert notice and describe in details a general problem and then go on the suffer that problem themselves. It’s sort of like the only way to become really expert in something is to do it, and that goes for being an expert in all the ways we can fail to be integrated, even with bodhi.
Hmm, but is it really necessary to become an expert in… anything, really, much less anything so esoteric as meditation/enlightenment/whatever, in order to avoid doing any sexual misconduct? It seems like most people manage this without any great expertise at all…
I think you miss my point. He’s offering here a detailed explanation of how we can fail to integrate with what we value, and I point out that maybe that’s because he has such difficulty with it. I’m not making any particular point here about whether or not he is an expert in meditation, bodhi, etc. or whether that is relevant to sexual misconduct beyond it being an instance of failing to integrate his actions with what he claims to value. That most people manage not to engage in sexual misconduct, commit murder, steal, etc. doesn’t seem much relevant to the point of understanding the gears of how not to do it, even if most of us don’t need to know about the gears to get our desired outcome.
Depending on standards of what counts as sexual misconduct, men in powerful position quite often engage in it.
He basically engaged in extramarital affairs and wasn’t always fully truthful about them with his wife. He also seemed to have paid money to sex workers which is also an activity in which many people engage.
As far as people we know of in that kind of position of social power, this doesn’t seem untypical to me.