If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Anyway, I have never noticed anyone “enlightened” having fewer cognitive biases than anyone else, or being more capable of anything in particular. If you claim otherwise, I should like to see the evidence.
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Direct embodied perception prior to thought.
But I want to acknowledge you’re probably using the concept of “mental machinery” differently than I am here. I’m guessing you mean something more like “internal human computation”. (Forgive me, I’m not sure how to be really precise there. Hopefully you can see where I’m pointing.)
Whereas I’m pointing at something in the structure of human experience. Like, seeing like an artist: When you look at a table and just see a table, you can totally miss nearly all the experience you are in fact having of the table. But if you set aside your idea of “table” and you look at it like you’ve never seen anything like this before, and you behold it with wonder… you start to notice the very subtle differences in color, and the grain of the wood, and the way the light glances off of it, and a bazillion other details.
The main difference here is that instead of projecting your internal concept (“table”) onto your experiences and staring at your concept, you’re just looking at the experiences prior to thought.
Michael Singer has a wonderful example of this kind of thing in “The Untethered Soul”. I don’t remember his example exactly but it goes something like this: Sometimes I go for a walk a bit after it rains and I see a rainbow over the valley near my house. And I think “Wow, that’s beautiful.” But in order to think those words, I had to already know it was beautiful. The words aren’t informing me of anything. What is the experience I have prior to thought? What if I just… stay with that level of experience?
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with thinking. But lots of (most? nearly all?) people seem to miss this process, and their thoughts carry on after that initial point and drag them into bizarre fantasies and illusions. Things like “That rainbow is really beautiful. I remember sitting on a hill with my ex looking at a rainbow like this. She broke up with me saying I’m selfish and emotionally unavailable. What a bitch. But maybe she had a point?” Et cetera. Most of that isn’t grounded in reality, but that fact is hard to miss because the thinker isn’t distinguishing between thoughts and reality.
Looking is just the skill of looking at reality prior to thought. It’s really not complicated. It’s just very, very easy to misunderstand if you fixate on mentally understanding it instead of doing it. Which sadly seems to be the default response to the idea of Looking.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
It may be the case that “enlightened” is historically correlated with “religious” or “esoteric”—so the downsides of “religious” or “esoteric” usually negate the upsides of “enlightened”?
By the way, this explanation of enlightenment looks totally understandable to me.
I would expect someone who’s really excellent at Looking would be better at tracking what actually matters.
Sidestepping cognitive biases requires something else. Like, you can be tracking what actually matters instead of what you think matters, but still get surprised by your systematically overoptimistic estimates about how long things will take. If you notice that affects what you care about in a way that matters, then you probably have to actually do something about your thinking.
Things like survivorship bias also require noticing when something true and important is hidden. Tracking that is a matter of rejiggering the mind to notice where this bias arises and adding corrective factors.
…but if a master Looker[1]does not care about these effects, they might in fact use examples that arise from (say) survivorship bias precisely because they make the point the Looker does care about. And they might dismiss and be disinterested in corrections to their thinking, basically for the same reason someone writing a text message might find it annoying for someone to correct their grammar & punctuation.
So I daresay that really grokking Looking runs the risk of making one enact biases more.
…because much of the time they just don’t matter for what you actually care about.
If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Anyway, I have never noticed anyone “enlightened” having fewer cognitive biases than anyone else, or being more capable of anything in particular. If you claim otherwise, I should like to see the evidence.
What is your sample size here? How many “enlightened” people have you examined for cognitive bias?
I’m not the one making the positive claim.
This response makes it sound as though you are trying to win a fight rather than interested in understanding something.
Direct embodied perception prior to thought.
But I want to acknowledge you’re probably using the concept of “mental machinery” differently than I am here. I’m guessing you mean something more like “internal human computation”. (Forgive me, I’m not sure how to be really precise there. Hopefully you can see where I’m pointing.)
Whereas I’m pointing at something in the structure of human experience. Like, seeing like an artist: When you look at a table and just see a table, you can totally miss nearly all the experience you are in fact having of the table. But if you set aside your idea of “table” and you look at it like you’ve never seen anything like this before, and you behold it with wonder… you start to notice the very subtle differences in color, and the grain of the wood, and the way the light glances off of it, and a bazillion other details.
The main difference here is that instead of projecting your internal concept (“table”) onto your experiences and staring at your concept, you’re just looking at the experiences prior to thought.
Michael Singer has a wonderful example of this kind of thing in “The Untethered Soul”. I don’t remember his example exactly but it goes something like this: Sometimes I go for a walk a bit after it rains and I see a rainbow over the valley near my house. And I think “Wow, that’s beautiful.” But in order to think those words, I had to already know it was beautiful. The words aren’t informing me of anything. What is the experience I have prior to thought? What if I just… stay with that level of experience?
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with thinking. But lots of (most? nearly all?) people seem to miss this process, and their thoughts carry on after that initial point and drag them into bizarre fantasies and illusions. Things like “That rainbow is really beautiful. I remember sitting on a hill with my ex looking at a rainbow like this. She broke up with me saying I’m selfish and emotionally unavailable. What a bitch. But maybe she had a point?” Et cetera. Most of that isn’t grounded in reality, but that fact is hard to miss because the thinker isn’t distinguishing between thoughts and reality.
Looking is just the skill of looking at reality prior to thought. It’s really not complicated. It’s just very, very easy to misunderstand if you fixate on mentally understanding it instead of doing it. Which sadly seems to be the default response to the idea of Looking.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
It may be the case that “enlightened” is historically correlated with “religious” or “esoteric”—so the downsides of “religious” or “esoteric” usually negate the upsides of “enlightened”?
By the way, this explanation of enlightenment looks totally understandable to me.
I would expect someone who’s really excellent at Looking would be better at tracking what actually matters.
Sidestepping cognitive biases requires something else. Like, you can be tracking what actually matters instead of what you think matters, but still get surprised by your systematically overoptimistic estimates about how long things will take. If you notice that affects what you care about in a way that matters, then you probably have to actually do something about your thinking.
Things like survivorship bias also require noticing when something true and important is hidden. Tracking that is a matter of rejiggering the mind to notice where this bias arises and adding corrective factors.
…but if a master Looker[1] does not care about these effects, they might in fact use examples that arise from (say) survivorship bias precisely because they make the point the Looker does care about. And they might dismiss and be disinterested in corrections to their thinking, basically for the same reason someone writing a text message might find it annoying for someone to correct their grammar & punctuation.
So I daresay that really grokking Looking runs the risk of making one enact biases more.
…because much of the time they just don’t matter for what you actually care about.
I’m avoiding terms like “enlightenment” or “enlightened” because of serious overloading here. I’m just talking about skill with Looking here.