It is occasionally said to me,
"Have you considered meditation and buddhism? Enlightenment is really powerful."
This feels similar to saying
"Have you considered giving up a massive resource - one of your scarce slots for a life-long habit, a daily time-sink with week-long retreats - to Buddhist meditation? It supposedly makes you feel funny at the end, as though you've had a major epistemological insight (but you aren't able to produce corresponding output as a result)."
Given the amount of people offering me something like the above, my background skepticism is very high.
The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result. If, for example, you wrote sequence of recognisably useful insights unrelated to enlightenment (example), and then afterwards told me that it was due to your having felt enlightenment, I'd consider that interesting evidence. But I do predict that I find your subsequent post not much evidence either way.
I will mention that I have some notion of a thing you might be pointing towards: I've experienced ontological updat...
Bemused exasperation here. I'm grinning as I write this. I wondered if this post would produce this kind of effect… and I hoped not, but it's not unexpected!
The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result.
I'm not advocating trying for kenshō. You can't try for it in any useful way. That's not how it works. I honestly don't care whether I persuade anyone of its value, because it does not matter whether you try for it. Or rather, if it does matter, it does so by making you obsessed in a way that can actually block the seeing. So, there isn't really any good benefit to fighting with your analysis to try to persuade you of its value. That's all on you!
And I imagine that's frustrating. And I do apologize; I'm really not trying to be frustrating or vague here. It's just… well, see the entire opening post!
But to steelman your… hmm, mix of a request and a challenge: I receive you as wanting either for me to give you concrete things learning how to Look has done for me, or to admit I can't and retract the value of what I...
I'm not advocating trying for kenshō.
I don't have any particularly good ideas for what an alternative goal of this post could be, and would be interested in more elaboration on that. It definitely seems to me that the goal of the post is to teach something, and as is usually required for teaching, to motivate why the thing you are teaching is important. If this post is only for people who are already motivated to learn about the things you describe, then that's fine, but I did not get that sense from the way it was written.
Upon reflection, I think maybe I can spell out the logic of what I was trying to focus on a little more clearly.
There’s this thing, ``flibble’’, that is super hard to understand. Some people come to understand it and can then talk to each other about it. But they can’t explain flibble to pre-understanding folk. There’s some kind of process that’s basically unrelated to the attempts to explain flibble that lets people suddenly get flibble.
It really doesn’t matter what flibble is. The curious thing from an epistemic point of view (to me) is that there seems to be a skill to getting flibble. It looks like it’s a very general “get my ontology to update when I have no damn clue beforehand what the update is” skill. That seems damn useful.
The problem is, that skill is just as subject to non-understandability as flibble is. Which means you need the skill to some extent in order to bootstrap.
I do not care what flibble is. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the value of flibble. I’m trying to point at this puzzle and note that it suggests a really huge goddamn hole in epistemology as we normally talk about it.
It just so happens that flibble, when properly understood, is exactly...
I want to address this response, because it fits a pattern I’ve seen a few times, which I think is an important aspect of this discussion. Here’s the pattern:
“I’ve invented a fascinating new baking technique! With it, I have baked an amazing new cake!”
“An amazing new cake?! Sounds delicious! Could we have a taste?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the cake, I want to talk about the baking technique.”
“I’ve invented an amazing new programming technique! With it, I have developed an awesome new app!”
“An awesome new app?! Sounds cool! Where can we download it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the app, I want to talk about the programming technique.”
“I’ve come up with a whole new way to write fiction! With it, I have written an incredible novel!”
“An incredible novel?! Sounds wonderful! Could we read it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the novel, I want to talk about the new writing method.”
But the only reason we might possibly care about your new baking technique is if it lets us bake amazing cakes. The only reason we might possibly want to hear about your amazing new programming technique is if let us make cool apps. And the only reason we might have to ...
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn't already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I'll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can't be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you'll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can't be directly explained in words and aren't obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficul...
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action.
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn: whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn: whistles aga...
I like this comment because it's a relatively clear articulation of the central thing you seem to be frustrated about here, which is that you think that Val could show you the cake but is refusing to for some perverse reason that you can't fathom.
I think the cake analogy is a very poor fit for what's happening here. Everyone knows what a cake is. I don't have to teach you anything to show you a cake; I just show it to you and you've instantly understood that what you're looking at is a cake. This is very different from trying to show someone what "enlightenment" looks like, whatever that means. At a minimum "enlightenment" involves something screwy happening with ontologies, so there's no guarantee that you'll be able to "see" an example of "enlightenment" just by staying in your particular ontology.
