Bentinho Massaro on beyond non-duality

In other words, (12:58 AM) Thusness: all those practitioners even after non-dual experience and still sink back to the Subject, will have the tendency of skewing towards the stage 3.

Also,

(3:57 PM) AEN: he's saying must drop off conscious presence also?
(3:58 PM) Thusness: Yes
(3:58 PM) AEN: icic..
(3:59 PM) Thusness: But that is not the most essential state.
(3:59 PM) Thusness: It is necessary.
(4:00 PM) AEN: necessary or not necessary?
(4:00 PM) AEN: oh u mean necessary but not the most essential state
(4:00 PM) Thusness: Yes
(4:00 PM) AEN: icic..
(4:00 PM) Thusness: That is not the absolute state
(4:01 PM) AEN: oic..
(4:01 PM) Thusness: That is just another state That is equally empty
(4:01 PM) AEN: icic..
(4:02 PM) Thusness: That too will pass due to its emptiness nature and no purer than that 'I M' state.

(Source: 2008 conversations with Thusness, excerpts in www.box.com/s/f86a921dfa62ccd0ca7b )

xsurf: Very cool. I always appreciate your posts.

"we are paving the way for a time when you can choose your outcome and confidently train toward that end in the same way that you can choose a physical fitness regimen today and sleep well at night knowing that you will not end up with a power lifter's body if you are hoping to be a ballerina."

Kenneth, on what basis do you believe that we can whip up any outcome that we like by training our minds in certain ways?

From my perspective, there are lots of people working in different traditions with different methods, and yet the similarities between their outcomes are more than thought-provoking.

Once upon a time, we believed that there was only one developmental path (KFD1-5), which everyone practicing meditation (or doing any other spiritual practice) takes. You also believed that there was a kind of pure awareness ('rigpa') universally available to be accessed. Now, it appears you believe that one can fabricate any kind of "enlightenment" they want, with enough time and effort, based on personal values or whims or whatever. This is a very drastic shift in viewpoint and I would be interested to hear how it came about and what the basis for your belief in it is.

Certainly there is a parallel to be drawn between many spiritual traditions ("one endpoint") and the modern, romantic / humanistic personal growth movement ("no endpoint, multidimensional development"), but I don't know how relevant that parallel is.

EiS: I'm not advanced enough to have an opinion on "you get what you optimize for", however, I know from experience that neuroplasticity is profoundly powerful.

Last year I trained my nervous system by touching my thumb and forefinger together every time I felt "happiness". Over the course of a month, this created a neural connection, so now, every time I touch my thumb and forefinger together, I instantly feel "happiness" *regardless* of my mental state or mood.

With "neurons that fire together, wire together" as an operating basis, I think you can train this organism to do pretty much any bizarre concoction you come up with.

Would you like to train yourself to be filled with love and compassion every time you see the color brown? I think you could do so by simply keeping a brown swatch in your pocket and every time you felt love and compassion, look at the brown swatch. I am confident that over time they'd become wired together.

"With "neurons that fire together, wire together" as an operating basis, I think you can train this organism to do pretty much any bizarre concoction you come up with."

Orasis, you might be interested in this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditioned_place_preference

Apart from rats...humans who repeatedly pair a mental state and a neutral stimulus together in an analogous way-for example cocaine intoxication and the sight of a rolled up dollar bill-generally report that the neutral stimulus eventually causes them to crave cocaine, rather than to feel cocaine intoxication.

I think there are a lot of complexities and limitations to associating mental states with neutral stimuli as a mechanism for influencing one's mental state.

I don't have any comment on the article originally posted, but the question of getting what you optimize for is intriguing. I think it is true to a large extent, such as having a strong intention to awaken and implementing practices that cultivate the ground for awakening is likely to lead to at least some level of awakening. Clearly even with this intention and practice the journey varies. Some people find things progress quickly with one practice or another, others - with the same intention and methods - slog on for long periods, or make faster progress when they change methods.

Beyond this, though, it seems evident from the way people (here) often reframe their understanding of awakening, that it is a process that is at least partially independent of what one wishes to attain. One aims at X, discovers that one instead has arrived at Y, and then still later discovers Z arising. X was the goal, but instead one finds oneself at Z. How exactly was intention and method the cause of that? It seems the process is complex rather than simple. Thoughts?

I vote for complex. And enigmatic.

