At the extremes, people have one of four life goals: To achieve a state of nothingness (hinayana enlightenment), to achieve a state of oneness (mahayana enlightenment), to achieve a utopia of meaning (galts gulch), or to achieve a utopia of togetherness (hivemind).
These are not distinct things—they’re alternative ways to frame one thing. All roads lead to Rome, so to speak. The way I see it, full enlightenment entails attaining all four at once. Just don’t get distracted by the taste of lotus on the way.
This is a common belief and it may in fact be true, but it’s at odds with the ontology as presented. There are tradeoffs between which one you choose in this ontology.
Ontologically distinct enlightenments suggest path dependence. That seems correct on reflection; updating and reframing.
Enlightenment is caused by a certain observation about mind/reality that is salient, obvious in retrospect and reliably triggers major updates. The referent of this observation is universal and invariant but its interpretation and the resulting updates may not be; the mind can only work with what it has.
In other words, enlightenment has one referent in the territory but the resulting maps are path dependent. This seems consistent with what I know about spirituality-related failure modes and doctrinal disagreements. Also, the sixties.
So yeah. Caution is warranted. Just keep in mind that your skull is an information bottleneck, not an ontological boundary.
These are not distinct things—they’re alternative ways to frame one thing. All roads lead to Rome, so to speak. The way I see it, full enlightenment entails attaining all four at once. Just don’t get distracted by the taste of lotus on the way.
This is a common belief and it may in fact be true, but it’s at odds with the ontology as presented. There are tradeoffs between which one you choose in this ontology.
Ontologically distinct enlightenments suggest path dependence. That seems correct on reflection; updating and reframing.
Enlightenment is caused by a certain observation about mind/reality that is salient, obvious in retrospect and reliably triggers major updates. The referent of this observation is universal and invariant but its interpretation and the resulting updates may not be; the mind can only work with what it has.
In other words, enlightenment has one referent in the territory but the resulting maps are path dependent. This seems consistent with what I know about spirituality-related failure modes and doctrinal disagreements. Also, the sixties.
So yeah. Caution is warranted. Just keep in mind that your skull is an information bottleneck, not an ontological boundary.