Back to the cell phone world: Alex texts me demanding that I show him an example of what looking up looks like. What can I do? I can text him a picture of a person looking up from a phone. What's his referent for that? Other pictures he's seen, on his screen, of people looking up from their phones. Nothing he hasn't seen a million times, on his screen. Alex thinks the thing he is asking me to do is easy, and if he's right it's not in the sense that he thinks.
To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’.
How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, several such things.)
Having done this, you will thereby have demonstrated ‘enlightenment’, and can then proceed up to the meta-meta-level of “the technique you used to achieve enlightenment”.
Analogously, suppose what I claimed to discover was not a new baking technique, but a new process of culinary experimentation which might be used to discover new baking techniques.
So first you’d exhibit a cake, and we’d all have a bite and agree that it’s delicious. Then you’d show us a pie, and we’d all have a forkful and agree that it, too, is delicious. You would then bring out a tray of cookies, and we’d all have one and judge them to be delicious.
Then you’d tell us about the novel baking techniques you used in the process of baking the cake, the pie, and the cookies, respectively. We’d all be impressed (and would, at this point, have no doubt that the techniques work, as the taste of your delicious baked goods still lingered in our m...
Valentine did list things in the above comment that are fancy.
As I say in another comment, Valentine has certainly told us all about how great the cake is. What he hasn’t done is provide us with any. All of his listed examples are benefits that are (a) self-reported, unverified, and possibly unverifiable[1], and (b) very, very vague.
[1] Though even third-party testimony, if sufficiently diverse and credible, would be a good start.
According to that conception enlightment isn’t about doing or more trying to do more but about doing less.
What does “doing less” mean, in this context? (And why might I want to “do less”?)
I must say I am perplexed by comments such as this. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m not singling you out in any way; this is only the latest in a pattern.)
In what world does any of what you wrote, there, constitute anything like: (a) concrete actionable knowledge or understanding; or (b) actual, real-world benefits?
It feels strange to do this, given how vague all of this is, but let’s try to tackle at least your first bullet point:
there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality
To what line of thought to do you refer? Are you making reference to the concept of the “map-territory distinction”? Or something else?
Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word
What is this discrepancy? Tell us about it!
It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on
And? What is actually going on?
what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is
So what are they?
and see how that conversation went off the rails.
Yes? And how did it?
...It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grou
People tend to get exactly the quoted part out of the sequences somehow, not the rejection of it. I didn't explain it there because it takes a lot of writing to do so, but I will do it here.
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Then, note that there are many parts of this pathway that can be interrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in there, and there is a fundamental disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain in there. Since there is always a chance for somthing interfering with that connection, nothing can be probability 1. From this you conclude that any thing that you experience is just some image your brain conjures up from sensory stimulus. Those things that you experience are not real, and are only maps of the actual real things out there in ineffable reality.
Looking allows you to see that the entire thing I just described is just a model - an image. In going through that whole thing, Look at how you are shri...
The image we are given in the sequences… [snipped]
It would be a drastic understatement to say that what you wrote in that paragraph is a ludicrous misunderstanding of what Eliezer wrote. I could call it a ‘distortion’, but it’s more like literally the opposite of what the Sequences say. (The part about probability in particular makes me question whether we read the same posts or, indeed, live in the same reality; suffice it to say that you certainly did not understand what was said in the Sequences about probability theory.)
The entirety of that section of your comment consists of setting up and then knocking down this frankly shocking strawman of Eliezer’s ideas; this is then mixed with a rather amateurish recapitulation of selected bits of Enlightenment-era and 20th-century philosophy (which have been beaten to death by generations of analytic philosophers—who, even in those cases where they haven’t solved these issues, have said some much more significant and useful things about them then you have). Most of it, frankly, is not even wrong.
In the second section, you take some facts about how non-verbal signals work in human social interaction—facts which are, no doubt, interes...
(comment continued from parent, due to character limit)
The final section is yet more of the mind projection fallacy. Phenomenology is interesting, and your contributions to it are… not novel, of course, but written in a clear enough way to be of interest to investigators. Yet you have again chosen not only to construct a bizarre ontology out of a combination of fairly straightforward phenomenological facts and what are apparently some highly-idiosyncratic-at-best elements of your mental experience; you’ve also gone on to make the again outlandish claim that none of it is discernible without your capital-letter skill.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I mean that in all sincerity and wholly sans sarcasm; I appreciate it, as I know that responding to skeptical internet strangers is a mostly-thankless task. Few people would attempt to respond in so concrete a fashion (and indeed almost no one else has), so know that I very much value the effort that you took to respond, and the product of that effort.