"Kenneth, on what basis do you believe that we can whip up any outcome that we like by training our minds in certain ways?" -EndInSight

I don't believe that, EndInSight. Why would you misquote me? We can have great discussions here, but only if we stick to some basic ground rules like avoiding straw man arguments.

I think some of the convergence in experience can be explained simply by a couple of large gravitational pulls:

- Pay enough attention, and you'll end up orbiting the present moment

- Stop thinking enough and you'll orbit the brightness, looseness, and lucidity of the sense doors

- Have enough present moment non-conceptual experience and you'll orbit emptiness

- Get lucky and see selfing = suffering and you'll tend to orbit no-self. This one seems more like luck than inevitability, but perhaps I'm viewing it wrong.

I could add more, but I think the first three are fairly compelling gravitational pulls.

Kenneth, I may well have misunderstood your position, in which case I apologize; could you distinguish what your position is from what I (perhaps erroneously) thought it to be?

I got the idea that you meant "you can get the outcome you like, whatever it may be" from the metaphor you offered: one can choose to train to be a ballerina or a powerlifter, but also, by my inference, a sprinter, a gymnast, a trapeze artist, a person who can do 20,000 situps consecutively for the Guinness Book of World Records, a person with enormous biceps and no other muscular development, etc. as long as one trains appropriately for the goal. However a human body can work, some regimen of training will push one in that direction (and away from other directions); I took "ballerina" and "powerlifter" to be colorful ways to illustrate the general principle of training specificity in relation to the development of the body.

A few more thoughts on the training question:

I wouldn't say that you "get what you optimize for." For me, that's too vague, possibly implying that if you believe you can optimize for awakening by praying to the Buddha, you will achieve that. I prefer to say that you get what you *train" for. This means you have to do some effective practice that is known to lead to a specific result. That's a big qualification, and this is what I mean when I say that we are pioneers in the very early stages of working this out. Again, compare it to physical fitness. When I was a young boy, physical fitness was a fairly nebulous concept. A few intrepid pioneers like Jack LaLane and Charles Atlas were promoting their own methods, which had some merit, but it was all pretty unsophisticated; the basic idea was that if you exercise, you'll get fitter. Well, yeah... that's right. Sort of. But there was a vague assumption that fitness was some monolithic, one-size-fits-all sort of thing, as though everyone's body started out the same and everyone had the same potential and the same desired outcome. It is only recently that exercise science has gotten so targeted that you can sculpt particular muscle groups and achieve a given type of physique with great accuracy. Equally important, we now understand that there are certain baseline levels of fitness required before you specialize if you want to realize your potential. For example, a good trainer won't let you just go to the gym and pump your biceps 5 days a week even if huge biceps are you goal; you first have to develop your core strength and your cardio and your back and leg strength. Otherwise, you are just going to hurt yourself.

Likewise, there are some baseline requirements for awakening. You have to have some ability to concentrate, for example, which means placing your attention on an object and sustaining it there for some period of time.

cont...

"I got the idea that you meant "you can get the outcome you like, whatever it may be" from the metaphor you offered: one can choose to train to be a ballerina or a powerlifter, but also, by my inference, a sprinter, a gymnast, a trapeze artist, a person who can do 20,000 situps consecutively for the Guinness Book of World Records, a person with enormous biceps and no other muscular development, etc. as long as one trains appropriately for the goal."

OK, thanks for clarifying, EIS. I can riff off of this. Yes, you can train with great precision to be a ballerina, power lifter, trapeze artist, etc. Modern exercise science is very well equipped for this. And, we must point out that you will be constrained by your own potential; not everyone will be an Olympic level athlete, no matter how much they train. Only one person (or team) wins Olympic gold each year in each category.

Let's apply this to meditation. There will come a time when we can train with great precision to be whatever kind of yogi we want to be. We already see the first vague outline of that when we notice that vipassana masters don't look quite like samatha masters, who don't look quite like Dzogchen masters, who don't look quite like Zen masters. How much of this is cultural indoctrination and how much is technique and training? We don't know yet! But we will find out. And I find this tremendously exciting. We are at the cutting edge of this movement, experimenting on ourselves. The more we can set aside culturally biased lenses like "the Grand Mucky Muck MahaKrishamundo said this and therefore it's true" and just practice in a systematic way, keeping track of our results and reporting them openly to the community, the more we will understand this. We will be able to choose the flavor of developmental meditation (or biofeedback or high tech intervention, etc.) that is known to achieve our desired result.

