A big problem with debating these things is that our culture does not have a good way to talk about mental states.
I’m not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of “enlightenment” came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There’s also the issue of “not-self”, “non-duality”, “impermanence” etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.
Like, if you already know that there is no soul, that people are made of atoms, and that our mental activity is a result of interacting neurons… maybe you already have more insight on “not-self” than Buddha did.
(It is possible for someone with modern knowledge to provide a much shorter explanation of something, because you can leverage powerful concepts. For example, Gödel wrote hundred pages on why every mathematical statement or proof can be encoded as an integer. To a high-school student today, you could just say “you can write the statement or the proof in a plain-text file, save it on disk, and treat it as an integer in base 256”. Similarly, halting theorem can be explained by “suppose we have a Python method that receives a source code and input, and returns whether this program halts for this input; here is a simple program that calls the method, what would it output?”.)
Maybe the problem is just that we expect the insights to feel magical, and the insights we already have feel mundane, so we conclude that they couldn’t possibly be the real thing.
In such situation it would make sense that different schools disagree on what is the real thing, only agree that it is mysterious and very important.
I’m not sure that the Eastern cultures whence the idea of “enlightenment” came are much better about this. Sure, they have jhanas and such, but AFAICT every sect has its own classification, and the notion of what the ultimate attainment consists of, if anything. There’s also the issue of “not-self”, “non-duality”, “impermanence” etc, which everybody agrees is tremendously important, but nobody agrees on what it really means.
Like, if you already know that there is no soul, that people are made of atoms, and that our mental activity is a result of interacting neurons… maybe you already have more insight on “not-self” than Buddha did.
(It is possible for someone with modern knowledge to provide a much shorter explanation of something, because you can leverage powerful concepts. For example, Gödel wrote hundred pages on why every mathematical statement or proof can be encoded as an integer. To a high-school student today, you could just say “you can write the statement or the proof in a plain-text file, save it on disk, and treat it as an integer in base 256”. Similarly, halting theorem can be explained by “suppose we have a Python method that receives a source code and input, and returns whether this program halts for this input; here is a simple program that calls the method, what would it output?”.)
Maybe the problem is just that we expect the insights to feel magical, and the insights we already have feel mundane, so we conclude that they couldn’t possibly be the real thing.
In such situation it would make sense that different schools disagree on what is the real thing, only agree that it is mysterious and very important.