That you have responded with enough specificity and detail for me to be able to draw satisfyingly (though not nearly totally) definite conclusions, is icing on the (sadly, only proverbial) cake. So, again: thank you.
P.S. I upvoted dsatan’s comment, as I very much endorse encouraging detailed, specific responses to critical inquiries, here on LW.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
FWIW, this aptly describes my own adverse reaction to the OP. "I have this great insight, but I not only can't explain it to you, but I'm going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn't understand it if I tried to explain it" sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, "If only you weren't blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord".
That the object level benefits offered seem to be idiographic self-exhaltations augur still poorer (i.e. I cut through confusion so much more easily now (no examples provided); I have much greater reserves to do stuff; I can form much deeper pacts with others who, like I, can See the Truth.) I recall the 'case' for Ander's Connection Theory was of a similar type. But at least connection theory at least sketched something like a theory to consider on its merits.
There needs to be either some object-level description (i.e. "This is what Looking is"), or - if that really isn't possible - demonstration of good results (i.e. "Here's a great post on a CFAR-adjecent topic, and this was thanks to Looking.") Otherwise, the recondite and the obscurantist look very much alike.
I appreciate you writing the list of examples, but also don't find them currently particularly compelling, mostly because they are hard to verify from my current perspective (which is fine and the real value might just be hard to communicate).
Yes, I don't think it is possible to convey the value that "understanding proof" provides to everyone. But even for someone who cannot easily understand, asking to be shown the value is a very reasonable response, and if they cannot be shown the value, it makes sense for them to not spend their time learning mathematical proof. Trying to teach them proof, without them seeing any value in it, seems doomed to failure.
I can imagine being in a world where it is similarly hard for me to understand the value of kensho. But in that world the necessary first step for me learning, is to be motivated to learn. As I said, it seems fine if the target audience for this post is not me. And it seems plausible, though obviously sad to me, that my mind is shaped so that I can not understand the value without spending dozens of hours on good faith on following your argument along. And if you continue writing this post-series, I will try to seriously engage with the things you are describing, even without seeing the value directly, because I do think you have some interesting perspectives and this whole area might have some value in it.
What I am trying to say is that for the goal of ...
I think that a) Val has obtained a real and valuable skill, b) Oli is engaging in good faith and making a reasonable request, and c) that there is a type of post that Val could conceivably write which Oli would find satisfactory.
I hope to eventually prove this by achieving enough skill in this area myself (making the assumption I'm correct in understand what Val's skill is), obtaining the value, and then conveying this in a convincing manner such that anyone reasoning as Oli does is motivated by my case.
Appreciation for you, Ruby. :-)
I’m honestly flummoxed about how to create the type of post you’re suggesting. Given the clarity of everything else you’ve written here about this, I’m inclined to believe you. And I’d much like to write that post, or see it written. Any pointers?
Thanks! Okay, some pointers :) You asked for them!
Your writing style is characteristcally evocative - the kind of writing I'd use to point at the majesty of stars, the tragedy of death, and the grandeur of all that could be. It's emotional, and that is perhaps both its strength and its weakness.
You have the right style to conjure strong feelings around things one already believes and endorses (perfect for Solstice), but perhaps less so to convince people of things they're skeptical of. A pastor's rousing sermon about Jesus's love for all mankind, while moving to his congregation, does little to convince me about the matter.
Unfortunately, it seems that people who don’t know how to intentionally Look literally cannot conceptually understand what Looking is for . . .
I emphatically reject this. You've observed that you don't feel understood when you explain your experie...
One more pointer - clarity on the purpose of a post is paramount. From your comments, it seems like a few different purposes got mixed in:
a) Kensho/Looking are very powerful, I want to motivate you to try them.
b) There is a puzzle around communicating things which you can only conceptually understand once you've experienced them. (I'd focus mostly on the puzzle and make it clear Kensho is but an example in this post.)
There's a dictum: "1) Tell them what you're going to tell them, 2) Tell them, 3) Tell them what you've told them." Going by your CFAR classes too, I feel like you don't like telling people what you're going to tell them (you even want them to be confused). I think this unsurprisingly results in confusion.
Thanks, this is clear and appreciated.
I do feel some exasperation. You’re right in picking up on that.
My experience is that even when I’m not exasperated, this doesn’t convey to people who haven’t done any Looking. I don’t mean that as a judgment against anyone; it’s just a really strong phenomenon, and I think it’s getting conflated with my frustration.
But I’ll take your push-back seriously and reflect on this.