So, let's talk about what you cannot do. You cannot train your body to be a butterfly or a tiger. Everything on Earth is constrained by physics. You can't fly and you don't have big sharp teeth. So, "you get what you train for" carries the caveat that you can only get what is possible and it only works if the training you choose is effective.

Similarly, you can train in the art of no-self (this is what my 9-stage map is designed to track, and I think it does a good job of showing the deep structure of that development). Or you can train to feel and manifest love and compassion. Or you can train to be an objective observer of all that goes on around you without sticking, attaching, or identifying with any of it. Notice that I just described the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives in their highly-developed manifestations.

So, here is my main focus of interest of late: you can train in all three of these! And if there is another lens that is not included in these three, you can train in that too. This is cool. It's a matter of aesthetics. What appeals to you? By the way, history shows that for many of us this is a dynamic process. The aesthetic that appeals to me today might not be the one that appeals to me next year. Fine! It's all part of not getting stuck anywhere. It's not up to us to script our own lives beyond the simple, practical matter of choosing a practice that is known to lead to a goal we find aesthetically pleasing.

Right now, the ideal I find aesthetically pleasing is a wholesome and dynamic balance of no-self; relationship (which means love and empathy); and non-attachment. And the trainings that lead to these outcomes are becoming clearer. I wonder where the cumulative knowledge of contemplative science will be in 10 or 20 years. Wow. So exciting...

Finally, we have to start being honest with ourselves about our own limitations. To say that you can realize your own potential for awakening, thereby improving your life beyond measure... is true. To say that you will definitely be as enlightened as the most enlightened person to ever walk the Earth... is ridiculous. We are constrained by reality and our own potential. You are constrained by your genes, your environment, your good luck or lack thereof.

It may be that part of taking contemplative art and science to the next level is facing up to this uncomfortable fact: you can only be the best YOU in the world. Odds are that you will not be the most enlightened person ever, any more than you will be as great a composer as Beethoven or as great a basketball player as Michael Jordan. Personally, I find this uncomfortable to contemplate, as the fantasy of perfect awakening can be the last refuge for competitive people with delusions of grandeur; as long as there are no clear standards for what enlightenment means, we can all imagine that we are the Buddhas of our time. As painful as it is, though, looking squarely at reality and our own limitations is a crucial part of growing up.

So, here is one healthy way to approach it: I will be the best, most awake, most loving and unstuck human I can be. If I can, I will even take this awakening to Olympic levels of excellence. Indeed, that kind of excellence is a personal goal for me. But all I can do is my best, and my best is good enough. Learning to be happy and content in my own skin is perhaps the most important gift that awakening brings.

"Finally, we have to start being honest with ourselves about our own limitations. To say that you can realize your own potential for awakening, thereby improving your life beyond measure... is true. To say that you will definitely be as enlightened as the most enlightened person to ever walk the Earth... is ridiculous."

There are a lot of interesting issues that have here, but perhaps it would be best to stick with just this one for now. On what grounds do you believe that awakening stretches out forever, rather than comes to an end at some point?

I believe the opposite (that there is such a thing as final awakening), so, for comparison, I'll list my reasons for believing thus.

1) The Pali suttas say that arahantship is the end of the line for absolutely everyone, and the Pali suttas seem to me to be a very accurate guide to this whole thing.

2) My personal analysis of the stuff that stands between me and the end of the line is that I don't ultimately need to gain any particular qualities; but rather, I need to lose some. The end of the line, to me, is the absence of craving and what follows from that. The highest mystical truth is, paradoxically, an absence. But that means that there's only a finite amount of stuff to lose, a definite collection of brain processes that need to be turned off, and not an unbounded possibility for increasing some particular quality (as there is an unbounded possibility for e.g. increasing the speed at which one could run 100 meters).

3) Jhana (more like the Visuddhimagga kind, not the kind people usually talk about on these forums) demonstrates very dramatically that craving, at least one kind of craving (I would say "the main kind"), *can* be turned off, at least so long as the state lasts.

4) The more I practice, the less craving I have; I extrapolate a long-term trend from this.

(cont)

I suspect you may be coming from a very different place (for example, you may not believe that craving is the sole cause of suffering, or you may not believe that the end of suffering would count as full awakening), but I'm looking forward to understanding that place nonetheless.

