Q1: To what extent do you think ~unenlightenment in an individual is caused by the need to fit in socially?
Ie: In order to get other people to take care of you or not kill you (especially when you’re a vulnerable child), you contort your mind in all sorts of ways and construct an ego (very much in the Elephant in the Brain way) and adopt all sorts of delusions.
For example, you might want to be able to control other people, and one way to do that is to exile your emotional emotions so you can tell them “You made me so angry! Stop doing that!” (Then later, if that doesn’t work, you can say, “I’m so sorry, my emotions got the best of me”—as if your emotions are separate from you, lol. Have your cake and eat it too.)
I write a little bit about how my experience of depression seems like this here.
Q1.b: To what extent do you think become more spiritually skilled is just about learning how to integrate with other people safely, but without having those common-but-helpful-but-wrong delusions about how your own mind works?
Q2: Do you think people benefit from being ~unenlightened or spiritually unskilled? Precisely how so?
Q1: I think waking up out of social reality is a mini enlightenment, one many people have gone through (esp. those who exited a religious or quasi-religious community). A downside is that it is now more difficult to be fully bought in to any social reality, including much healthier ones.
My take on interacting more harmoniously with others was touched on by the representational flexibility stuff. It’s a skill set that feels strongly related to empathy for me. E.g. providing safe trails of retreat for people when they aren’t ready for too many degrees of freedom on a load bearing belief yet.
Q2: Not really. Reports of greater well being are almost universal past certain milestones. IIRC Jeffrey Martin’s survey data set included 4-5 people who found the experience neutral and 4-5 who found it actively negative, but notably the active negative cases were all cases of people who had stumbled into such things on their own and hadn’t had any guidance on working with the common failure modes. On being put in touch with others like them who gave them some advice, reportedly all of them were able to resolve the negative valence stuck points.
So I don’t doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously.
But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I’m expecting here, consider that a child who doesn’t learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.
In which case, I wonder, if you don’t have these common delusions about the mind (or you’re ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially?
(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)
To what extent do you think ~unenlightenment in an individual is caused by the need to fit in socially?
I’d guess to a very significant extent, though I think there are also actual developmental stages that are distinct from social constraints. E.g. one axis of development in “enlightenment” involves taking more and more things as object, coming to experience them as mental constructs rather than as intrinsic aspects of reality. I think this involves the development of something like additional neuronal circuitry that provides increasingly meta levels of awareness into your mind, separate from any social considerations. (Social considerations might very well act as blockers for developing some of that awareness, however.)
Q2: Do you think people benefit from being ~unenlightened or spiritually unskilled? Precisely how so?
Fitting in socially is quite important! We wouldn’t have evolved to do that if it wasn’t useful, and as I mentioned in the dialogue, some Buddhist lineages that didn’t were likely wiped out because they started making too much trouble.
Also depends on how you define “benefit”, but if spiritual development makes you e.g. care less about money and status, then you’ll probably end up having less money and status. Even if that makes you happier, it might make you worse off in terms of external conditions, and more likely to be hurt by people who do have that money and status.
Someone like Stalin seems to have been quite spiritually unskillful, but his paranoia and desire for power got him to the position of being a dictator and killing off quite a few other people. On some measure of “better off”, it might have been better for some of those others to also be equally unenlightened and more power-hungry, so one of them would have become the ruler instead and survived.
Some various questions:
Q1: To what extent do you think ~unenlightenment in an individual is caused by the need to fit in socially?
Ie: In order to get other people to take care of you or not kill you (especially when you’re a vulnerable child), you contort your mind in all sorts of ways and construct an ego (very much in the Elephant in the Brain way) and adopt all sorts of delusions.
For example, you might want to be able to control other people, and one way to do that is to exile your emotional emotions so you can tell them “You made me so angry! Stop doing that!” (Then later, if that doesn’t work, you can say, “I’m so sorry, my emotions got the best of me”—as if your emotions are separate from you, lol. Have your cake and eat it too.)
I write a little bit about how my experience of depression seems like this here.
Q1.b: To what extent do you think become more spiritually skilled is just about learning how to integrate with other people safely, but without having those common-but-helpful-but-wrong delusions about how your own mind works?
Q2: Do you think people benefit from being ~unenlightened or spiritually unskilled? Precisely how so?
Q1: I think waking up out of social reality is a mini enlightenment, one many people have gone through (esp. those who exited a religious or quasi-religious community). A downside is that it is now more difficult to be fully bought in to any social reality, including much healthier ones.
My take on interacting more harmoniously with others was touched on by the representational flexibility stuff. It’s a skill set that feels strongly related to empathy for me. E.g. providing safe trails of retreat for people when they aren’t ready for too many degrees of freedom on a load bearing belief yet.
Q2: Not really. Reports of greater well being are almost universal past certain milestones. IIRC Jeffrey Martin’s survey data set included 4-5 people who found the experience neutral and 4-5 who found it actively negative, but notably the active negative cases were all cases of people who had stumbled into such things on their own and hadn’t had any guidance on working with the common failure modes. On being put in touch with others like them who gave them some advice, reportedly all of them were able to resolve the negative valence stuck points.
re Q2-
So I don’t doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously.
But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I’m expecting here, consider that a child who doesn’t learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.
In which case, I wonder, if you don’t have these common delusions about the mind (or you’re ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially?
(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)
I expect it to be dangerous in low openness environments with strong religious norms.
I’d guess to a very significant extent, though I think there are also actual developmental stages that are distinct from social constraints. E.g. one axis of development in “enlightenment” involves taking more and more things as object, coming to experience them as mental constructs rather than as intrinsic aspects of reality. I think this involves the development of something like additional neuronal circuitry that provides increasingly meta levels of awareness into your mind, separate from any social considerations. (Social considerations might very well act as blockers for developing some of that awareness, however.)
Fitting in socially is quite important! We wouldn’t have evolved to do that if it wasn’t useful, and as I mentioned in the dialogue, some Buddhist lineages that didn’t were likely wiped out because they started making too much trouble.
Also depends on how you define “benefit”, but if spiritual development makes you e.g. care less about money and status, then you’ll probably end up having less money and status. Even if that makes you happier, it might make you worse off in terms of external conditions, and more likely to be hurt by people who do have that money and status.
Someone like Stalin seems to have been quite spiritually unskillful, but his paranoia and desire for power got him to the position of being a dictator and killing off quite a few other people. On some measure of “better off”, it might have been better for some of those others to also be equally unenlightened and more power-hungry, so one of them would have become the ruler instead and survived.