Thanks. :-)
I may have a better answer for the concrete thing that it allows you to do: it's fully generalizing the move of un-goodharting. Buddhism seems to be about doing this for happiness/inverse-suffering, though in principle you could pick a different navigational target (maybe).
Concretely, this should show up as being able to decondition induced reward loops and thus not be caught up in any negative compulsive behaviors.
Thanks for the offer Ruby. I've done a little bit of meditation (0.5-2 hours, 5-10 times) and think it may have given me a better phenomenological sense of my own focus and awareness, and slightly more control over it.
However, the improvement seems very low cost-effectiveness compared to the similar improvements in focus and awareness of my cognition I get from doing long stretches of math - noticing which strands of my mind think different things are useful to think about and focus on. I also find that most of the low-hanging fruit in improving my attention came from a CFAR class I had (that Val taught :-) ) about how removing drains on your working memory has increasing marginal value, and how to design your life environment accordingly (analagous to how rationality training on humans is very weak relative to being able to set up economic incentives to do well). This has helped me a fair bit, I think.
Regarding the practice of meditation, I'm currently at a level of skepticism where (I think) the only thing that will persuade me to do a bunch more will be someone doing something I personally regard as remarkable, and then telling me they believe it was causally due to their having done lots of meditation. It honestly just doesn't seem worth the time.
As I said, I'm very happy to read examples of people having accomplished impressive things, and then crediting it to the practice of meditation. Such examples will gradually move my credences up.
Follow-up to: Gears in Understanding, Fake Frameworks
This last September, I experienced enlightenment.
I mean to share this as a simple fact to set context. I don’t claim I am enlightened, as though I have some amazing property that makes me better than people who don’t have it. I mean simply that there’s something vaguely like a state that our culture calls “enlightenment” that I’ve been in and have returned to a few times over the last four months. In Rinzai Zen one would say that I had a kenshō: a moment of understanding that makes the path clear but is not yet full attainment.
Over the last several months I’ve tried to share what I now see so clearly. And this has mostly just failed. People who’ve had a kenshō follow what I’m saying just fine, but most people just get really confused. It feels a bit like being one of the only people around who understand scientific thinking: most people can see that the behavior of a gyroscope is weird when you show them, but most can’t really see its behavior through the lens of scientific epistemology. They just keep translating what you’re saying into e.g. isolated facts.
This is particularly vexing in the case of kenshō because enlightenment isn’t an insight. I claim it’s not a matter of inferential distance. It’s more like bothering to notice what you already know. When the moment of seeing struck me, I fell over laughing and basically didn’t stop laughing for two days, because it was so incredibly stunningly obvious. There isn’t something to learn: it’s already always here.
And what is “it”, you might ask? Well, I would honestly love to be able to tell you. But apparently my saying it doesn’t convey it hardly at all, unless you’ve already seen it for yourself.
(And yes, there’s most definitely an “it”. This isn’t just brains getting flooded with feeling-of-profundity without an object. And it totally makes sense that some people think that. Just… from this vantage point, those objections come across a bit like people arguing that science is just another religion. Or more to the point, it’s like trying to convince me that I have no subjective experience: no matter how cunning and logical and well-researched the argument, I’m still here listening to you.)
With all that said, I think I can share something one meta-level up. I think the reason it’s hard to convey enlightenment in words can itself be conveyed with words. And I think doing so illustrates something important about epistemology. And with some luck, this might give me a way of pointing at what enlightenment is, in a way that can land.
So, that’s what I’ll aim to do here.
First, a parable.
Imagine you’re in a world where people have literally forgotten how to look up from their cell phones. They use maps and camera functions to navigate, and they use chat programs to communicate with one another. They’re so focused on their phones that they don’t notice most stimuli coming in by other means.
Somehow, by a miracle we’ll just inject mysteriously into this thought experiment, you look up, and suddenly you remember that you can actually just see the world directly. You realize you had forgotten you were holding a cell phone.
In your excitement, you try texting your friend Alex:
You now realize you have a perplexing challenge made of two apparent facts.
First, Alex doesn’t have a place in their mind where the idea of “look up” can land in the way you intend. They are going to keep misunderstanding you.
Second, your only familiar way of interacting with Alex is through text, which seems to require somehow explaining what you mean.
But it’s so obvious! How can it be this hard to convey? And clearly some part of Alex already knows it and they just forgot like you had; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to walk around and use their phone. Maybe you can find some way of describing it to Alex that will help them notice that they already know…?
Or… maybe if you rendezvous with them, you can somehow figure out how to reach forward and just pull their head up? But you’re not sure you can do that; you’ve never used your hands that way before. And you might hurt them. And it seems kind of violating to try.