I also realize that this particular view of yours is not very different from your previous beliefs. (You have said on numerous occasions in the past that the possibility for development with respect to rigpa is nonexistent in the sense that one either recognizes it or not, but stretches out infinitely in the sense that one can practice to spend more and more of one's life recognizing it or able to recognize it; but only the mythical primordial Buddha recognizes it constantly) So this theme, of an endless potential for development, is a long-standing one for you. Is the reason you hold it now the same reason that you held it then? If so, can you share why you held it then? If not, can you share what the new basis for that belief is?

(To be clear, I read what you've written as advocating an endless potential for more awakened experience on the basis of statements like this: "Odds are that you will not be the most enlightened person ever, any more than you will be as great a composer as Beethoven or as great a basketball player as Michael Jordan." Athletic and musical endeavors have no practical bound with respect to skill, and so I read you as making the claim that awakening also has no practical bounds with respect to the degree one attains it, in whatever form it comes.)

" We are at the cutting edge of this movement, experimenting on ourselves. The more we can set aside culturally biased lenses like "the Grand Mucky Muck MahaKrishamundo said this and therefore it's true" and just practice in a systematic way, keeping track of our results and reporting them openly to the community, the more we will understand this. We will be able to choose the flavor of developmental meditation (or biofeedback or high tech intervention, etc.) that is known to achieve our desired result."

Kenneth, how does this opinion differ from your opinion of what I have described concerning my own practice in the other thread? Is not your current view 'culturally biased' ? Is it now "Kenneth said this and therefore it's true"? Isn't it then simply putting up a wall against what I have described as a possibility limiting exactly what you are getting behind in this very quote? Why rail on others due to not agreeing with their own 'cuttting edge'? Isn't it simply more data for what you are promoting in this quote?

Sincerely,

Nick

"Isn't it simply more data for what you are promoting in this quote?" -Nikolai

Yes, everything is data for the long term informal study we are running here. That's why we continue to engage even when we disagree. Learning often happens over months and years. So many times I have been schooled by interactions with posters here. And even if I fought about it at the time, some of it eventually sunk in. Sometimes it just takes time to sort all of this out. And even then, it never stops. As long as we are living, we can learn.

"On what grounds do you believe that awakening stretches out forever, rather than comes to an end at some point?" -EndInSight

On the grounds that I have never seen a perfect human being.

"On what grounds do you believe that awakening stretches out forever, rather than comes to an end at some point?" -EIS

On the grounds that there isn't a single human endeavor that works like that. There is no athlete, musician, or mathematician who has "come to an end" of perfecting his or her skill. Everything exists on an infinite continuum of potential.

On the grounds that to even begin to make the case that awakening "comes to an end at some point" one has no choice but to turn to myth, legend, hagiography, and ancient texts that cannot be substantiated nor verified by modern experience or observation.

On the grounds that what we know about the brain doesn't support the idea of some permanent off switch that will make all subjective badness go away.

Everything I can see, when I allow myself to see clearly, tells me that developmental awakening is very much like any other human skill. It involves training the body (including and especially the brain) to function in a particular way. For me, by the way, this is by no means demoralizing; it doesn't make me feel resigned or defeated. Quite the contrary, it fills me with hope and determination and with the understanding that my own development with regard to awakening as with everything else in life depends on my willingness to engage the world in a productive way, paying attention to what works and what does not, and actually doing practices that are known to lead to progress. This, for me, is pragmatic dharma.

"On the grounds that there isn't a single human endeavor that works like that. There is no athlete, musician, or mathematician who has "come to an end" of perfecting his or her skill. Everything exists on an infinite continuum of potential."

Either a person is infected with a virus, or isn't.

Either a person hears voices that command them, or doesn't.

Either a person has a certain gene, or doesn't.

Either a person is pregnant, or isn't.

There are lots of interesting and relevant properties that are binary. Why do you think enlightenment is more like athletic skill than like e.g. not hearing voices?

"On the grounds that to even begin to make the case that awakening "comes to an end at some point" one has no choice but to turn to myth, legend, hagiography, and ancient texts that cannot be substantiated nor verified by modern experience or observation."

I thought the four reasons I gave for my belief were pretty reasonable, but I guess you don't agree.

