Thinking about relation between enlightenment and (cessation of) signaling.
I know that enlightenment is supposed to be about cessation of all kinds of cravings and attachments, but if we assume that signaling is a huge force in human thinking, then cessation of signaling is a huge part of enlightenment.
Some random thoughts in that direction:
The paradoxical role of motivation in enlightenment—enlightenment is awesome, but a desire to be awesome is the opposite of enlightenment.
Abusiveness of the Zen masters towards their students: typically, the master tries to explain the nature of enlightenment using an unhelpful metaphor (I suppose, because most masters suck at explaining). Immediately, a student does something obviously meant to impress the master. The master goes berserk. Sometimes, as a consequence, the student achieves enlightenment. -- My interpretation is that realizing (System 1) that the master is an abusive asshole who actually sucks at teaching, removes the desire to impress him; and because in this social setting the master was perceived as the only person worth impressing, this removes (at least temporarily) the desire to impress people in general.
A few koans are of the form: “a person A does X, a person B does X, the master says: A did the right thing, but B did the wrong thing”—the surface reading is that the first person reacted spontaneously, and the second person just (correctly) realized that X will probably be rewarded and tried to copy the motions. A more Straussian reading is that this story is supposed to confirm to the savvy reader that masters really don’t have any coherent criteria and their approval is pointless.
(There are more Straussian koans I can’t find right now, where a master says “to achieve enlightenment, you must know at least one thousand koans” and someone says “but Bodhidharma himself barely knew three hundred” and the master says “honestly I don’t give a fuck”… well, using more polite words, but the impression is that the certification of enlightenment is completely arbitrary and maybe you just shouldn’t care about being certified.)
Quite straightforward in Nansen’s cat—the students try to signal their caring and also their cleverness, and thus (quite predictably) fail to actually save the cat. (Joshu’s reaction to hearing this is probably an equivalent of facepalm.)
Stopping the internal speech in meditation—internal speech is practicing of talking to others, which is mostly done to signal something. The first step towards cessasion of signalling is to try spending 20 minutes without (practicing) signalling, which is already a difficult task for most people.
Meditation skills reducing suffering from pain—this gives me the scary idea that maybe we unconsciously increase our perception of pain, in order to better signal our pain. From a crude behaviorist perspective, if people keep rewarding your expression of pain (by their compassion and support), they condition you to express more pain; and because people are good at detecting fake emotions, the most reliable way to express more pain is to actually feel more pain. The scary conclusion is that a compassionate environment can actually make your life more painful… and the good news is that if you learn to give up signaling, this effect can be reversed.
Thinking about relation between enlightenment and (cessation of) signaling.
I know that enlightenment is supposed to be about cessation of all kinds of cravings and attachments, but if we assume that signaling is a huge force in human thinking, then cessation of signaling is a huge part of enlightenment.
Some random thoughts in that direction:
The paradoxical role of motivation in enlightenment—enlightenment is awesome, but a desire to be awesome is the opposite of enlightenment.
Abusiveness of the Zen masters towards their students: typically, the master tries to explain the nature of enlightenment using an unhelpful metaphor (I suppose, because most masters suck at explaining). Immediately, a student does something obviously meant to impress the master. The master goes berserk. Sometimes, as a consequence, the student achieves enlightenment. -- My interpretation is that realizing (System 1) that the master is an abusive asshole who actually sucks at teaching, removes the desire to impress him; and because in this social setting the master was perceived as the only person worth impressing, this removes (at least temporarily) the desire to impress people in general.
A few koans are of the form: “a person A does X, a person B does X, the master says: A did the right thing, but B did the wrong thing”—the surface reading is that the first person reacted spontaneously, and the second person just (correctly) realized that X will probably be rewarded and tried to copy the motions. A more Straussian reading is that this story is supposed to confirm to the savvy reader that masters really don’t have any coherent criteria and their approval is pointless.
(There are more Straussian koans I can’t find right now, where a master says “to achieve enlightenment, you must know at least one thousand koans” and someone says “but Bodhidharma himself barely knew three hundred” and the master says “honestly I don’t give a fuck”… well, using more polite words, but the impression is that the certification of enlightenment is completely arbitrary and maybe you just shouldn’t care about being certified.)
Quite straightforward in Nansen’s cat—the students try to signal their caring and also their cleverness, and thus (quite predictably) fail to actually save the cat. (Joshu’s reaction to hearing this is probably an equivalent of facepalm.)
Stopping the internal speech in meditation—internal speech is practicing of talking to others, which is mostly done to signal something. The first step towards cessasion of signalling is to try spending 20 minutes without (practicing) signalling, which is already a difficult task for most people.
Meditation skills reducing suffering from pain—this gives me the scary idea that maybe we unconsciously increase our perception of pain, in order to better signal our pain. From a crude behaviorist perspective, if people keep rewarding your expression of pain (by their compassion and support), they condition you to express more pain; and because people are good at detecting fake emotions, the most reliable way to express more pain is to actually feel more pain. The scary conclusion is that a compassionate environment can actually make your life more painful… and the good news is that if you learn to give up signaling, this effect can be reversed.