So, now what?
Here’s one way I used to try to convey part of the “it” from my kenshō:
After several attempts at this, I gathered that many (but not all) folk were translating what I was saying into one of two categories:
And… nope. Not even close.
But it makes sense that so many people had those interpretations. I mean, what else are they going to think when I say “it’s okay”?
The thing is, I don’t mean “it’s okay” as something to think. I mean it more like an instruction, like “look up” in the cell phone parable. Trying to understand the meaning is analogous to Alex posting a photo of their phone and then scrolling above it in the text chat.
Another way I could try to say the “it’s okay” thing is something like, “The world is real in your immediate experience before you think about it. Set aside your interpretations and just look.” The trouble is, most people’s thinking system can grab statements like this and try to interpret them: if you think something like “Oh, that’s the map/territory distinction”, then all I can say is you are still looking at your phone.
It seems that most people do not have the type of conceptual Gears needed to intellectually understand what enlightenment is about. But instead of hitting a “this falls outside the current system” alarm, their minds grab the most fitting conceptual bucket they have to what they heard and plop it in there. This creates an impression of understanding that actually blocks the ability to understand.
This is why zen sometimes uses koans. A koan is meant to give the student’s mind something to chew on that it cannot understand intellectually. The hope is that at some point the conceiving mind will jam, the student will see “it”, and then they’ll have the raw data they need for their mind to start building the new type of Gear. That’s kenshō.
…which makes it kind of frustrating when rationalists are so pleased with themselves for dissolving koans. Yes, very good, you figured out how to download a few apps that prevent me or others from easily sending you messages that jam your cell phone. And that’s good and worthwhile. But you are still looking at your phone. And now you’ve removed one way you can be directly shown this fact.
At this point I’ll try to say the meta-level thing plainly:
There is a skill, analogous to “looking up”, which one will almost certainly misunderstand if we use normal words or concepts for it. I need a handle for it, though, so I’m going to call it “Looking” with a capital “L”.
(And yes, it’s conceptually related to Seeing With Fresh Eyes. But if you think it is Seeing With Fresh Eyes, you will miss the point, because you’ll be attaching what I’m saying to ideas you’re familiar with instead of Looking. And if you object based on the claim that that’s what Seeing With Fresh Eyes is about… then please reread the previous sentence.)
As far as I can tell, you need this skill in order to bypass a particular kind of epistemic trap, where your methods of gathering information preclude the ability to get an entire dimension of data type. It’s an ontological version of confirmation bias.
Once you have any meaningful grasp of how to Look, you can use it to see things that prompt novel Gears in your understanding of the world. A lot of things that previously sounded kind of mystical or incoherent will suddenly change meaning and be made of obviousness to you. And some of them really, really, really, really matter.
Seeing these things will probably transform you, although it usually seems to feel more like realizing who you have always been and what has always mattered most to you. Your reflective priorities rearrange, you start caring in a different and deeper way, and most of the things you had previously been so stressed or concerned about stop mattering. You actually start to get what’s at stake and what’s worth doing.
And then you, too, can experience the hilarious frustration of trying to get others to Look.
So, how does one learn how to Look?
Well, that’s a damn good question. And people with varying degrees of enlightenment have been trying to answer it for literally thousands of years.
So, rather than pretending I have some great novel algorithm for this, I’ll add three notes that I hope will be helpful here.
First, for rationalists in particular, I think skill with switching freely between frameworks is really useful. That is not at all the same thing as Looking, but it sort of stretches a thing I usually find is rigid in rationalists in a way that blocks their ability to Look. If you’re always interpreting everything through Bayesian updating or decision theory or epistemic hygiene or whatever, you’re always interpreting, regardless of the validity of which tools you’re using. I claim that being able to put those tools down for a second is actually really helpful — and, I claim, it can help contextualize where those tools are actually useful.
Second, one clear thing I noticed when I first intentionally Looked is that everyone has bodhicitta. There’s an important way in which everyone is already enlightened, and “enlightenment” is simply a moment of someone remembering this fact about themselves. This is why people know to build beautiful monuments to honor lost loved ones, and to be respectful while in them, across vast cultural and religious belief differences. We already know. This is the “already know” of that small quiet part of us that nudges us to notice that we’re wrong while in a fight with a loved one. The skill of Looking is closely related to the skill of pausing our usual habit patterns and actually paying attention to our quiet, clear sense of knowing.
Third, my kenshō was deliberately induced. I think I understand the mechanisms behind how, and I believe I can convey them in a usable way. I plan to do so in an upcoming post.