"On the grounds that what we know about the brain doesn't support the idea of some permanent off switch that will make all subjective badness go away."

What do we know about the brain in this regard? As far as I know, neuroscience hasn't progressed to the point where we have anything like thorough knowledge of what would have to change for "subjective badness" to stop, or why such a change would be impossible. People are still working on much simpler issues, like desire vs. pleasure, and mostly limited to e.g. rats (since no one could ethically run the really telling experiments on humans). Neuroscience is, to my knowledge, quite rudimentary when it comes to linking brain structure and function with high-level human behavior and reported experience.

I made a post illustrating how three of the examples I gave are relevant to common human endeavors, but it seems not to have gone through. So, briefly:

* Convalescing has a definite endpoint

* If one was to recover from some of the symptoms of schizophrenia / psychosis, that has a definite endpoint

* Bringing a pregnancy to term can be a quite involved process, and has a definite endpoint.

So, my question is, why is enlightenment more like the "athletic skill" sort of human endeavor, and not like e.g. working not to hear voices? (I gave my reason for my belief in #39 and look forward to hearing yours.)

"Beyond this, though, it seems evident from the way people (here) often reframe their understanding of awakening, that it is a process that is at least partially independent of what one wishes to attain. One aims at X, discovers that one instead has arrived at Y, and then still later discovers Z arising. X was the goal, but instead one finds oneself at Z. How exactly was intention and method the cause of that? It seems the process is complex rather than simple. Thoughts?"

Giragirasol, I agree that it's complex rather than simple. I would also say that when people reframe their understanding, they may be doing that on the basis of some unexpected change, but they may also be doing that on the basis of adopting or creating a new model that they think is more suitable.

To me it seems like the process is actually fairly linear over time when looked at from a particular angle (craving and getting rid of craving), although there are lots of potential detours, dead-ends, sand traps, rest stops, shortcuts, etc. on the way, depending on the details of how you approach practice and how your mind works. On the other hand, it's also possible that there are ways that attainment-paths can diverge and split off , and then rejoin each other later, which would produce the illusion of their being one linear path (when there might be many quasi-linear paths, but each practitioner can take only one).

Part of what's difficult about your question is separating "what changes have actually happened?" from "what changes have happened according to the model being used?" (Is "aiming at X but arriving at Y" based on a switch between actual experiences X and Y, or terms X and Y in a model, or some combination of these?) The two (experience and models) are supposed to match up, but there's never a guarantee.

This is just my humble opinion but it is definitely too early to make claims that mind/brain *anything* is binary or not binary. We just don't know enough about it. We are barely scratching the surface on this stuff even now, and though we have some really neat new tools, like fMRI, they do not measure the actual phenomena we really need to measure. Rather, they measure things like blood flow and electrical impulses.

What I can observe for myself and read about in this area says that everything related to mind/brain activity lies on a spectrum and yes, things do seem to get "shut off" but it seems that's reflective of reaching a certain point on a spectrum of phenomena, not an actual binary event. So convelescing, infections, and all kinds of biological phenomena seem to "end" when the symptoms are no longer observable to a patient. But we know that we are always infected by viruses and bacteria, that low level symptoms may still be there but not observable, and so on.

So I believe caution is in order on this entire front. We (me) do not really "know" with certainty very much at all. So to argue about this stuff sees silly to me. It is drawing lines in the sand at low tide.

Again, JMHO.

On a moderation note -- I perceive that we're in danger of developing a running argument across several threads just over last 12 hours or so. I suggest that we be careful about what we're posting in reply to each other. Think before you hit the "Post" button. Be nice and civil, and let's not let this get out of hand.

Thanks

"So I believe caution is in order on this entire front. We (me) do not really "know" with certainty very much at all. So to argue about this stuff sees silly to me. It is drawing lines in the sand at low tide."

Chris, I would say I agree with the gist of this. As I mentioned before, I don't have definitive proof of what I believe, I merely have a bunch of reasons that seem more plausible to me than the alternatives I can think of. Someone (e.g. Kenneth) could have different reasons that seem more plausible to him but support a different conclusion. That's why I'm pursuing this topic; I'd like to see why someone advanced such as Kenneth has come to a different conclusion, not for the sake of arguing about who's right, but for the sake of seeing the alternative reasoning process (or the alternative basic suppositions).

Kenneth, it's possible that beginning a new thread for this discussion is the best approach. What do you think?